Ana McKellar

@anamca

Always curious. On a narrowboat, hoping for a passivhaus one day. Landscape history, nature and biodiversity. Partially-sighted. Please use descriptive alt-text to help screen-readers and include everyone.

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Bluesky

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Ana McKellar@anamca· 7d

I noticed this comment (wholeheartedly agree!) and the panel but not location, so imagine my shock when I came face to face with her today!

Interpretive panel about hill fort and its people featuring a woman holding a spear

Ana McKellar@anamca· 11d

Spotted for @lakesstiles.bsky.social I wonder why churchyards often have excellent path entry methods 🤔

Ana McKellar@anamca· 14d

It works well as a wallpaper design

Random part moon shapes of light on an internal wall, they’re patches of sunlight shining through a hedge with the sun in the final 1/3 of eclipse.

Ana McKellar@anamca· 14d

I enjoyed the natural effect from the gaps in adjacent hedge/trees.

Overlapping random new moon shapes in bright light blue on darker blue background, natural projections of the eclipse through gaps between leaves of a hedge onto shiny painted metal.

Ana McKellar@anamca· 24d

The riverside or north-south?

Extract of OS map showing public footpaths in Danesfield grounds

Ana McKellar@anamca· 29d

I’ve been thinking that this week, moored opposite harvested fields and watching bales of various forms be carted. How many to build my house I ponder …

Green water in foreground, lightly rippled by wind, reflecting blue sky with puffy white clouds. A line of reeds and other green plants line the edge of the water with shorn wheat fields rising slightly behind to meet the sky, the horizon dotted with young trees from a hedge, the top of which is just visible in places. Zooming in shows the pleasing curved lines in the stubble of sowing and harvesting.

Ana McKellar@anamca· Jul 26

Reminded me of this chunksome piece of granite, not far away, they breed ‘em good down there #SundayStiles

Stone stile between black and white banded marker posts, big natural smoothish rock in the foreground is the first step to big blocks of granite, resting on a gap through a hedge (hedge in Cornwall but it’s a dry stone wall with earth core and vegetation), a clump of deep green rushes to the right, long grass and trees beyond

Ana McKellar@anamca· Jun 27

For @mostlyrambling.bsky.social Now listening to Alla Dolce Ombra, Royal Wind Music. My all time favourite on here: Palestrina’s Viri Galilaei

The Royal Wind Music’s album cover for Alla Dolce Ombra with a painting in shades of ochre of a man on a path on the bank of a small river with big trees and lots of verdant plants

Ana McKellar@anamca· May 18

Nice!

25” OS map early 20th century showing Sparkwell village and block of woodland labelled Smuggler’s Coppice

Ana McKellar@anamca· Apr 28

Mmm yes. And I may have a new addiction, courtesy of you 😋

Empty wrapper of Tunnock’s dark chocolate caramel wafer

Ana McKellar@anamca· Apr 11

😂 Saving this for the colleagues who dare to doubt me

Screenshot with score of 0.0076 and text Better than most. You can see differences that half the population would swear don’t exist. Your opinions about colour palettes are now legally binding.

Ana McKellar@anamca· Apr 8

Oh yes that’s right. Hopefully he’ll grace us with lots of lovely chunkies, gridders and steppers later

Cornish granite gridder stile with chunks of stone set in the ground across tye path with deep gaps between. This one is set between a stone house wall and garden wall with a variety of plants in each crevice

Ana McKellar@anamca· Feb 27

I’ve been visiting stile country again @lakesstiles.bsky.social

Big chunks of shaped granite to form large steps through a stone hedge, gorse and new grass between the stones

Ana McKellar@anamca· Dec 26

Any landscape historians able to point me to a source that will help learn what mediaeval-nineteenth century terms mean, please? e.g. derrings #LandscapeHistory

25” OS map 1892-1914 showing fields and an area label of Tholthorpe Derrings

Ana McKellar@anamca· Oct 28

What a great book! I wish I’d known about it when I lived there. I often asked why boots and shoes, and no one could tell me, but I’m glad my supposition was right: pasture for cattle and water for tanning. Good for EH for documenting the buildings. Spotted your drawings.

Labelled pen and ink drawings of a boot and bootmaking machinery

Cut away watercolour drawing of home workshop

Cutaway watercolour drawing of shoe factory in red brick with big windows

Ana McKellar@anamca· Oct 12

There *should* be a level board like this one ⬇️ but with low highway budgets, it may have fallen and not been replaced, or on a road like Mill Beck, which is so low in status it’s way off the scale of priorities, maybe never had one, in expectation of local traffic only.

Narrow tarmac lane between high wooded banks and a white post with black level markers to the side. It used to be a track with a stream, which in winter could be half a metre deep. Now the stream is piped below the surface and only the road becomes a long shallow ford in winter, except in brief extreme conditions.

Ana McKellar@anamca· Sep 28

Interesting perspective informationisbeautiful.net/visualizatio...

Graphic of circle with coloured polygon shapes in it relative to country populations, showing how India and China dwarf the other geographical areas.

Ana McKellar@anamca· Sep 2

The floating cruck … 🥺 This is a fascinating house, probably C16 origin, multiple extensions. #BuildingsArchaeology #OldHouses

A section of oak cruck beam inside a house from sloping from ceiling of first floor top left to bottom right, where it’s cut off at ground floor ceiling height. White plaster walls.

Ana McKellar@anamca· Aug 24

#SilentSunday

Dry stone wall with big stones at the bottom reducing size of stones as it rises. Propped open wooden gate to right, short grass in foreground and distant view to misty sea

Ana McKellar@anamca· Aug 13

Good article on the breakdown of farming, loss of small farms and loss of variety to agribusiness and development while losing food security to imports from low standard production. At the same time we’re losing allotments so no independence. #Farming #Food theconversation.com/family-farme...

The first crop of wheat I grew, I got £120 a tonne for it – when I was 18 and beer was 50p a pint. So I got 240 pints for every tonne going off the farm. Last year, I got £65 a tonne and beer has come up to £3. So now, I’m getting 20 pints a tonne.

Ana McKellar@anamca· Aug 7

I was, too briefly, but snagged a series of their fantastic stiles and a bonus trig point with benchmark. What a place!

Short concrete pillar set on a cliff top, blue sky and blue sea beyond, grass in the foreground round the square base on the pillar, an Ordnance Survey trig point with a benchmark for surveying levels of the land.

Ana McKellar@anamca· Aug 7

Cornwall between Zennor and St Ives but I understand they’re fairly widespread in the county. A variation has a ‘lintel’ above

Cornish granite stile comprising blocks set parallel across the width of the path supported above a hollow with another block set across at hip height between stone walls. Lots of moss, ferns, and other plants on a drizzly day

Ana McKellar@anamca· Aug 7

Specially for @lakesstiles.bsky.social 😆. It’s beyond my camera skills to capture the size and depth of these granite stiles, even with a hound attempting scale

Cornish ‘cattle grid’ stile comprising four weathered and worn chunky blocks of granite each about a foot high, three feet wide and ten inches deep, set across the path one after the other, with an equivalent gap between each; a dry stone wall to each side. Lots of moss and lichen and a general air of ancient character.
A short legged white Jack Russell terrier is standing on its hind legs in one gap with front paws on the foremost block. There’s a depth of several inches below the blocks, the terrier can walk beneath them.

Ana McKellar@anamca· Jul 28

Aww, finished it … and enjoyed every word. Thanks @levparikian.bsky.social for the pleasure. Lovely book about rediscovering bird-watching, that’s birding not twitching, an important difference you understand.

Front cover of a white book entitled Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? by Lev Parikian

Ana McKellar@anamca· Jun 8

But you can see why 😉

Coward nlue sky, distant islands, blue to green sea and tiny wavelets lapping pale sand

Ana McKellar@anamca· Jun 7

“The most hazardous building in the UK” from the Public Accounts Committee on decommissioning nuclear Sellafield. Delays to infrastructure build, failure to invest, unsafe, environmental hazard, escalating costs — familiar? committees.parliament.uk/committee/12... #Nuclear #Energy #Sellafield

Screenshot from the report. Text says:
One building, the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo (MSSS), has been leaking radioactive water into the ground since 2018 – the PAC calculates, at current rates, enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool roughly every three years. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) accepts this leak is its "single biggest environmental issue", but that the radioactive particles are "contained" in the soil and do not pose a risk to the public.

Ana McKellar@anamca· Jun 6

My last garden was on a sixties estate, bigger gardens than today. 15 yrs ago there were street trees, garden trees and almost every house had a garden front and back. Satellite view now shows ~60% concrete 😔. Mine went from 1 to 2 with a big increase in insects and birds

Town garden, mostly concrete slabs, gravel, crazy paving and ‘lollipop’ thuja trees

Town garden with a lot of self-seeded vegetation , soft edges and gravel giving way to plants

Ana McKellar@anamca· May 24

Anyone looking for a narrowboat? 44’ thoughtful design to make the most of space, good quality build and well maintained, 5 years old and very lightly used, 250 engine hours. Perfect go anywhere leisure boat for one or two. www.abnb.co.uk/boat?BoatID=... #UKCanals #BoatsForSale #Narrowboat

Smart shiny dark blue narrowboat facing the camera on rural canal with wide grassy towpath, trees behind and overcast sky

Ana McKellar@anamca· May 12

Excellent article on composting, including that the hardest items to home-compost are those labelled as 100% biodegradable. Don’t be misled by that greenwash! And that weed-killer survives composting 😱 www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Extract from article saying : Hay or animal manure can contain aminopyralid residue. This commercial weedkiller, introduced to the UK in 2005, adheres to plant material so effectively that not even the digestion of ruminants or microbes will disable it. The first sign that a batch of compost is affected is that young plants grow pale and distorted. It’s unsettling to realise that homemade compost can be actively damaging to plants.

Ana McKellar@anamca· May 11

#SilentSunday