When the Observatory was first built, Charles appointed the first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, to start plotting all the stars visible in the northern and southern hemispheres. At this point, large portions of the rest of the world were controlled by the European empires, and although trading with other countries was growing more and more successful, the astronomical information needed to navigate the seas was lacking. While captains could easily measure the latitude of their location at sea, it was almost impossible to measure their longitude once out of sight of land, so in 1714 Parliament passed the Longitude Act, offering large rewards for anyone who could find a practical method of determining a ship’s longitude.
Around 50 years later, Nevil Maskelyne, the first person to scientifically measure the weight of the planet, made a breakthrough. He oversaw the publication of the Nautical Almanac, a set of carefully observed tables that finally enabled sailors to determine their longitude at sea. He recognised how the moon, a fixed point in the sky, could be used as a consistent reference point for ships – providing the sky was clear – and went on to devise a calculation known as the lunar distance method. The lunar distance is the angular distance between the moon and another celestial body (like a star), and by comparing this angle with the local times recorded in his Nautical Almanac, navigators were finally able to approximate their position. After Maskelyne’s initial success, the famous clockmaker John Harrison went on to design and create the first accurate marine timekeepers, portable clocks that kept time to within three seconds of accuracy.
As astronomy and time are so inextricably linked, the data recorded at the Observatory was vital in developing accurate timekeeping on land as well as at sea. By the late nineteenth century Britain officially declared that all clocks in the country would be set to the Greenwich Meridian rather than the array of local times kept by different towns, and in 1884 the Greenwich Meridian was chosen to be the Prime Meridian against which all the world’s clocks would be set. To this day, the Royal Observatory Time Ball signals to the watching public the exact time every day at 13.00. At 12.55 an ancient, orange ball is hoisted over London, ready to be dropped at exactly the right time, which would have once allowed sea captains waiting on the river to check the rate of their marine timekeepers before sailing out into the ocean. I later discovered you can buy a jar of your own aniseed ‘time balls’ in the gift shop on your way out.
Walking through this postcard-perfect observatory in Greenwich Park, I couldn’t stop my mind wandering down to the layers of history beneath my feet. A few metres away on the bank of the Thames, London’s history is literally dragged out by the shifting tides, and people have scampered about for hundreds of years in search of valuable items exposed by the mud. The hobby is called mudlarking, and was particularly common during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when poverty and lack of education enticed people of all ages to make an income from scouring the banks at low tide. From padlocks, coins and musket balls to pottery, fossilised shark teeth and Mesolithic axe heads, freshwater shores can theoretically produce anything that has passed through the waterways – and for the River Thames, that could mean anything.
As for inland treasures, the roads in London have been built and rebuilt over 2,000 years, a multi-layered sandwich of concrete, stone, earth and every dropped possession that’s slipped in between. Although the Romans are credited for inventing the road system, building 87,000km of road throughout their empire, many archaeologists believe they probably stole the idea from the people of Carthage before they burned the place down and sowed the land with salt in 146bc. Before the Romans arrived in Britain there were no traditional roads in place, just the green tracks and dirt paths that still exist today. Most roads were designed to connect military camps, and since their main purpose was to carry foot soldiers long distances, they were straight.
But it wasn’t just roads we have the Romans to thank for. Around 100ad, Claudius Ptolemy was born in Egypt as a Roman citizen. He would later become one of the greatest scholars of his time, making enormous contributions to the fields of astronomy, mathematics and geography, but he is now remembered just as fondly for his wrong theories as his right ones. He famously claimed that our earth stood still in the solar system, and that the sun, stars and moon all orbited around it. Although some earlier astronomers like Aristarchus had already started to theorise that the earth travelled around the sun, Ptolemy wasn’t convinced, and his consequent theories about how other planets moved were all wrong because his calculations were based on the earth being the centre of the universe.
However, astrometry – the most ancient branch of astronomy – started thousands of years ago far from the future stronghold of Europe, primarily in China, Mesopotamia, Central America and India. Astrometry was the art of measuring the sun, moon and planets, the precise calculations of which allowed observers to model the evolution of planets and stars and to predict phenomena like meteor showers and comets. These early astronomers noticed patterns in the sky, and tried to record their movements and understand their order. The first patterns to be recorded are now known as constellations, the arrangement of stars that helped our ancestors measure the seasons, giving birth to the hundreds of ancient stories surrounding the night sky today.
NASA defines astronomy as ‘the study of stars, planets and space’. Modern astronomers are divided into the observational and the theoretical: some focus on observations of physical bodies like planets and stars, and some use measurements to analyse systems and try to understand how the universe evolved. Unlike so many other fields of science, no astronomer (or human) is able to observe a galactic system from birth to death, as even the tiniest star will exist for millions of years at least, so we have to rely on snapshots of the universe in various stages of evolution to work out how they formed and when they will die.
Of the many branches of astronomy, cosmology is one of the newest, coined in 1656 by the English lexicographer Thomas Blount. It focuses on the universe in its entirety rather than individual objects, theorising its existence from the Big Bang to the present, and then onwards to its inevitable fate. Whether or not we will be there at the end of the universe is a mystery, and one that perhaps we should not solve. The knowledge we’ve gained as a species is both a gift and a curse, and it becomes easy to envy other creatures who are not burdened with the inevitability of what might happen to the universe, but who spend their days looking for food or sex or a warm place to sleep. They don’t worry about powers out of their control, nor do they philosophise if nature is cruel or kind, an unstoppable force that reacts to unpredictable events and could cast an entire planet into oblivion without hesitation.
I watched Interstellar for the second time the other day, a Christopher Nolan film that follows a group of astronauts as they travel through a wormhole in search of a new home for humanity. It struck me how desperate we are to colonise other planets rather than focusing on the one we have. Not that I’m against space travel – if somebody offered me the chance to go into space, I would snatch it. I remember visiting the Kennedy Space Center in Florida when I was five, and watching a shuttle leap away from the earth and into the great unknown. How amazing would it be to leave the planet and float through a silent galaxy with nothing but stars and space dust for company? To know that beyond the walls of the little metal cabin you’re sitting in, there is nothing but an empty void, a starlit chasm? To bob around without gravity and eat freeze-dried strawberries? Yes please. But it’s worth remembering that in 2014, NASA had a total budget of $17.6 billion, the 2012 US defence budget was a jaw-dropping $737 billion, while in 2008 the United Nations reported that just $30 billion a year could end world hunger.
I finished my hike up to the Observatory, crossed the Meridian Line marked on the floor and wandered into the Astronomy Centre. Here you could touch a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite (as old as the sun!), and I clung to it with relish. I love anything ancient; an archaeologist friend once let me hold a real mammoth tusk and I couldn’t handle t
he excitement of touching something so real, an actual fragment of a once-living, hairy, pungent, beautiful mammoth. This meteorite was grey and smoothed by the millions of human hands that had run across its surface. Beyond this the building was divided into dark, cosy rooms filled with screens and a range of ancient timekeepers and navigational devices. Brass spectroscopes and sextants shone behind panes of glass, relics of an older world when their invention would have been worthy of a slot on Tomorrow’s World. I imagined these devices being displayed to society hundreds of years ago when the city was smaller; will this be how our great-grandchildren feel when they see the first satnavs and Bluetooth headsets behind glass in some ancient technology museum?
‘How clunky it all was, Grandmother.’
‘You actually had to ask it to avoid toll booths!’
‘What’s a U-turn?’
With its design-led modern skyline and an unofficial bid to become Europe’s ‘silicon capital’, London has become a beacon of progress and technology. But beneath it all lies a hidden city, an older world sleeping under the buses and shops and skyscrapers.
The city of London was founded in 43ad when the Romans established a settlement and major port called Londinium on the banks of the Thames. Early London was tiny, around the same size as Hyde Park and a far cry from the 1,569 square kilometres that now makes up the region of Greater London. In its early days, the Iceni queen Boudicca’s rebellion forced the Romans to abandon their new settlement and it was razed to the ground, only to be rebuilt when they defeated the Iceni at the Battle of Watling Street around 61ad. By the end of the first century it had expanded rapidly, eventually becoming the capital of the United Kingdom, a global leader in the arts, entertainment, fashion, healthcare, media, research and tourism, as well as the largest financial centre in the world. Those Romans would have been proud.
When I was studying for my Masters degree I lived in south London with friends, but to escape the claustrophobia of the city I spent every Thursday volunteering with the London Wildlife Trust at one of their reserves, Sydenham Hill Wood. It was once part of the extensive Dulwich Woods and the largest remaining tract of the ancient Great North Wood, a natural oak woodland that stretched from Camberwell almost down to Croydon. The Great North Wood was lost to urbanisation over the centuries, and in 1854 Sydenham Hill Wood was dissected by a steel railway carrying passengers to the newly built Crystal Palace, a cast-iron and glass structure originally built in Hyde Park three years earlier. The Palace was designed to house the Great Exhibition, an international world fair to display London’s hoarded treasures from around the world, including the famous Koh-i-noor diamond and the first fax machine. A similar fair in Paris in 1889, called the Exposition Universelle, is still famous for the specially designed entrance gate that was left there after the fair closed, now known as the Eiffel Tower.
After three years the London Exhibition grew in popularity until it was moved to Penge Peak in south London, where it stayed until 1936 when it was destroyed by a fire. There were so many visitors to the Palace that a new railway had to be built through the wood to carry the crowds, and the area became so popular that a number of fashionable villas were built along the edge of the trees, a hive of social merriment. According to one story, an elephant being housed in the Palace once escaped into the wood and rampaged across the footbridge before being recaptured. When the Palace burned down, the railway closed and the houses became derelict, and over the decades nature has slowly been allowed to reclaim her territory with help from the London Wildlife Trust.
When I started volunteering there, the woods were still littered with relics of fashionable gardens, rockeries and sundials hidden behind wild birch trees. A folly was once built to simulate the ruins of a monastery, and a pleasure pool was carved into the earth like a bomb crater. There were also rhododendrons that once filled the borders of flawless lawns, a Chilean monkey puzzle tree and a cedar of Lebanon left to rise alone above the canopy. Now the wood was wilder, overgrown, but there were glimpses of the past growing under the gaze of firecrests and tawny owls. Even the railway didn’t fully disappear; we walked over the footbridge and a nettle-strewn valley was carved out of the ground beneath it, the occasional rusted train track lying forgotten, corroding beneath the earth.
Volunteering in the wood was the best part of what became an isolating seven months in London. The city is old and alive, a gigantic machine full of people and music and stories, and I enjoyed travelling into the centre each week to study great writers and poets, trying and yet again failing to read Ulysses, discussing the intimate details of every paragraph in the way that only English-literature students can. But then the day was over, and I had to retreat back to the outskirts, away from the vibrant core of the city. London has a beauty of its own, but I recognised that I couldn’t live there. I needed the chalklands of the South Downs, the beech trees and birdsong of the countryside where nothing much happens, the bustling simplicity of a small town where the most exciting news of the decade was when Waitrose started giving out free coffees. The city of London glitters; it’s full of wonder and movement like a waterfall – loud, beautiful, constant. But for me, it is not raw beauty like the roaring coast or the forests, where the air swells with life and nature weaves itself into an infinite tapestry of growth and decay. To watch dandelions creep through pavement cracks and peregrines tumble from the Tate is wonderful, but to stand in a meadow and feel bees brush against the hairs on your arms, to smell wild roses and listen to the skylark ascending into the ether – that is sublime.
It was in winter that I spent most of my time in Sydenham Hill Wood, when the leafless trees were tangled boughs in the dark. Along the old train track the ground was undisturbed and carpeted with fungi: candlesnuff, oysterling, birch polypore, coral spot and clouded funnel, and electric-blue spores of cobalt crust grew unnoticed on fence posts. In winter the nights came early and, within the shadows of the trees, there was a sense of mystery about the place, as if the forest was a secret that the rest of London hadn’t heard about, and it was up to us to keep it safe, protected, alive. The earth was soft and fragrant underfoot, the air full of insects.
One evening our volunteer group arrived later than usual to complete a bat survey. As darkness cloaked the trees, we heard the last diurnal creatures moving around us; green woodpeckers undulating between branches, a nuthatch on the mulberry tree, wood mice creeping silently over mouldering leaf litter. The purpose of the survey was to keep an eye on the bats that were roosting in the abandoned train tunnel now closed off to the public. We were given high-vis jackets and torches, and then made our way over to the tunnel entrance, near the shipping container where vital tea and biscuit supplies were kept. We were accompanied by a licensed bat expert, and the intention was to find the bats roosting in the tunnel, record a few observations and then leave them in peace to enjoy their hibernation. It was late winter and bitterly cold, and being one of only three mammals to hibernate in Britain – along with dormice and hedgehogs – it was the perfect time to sneak up and count them without causing too much disturbance. The results would be fed back to the London Wildlife Trust and the Bat Conservation Trust to help them gauge the health of London’s bats and work out how best to preserve and protect their populations.
Bats have a hard time in the human world. One summer I volunteered for the Bat Conservation Trust’s bat helpline, answering calls from people who had a bat in their house, caught by the cat or from a roost in the roof. It became clear that, although most callers wanted to help wildlife, they had more difficulty coping with a bat than a bird or rodent. Many of us grow up believing bats carry rabies and can get tangled in your hair (too many reruns of Ace Ventura), but the truth is they are excellent fliers and would never be stupid enough to fly into your head, let alone somehow get caught up in your hair. The rabies myth is not entirely unfounded; each year a few bats in the UK are tested positive for a rabies virus called European Bat Lyssavirus, but this is not the classic rabies strain. It ca
n be treated easily with vaccinations or medical attention, but treatment is only necessary if you are bitten by the bat, which is unlikely unless you’re a licensed handler.
Perhaps it’s because they are nocturnal creatures that they have gained an unsavoury reputation, being associated with blood-sucking and vampires, but British bats are incredibly sweet on closer inspection, being essentially no more than velvet mice with wings (although they are more closely related to humans than mice). They are incredible creatures, perfectly adapted to the night through their use of echolocation to navigate and hunt for insects in the dark; even the smallest bat can eat up to 3,000 insects a night, so they are a welcome form of garden pest control. In tropical countries they also feed on fruit and flowers, and it’s thanks to bat pollination that we can enjoy dates, vanilla, bananas, guava, tequila and chewing gum. Unlike other small mammals, they will only have one baby or ‘pup’ a year, which means it’s even more important not to disturb their roosts, as a healthy bat can live for 30 years if left in peace. Aside from a small handful of predators in the wild, one of their biggest living threats is the domestic cat, which is known to catch individuals and kill, eat or maim them, just as it does with our dwindling garden bird populations.
At the entrance to the tunnel somebody had written ‘Moria’ in graffiti paint, which I thought amusing. When we climbed through the doors and into the tunnel we found newspapers lining the edges dating back 50 or 60 years to when the line had been closed. Shut off to the public for both safety and conservation reasons, it was amazing to be allowed inside this time capsule of an older London. As we wandered through, our torch lights were reflected off broken timbers and glass that must have been lying there for decades.
Dark Skies Page 9