The Brigantii Moot

The first excavation in 4 decades within the rings will start at Stonehenge on Monday

The two-week dig will try to establish, once and for all, some precise dating for the creation of the monument.

It is also targeting the significance of the smaller bluestones that stand inside the giant sarsen pillars.

Researchers believe these rocks, brought all the way from Wales, hold the secret to the real purpose of Stonehenge as a place of healing.

The excavation at the 4,500-year-old UK landmark is being funded by the BBC. The work will be filmed for a special Timewatch programme to be broadcast in the autumn.

Campaigners have submitted a petition to the Scottish Parliament calling for the last woman convicted under the Witchcraft Act to be pardoned. Helen Duncan spent nine months in Holloway prison after being found guilty at a trial in 1944.

Mrs Duncan told a séance a warship had sunk before the news was officially announced. A second petition organised by a paranormal group, Full Moon Investigations, calls for all those convicted under Witchcraft legislation in Scotland to be pardoned. A petition to the Westminster government last year failed to secure a pardon for Mrs Duncan, and the new document calls on the Scottish Government to urge the Home Secretary to reconsider the case.

Yesterday was Buy Nothing Day. The majority of people don’t know about it, it’s been going for some years, but the basic idea is that it’s a way of highlighting the damage caused by rampany consumerism.

I wrote about it on my own site here and I think it’s a good thing. There’s a link from there to the BBC story all about it. So what do you think–is it as good an idea as, say, International AIDS Day or Breast Cancer Awareness? Comments below always appreciated and diverse opinions are the stuff of life!

It’s the complete antithesis of eBay but Freecycle is a brilliant way of doing your bit to encourage people (including yourself!) to recycle and you can easily avoid your no longer useful (to you) items ending up in landfill.

The idea is simple: if you’re going to chuck something away, and it’s still useful to someone ‘out there’, you just post the details to your local Freecycle mailing list and then others can arrange to collect the item from you. Everything except animals can be offered (so no pets), from sofa beds to packing crates, books to CDs.