PITFALL TO ANOTHER DIMENSION?

Coincidences: Cosmic Murmurings or Meaningless Codswallop?

What do they tell us, if anything at all?

Hard hats? Aren’t they supposed to bells? (Photo by DEAR on Unsplash)

It all started with Hilbre Island. An insignificant fleck of land just off the coast of an obscure peninsula tucked away in a corner of Britain between the Rivers Mersey and Dee.

In the utmost brinke of this Promontorie lieth a small, hungrie, barren and sandie Isle called Il-bre, which had sometime a little cell of monkes in it.

That is the description offered by William Camden in his 1586 geographical work Britannia. So charmingly quaint and poetic, don’t you think?

Or is it?

I imagine that’s just how any common-or-garden geographer would have written in the 16th century.

To a contemporary reader it would have seemed no more quaint, and perhaps no more poetic, than a modern equivalent: ‘At the far end of the peninsula is a small, barren, sandy island by the name of Hilbre, which formerly housed a minor monastery’.

No one is going to win a Pulitzer for that.

It’s all about how we contextualise it in space and time, isn’t it? Unless we can compare it against what might have been, someone else’s Elizabethan description of…