December 2009.

Monday, 14th December, 2009: Interesting weekend.  I decided that because of the recent floods I should probably stick to high ground so I thought Offaly in the Slieve Bloom mountains would be the safest bet. How wrong I was.  The started with another failed attempt to see a barrow and standing stone at Kilcreman on the Laois/Offaly border.  I think that this barrow has been lost to the undergrowth since forestry was planted around it. Next I tried to see a Holy Well, the field was too flooded to get to it. Then a failed attempt to see a castle and a few barrows.  Finally I managed to see a massive hill fort near Leap Castle and then the high cross at Kinnitty.  I rounded off the day by battling the mud (and by being chased by a bull) to get to a wonderful medieval bridge at Cadamstown.  It's near collapse so I was glad to get to it and will get it up on the site as soon as possible.  I think that last weekend will be my last visits to places this year.  Christmas is looming and I've got a lot of work to do and family to spend time with.  Happy Christmas to all...

Updates will continue but there will probably be no new till the new year...see you then...

Wednesday, 9th December, 2009: Just a quick notification about updates.  As you know I usually do updates every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning.  For the next few weeks they may be up in the air a little bit.  There will still be 3 a week but I may have to do them on different days and times.  Also, there is likely to only be 2 updates per week for the Christmas week and New Years week.  Both Christmas Day and New Years Day fall on Fridays so naturally I won't be anywhere near my computer.  I'll try to fit in a 3rd update if possible but obviously time seems to vanish at Christmas.

This weekend I will be roaming around Offaly in the Slieve Bloom area.  There are many scattered places around that area and I hope to get to most on my list.  Hopefully I will get to Carlow next weekend all being well.  I've run out of Carlow sites to put onto the site to I need to get down there.  There's now over 40 sites on this site.  This is still small in comparison to many websites out there but it's growing all the time and hopefully these are places that people are not familiar with and find interesting.

Wenesday, 2nd December, 2009:  I'm pleased to say that finally we have a proper domain name now.  From now on this site will operate under the domain of www.thestandingstone.ie.  Please update any bookmarks you may have.  You will still be able to get here, however, under the old address.

Tuesday, 1st December, 2009:  After months of fiddling around with it the new glossary is completed and should be working smoothly.  Pictures of certain features have been included and the different pages are now interlinked with each other.  I will now move back to the early pages of the site to relink them with the new glossary.  On some of the older pages the links will take you to the glossary index page as opposed to the correct letter page.  This will be fixed soon.

As many of you are aware there has been widespread flooding in Ireland over the past two weeks.  This will hinder me in the next few weeks so I can't really envisage too many visits this month.  Also, while the people and their homes that have been affected are of the primary concern, I suspect then when the water retreats over the following weeks we may find that many antiquities have been irreversibly damaged and many may collapse.  This goes to show the importance of conservation  work on these sites.  Sometimes the simplest work can prevent a site from crumbling into nothing.  Please, always encourage conservation when you see it and encourage it at places where it has not happened.  The more people that write to councils and TDs and the more people joining historical societies the better...it will help to save our heritage.

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