Richard Barnes

@macinnes_john @joannemacinnes and it's got sheep ticks waiting for you!

Don’t ever visit Iona, it just rains here, every single day! Summer, autumn, winter and spring. Sometimes it is warm, but mostly it is cold rain. And don’t try to do a lambing here🐑🤦‍♂️ @joannemacinnes #belingtoiona

‘Waking FromA Dream’ a song about outgrowing a life that feels too small. Images: #Midjourney Animation: #VEO3 Lyrics by me and song made using #Suno. #ai #aiart #aivideo #surreal

@daniellismore Sometimes you see a tweet so fatuous, like this one from @daniellismore, that it makes people not bother to interact or reply. It's instablock for him.

People who voted for Brexit are traitors to Great Britain. In a new book, it has been claimed that the late Queen Elizabeth II privately expressed concern to former US President Barack Obama, questioning why David Cameron would put such a significant political decision to a public vote without knowing the likely outcome. The 2016 referendum was full of misinformation, and 10 years later, the consequences are clear. We must rebuild our relationship with Europe. 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🫖☕️👑

@DaddyCoffee73 @Keir_Starmer Nobody born this century voted to be in the doomed trade bloc. Even if, (imagine) it was true that sufficient remainians could overturn the majority, there would still be the problem of our country having to increase corruption in order to re-align with Brussels.

NOBODY born this century voted for Brexit. More than 1 in 10 Brexit voters have died since 2016. The population has changed; Britain wants to #Rejoin! @Keir_Starmer, just do it 👍

A colourised photo of the Half Moon Inn, which was once situated at Sunderlands 200 High Street East, circa 1900 🍺 #RIP To the pub and all those who used it.

@histories_arch Somehow skirted around the central question of why the Irish Scoti killed the North British Picti?

The Picts did not fall... That is the strange thing at the centre of their story. They were not conquered by Rome, though Rome tried. They were not destroyed by the Angles or the Vikings, though both pressed hard against the edges of their world. They did not end in fire or massacre or the kind of catastrophic military defeat that closes other chapters of early medieval history. They simply stopped being Picts. By the middle of the 9th century, the people who had controlled much of northern Britain for five hundred years had merged with the Gaelic kingdom of Dalriada to form the kingdom of Alba, the political foundation of what would eventually become Scotland. The merger was not sudden. It was not clean. Historians argue about whether it was primarily political, cultural, or dynastic, whether the Picts absorbed the Gaels or the Gaels absorbed the Picts or whether something genuinely new emerged from the collision of the two. What is harder to argue is the outcome. Within a few generations, the Picts had become invisible. Their language disappeared, leaving almost no written record. The few Pictish words that survive come mostly from place names and the names of kings preserved in later lists, scraps of sound without enough context to reconstruct what surrounded them. No Pictish manuscript tradition survives. No law codes. No literature. No religious texts in their own tongue. A people who had maintained their independence against the most powerful empire the ancient world produced left behind less written evidence of themselves than almost any comparable culture in early medieval Europe. What they left instead were the stones. Hundreds of them, scattered across the Highlands and islands of Scotland, carved with a visual language that nobody has fully decoded. The symbols appear again and again across different stones and different centuries with a consistency that speaks of meaning, of a shared system understood by the people who made them, but the key to that system did not survive the merger that ended the Pictish world. Spirals and crescents. Stylised animals of extraordinary elegance. Geometric designs of a precision that required both skill and intention. The stones are clearly saying something. We do not know what. This is what makes the Picts so compelling and so frustrating in equal measure. They were not a marginal people. From roughly the 3rd to the 9th centuries they controlled most of northern Britain, built fortified settlements, engaged in complex diplomacy with their neighbours, and maintained a cultural identity distinct enough that everyone around them recognised it. Roman writers noted them. Later Gaelic and Northumbrian sources noted them. Medieval chroniclers recorded their kings in lists that suggest an organised and continuous political structure. They were present, powerful, and noticed. And then the noticing stopped. The kingdom of Alba that emerged in the 9th century was in many ways a Pictish kingdom wearing Gaelic clothes, or a Gaelic kingdom built on Pictish foundations, depending on which thread you pull. The kings of Alba traced their legitimacy through lines that included Pictish royal blood. The territory was overwhelmingly what had been Pictish land. But the name was gone, and with the name went the identity, at least as a distinct category that the people themselves maintained or that outside observers continued to apply. What drove the transformation is still debated. A dynastic union under Cináed mac Ailpín, known to later tradition as Kenneth MacAlpin, is the conventional starting point, but the conventional starting point has been questioned and complicated by subsequent scholarship. The reality was probably messier and slower than a single king and a single moment of unification. These things usually are. #archaeohistories

‘Golden In The Sun’ I wrote this song about how good just feeling the sun on your face can be when you are feeling down and it just recharges your soul. Images: #Midjourney Animation #VEO3 Lyrics by me and sing made using #Suno. #ai #aiart #aivideo

@MeredithCatrin @Royal_Sculptors Sorry Catrin – there is no list of every grave or memorial in UK. I was referring to the list of sculptors / dates / locations in Geoff Archer's 2009 book about Figurative Sculpture of British WW1 Memorials.

@onefrontier @Royal_Sculptors Ooh there's a list? Is this the Sculptured Memorials and Headstones Group? Don't suppose there's a location for Emily Katharine Jacques' headstone?

A mystery for #MemorialMonday - don't suppose anyone can recognise where this is? Calvary cross is the work of Julian Phelps Allan, poss date 1931.

@MeredithCatrin @Royal_Sculptors Have had a look in the lists, but no joy. Surprised it is in marble as Miss Allan favoured local stone. Possibly a convent church in northern England?

Any clues, @onefrontier @Royal_Sculptors ?

Five #statues of the #goddess showing her different characteristics at Flora Fountain in Mumbai. A collaboration in 1869 between #Sculptor James Forsyth and #architect Richard Norman Shaw.

@Gwynoro but Gwynoro it was #PMQs. Even if you favour the PM, how can you approve his evasive 'whataboutery' and ad hominem responses?

For once I watched #PMQs today - you have to hand it to Keir Starmer he has great inner strength ( bearing in mind the incessant vitriol several in the media throw at him and about him). He decimated both Badenoch and Farage, the latter could not take the heat, his MPs walked out

@Eddystone506 but Eddy the Remainian propaganda has been repeatedly debunked. We never hear from you about all the times your stats have been shown to be concocted.

You know the Leave-voter myth that somehow Brexit's immense harm has been "debunked"? It hasn't 🔽🔽

@john4brexit Thank you John Longworth. It needed saying.

This is complete rubbish. Brexit has been a benefit & could do much more. I guess Rejoiners believe if you repeat a lie often enough people will begin to believe it. It’s called propaganda

@welshroots How much do you want for your bridge?

Shame on Nick Ferrai and some of the other Right Wing Jumped up Journalists running down and criticising Keir Starmer’s government at this very SERIOUS moment in WORLD HISTORY If you think Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage could do better I got a bridge to sell you Stop spreading FEAR and start acting responsibly !!!!! #lbc #BBCBreakfast #r4today #JeremyVine #GBNEWS

@Suewilson91 When confronted, the Observer was not able to substantiate its wild claim, and tweeter Wilson has been exposed time and time again for false facts. What's different now is that with EU in a panic to federalise and warmonger, its undemocratic failings are seen by all.

"The problem with Brexit is Brexit", not whether is was done "properly". observer.co.uk/news/national/…

@DaddyCoffee73 @bbclaurak reminiscent of Blair's #WMD45 lie to parliament?

The most irresponsible journalist in UK media… @bbclaurak is desperate to foment fear of a missile attack on London despite all her guests telling her repeatedly that there’s zero evidence that Iran have that capability. She’s a disgrace to her profession.

@WW3finalboss There are 160,000,000 people inside the doomed trade bloc who don't want your united West Asia fantasy.

It is time for Europe to unite and abolish borders forever I’ve never met even a single person that is against a united Europe Seriously, what the fuck are we waiting for? 🇪🇺🇪🇺🇪🇺

@NotFarLeftAtAll why do you say that?

No … Biggest Traitor ever

@franceshinde I am surprised that you, Frances, who describe yourself as a truth-seeker, can endorse a politician exposed as a liar.

Absolutely right, David. He is the adult in the room