"Witch's Cottage" Found In UK

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Workmen make 'bewitching' discovery


(UK News-Yahoo) Water engineers have unearthed what could prove to be one of the most infamous sites in England's history of witches and warlocks.

United Utilities' workers were "stunned" to discover a 17th century witch's-style cottage, with a mummified cat sealed into the walls, during a routine construction project in Pendle, Lancashire.

The "spellbinding" find occurred near Lower Black Moss reservoir in the village of Barley, which nestles in the shadow of Pendle Hill - the UK's premier witching hotspot.

Speculation is already rife among local historians that the building could be the lost Malkin Tower - the site of a notorious meeting of the Pendle witches on Good Friday, 1612.

Archaeologists brought in by the North West water firm to survey the area found a remarkably well-preserved building from the 1600s, hidden beneath a grass mound.

The building contained a sealed room, with a mummified cat bricked into the wall. It is believed the cat was buried alive to protect the cottage's inhabitants from evil spirits.

Carl Sanders, United Utilities' project manager, said: "It's not often you come across a fairytale cottage complete with witch's cat. The building is in remarkable condition. You can walk through it and get a real sense that you're peering into the past."

Simon Entwistle, an expert on the Pendle witches, said: "In terms of significance, it's like discovering Tutankhamun's tomb. We are just a few months away from the 400th anniversary of the Pendle witch trials, and here we have an incredibly rare find, right in the heart of witching country."

Frank Giecco, from NP Archaeology, led the team who unearthed the Pendle building.

He said: "It's like discovering your own little Pompeii. We rarely get the opportunity to work with something so well preserved. As soon as we started digging, we found the tops of doors, and knew we were onto something special."


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The cottage may have once looked like these nearby homes in Pendle Hill Witch Country.

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17th Century "Witch's Cottage" Unearthed in Britain

(NBC Miami)  A 400-year-old "witch's cottage" complete with a mummified cat was unearthed by British engineers excavating a grass-covered mound.

Archaeologists were called to the construction project in Lancashire after the cottage was discovered, according to the BBC. Experts believe the the well-preserved cottage may have belonged to one of the Pendle witches.

The mummified cat was found embedded in a brick wall, where it may have been buried alive to ward off evil spirits.

Carl Sanders, United Utilities' project manager, said: "It's not often you come across a fairytale cottage complete with witch's cat.

"The building is in remarkable condition," Carl Sanders, manager of the utilities project that necessitated the digging, told the BBC. "You can walk through it and get a real sense that you're peering into the past."

The area around the cottage, Pendle Hill, is known as witch country for a spate of witch trials that took place during the 17th century.

Simon Entwistle, an expert on the Pendle witches compared the discovery to finding the tomb of King Tut.

"We are just a few months away from the 400th anniversary of the Pendle witch trials, and here we have an incredibly rare find, right in the heart of witching country," he said. "This could well be the famous Malkin Tower - which has been a source of speculation and rumor for centuries."

The building also contains a 19th Century kitchen range, Victorian crockery, a tin bath and a bedstead from its later years.

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Found Artifacts, Lost Civilizations

The Lost Nation of Iynkicidu
by Brad Steiger

UFO Digest- In November, 1829, in a quarry twelve miles northwest of Philadelphia, a block of marble taken from a depth of between sixty and seventy feet was found to bear an indentation containing the raised alphabet characters "I" and "U." According to a report prepared by J. B. Browne (American Journal of Science Vol. 1, #19, p. 361): "Fortunately several of the most respectable gentlemen residing in Norristown were called upon to witness this remarkable phenomenon, without whose testimony it might have been difficult, if not impossible, to have satisfied the public, that …the letters [had not been made] after the slab was cut off."

In all frankness, Browne does not call the characters "I" and "U"; he calls them simply "characters" and "letters," and the illustration in the American Journal of Science pictures the two raised characters upside down. This also creates an interesting effect. With the "U" resting on its legs instead of on its curve, the character becomes a dolmen (a single chamber megalithic tomb). The "I" becomes a towering monolith to its right. It is almost as if some ancient hand had previously designated that the marble slabs should be used as tombstones or grave markers.


In November, 1832, Charles C. Jones, Jr., discovered two silver crosses in a grave-mound at Coosawattee Old Town in Murray County, Georgia. Native American tribal relics were also found in the burial mound, so those who had disinterred the grave theorized that the crosses had come to the Cherokee nation during the expeditions of Hernando de Soto at Luis de Velasco. Read more>>




Note: Other items found have been a gold chain, an ancient nail, an iron pot, coins, bell, a wall, candlestick, strange metal spheres and many other objects that defy logic, as they are found in anything, from lava and lumps of coal, to crystals.

Was there a civilization thousands of years ago, or is there another, more recent explanation? Maybe some day that mystery will be solved.

Fossil Skeleton From Africa Predates Lucy

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: October 1, 2009




Lucy, meet Ardi.

Link to Photo

Nytimes.com- Ardi, short for Ardipithecus ramidus, is the newest fossil skeleton out of Africa to take its place in the gallery of human origins. At an age of 4.4 million years, it lived well before and was much more primitive than the famous 3.2-million-year-old Lucy, of the species Australopithecus afarensis.

Since finding fragments of the older hominid in 1992, an international team of scientists has been searching for more specimens and on Thursday presented a fairly complete skeleton and their first full analysis. By replacing Lucy as the earliest known skeleton from the human branch of the primate family tree, the scientists said, Ardi opened a window to “the early evolutionary steps that our ancestors took after we diverged from our common ancestor with chimpanzees.”

The older hominid was already so different from chimps that it suggested “no modern ape is a realistic proxy for characterizing early hominid evolution,” they wrote.

The Ardipithecus specimen, an adult female, probably stood four feet tall and weighed about 120 pounds, almost a foot taller and twice the weight of Lucy. Its brain was no larger than a modern chimp’s. It retained an agility for tree-climbing but already walked upright on two legs, a transforming innovation in hominids, though not as efficiently as Lucy’s kin.

Ardi’s feet had yet to develop the arch-like structure that came later with Lucy and on to humans. The hands were more like those of extinct apes. And its very long arms and short legs resembled the proportions of extinct apes, or even monkeys.

Tim D. White of the University of California, Berkeley, a leader of the team, said in an interview this week that the genus Ardipithecus appeared to resolve many uncertainties about “the initial stage of evolutionary adaptation” after the hominid lineage split from that of the chimpanzees. No fossil trace of the last common ancestor, which lived some time before six million years ago, according to genetic studies, has yet come to light. More>>