Beltane A History

a Beltane fire🔥

Beltane is the Celtic May Day festival that we celebrate. Most commonly it is held on 1 May, or about halfway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. The Beltane festival marks the beginning of summer, and celebrates the fertility of the coming year. Homes and cattle were decorated with yellow May flowers.

Fire plays an important role in the Beltane festivities in history flames, smoke, and ashes from bonfires kindled during the festival were thought to have protective powers. All household fires would be put out and then re-lit from the Beltane bonfire.

a may queen

Down through the centuries May Day has been associated with fun, revelry and perhaps most important of all, fertility. The Day would be marked with village folk cavorting round the maypole (which sounds like fun), the selection of the May Queen and the dancing figure of the Jack-in-the-Green at the head of the procession. The Jack is thought to be a relic from those enlightened days when our ancient ancestors worshipped trees.

In the sixteenth century riots followed when May Day celebrations were banned. Fourteen rioters were hanged, and Henry VIII is said to have pardoned a further 400 who had been sentenced to death (that's a lot of people).

The May Day festivities almost completely vanished following the Civil War when Oliver Cromwell took control of the country in 1645. Describing maypole dancing as superstition and wickedness, a legislation was passed which saw the end of village maypoles throughout the country.

Dancing did not return to the village greens until the restoration of Charles II. who helped ensure the support of his subjects with the erection of a massive 40 metre high maypole in London’s Strand that's super tall. This pole signalled the return of the fun times, and remained standing for almost fifty years. that's mainly it other than there are some different types of food that

🐝Gardening To Help Bees & Butterflies 🦋

Our gardens are important to wildlife such as butterflies and bees because of the different plants they contain it doesn't matter if your garden is a mess because in winter . if you grow a good mix of flowers and bushes and shrub plants in your garden, you can provide a tone of nectar and pollen for all of the bees

Bees like many types of different flowers here is a list of ten

1. Hellebore 
2. Bluebell
3.  Bugle 
4. Crab apple
5.  Crocus 
6. Flowering cherry
7.  Forget-me-not 
8. Hawthorn
9.  Primrose
10.  Pulmonary

fox glove is a good one for bees as well because there are a tone of flowers on the plants but dont touch the plant without gloves or somthing as all of it can cause allergic reactions, but the berries are particularly poisonous so don't eat them. Here are ten flowers that butterflies like the most

1. Hebe
2. Lavender
3. Cornflowers
4. Fennel
5. knapweed
6. marjoram
7. Sedum
8. Verbena
9. valerian
10. buddleja

Buddleja is actually one of the best known nectar flowers for adult butterflies, it produces blooms over a number of weeks between summer and autumn. Also hebes are great too, as well as being a reliable evergreen shrub, hebes attracts a range of insects bees and butterflies in particular. I would sugest planting some of the flowers as it will help nature and it looks pretty.

Also we cant forget moths not all of them eat cloths.
Night-scented plants are particularly good for moths, and actually evolved their night-time perfume to attract moths to pollinate their flowers. here are ten flowers that moths love to eat

1.  Jasmine
2.  Honeysuckle
3.  Evening Primrose
4.  Sweet Rocket 
5.  Night-scented Stock
6. Ivy
7. Michaelmas daisy
8. Sedum spectabile
9. dandelions
10. pale petunias

Don't be to tidy with your garden because while most moths breed in grass the lava spend winter hidden in the leaf  litter and plant debris so don't tidy up your garden until late spring. also leave some weeds in your garden as at the beginning of spring bees practically don't have any flowers other than dandelions to eat. It dosen't matter if you havent got a garden you could just get a window box and plant a tone of nectar filled flower

The History Of Toys

For centuries kids have been playing with toys even if its just a piece of string. Basically any thing can be a toy; a stick could be a sword, a nail could be a seat for a fairy, an acorn could be cup for a tiny elf. Little things like that.

Toys may look different depending on what materials are available to make the from. For instance a metal yo yo could be shiny or dull, a dolls house could be made out of plastic or wood. in the tutor era some rocking horses were made out of hay.


Teddy bears were made in the years 1902-1903 they were made in two different country's America and Germany, America made them first in 1902 but because the two country's are so far apart Germany didn't know and thought that they had made them first in 1903.
Teddy bears were named after the USA president Teddy Roosevelt.
My oldest teddy bear is almost ten and I've had it since I was three

this is the oldest toy found in Britain

The oldest toy found in Britain was found near Stonehenge. It looks like a hedgehog and it was found in a three year child's grave it is possibly 2,500 years old it is the earliest known depiction of a hedgehog in Britain.

These days only some kids still play with things without battery's but a vast majority only play with electronic toys with battery's I myself play with both. The first electronic toy was called pong and it was made in the early 1970s by Nolan Bushnell.

Covid-19

Covid-19 is a new illness that affects your lungs and air ways. It's a virus that has spread all around the world. The symptoms are similar to if you had the flu or a cold. At the moment, all over the world, over 590,000 people have covid-19 and there are 27,367 people dead.

Covid-19 also affects me, for one we have bad internet connection here and as most schools have shut down thousands of kids will go on internet, so it has gone from bad to terrible. Me and my sister have been limited to 2-3 hours on the internet by my Nan because she needs to work.

Nanny has had to close her online shop because she can't guarantee that the things she's sold will get to the people who have bought them because of so many people being sick and self isolating so we won't have as much income.

I think people are being stupid though I saw some of it on the 11th when I went shopping, everyone was panic buying things like bread, meat, bottles of water and toilet roll like they were going to die of hunger, also I don't get why people are buying bottled water when there is water in the tap drink that instead of wasting money on something that is killing the earth.

We have made more recipes or altered our usual recipes to make them go further we don't have as much food as we normally do. Nanny is hoping to only go out once a fortnight but we probably will have to go out more for milk because most shops are limiting you to one carton per visit.

Some people are going out like nothing matters and are letting there kids walk around the streets this actually proves that some people don't care that they could be spreading the virus and potentially killing others. They are being selfish and are a risk to other peoples health.

Coastal Landfill

I think we can all agree that the sea is becoming more and more polluted every day.
So much so that there's now plastic pebbles floating in the sea and the beaches are covered in rubbish like plastic bottles and tin cans.

Some of this is down to the 1200 or so coastal landfills in the UK that are at risk from erosion.
Some are already spilling tonnes of waste into the sea leading to a pollution time bomb around the UK coastline.

Powerful storms and rising sea levels mean once-hidden waste could be exposed to pollute oceans and beaches, according to coastal policy expert Mark Stratton.

"One of the biggest risks of doing nothing at these sites is that the defences will fail and you’ll potentially have former landfill either eroding out onto the foreshore or leaching into the water. Alongside that there’s a potential impact on human health depending on what’s in the sites" he said.


Landfill sites before the 1990s had basically no restrictions about what rubbish could be dumped in them, therefore not a lot is known about what they contain so it can be very dangerous.

Many landfill sites were on the coast and some were used to raise land levels and even as part of flood defences, but as climate change is bringing higher sea levels and stronger storms the flood defences are weakening and in some cases bursting.

There's probably over 77,000 tonnes of waste in all those landfill sites combined. Leaking landfills may also be the source of the bizarre plastic pebbles that are being found on beaches, experts say these lumps of plastic are formed from burnt waste dating back to the 1980s.