h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Tremors here usually mean a large farm vehicle is passing by.

We have a couple of Roman roads close by, but no sign the Romans came up the bank to where the village is - it was probably a handful of Saxon hovels at the time.

There did used to be a pond across the road, within twenty yards. I wonder what fed that.

Vehicle rumbles... I've noticed the same effect with the Southern Pacific Railway about mile from home. I don't usually hear it, excepting the whistle, and its hidden behind a 12 meter by 500 meter sand dune immediately next to the tracks so I don't see it, but tremors are readily transmitted through the desert sand when the trains go rumbling by and may be a contributing factor to stress on buried pipelines.

Transmitted through desert sand - that's what they said was why a small tremor we had round here had more effect than it's scale number suggested it might. By USA standards we're talking miniscule, but chimney pots tumbling, as they did in Shrewsbury, is a big quake here.

My village is actually on the edge of a glacial sand and gravel bank, but it's more or less invisible - it's certainly not in a desert. Though we did create sandstorms on the A41 by deep-ploughing near-by Prees Heath as part of an effort to re-create heathland. The sand there is a metre deep and is pure sand.



The water feature is no more. I miss it, it was cheerfull bubbling up, but it was too close to the house for comfort. I started to wonder just what was happening underground, with soil and gravel etc being washed away. Perhaps the fact the water was forced to the surface was a good sign.



Willem, I looked up the field guide, it's a Dr Austin Roberts'. Is that the same one? It has a foreword from the late Field Marshall The Right Honourable JC Smutts. He must have been a bird watcher.

Hey Waz! Yes that's the 'Roberts' all us bird watchers here in the South of Africa know and love.

Jan Smuts was an all-round knowledgeable guy. I didn't know about watching birds but I know he was, like me, also very interested in plants!

By the way how's Prees Heath going on these days?

It's mostly in winter hibernation, but we had a meeting of its support group last week, and the warden said there was a haze of new green over the area planted with wild flower seed.

Next job, shortly, is to thin out some of the trees that are beginning to shade out the heather.

In spring we'll find out whether any of the heather seed has taken and how the butterflies have come through - there's an egg search and count planned for them.

That sounds interesting. You must be looking forward to some good weather instead of this stuff!

Websailor

The Roman pipeline story was about one being used to divert spring water to a more convenient location for watering livestock and was entirely in agricultural land.

Did you feel the quake? Any renewal of activity with the spring? Underground flows of water sometimes can precipitate quake activity on account of the lubricating effect they produce when they get into an active fault.

I felt it alright, that makes my third - no floods resulted. My mystery spring didn't get quite as far as Lincolnshire.

What I have noticed though is that the drive is depressed. It's just a mild depression, about TV satellite dish sized. There was a bit on the news the other day that a certain amount of depression was actually good for us, so I'm leaving it and keeping an eye on it for now.

Myself, I'm really only only comfortable when somewhat depressed. In my own subculture we're supposed be able to turn the adrenaline flow on and off at will (bend steel with bare hands, casually toss automobiles out of the way to get at people trapped underneath at need, that kind of thing).

Too much of that isn't good for one. Accelerates aging and confuses thought.

Right, the depression stays. Last thing I need is a drive that starts casually tossing the car out of the road.




http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/shropshire/7289141.stm

Can't be mine popped up elsewhere, it's too far away (not to mention the effectiveness of the stop taps), but makes you think.