About
Tacitus
A double blog about the outdoors written in an alternating format.
Half of the posts are about personal experiences, containing topics such as the New England Hundred Highest, Colorado Fourteeners, rockhopping in the Smokies, and roadtrips across great expanses of the US.
The other half are about the outdoors and the subject of landscape viewed through the filter of history, literature, art, or philosophy. Topics will include Nabokov’s imaginary version of Central Asia, wild animals in the Iliad, Ulysses S. Grant’s love of maps, orienteering in Wittgenstein, the Hercynian Forest of Germania, and the terrain of the Boer War. Selections from my Boer War book, Transvaal Citizen, may also be read on the separate page shown above.
I adopted this format as of 11/5/08. This post explains about why I’m doing this.
Bison and calf at Yellowstone/photo by Peter Bennett
– Jenny
“………. That’s a good choice—makes Pienaar a British citizen but from a pro-Boer town near the Free State border. Buchan, like many other Englishmen who spent time in South Africa during or soon after the war, seems to have been divided between admiring the veldcraft of the Boers and insisting on the noble cause of the Empire. Pienaar is described as………….. ”
John Buchan was a Scot, not an Englishman. He was born in Perth and brought up in Fife.
I enjoyed reading your piece on Stob Ban etc (which includes the above paragraph) when I was researching that mountain for a walk I intend to do with my wife.
Thanks for the comment—I’ll change the wording. I would have to say that in his function as secretary to Alfred Milner right after the war, he was essentially acting as an Englishman—he may have been born in Scotland, but he attended Oxford and was a servant of the larger Empire. But he certainly did have a Scotsman’s appreciation and knowledge of the landscapes up north.
Hello Jenny,
I came across an image of a rotary car dumper on your website (http://streamsandforests.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/nws-lamberts-point-pier/, label: “The whole thing gets turned upside down”). I am writing to request permission to use your images to illustrate these equipment in my academic thesis. I am research student at Monash University in Australia.
Cheers.
Regards,
I’m happy for you to use the images in my writeup about Lamberts Point. The rotary dumper image comes from a Wikipedia article titled “rotary dumper,” and as I recall it is one in operation in the UK (I don’t have it in front of me at the moment).