The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Irish monk St Columba is credited with being among the first witnesses to the ‘Loch Ness monster’.
Columba brought twelve monks to Iona in 563, and set about converting the pagans of Scotland. Two years into his mission, his labours took him and the monk Lugne Mocumin, whom he had cured of a persistent nosebleed, to the River Ness at the eastern end of the famous Loch.
Joseph Skipsey’s short poem evokes the last goodbye a Northumberland miner made each morning.
Northumberland miner Joseph Skipsey (1832-1903) won praise for his poetry from such famous names as Oscar Wilde and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He could evoke in a few lines the harsh life of a northern collier, and the dangers and tragedies he faced every day.
Joseph Skipsey taught himself to read and write by candlelight, hundreds of feet below ground in a Northumberland pit.
Joseph Skipsey (1832-1903) taught himself to read and write down a Northumberland pit when he was just seven. He subsequently became a nationally-recognised poet, praised by Wilde and Tennyson, but it was an art born of hardship and personal tragedy.
Zeus employs a little psychology to effect a reunion with his offended wife.
Pausanias explains why every fourteen years, the people of Platea in Boeotia (central Greece) celebrated the festival of the Greater Daedala, in which a female figure carved from oak and dressed in a bridal gown was taken by cart to the River Asopos, and sacrifices were offered on Mt Cithaeron.
The little County Durham line built by George Stephenson and his son Robert was the place where the world’s railway infrastructure really began.
George Stephenson had already built over a dozen steam locomotives and engineered colliery railways at Killingworth in Northumberland, and Hetton in County Durham. Now his growing reputation had brought him another challenge, a little further south at Shildon, and on September 27th, 1825, the world’s railways began to take their now familiar shape.
The railway earned a special place in history as the first to be designed for steam locomotives only.
The railway at Hetton-le-Hole in County Durham, opened in 1822, was the first to be built entirely with steam locomotives rather than horses in mind. The new technology helped to create thousands of jobs and bring tremendous prosperity to this corner of northeast England.