Slios Bruguaine

Parchment: Medieval Availability & Use Deerskin parchment, with a duck feather quill pen. In the medieval period, scribes across Europe relied upon animal skin for their painting/writing/book-making medium. Paper existed (such as papyrus, in northern Africa, hemp and mulberry paper in Asia) but in the colder, wetter climate of northern Europe, animal skin was comparatively abundant, affordable, more durable and easier to make. Skins were a constant natural byproduct of butchering livestock for meat. Flat, stretched rawhide, called parchment or vellum (depending on thinness & quality), could be written upon with char pencil, chalk, ink or paint; it could be dyed special colors and cut into useful shapes (rectangles, hearts, etc), and it would last for centuries, so long as it was kept dry. It was also far more reusable than papyrus. Cow, goat, sheep and deer skin could all be made into parchment without too much labor investment, and the skin from the young animals (cal...

Correcting the Celtic Myth in Ireland A mythos surrounding the culture of a people called Celts has dominated studies of the Irish for more than a century.  'Celtic' began as a linguistic term and may still accurately be used to describe, linguistically, the Irish language.  Over time, however, Celtic came to associate the native population in Ireland with a Continental culture that migrated across Europe during the Greek and Roman Classical period, called the Celts. The Celts immigrated through northern Europe and across the Channel into England; the genetic analysis of Central and Eastern England shows significant Continental ingression compared to the rest of the British Isles  (1) .  Many people therefore assume today that the Celts must also have conquered Ireland, and that the modern Irish are ethnically descendants of the Celts.  This notion emerged in the nineteenth century, in large part due to coincidental similarities between Irish art and...

Charring Wood as a Preservative Treatment To read about what charcoal is, see  The History of Charcoal . To read about the mound method of producing charcoal, see  Charcoal Clamps , and to read about the underground method, see  Pit Kilns . To read about other uses for charcoal, see Micro-Charring .  Char chemically changes wood, making it more resistant to rot, insects and fire damage, and can be done easily at home without specialized equipment. Background In temperate regions, wood posts are likely to rot, particularly at the line where they protrude from the ground. The denser the wood, the slower the rot (which is why locust wood makes good fence posts), and certain species of tree can contain chemicals that fight mold and insect damage, but here in the mid-Atlantic region of the US, these are not enough. Even cedar posts rarely last longer than 20 years without treatment. Locust posts frequently survive 10 years, and other hardwood species last...