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beesincampanula.bsky.social
Mary B
@beesincampanula.bsky.social
1.9K followers 1.9K following 810 posts
I should have been a pair of ragged claws…
Reads 📚Writes 📚Haunts museums, art galleries, ancient sites, woodland and marshes. #amquerying
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beesincampanula.bsky.social
Mary B @beesincampanula.bsky.social · Nov 17
If I could write words
Like leaves on an autumn forest floor,
What a bonfire my letters would make.
Spike Milligan
A path in a birch wood strewn with autumn leaves
Reposted by Mary B
kristenradtke.bsky.social
I wrote about my childhood friend Alexi Pretti. Please read it and share it and remember him as a human being. @theverge.com
I grew up with Alex Pretti
The kind-hearted ICU nurse shot by ICE agents was my childhood best friend.
www.theverge.com
January 27, 2026 at 4:45 PM
Reposted by Mary B
andreapa.bsky.social
Next up,local author Sarah Hall. Helm was Shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2026. A story of the relationship between nature and people.The Helm Wind is Britain's only named wind, a powerful, cold northeasterly wind affecting the southwest slopes of Cross Fell in Cumbria. #Booksky
January 27, 2026 at 7:16 PM
Reposted by Mary B
kpw1453.bsky.social
The remains of South Clettreval Chambered Cairn in North Uist. The cairn dates to the Neolithic and is located on the southern slopes of Cleitreabhal a Dheas. 📸 My own. #TombTuesday #Prehistory #Archaeology #NorthUist
January 27, 2026 at 6:38 AM
Reposted by Mary B
drnwillburger.bsky.social
Bent iron sword and lance head found in a burial at St. Johann-Gächingen. Bronze and Iron Age weapons deposited in burials were often bent or hacked into pieces before being placed into graves.. In this way, they 'died' with the owner. 3rd c. BC

📷 Landesmuseum Württemberg🏺
Close-up of corroded iron items on a gray surface: a large bent sword blade and lancehead stored together loosely, alongside shears with curved blades and a fragmented razor blade.
January 27, 2026 at 10:24 AM
Reposted by Mary B
drrjwarren.bsky.social
#ArtDD2026
Godwit

A linocut I did 3 years ago.

@saocousins.bsky.social @holnicotenh.bsky.social @stevecobbin.bsky.social @andykaitken.bsky.social @mayfieldbirder.bsky.social @indikon.bsky.social 🦉🪶
White image on black background, of wading bird standing on one leg, looking to the right. It has a very long thin beak, white head, breast and tail, and the rest of the plumage is shaded using white stripes. (An actual godwit's plumage is mottled browns and russets with a pink beak.)
January 27, 2026 at 6:30 PM
Reposted by Mary B
hookland.bsky.social
Some homes hold their ghosts with quiet forbearance. They do not boast of their phantoms nor advertise for psychic researchers to poke and test them. They accommodate both living and dead residents, afford privacy to both sides. Places of gentle spectral tolerance. – #CJosiffe #Ghosts
January 27, 2026 at 6:33 PM
Reposted by Mary B
alisonfisk.bsky.social
A 3,400 year-old ancient Egyptian beauty box with original containers for makeup and beauty products! 🤩

📷 Museo Egizio, Turin

#Archaeology
An image of an ancient Egyptian wooden box with a separate flat lid placed on top slightly ajar. Dimensions 29.5 cm x 22 cm x 49 cm. The inside of the box is divided into compartments (obscured in the image by the lid). The exterior of the box is decorated with a painted checkerboard pattern, with lotus bud and blossom border. The box’s contents are displayed next it. Small jars and containers made of alabaster, faience, and blue glass decorated with yellow and white festoons. Some still contain traces of original unguents and fat based creams. A blue glass eye-makeup tube decorated with white and yellow festoons, contains an applicator stick for applying kohl, a black eye cosmetic ‘made from soot and antimony that was applied to the eyelids and eyelashes as a protective filter against the rays of the sun and as a disinfectant’. This beauty box belonged to a woman named Merit. It was discovered in 1906 by Italian archaeologist Ernesto Schiaparelli inside Theban tomb (TT8) which belonged to Merit and her husband Kha. Kha was a high ranking official responsible for the design and construction of three 18th-Dynasty royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. An inscription on the beauty box, possibly added just before burial, states that the box is a funerary offering for Merit’s spirit. Dated New Kingdom, Eighteenth Dynasty, 1425–1353 BC.
January 27, 2026 at 5:26 PM
Reposted by Mary B
karencushman.bsky.social
Discoveries revealed at the UNESCO World Heritage Site at Gobeklitepe and Karahantepe near Sanliurfa, Turkey, are giving archaeologists new understandings of how humans transitioned from hunter-gatherers to settled societies more than 11,000 years ago. www.reuters.com/science/new-...
New finds in Turkey's southeast add to picture of Neolithic age
Turkey unveiled dozens of new finds at a major archaeological site in southeast Turkey on Wednesday, giving fresh insight into an area seen as showing humanity's transition from hunter-gatherers to se...
www.reuters.com
January 27, 2026 at 12:55 PM
Reposted by Mary B
britishnatureguide.bsky.social
A Ulysses Swallowtail seen by a friend in Cairns Australia yesterday.
January 27, 2026 at 1:58 PM
Reposted by Mary B
hookland.bsky.social
For Hookland has the dialect word of gigban – a corner on a path that is not itself haunted, but when turned will present you with ghosts. If you are walking the county it is a most useful word to have. – #CLNolan #WOTD
January 27, 2026 at 1:21 PM
Reposted by Mary B
paulwelsh89.bsky.social
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Winter
"Winter is represented as an old man, whose skin is a gnarled trunk, with the abrasions and swellings of the wood representing the skin wrinkles of old age. The beard, thin and poorly groomed, is composed of small branches and roots"
December 9, 2024 at 4:23 AM
Reposted by Mary B
signemaene.com
'Then they came to another grove of trees, where all the leaves were of gold; and afterwards to a third, where the leaves were all glittering diamonds.'
-The Twelve Dancing Princesses, Brothers Grimm.

🎨Errol Le Cain
Illustration of the twelve princesses walking through the forest on the way to the underground palace where they dance.
January 27, 2026 at 10:05 AM
Reposted by Mary B
chapps.bsky.social
The article below adds some fascinating detail to the rule of the #Thracian king Seuthes III, whose bronze portrait head, greaves and helmet I've photographed, below. He straddled multiple cultures, as the treasures from his tomb attest. 🏺

📸 me #ancientbluesky

flic.kr/s/aHBqjBSifK
The slightly over-life-size bronze head of a bearded man was found ipropped up on the ground of a rich Thracian tomb. As can be seen from the ragged edges of the bronze's neck, the head was crudely separated from the body of a statue, of which no trace was discovered in the tumulus. The excavators have speculated that the comprehensive equipment of the tomb with royal accoutrements despite the absence of human remains, together with the deposition of a reused partial portrait statue, suggests a symbolic rather than physical interment of the king. His body was not in the tomb. The hollow-cast bronze itself is in an exceptional state of preservation. The surfaces of both the hair and the flesh parts display a noble patina, in a palette between malachite green and dark chocolate browns. Most extraordinary, however, are the composite eyes, made from various materials, including alabaster for the sclera and glass in contrasting colors and opacity levels for the pupils, irises, and lacrimal caruncles. The eyes are inserted into open sockets of the hollow bronze, where they are framed by eyelashes cut from thin sheets of copper. The translucency and reflectiveness of the irises are such that the eyes retain their literal sparkle, giving the portrait an intense gaze that has rarely failed to stun viewers in the twenty years since the portrait's discovery. The image of a mature man is characterized by an ovoid skull, with a rounded forehead, wide-set eyes under bushy eyebrows, a large and aquiline nose, long handlebar mustache, and an untrimmed, scraggly beard - spade-like and jutting forward. In the combination of these iconographic and physiognomic details, the head is unlike any known portrait of a Greek man, including philosophers or rulers. The context of the head's discovery in the tomb of Seuthes Ill makes it more than plausible that the portrait indeed represents that Odrysian king. 3/4 view of the front, with its shaggy beard jutting forward. The slightly over-life-size bronze head of a bearded man was found ipropped up on the ground of a rich Thracian tomb. As can be seen from the ragged edges of the bronze's neck, the head was crudely separated from the body of a statue, of which no trace was discovered in the tumulus. The excavators have speculated that the comprehensive equipment of the tomb with royal accoutrements despite the absence of human remains, together with the deposition of a reused partial portrait statue, suggests a symbolic rather than physical interment of the king. His body was not in the tomb. The hollow-cast bronze itself is in an exceptional state of preservation. The surfaces of both the hair and the flesh parts display a noble patina, in a palette between malachite green and dark chocolate browns. Most extraordinary, however, are the composite eyes, made from various materials, including alabaster for the sclera and glass in contrasting colors and opacity levels for the pupils, irises, and lacrimal caruncles. The eyes are inserted into open sockets of the hollow bronze, where they are framed by eyelashes cut from thin sheets of copper. The translucency and reflectiveness of the irises are such that the eyes retain their literal sparkle, giving the portrait an intense gaze that has rarely failed to stun viewers in the twenty years since the portrait's discovery. The image of a mature man is characterized by an ovoid skull, with a rounded forehead, wide-set eyes under bushy eyebrows, a large and aquiline nose, long handlebar mustache, and an untrimmed, scraggly beard - spade-like and jutting forward. In the combination of these iconographic and physiognomic details, the head is unlike any known portrait of a Greek man, including philosophers or rulers. The context of the head's discovery in the tomb of Seuthes Ill makes it more than plausible that the portrait indeed represents that Odrysian king. Right side view, showing the hooked nose in particular. Excavated from the Golyama Kosmatka tumulus (burial mound) in 2004, these bronze greaves were among the opulent grave goods associated with the Thracian King Seuthes III. The armor found in the tumulus - a bronze helmet, this pair of decorated bronze greaves, a gorget-pectoral, and fragments of a composite (leather?) corselet - was all highly decorative and probably ceremonial. The greaves were cast in separate molds for the right and left legs, and additionally forged and chiseled; the knees are decorated in high relief with heads of Athena wearing an Attic helmet with three crests, supported by figures of a sphinx (the central one) and griffins (the lateral ones). Bronze, late 4th century BCE. Kazanlak, Iskra Historical Museum, Bulgaria. Photographed by me at an exhibition on ancient Thrace at the Getty Villa Museum in Malibu, California. From the Golyama Kosmatka tumulus near the town of Shipka, Bulgaria. The tomb inside is believed to be associated with the Thracian king Seuthes III (ca. 330-300/295 BCE). A rich assembly of luxury objects and armor were found in the burial chamber, including this bronze helmet and several silver vessels bearing inscriptions with the king's name, as well as a few bronze coins of Seuthes. The archaeologists did not, however, find any human remains or other evidence of an actual burial. This helmet is of the so-called Chalkidian type, with fixed cheekpieces, and belongs to the "Thracian group" with an outwardly curved nape guard. In the middle of the pediment-like frontal part, there is a dotted inscription: ΣΕΥΘΟΥ, "(belonging to) Seuthes." Soldered above the inscription is a gilded-silver appliqué depicting the frontally facing head of the goddess Athena wearing a winged helmet terminating in a swan's head at the top. Two silver plume holders were attached above the temples. Late 4th century BCE, bronze and silver with partial gilding. Kazanlak, Iskra Historical Museum, Bulgaria. ______ Photographed at the Getty Villa Museum, part of the 'Ancient Thrace and the Classical World: Treasures from Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece' exhibition.
January 26, 2026 at 7:19 PM
Reposted by Mary B
hookland.bsky.social
Goodnight from PC Ashbury, resenting cordon duty at Worley Woods on a night when the wind not only has a hundred pins for teeth, but a voice that whispers doom. Goodnight from June Rundle, telling herself the extra damson gin is for witch warding purposes. Goodnight from Hookland.
January 26, 2026 at 9:59 PM
Reposted by Mary B
ahistoryinart.bsky.social
Keith Vaughan painted just twenty still life oil paintings over the course of his career. This work 'Pomegranate, Lemon, Cup,' painted in 1948, consists of a tabletop with a striped tablecloth and angular forms.
January 26, 2026 at 8:37 PM
Reposted by Mary B
northumb-astro.bsky.social
I've just uploaded a short clip of real-time aurora to YouTube. This is my second attempt at filming an aurora with the Sony A7S ii, learning new stuff about this camera every time I use it. The high ISO video is insane !

www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2h4...

#NorthernLights #AuroraBorealis
Real-Time Aurora Borealis with the Sony a7S II
YouTube video by Northumberland Astro
www.youtube.com
January 25, 2026 at 5:11 PM
Reposted by Mary B
emmasartworks.bsky.social
Beach wildlife and strandline finds from an early morning walk last month. (Hartlepool, northeast England).
🪶🐡
Ink and watercolour drawings of shells, birds and fungi from Seaton Carew, Hartlepool, northeast England
January 26, 2026 at 10:51 AM
Reposted by Mary B
ahistoryinart.bsky.social
'Miners.' (1952) Keith Vaughan painted this image, probably in situ, during a period of significant optimism and patriotism in Britain when toil and work were associated with progress and regeneration.
January 26, 2026 at 7:11 PM
Reposted by Mary B
andreacarollee.bsky.social
a January Cormorant chilling on its perch over a pond in mid Hampshire, England
January 25, 2026 at 7:27 PM
Reposted by Mary B
drrjwarren.bsky.social
#ArtDD2026
Queen of the Night

From my archive. Felt like some lush colour today.

@saocousins.bsky.social @holnicotenh.bsky.social @stevecobbin.bsky.social @andykaitken.bsky.social @indikon.bsky.social @mayfieldbirder.bsky.social
Two tulip flowers, in deep black-crimson. Same colour splashed across the image.
January 26, 2026 at 6:33 PM
Reposted by Mary B
cwebbonline.com
Wow! This read-along of the NYT moment-by-moment leading to the murder of Alex Pretti should shake everyone awake. He was a Good Samaritan.

Agents fired at least ten shots in roughly five seconds. DHS and Pam Bondi claim Pretti approached them armed and intent on a “massacre.”
January 26, 2026 at 2:29 PM
Reposted by Mary B
gutenberg.org
The Alfred Jewel: A 1,100-year-old treasure from England's first king that proclaims 'Alfred ordered me to be made'

www.livescience.com/archaeology/...

"The Alfred Jewel: An Historical Essay" at PG:

www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59372

#art #history
The Alfred Jewel: A 1,100-year-old treasure from England's first king that proclaims 'Alfred ordered me to be made'
This gold-encrusted jewel has an inscription revealing who made it.
www.livescience.com
January 26, 2026 at 1:11 PM
Reposted by Mary B
annazona.bsky.social
The #Death of Priam by Achilles' son during the sack of #Troy. #Relief #war by Antonio Canova. #art #ancient #ancientbluesky #alphabetchallenge #weeKDforDramatic #photography #eastcoastkin #anzaa #sculpture #blueskyphotography
January 26, 2026 at 2:53 PM
Reposted by Mary B
forestcollectiv.bsky.social
#MosaicMonday with this labyrinth mosaic, discovered in the churchyard at Caerleon, from the legate's residence
~c1-3 AD

We recently had a discussion on the Roman invasion of wales with @drtobydriver.bsky.social along with all things Wales & Hillforts 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
its here >>> www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvyY...
January 26, 2026 at 9:22 AM
Reposted by Mary B
chapps.bsky.social
The ring below is a historical mashup. It's a chunky Anglo-Saxon gold filigree finger ring set with an ancient Roman intaglio featuring the god Bonus Eventus, aka "good outcome." He personifies the successful results of labor, particularly agriculture. 🏺 1/

6th c. CE ring, 1st-5th c. intaglio. 📸 me
Anglo-Saxon gold filigree finger-ring - with gold wires representing branches or vines, and a myriad of tiny granular gold balls representing flowers or fruit - set with an engraved oval Roman intaglio gem made of nicolo, depicting figure of the god Bonus Eventus. Bonus Eventus was the Roman god of "good outcome," personifying the successful results of labor, particularly agriculture, but also other human activities. He was depicted as a male figure holding a cup and a spray of wheat or grain and was associated with general success and good omens, appearing on coins from emperors like Vespasian and Septimius Severus. The naked god holds a sheaf of wheat in his right hand, down by his leg, and holds out a cup in his left hand. Nicolo is an intaglio carved in banded onyx (such as this one), agate or glass in such a way that the depiction, engraved on the pale top layer, reveals the dark color underneath. Anglo-Saxon gold ring, 6th century CE; Roman nicolo intaglio, ca. 1st-5th century CE. Found at Snape, Suffolk, England. British Museum, London (1950,1206.1)
January 26, 2026 at 5:13 PM