Phil - Warden, ULMC Caseg Fraith Hut🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

The Latin family tree

One storm. One fallen tree. One field in the Lake District. ✏️ The entire global pencil industry. There is a field in the Lake District. Nothing remarkable about it. Fell sheep, grey sky, Cumbrian rain. Until one day a storm came through. It uprooted a tree and underneath the roots was something nobody had ever seen before. A black substance. Soft, dark, left a mark on everything it touched. The shepherds didn't know what it was, but they used it to mark their sheep. That was 1565. It was the purest deposit of graphite ever found on earth. The only one like it. Ever. 🌍 Word spread fast. The Crown seized the mine, put armed guards on the fell and flooded it between diggings to keep the price high. Stealing graphite became a criminal offence. Punishable by transportation to Australia. Because this wasn't just for marking sheep. It was perfect for lining cannonball moulds. It made England's cannonballs rounder. Faster. More deadly. ⚔️ England had a pencil monopoly for nearly a century. Every artist, every cartographer, every engineer in Europe. All of them wanted what was in that one Cumbrian field. Slowly, workshops appeared in nearby Keswick. Cottage industries. Families cutting graphite into sticks. Wrapping them in string. Then sheepskin. Then wood. The pencil was born. ✏️ In a Cumbrian field. Because a storm uprooted a tree. There is still a pencil factory in Keswick today. On the same site it has always been. Did you know that? These islands have thousands of stories the world has forgotten. We find them. We tell them. We put them in front of millions. You help us make that possible. Be Part Of Us. Be Proud Of Us. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧 proudofus.co.uk

@ProudofusUK The pencil factory in Keswick closed in 2007 when production was moved to Workington @pencilmuseum is still on the site, but the factory and its surrounding area were bought by Keswick Ministries to consolidate all the Keswick Convention activities on one site

Did you know!?

This map shows the 8 sections of the newly opened King Charles III England Coast Path. At 2,689 miles (4,328 km) long, it is now the longest managed coastal walking route in the world. More about it: brilliantmaps.com/king-charles-i…

It's incredible to think about it. The Famine was 174 years ago and the population of Ireland still hasn't recovered from it.

This mind-blowing visualization reveals the insane relative cosmic velocities at play: Earth spinning + orbiting the Sun + Solar System racing around the galaxy + our galaxy hurtling through the universe Shocking part? We still feel nothing.

May 16, 1963. Gordon Cooper was orbiting Earth alone inside a capsule barely big enough to turn around in, moving at 17,500 miles per hour. He had been up there for over a day. Then the warnings started. First a faulty sensor screaming that the ship was falling — it wasn't. He switched it off. Then something far worse: a short circuit knocked out the entire automated guidance system. The one that kept the capsule steady. The one that was supposed to bring him home. Without it, reentry was nearly impossible. Too shallow an angle and the capsule would bounce off the atmosphere back into space. Too steep and it would incinerate. The margin for error was razor thin — and every computer that was supposed to hit that margin was dead. Down on the ground, NASA engineers watched the telemetry in silence. They could see everything going wrong. They could fix nothing. Cooper didn't panic. He uncapped a grease pencil and drew lines directly on the inside of his window to track the horizon. He looked up at the stars he had spent months memorizing and used their positions to orient the ship by eye. Then he set his wristwatch. Because when you have no computers left, you become the computer. At exactly the right moment — calculated in his head, confirmed by the stars outside — he fired the retrorockets. The capsule shook. The sky turned to fire. For several minutes, no one on Earth could reach him as plasma swallowed the ship whole. Then the parachutes opened. Faith 7 hit the water just four miles from the recovery ship — the single most accurate splashdown in the entire Mercury program. The man with a wristwatch and a few pencil marks on a window had outperformed every automated system NASA had. We talk a lot about technology saving us. And it often does. But Cooper's story is a quiet reminder that behind every machine, there still has to be a human being who can look out the window, think clearly under pressure, and decide what to do next. The final backup was never the software. It was him.

@JamesRowan_1980 @JHenryCDF You have got the decimal place wrong. Welsh is spoken by 99% of the UK population and 18% of the Welsh population I don't speak Welsh, but I respect the right of the local people of Gwynedd, where 64% speak Welsh, to determine what places should be called, in their own language

@JHenryCDF Yr Wyddfa will always be Snowdon on behalf of 99.9% of the population of the UK who don’t speak Welsh.

Reminder: Caerdydd ✅ Cardiff ❌ Ynys Môn ✅ Anglesey ❌ Penfro✅ Pembroke❌ Trefynwy ✅ Monmouth ❌ Caerfyrddin✅ Carmarthen ❌ Wrecsam ✅ Wrexham ❌ Llanelwy ✅ St Asaph❌ Dinbych ✅ Denbigh ❌ Caerffili ✅ Caerphilly ❌

Oxford professor John Lennox in an interview with Jordan Peterson in 2023 explained his view that there is no conflict between science and Christianity: "I never saw the tension between Christianity and science because very early on as a teenager I was introduced to the writings of a scientist who was a Christian who drew my attention to something Alfred North Whitehead wrote, and it was really put in much simpler language by C.S. Lewis when he wrote 'Men became scientific because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in a Lawgiver.' And so, very early on, and I was fascinated by the idea, that actually modern science is a legacy of the biblical worldview, and therefore, it's no accident that the pioneers—Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, and so on—were believers in God. And as you pointed out, it underpins the tradition that lies behind the great universities of the world that the doctrine of Creation was actually the belief, the underlying presupposition, that allowed people to do science. So I've come over my life to the conclusion that science and the biblical worldview sit very comfortably together, but it's science and atheism that do not sit comfortably together."

Tomorrow marks the Spring Equinox, the first day of astronomical spring in the northern hemisphere! Increasing amounts of daylight until 21 June. Equinox in Latin means "equal night" but day and night were equal on the Equilux which was on 18 March. weather.metoffice.gov.uk/learn-about/we…

I’ve learned that doubt isn’t the opposite of faith. It’s a part of it. It’s the questions that lead to a deeper understanding. It’s the wrestling that makes your belief your own.

Another glorious day at the Caseg Fraith Hut! No bookings at the moment, for either of the bank holiday weekends in May (1-4 and 22-25) and we are looking for whole hut bookings caseg.ulgmc.org/caseg-fraith-h… Now 1 short of reaching 1000 followers, so a repost would be appreciated

Use of Dinner vs Tea vs Supper In The UK & Ireland credit: @Starkey_Comics More similar maps: brilliantmaps.com/6-ways-to-divi…

A glorious day at the Caseg Fraith Hut! No bookings at the moment, for either of the bank holiday weekends in May (1-4 and 22-25) and we are looking for whole hut bookings caseg.ulgmc.org/caseg-fraith-h… Also, we are 2 short of reaching 1000 followers, so a repost would be appreciated

#MountainToponymy Well done! Not everyone gets these interpretations right! Lots of people think Tryfan means Three Peaks and Pen yr Ole Wen was misinterpreted for many years! bbmc.boys-brigade.org.uk/pen-yr-ole-wen bbmc.boys-brigade.org.uk/tryfan

I’ve learned that on our own we’re pretty weak, but connected to something bigger than us, we become stronger. A team. A family. A faith. Don’t try to do it all alone.

@GPCdictionary I know the area well, having camped at @BBWMDCC and being a trustee of @CMCAdventure But I never knew that there was a 16-mile submerged ridge (named after St Patrick) extending in a southwesterly direction from Mochras Point that occasionally became visible at very low tides

Word of the Day: Sarn Badrig geiriadur.ac.uk/gpc/gpc.html?S…. Today is St. Patrick’s Day, patron saint of Ireland. Sarn Badrig is the Welsh name for St. Patrick’s causeway near Harlech and is also one of several Welsh names for the Milky Way. (Photo: Ian Warburton)

The longer you look, the more satisfying it gets.