Probably haggis rustling.




Why on Earth would you give tea to someone at the servant's entrance?




I've included below an article I did a while back verging on the subject.







It was written by Mark (Sherlock) Gaitiss and got nominated for lots of awards. Made by the current Doctor Who production team it was also an excuse to rebuild the original TARDIS interior, some of the original Daleks, Zarbis, and original Cyberman. Because.

The TV industry specially loved this film because it was the very last thing that was partly shot in the old "iconic" BBC TV centre before it was sold off in the name of budget cuts. It was an ideal location shoot for a story actually set in the old "iconic" BBC TV centre, and its something of a memorial to the place.




*sidles away*







Well, admittedly the Yowie-lovers can get a bit radical and the Yara-ma-yha-who supporters can be real bloodsuckers, but the bunyipists are still better than the Drop Bear Protection League.

________


Eight Hundred Thousand Years Ago and Two Weeks

In the Pleistocene era, England was joined to Europe by a thick landmass that connected to France, Germany and Holland. The Thames ran along a different course, because the bit of North Sea it empties into today was dry land. It curved more northerly, its estuary starting at what is now the quiet coastal village of Happisburgh, (pronounced happy’s-burra), Norfolk. Back then it was grassy open river-valley filled with pine trees, fifteen miles inland. One day something happened there, and then it was forgotten for a very long time.

800,000-900,000 years later, archaeologists set up a long-running project called Pathways of Ancient Britain, an initiative to log as much of the country’s ancient landscape as can still be discerned. Two of its senior organisers, Nicholas Ashton, curator of the British Museum, and Martin Bates from Trinity St David, the University of Wales, were walking the stretch of coastland past Happisburgh, tracking, um, trackways. But they found tracks.

There, on the sediment shore, partially covered by sand but newly exposed after recent sea-storms, were footprints. Very old footprints. Very old. They were marks made by hominins – that is, some kind of ancient humans or proto-humans, who had traversed that long-gone estuary and got muddy as they trekked past. What are the chances that exactly the right people who could recognise the find would walk past at exactly the right moment?

The coincidence gets even greater when you realise that these tracks, preserved in sediment under a layer of protective sand for eight hundred million years plus, had been exposed for mere days. Because they were actually below high tide mark, this ancient evidence of prehistoric England was washed away, destroyed, less than two weeks after.

Why was the discovery a big deal? Because before that, the oldest footprints in England were at Uskmouth in Wales, carbon-dated to 4,600 years ago, the Mesolithic.

The Happisburgh footprints couldn’t be carbon dated – they were too old. That technique only works for things newer than 50,000 years ago. Dating was therefore done via magnetic signatures – when clay is first laid down it preserves the polarity of the Earth’s magnetic field. The footprints were in sediment that came from between the Brunhes–Matuyama polarity reversal 780,000 years ago and the Jaramillo reversal around 950,000 to 1,000,000 before present. Fossil flora and fauna evidence suggests an earlier rather than later period within that window.

In the short time available to them before the sea claimed the prints, Ashton and Bates recorded everything they could, using photogrammetry to get 3D model images. They found around fifty footprints in an area of 430 square feet. Some were so well preserved as to show toe-marks. They ranged in length from 5.5 to 10.2 inches, probably from five different people. Experts think they were made by Homo antecessor, a species previously only located at Spain’s Atapuerca mountains about 800,000 BC.

The sediment that the prints were in has helped give some picture of the world those primitives were passing through. Remains of fifteen mammal species, 160 kinds of insects, and over a hundred plants have been recovered. The travellers coexisted with elephants, rhinos, giant deer, and sabre-toothed cats in a terrain and climate not unlike modern day Scandinavia. Flint tools and other artefacts discovered when coastal erosion caused cliff collapses nearby suggest that people were living and working in that area at the time of the prints were made.

All of which goes to show that beach walks can be quite interesting sometimes. If the timing’s right.