Month: July 2014

St Patrick’s well is  located close to the village of Marlfield, a few miles outside of the town of Clonmel.  It is well is signposted  and can be accessed  from the Cahir to Clonmel road and from the Marlfield village.

St Patrick’s well is located beside a stream at the base of a limestone cliff.  This is a really lovely peaceful spot.  As well as being a place of pilgrimage (excuse the pun) it is also a focal point on hot sunny days for families and children who come here to hang out and paddle in the icy waters of the  man-made pond beside the well.  I had hoped to write a post about the well for St Patrick’s day  but unfortunately the time just got away from me, so better late then never.

Modern Landscape

To access the well you  climb down  modern steps  built into the side the…

A few weeks ago I had a fantastic holiday exploring parts of  Wales  and England. One of the  most amazing places I visited  was a tiny medieval chapel called St Govan’s chapel in Pembrokshire, Wales.

St Govan’s Chapel Pembrokeshire Wales

St Govan’s chapel is located at the base of a cliff, a short distance from the village of Bosherston. The site  has an Irish connection as   Govan is  supposedly an Irish saint.

Cliff top above St Govan’s church

The present chapel dates to c.  the 13th century and it may have been built on an earlier structure.  The chapel can be accessed from  the top of the cliff by climbing down a series of steep steps.

Steps leading to St Govan’s chapel

The church is a small single single cell room built into a rock cleft  and it has  a vaulted ceiling.

West wall of chapel

A stone altar  is…

Katherine wasn’t the only person thinking about Etruscan around Christmas (see her post below). On Boxing Day I went to the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia in Rome to see their fantastic collection of Etruscan finds. They’ve got some spectacular stuff including the sarcophagus of the spouses (of which there’s a picture in Katherine’s post), and three gold tablets from Pyrgi which are written in Etruscan and Punic (pictured below). In real life they’re surprisingly small, but just as golden as they look here (Etruscan on the right and left, Punic in the middle). It’s thanks to these tablets – which aren’t direct translations of each other, but contain similar material – that we know the Etruscan word for ‘three’, which is ci. The museum has a particularly good section on writing and the alphabet.

What, you may be asking, does all this have to do with mirrors?…

Some would say that the title of this post should be “Alexander’s Battle in Pakistan”, but at that time Pakistan didnt exist, and probably thats why historians and these guys (no I am not confusing the two, being poles apart) refer to this battle in India. This is the battle that Alexander, having defeated all the empires on the way from Macedonia, including the mighty Darius, fought as he reached the Indian subcontinent. This was the battle he fought against the King Porus (known as Porus to the Greeks, the traditional name being King Purushottam), the king of Paurava. Paurava was the ancient Indian kingdom between the Jhelum and Chenab rivers. Some historians believe that this was a part of the larger Magadha kingdom, but thats a separate debate.

These guys were discussing about this, and this was a sort of continuation of this post. To cut a long…