Posted on 02/25/2006 10:44:53 AM PST by blam
Ancient refuge found by workmen
The stone-built tunnel leads into the hillside
Workmen have unearthed 1,000 years of history on a County Down building site. They have come upon an underground stone-built tunnel in Raholp, where our ancestors might have hidden from the Vikings or from warring neighbours.
Archaeologist Ken Neill said that with chambers off from the main tunnel it was a quite complicated souterrain, and probably built by better off farmers.
The opening that led to the tunnel - which leads into the hillside - will be sealed and the passage left alone.
"It was really somewhere for you to get down and hide when your area was being attacked by your neighbours or Vikings," he said.
"You would get down into this and you would be relatively safe.
The souterrain was found on a building site
"It would be a brave man that would come down one of these after you - not knowing the plan of it and not knowing at which corner he stuck his head round you'd be waiting on the other side with an axe or whatever."
There are about 1,000 known souterrains in Northern Ireland, about 100 of which are in County Down.
They are one of Ireland's most distinctive archaeological features but very few are accessible to the public.
While the one on the building site is being closed off the Finnis souterrian, near Dromara, is open to the public.
Known locally as Binder's Cove it was found in the 18th century and consists of a main passage of around 30m in length and two straight side passages on the right hand side, each approximately 6m long.
Obviously the Anderson and Peterson are Swedish, and some of the others may be too. What part of the country?
My mother's family name was Longacre, and we always thought it was English. We learned a few years ago, however, that it is actually Swedish. At the time the Swedes first came here they used the patronymic (sp?) method of naming their children. In other words Lars Peterson's sons last names would be Larson, or Larsen. His daughters' last names would be Larsdotter. This changed every generation, so there was no obvious continuity. The Dutch did the same thing.
When the English kicked the Dutch out of the New World and took over New Amsterdam they passed a law that said that all the Scandinavians and Dutch had to adopt the Anglo way of naming children -- the father's last name carries on through the generations -- because the Dutch and the Swedish methods were too confusing. This was in the 1700s.
We don't know the reason; but my ancestor, who at that time was named Anders Peterson, adopted the last name of Longacre (Lonoker), instead of Peterson. He is recorded in the records variously as Andreas (Anders) P. Lonoker, Longaker, or Longacre. At the time he owned a piece of land on an island in the Schuykill River (PA) that was long and skinny -- a long acre. Either he named himself after his land, or he named himself after his brother in law who was an Englishman and owned the adjacent land -- his name being Longshore. The two parcels are marked on the old map -- Longacre and Longshore.
Reason? I figure it was because there were already too many Petersons in the community! Or, he had a great sense of humor. And it has confused multiple subsequent generations.
But if you look at the lists of the "Old Swedes" from New Sweden, you will find many names that do not sound Swedish to our present day ears. In other words, not all of the names ended in "son".
What town would I find Swedetown Road?
Fascinating link. I'd love to see those textiles.
It's in a small unincoroprated town about 15 miles west of Mobile, Alabama.
My dad ran Browder's Dairy within the area of that map. All those roads on the left of the map are now on land that was the dairy.
Hmmmm. I don't know if any of my ancestors made it to Alabama, although their descendents are all over the place. My family branch went from Pennsylvania to Virginia to Tennessee to Missouri to Oregon to California. Other branches are in nearly every state of the union. Your "Swedetown Rd." was probably named for a later group of Swedes because by the time my family started spreading out they were pretty well intermarried with the Dutch, Finns, Norwegians, English, and Germans. My husband's family has roots in 'Bama, Arkansas, OK, and NC, but they were Scots-Irish.
When I looked on your Chinese link about the mummy, there was a paragraph about the "Dingling tomb". I couldn't help but laugh.
You can in this excellent book: The Mummies Of Urumchi
The author, Elizabeth Barber, has a PhD in textiles.
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I know Vikings invaded what is now Ireland. Those Celtic artifacts look similar to Anasazi artifacts.
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Great place to hide out from work!
Thanks for the ping!
Saw them all in 2002. The elderly woman guide at Newgrange ranted on about how "grange" just meant farm and how the English were monsters, and unimaginative too, for calling it "Newgrange" meaning "Newfarm" instread of calling it by the name the Celts used.
Because my wife had made me promise to be on my best behavior I (barely) overcame my desire to speak up and point out that what ever the English or Celts called it, we don't know what the people who built Newgrange called it, because the Celts (with whom the present Irish in the Republic identify, especially when they accuse the English of cultutal genocide), had destroyed the builder's culture so throughly that we don't even know what the pre-Celtic inhabitants of Ireland called the monuments they built, including Newgrange.
Yeah, I don't buy her GAM theory, either :-) That's one reason I mentioned Bailey, because he shows how you can interpret the same data without a GAM slant. Everyone's got strengths and weaknesses, though. She's still got a good feel for symbolism, and more importantly for my purposes her books have lots of photos and illustrations for raw data, which is my main use for them; for theory I go elsewhere. Thanks for the Hutton recommendation--I'll check that out.
Lucky you. The resources on the web say that Newgrange is called that because it was the site of a new grange. The mound and the astronomical site lay undiscovered until the 1600s. It was just a mound of grass. By then it was already called new grange because it was a new far as compared with the neighboring, already established grange! Geeesh! Some people are picky.
We thoroughly enjoyed our guides until the name of Bill Clinton came up. Unfortunately a lot of the Irish do not understand what that man put this country through. LOL.
We were touring Ireland on 9/11/2001. You can imagine how tense things were. THe people were wonderful to us, but we did not know if we would ever make it home again. LOL.
LOL. Love the picture! Did you do that?
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But they being a brave and courageous type folks who I beleive as well as the whole of UK being descendance of tribe of Israel "NOT to confuse with British Israelite distorted version of today!", but as history unfolds I am sure we will learn the correct untarnish truth.
Recall an episode on History Channel, or some such, where the topic of Swedes 'going South' was detailed very well with some of what you say...spoke of the Swedish DNA being common among certain areas a long way from Sweden....
"....Anderson, Peterson, Ott, Vanek, Kasky and Haskew...."
Anderson is Scottish....I am descended from some Scottish Andersons. (Andersen or Andersson would be the Scandinavian spellings). Peterson, Ott, and Haskew also sound Scottish to me (Haskew is probably a variation of Eskew, which is certainly Scottish). Vanek sounds Czech to me; Kasky is probably Polish.
Most of the settlers of Alabama (indeed, most of the inland South) were "Scotch-Irish", that is, the Ulster Scots. Very few Swedes appeared in the South...there are very few even to this day.
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