Benjamin Thébaudeau
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
So this game is called Pigeonhole.
Polna Gollum, some people said, not from here specifically, but the Gollum character in the Lord of the Rings might be inspired by the Irish for pigeon, Gollum, with the Uru Gollum.
Because we know that Tolkien took other things from this landscape, didn't he?
And from the language, being a linguist.
I think it was more attached to the actual Byrne landscape in County Clare than here.
But that being said, it's a nice kind of reminder, just the alliteration, the polna golem.
How extensive is the cave network?
The cave network is very extensive.
However, it's through a lot of small cracks, so they're not easy to explore.
There's a team from Bristol University, a speleological team, that has come over the year exploring the cave and trying to link up between the swallow holes on the southeast shore of Loch Mask to the springs around the Kong village.
But they haven't been able to.
It's just too narrow for the widest part.
And that's very important for anybody farming in particular on karst landscape.
Because you have to make sure there's not an input where you are.
Even if you're further away from a river or a stream, you might have actually a swallow hole in your land that you're not familiar with.
This is manganese mineralization coming down from rainwater.
The last thing I'm going to try and show you is there's a very nice fossil.