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  • Daily History Picture: Luxembourg Liberated April 29, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical Pictures
    Daily History Picture: Luxembourg Liberated

    Allies arrive at the end of WW1 and the Grand Duchy tastes freedom for another twenty years.

    Man vs Horse: Pheidippides and his Missing Mount April 29, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient
    Man vs Horse: Pheidippides and his Missing Mount

    ***Inspired by Little Miss Beach and Tacitus at Empire*** http://detritusofempire.blogspot.it/ When Beach recently described, at table, Pheidippides’ heroic 300 mile round trip from Athens to Sparta little Miss Beach looked at her father contemptuously and asked ‘why didn’t he just get on a horse?’ Beach prepared to gently put his daughter down, not wanting to crush her […]

    Daily History Picture: Medieval Golf April 28, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical Pictures
    Daily History Picture: Medieval Golf

    Late medieval manuscript (BM) showing what looks like golf.  

    The Hanging Bed April 28, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    The Hanging Bed

    Ohio’s premier anomalist, Chris Woodyard has just put up a post on an unusual method of execution in the nineteenth-century press, the cone of death, and she has two earlier posts, including the needle mask, praying to death, squeezing to death and smothering to death. Every ‘funny’ bone in Beachcombing’s body tells him that there […]

    Ash Magic April 27, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Ash Magic

    Your little boy is ill. The doctors can do nothing (this is the nineteenth century) and money is, in any case, short. What on earth do you do. Well, the folk answer, and one that is almost certainly as efficacious as Victorian medicine, is to look for an ash tree. This account comes from Somerset […]

    Daily History Picture: Rolling Ball April 27, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical Pictures
    Daily History Picture: Rolling Ball

    Loisset performs the ball trick at the Vauxhall Gardens

    Daily History Picture: Fish or Beast? April 26, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical Pictures
    Daily History Picture: Fish or Beast?

    Beautiful fourteenth-century beaver: fish or animal?  

    Illinois Lion Man April 26, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Illinois Lion Man

    Imagine that there is a wild man out in the local woods. However, this guy is not your normal naked wimp, dirty with matted hair, who fell on hard times blah blah blah. He wears a lion mask, steals carpets and sports a nifty yellow black mini skirt: and this is 1874. Beach would put […]

    Balloon Bridge Across the English Channel, c. 1850 April 25, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Balloon Bridge Across the English Channel, c. 1850

    This story appeared in British newspapers in September of 1850. It was one of several attempts, attempts that had been going on since Napoleon had considered invading England and that would continue until the Channel Tunnel was finally drilled through, to do away with the English Channel. Any dolt can build a tunnel or a […]

    Daily History Picture: Pinkerton, Lincoln and McClellan April 24, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical Pictures
    Daily History Picture: Pinkerton, Lincoln and McClellan

    Three great Americans at Antietam  

    Manx Judge and Manx Fairies, 1932 April 24, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Manx Judge and Manx Fairies, 1932

    We have noted previously here the spectacle of the fairies in a law court in nineteenth-century Ireland. However, this one came surprisingly late (11 March 1932 the report) and from the Isle of Man. The Deemster is a Manx judge: The unusual spectacle of Manx Deemster, or law-giver, weighing up the evidence for and against […]

    403 Cossack Adolescents: Soviet Genocide? April 23, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    403 Cossack Adolescents: Soviet Genocide?

    Beach lives in a part of Europe (Italy) where the memory of the Soviet Union is revered not only by daft revolutionaries creeping out at night to graffiti their way to world revolution; a good part of the general population also makes this mistake. Of course, they will not defend Stalin and they shed some […]

    Daily History Picture: Liberation! April 23, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical Pictures
    Daily History Picture: Liberation!

    De Gaulle drives into a free Paris

    Daily History Picture: Medieval Donuts? April 22, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical Pictures
    Daily History Picture: Medieval Donuts?

    I have no idea… Probably the artist didn’t either…

    Guest Post: Walking the Pennine Way in 1965 April 22, 2015

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Guest Post: Walking the Pennine Way in 1965

    This guest post sets out the experiences of one of the first walkers on England’s best long-distance trail just after it had opened in 1965. I still keep one bit of kit in my rucksack that goes back to my 1965 trip up the Pennine Way. It’s a small blue, plastic container with a cracked, click-on […]