All articles in Natural World
31st March, 2025 in Folklore, Natural World
The Mesolithic Mermaid and the Welsh Utopia
A magical mermaid story extracted from the new book Welsh Folk Tales of Coast and Sea by Peter Stevenson. The Welsh Utopia Amser maith yn ôl / A long time ago. The shallow sea in Cardigan Bay, from Pen Llŷn in the north to Ceredigion in the west, was once a mix of forests, lakes,…
20th November, 2024 in Natural World, Society & Culture
A History of Polar Exploration in 50 Objects
Author Anne Strathie is a writer and researcher, whose three biographies of members of Robert Scott’s 1910-13 Terra Nova Antarctic expedition are published by The History Press. Her new book, A History of Polar Exploration in 50 Objects: From Cook’s Circumnavigations to the Aviat…
28th August, 2024 in Natural World
Wildfires humanity has to face
Ian Hembrow, author of Celsius: A Life And Death By Degrees, reveals the bigger story behind the world’s increasingly frequent and ferocious summer wildfires. As I watched the television news, an announcement scrolled across the screen: ‘Authorities in Greece say wildfires are un…
13th June, 2024 in Folklore, Natural World
A time traveller’s guide to watching the sunrise
To mark the Summer solstice join Dawn Nelson author of Stories of the Sun as she watches the sunrise… Come with me to a hillside where the trees face east and if you stand with them, you can watch the sunrise. Here the twilight lingers and the dew on the grass glistens in the g…
14th May, 2024 in Local & Family History, Natural World
Restoring and re-wilding Wicken Fen
East Anglia is known for its fabulous coastline and riverside cities such as Cambridge and Norwich. The countryside in between is all-too-often dismissed as being flat and featureless. While ‘hill’ is a relative term in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, the rural landscape is certainly…
20th March, 2024 in Fiction, Natural World
For the love of flowers
For National Flower Day Emma Timpany, author of Botanical Short Stories, discusses the fascination with flowers. We humans have a universal, innate love of flowers, and go to great lengths to satisfy this desire. The worldwide flower growing industry is worth billions of pounds,…
24th August, 2023 in Folklore, Natural World, Society & Culture
Stories about the starry night sky
The stars are our common heritage in the night sky, we are influenced by the portion of it that we see, and our stories create links between us as we realise our similarities and differences. When you look at the night sky – what do you see? Stars Stand there long enough and your…
10th August, 2023 in Natural World, Society & Culture
The meaning of ‘spice’
There is a need for definition, as spices have meant different things in different periods of history. ‘Spice’ is not a botanical term, but we can use botanical words to describe them. Today we might reasonably define a spice as the (usually) dried part of a plant used to season…
9th August, 2023 in History, Natural World, Society & Culture
Cats in the Roman world: The big and the small of it
Feles: a cat, a mouser, but also a thief. The eyes of nocturnal animals like cats gleam and shine in the dark. Pliny, Natural History IX.55 Excavated cat bones and cat images on vases and coins are proof that cats were padding about southern Italy at the end of the fifth century…
5th June, 2023 in Local & Family History, Natural World
Wild times in a London park
Nick Stewart Smith author of The Thousand Year Old Garden unlocks the gates and invites us to wander through a beautiful park‚ situated between the urban bustle of Peckham and the busy streets of Camberwell in London. Early every Saturday morning, there is organised run…
22nd February, 2023 in Folklore, Natural World
Telling the bees: Ancient bee customs now have royal approval
Mark Norman author of Telling the Bees and Other Customs: The Folklore of Rural Crafts talks about the ancient bee custom of ‘telling the bees’ and its connection to royalty. When the British monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, passed away the world was naturally watching the news. As t…
13th February, 2023 in Folklore, Natural World
A love letter to February
Martin Maudsley author of Telling the Seasons declares his love for the month of February and the folklore behind it. Sensing the seasons Perceptibly, there seem to be more than just four seasons, as we experience the gradual changes of the natural world through the cy…