No 
C’mon, of course they had ducks – what else would they use for assaying witches? 
…but yes, truly a cool thing, Mangetout.
I’ll just note that I have now learned that the word “doom” originally meant something along the lines of “judgement” or “reckoning”, while of course these days means “certain dire partings.”
Any chance you could post a picture, or GoogleEarth link, or something to give us an idea what it looks like? Maybe a scan of the page in which it appears? Some of us Colonials are soooooooo jealous.
A recent trend for local historians (I’m in Navarra, in northern Spain) has been to check out “old wives’ tales.”
For example, they measured the age of an olive tree which people from that village thought was “over two hundred years old.” There’s “always” (well, we figure since the Greeks came around, tops) been olive trees in that area; not groves but one or two in each person’s land; this one was considered the oldest. Chopping down a healthy tree just to find out its age is pretty stupid, but you can drill a hole with a special tool that takes out a cylindrical sample.
The tree turned out to be about two thousand years old…
Cervaise, as an Italian-American, I’d like to say that that’s a lovely notion in your quote there.
Oh, and when come, bring nougat!
I’m planning to write an article about it for my website - I’ll post the link when it’s done. For now, though:
Here is the google maps link (turns out the pond is actually square-ish - but it looks circular when viewed from the ground).
and here is a link to the official website for the farm/country park.
I think I know how you feel, Mangetout. In the UK it’s pretty easy to find places that are pretty old, but normally, there’s a placard saying "this place is realllly old, or there’s a tourist kiosk, or it’s fenced off or whatever. It’s only once in a while that it justs sits there getting older with no one taking a blind bit of notice.
I think the best example I can think of wasn’t in the UK, but in Tunisia. I was driving across the desert in the middle of absolutely nowhere (NB, not far from Tatooine). We came across this tiny village with some really weird houses. Two storey construction, made from dried mud and looked like stacked beehives. I asked what they were and the driver told me that they were Roman grain silos.
2000 years later and people are living in them :eek:
Yes, I think that’s exactly what it is about the place.
I’ve taken a few photos of it from ground level - here on my website (although, it’s just a pond) - I do plan to get a copy of the relevant page of the Domesday book and will be adding something about that to the page later.
My son used to say that!
Oops. Well spotted.
Does anyone know of an online tool that will spell check a whole website?
My hometown, a fairly nondescript suburb of Dublin contains a 1500 year old well, an 800 year old castle, and a monastery and church with buildings dating back to before 1000CE. I often say that if such buildings were all together in some town in the United States it would be a huge tourist attraction. Around here where there are 5000 year old structures our humble little castle doesn’t cut the mustard.
The pond is quite likely fed by a wellspring.
In any densely populated areas, waterways and brooks can be redirected, closed and dug anew. So if the pond was fed by a brook, it quite likely isn’t that old.
But wellsprings depend on deep underground aquifers, that are usually unchanged over the millenia. You can’t plug a well up, and you can’t build anything over it, because the foundations will just bubble up and float away. So it isn’t surprising that that pond is so ancient.
So all you US-Dopers who complain you don’t have anything old in your neighbourhood…you know that permanently wet spot in your garden, at the bottom of that hill? It is quite likely centuries older then the arrival of the Mayflower.
Somewhat along these same lines, near my hometown in Alberta is Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. It was made a Unesco World Heritage site after I was grown. People come from all over the world to the interpretive centre that was built there, on the site where I played as a kid. It’s where we picked Saskatoon berries and found arrowheads and searched for fossils.
Nice pair of tits.
(Now I bet you get some hits)
I stayed at a home in Amsterdam a few nights. The house was over six hundred years old. It wasn’t famous. It was a taxi driver’s house.
Gave me a readjustment. The oldest building in my home town was built in 1742, although there are some who say that building was torn down in 1920, and the present house is another one, built in 1800. The thing is, no one really knows.
Tris
Somewhere I heard this aphorism, and it’s very true:
Wish I remembered where I read that.
Who would have thought, a thousand years after the human race is gone, all that will be left of our civilisation are plastic bags and duck ponds.
Funny that its sometimes the most mundane things that survive, I could imagine it in that scene from the 60s The Time Machine, Wells looking on as everything but the pond changes.
I regularly see buildings that are six hundred years old, my parents live in a city that’s over a thousand, and it was still breathtaking to see an opera performed in a two-thousand-year old Roman arena.