Rowling Makes a Stand

[JadeLeader]

Ok, so I know the educated classes hate us and our Dear Leader, but she's really not doing herself any favours here...

Gravity is not real?

Probably pumps. I think there's a place along one of the big drains/rivers where their are successive generations of drainage pumps built next to one another. The details escape me but it's something like the oldest is wind powered, then steam, then diesel with the newest being electric, probably with the diesel as back up. The pumphouses are all at different levels as the land shrank as it was pumped dry more and more efficiently.

That makes sense...windmills in Holland

I think there may be pumps somewhere? Probably where the dyke would come to a full stop and needs to be pumped up into another watercourse.
Pumps and sluices often go together, and the electric pumps used nowadays are really small compared to windmills and steam engines so less easy to notice.

If it's not pumped then it's definitely witchcraft.

There's a drain that catches the water that comes down off the limestone ridge that Lincoln cathedral sits on the end of. It is way lower than the Fossdyke canal which it goes into via a great big pipe installed under the canal and a pumping station. The Fossdyke is probably Roman and the pipe was put in iirc late 19th century after the Trent levy went all the land down to Lincoln flooded. No way at all for it to drain due to the uphill issue so things had to be done.
Every watercourse that meets the sea on the Lincolnshire coast has to be pumped up as the land is lower and the whole huge area between the wolds and the sea relies on those pumps, and ruddy great sea defences. Same with the lower Trent which was dredged for shipping and trammelled between high levys where it used to be wide and sprawling and shallow enough to ford in places.

Ha, long post, got behind.
Windmills in Lincolnshire are mostly for making flour, around the Broads they were pumps. We have naturally visited Horsey windpump, encouraged by the DS during the fen drainage phase.

I love this.

Desperate misogynist attempts some futile women baiting and immediately invokes female goddesses.

Discussion of which replaces his conversation entirely.

Yes, this. I think the successive generations of pumps featured in a rather good Talking Landscapes documentary by Aubrey Manning around 20 years ago.

Out near Whittlesey the peat has shrunk by about 4 metres since the 1850s alone.
www.greatfen.org.uk/about-great-fen/heritage/holme-fen-posts

Holme Fen! When I was about 10, my Dad used to take me on the back of his moped to Holme Fen, where we'd, er, pick bluebells. As far as I recall.

I hated the fens as a kid. Drab and flat and boring.

I'm irrationally excited by estuarine landscapes.

So the OP understood perfectly well what Rowling meant but decided to misinterpret it just for the fun of having a pop at her. Well that was a lot of noise about nothing then. Still, the fens were interesting so my reading the thread not entirely wasted.

Ooh thanks. I love a brack. I might try it with Earl Gray and some finely chopped stem ginger mixed through it.
Going back to earlier in the thread (sorry, catching up) re celery; for those who are iffy about it, use celeriac. Excellent in soup and no horrid strings to gag over.
Dill. Satan's herb. Use fennel instead. My late DF will now be haunting me, he hated fennel and loved dill.
Mashed spuds. Add far more medium cheddar than you could possibly need and then some more. Bake till it reaches the temperature of the surface of the sun. Excellent with Christmas ham, leftover turkey, stuffing etc. Also with braised red cabbage cooked with vinegar (just a little) and crabapple jelly (lots).
V interested in cucumber jam, recipe please. I make pear, ginger and lime which I am guessing fulfils the same functions.

Crikey, imagine how exhausting it must be to know certain people in real life. Has Emily exhausted themself after their climatic babbling biddies?

Am going to read back about Holy Wells (as an aside, as a non religious person I found the BBC's pilgrimage easter programme really lovely - it was based in the NE of England this year)

Why is MN having to think for so long about a map of holy wells??

If anybody wants to go into the subject in detail:
Holy-Wells-of-Ireland.pdf

Add far more medium cheddar than you could possibly need and then some more. Bake till it reaches the temperature of the surface of the sun.

I like your style of recipe, AverageWhiteShark.
You should have your own cookery programme on TV, it'd be kickin'😁

The best waffles I ever ate were on a whale watching trip on a catamaran off the coast of Norway in December about 10 years back.

It was perishingly cold, so we'd watch the pod of orcas until our hands froze to our cameras, then dash inside to drink hot chocolate and eat piping hot waffles the crew made for us all. They had about 3l of batter and just kept pouring it into the waffle iron.

I've never seen so many waffles at one time. It was downright majestic.

I am with Seethlaw here.

And I became so, so bored with this Emily creature: claiming the thread is about something it isn't, when clearly what the creature wants is for the thread to be about Emily. Ego much?

Good on the babbling biddies of MN for seeing the creature off, at least for the time being, with talk of saints, and possibly shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax, and cabbages and kings,

Yours, hunting for a good recipe for coleslaw with no celery involved. (Or dill, but I don't think putting that in would be particularly usual.) It's hot and coleslaw is food for a hot day. Also, I seem to have got this cabbage....

Why not both? Dim AND malevolent would seem to cover it.

I identify as a Ghastly Old Trout. Luckily, unlike 'Emily' I am not suffocating on my own (metaphorical) brain farts.

Thanks for the responses on use of pumps to lift tthe water from the fen up several metres to discharge it into the Nene. I got a little bit obsessed involved in it and ended up with the detailed drainage maps from the drainage board (Middle Level or something similar). Drains drain into main drains which are then pumped into rivers like the Nene, Ouse, Fifteen Foot River or the Twenty Foot River. The direction of flow for every drain and main drain is shown as it every pumping station. But here's the thing: this particular drain starts on the fen and discharges into the Nene in the middle of March without any pumps. Witchcraft you say?

Or it could be some trick left behind by Hereward the Wake or a cunning trick to defeat the Fen Tigers.

We just do shredded cabbage and grated carrot in mayonnaise that has been slackened a bit with yoghurt.
Does that even count as a recipe?

That remind me of when The River Cafe people did the recipes in the Saturday Guardian and there seemed to be quite a lot of buy some food, put it on a plate and eat it. Stretching the definition of recipe somewhat.

I have just seen a request for a coleslaw recipe. Does anyone have one that doesn't contain raw vegetables or mayonnaise?

I think you might have just taken us back to floppy leeks and vinaigrette. You could add some cooked cabbage and carrots, very thinly sliced, of course.

Water always finds its own level, perhaps there's a siphon?

Ooo, I missed this, a mystery!