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If you thought I was barking, you should see my brother!

In search of Neolithic rock carvings, and other tales of the sixth day of Pesach

It being a nice day on Sunday, my parents and I headed out into the Northumbrian countryside in search of the Stone Age. They had seen on a programme that rock carvings had been found in a field near somewhere called Glantlees (geographical context) a few years ago, and wanted to have a look themselves. They had a map printed off the Internet, but no GPS receiver; so what we ended up doing was tramping off into the field and heading off hopefully towards the stone outcropping near the top of the hill.

( Read more, and view piccies )

Along the way, we stopped off at Barter Books in Alnwick, where my parents got the secondhand Compact Edition OED they got me for my birthday a few years ago. (The Compact Edition is the one with all n volumes compressed into two physical volumes by dint of very small print.) The bookshop is absolutely huge—it occupies the (entirety of) the old railway station (and there's a little model train running along a track above the books), but much, I suspect, to livredor and rysmiel's disgust, I didn't buy anything there. It was, in a way, too big, because you couldn't take the whole place in at a single sweep, but also in a way too small, because (even though it had 300,000 books) it wasn't big enough to have the hard-to-come-by books I was after. When you're searching for something in particular (rather than just browsing), usedbooksearch is generally better.