Old battles, old and new harvests.

The harvest is coming to an end in Newburgh on Ythan. It amazes me just how much the harvest has changed in my life time. When I was a young boy the corn was cut with binders that spat out sheaves that had to be erected, by hand, into small stooks, to complete the drying process. Once dry, the sheaves were forked, again by hand, onto carts and were taken to the farm yard. There they were carefully stacked, again by hand to form beautifully crafted corn ricks. Some time afterwards a huge threshing machine would arrive, sometimes still powered by a steam traction engine but more usually by one of those newfangled Field Marshall tractors. The sheaves were forked onto the top of the thresher, the strings cut by hand, and then fed into the great beasts's mouth. After much whirling and beating the grain came out at one end to be fed into stacks, the straw billowed out at the other end, and the chaff flew everywhere, like driven snow. All that then remained was to cart the sacks of grain to the granary and to bale the straw. Nowadays a combine harvester and a baling machine do the job in one fell-swoop!

To change the subject completely, the hill on the horizon is Bennachie, claimed, by many, to be the site of the ancient battle of Mons Graupius. In AD 84, on the slopes of Bennachie, a large force of 17,000 Roman soldiers led by Agricola took on 30,000 natives under the leadership of Calagacus,

According to the only contemporary account of the battle, Tacitus' The Life of Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the Romans emerged totally victorious, slaying some 10,000 of their opponents with the loss of only 360 on their own side.

One of the Roman units fighting on that day was the IX Hispana, the ninth legion. Later the the 9th was to become famous when, in around 108 AD, 5000 battle-hardened men simply disappeared from the face of the Earth, somewhere in Northern Britain.

Tomorrow I am off to a wilder part of Scotland where there is no internet connection and no 'phone signal, but probably where there are still dragons to be seen. So, no blips from me for a few days, although back blips will surely materialise eventually.