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Ulster is another and older name for Northern Ireland, and its badge is a red hand. Long years ago, so legend tells, a party of bold adventurers was approaching the coast of Ireland when the leader announced that whoever of his party first touched the shore should possess the territory he reached. Thereupon an ancestor of the O'Neills from whom descended the Kings of Ulster, finding another boat forging slowly ahead of his, struck off his left hand and flung it on to the land. Thus the hand of Ulster, red with O'Neill blood, still remains an emblem. Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

The Ring of Brodgar or the stone of henge at Callanish had over 60 standing stones, forming a great open temple. This ancient monuments may have been gigantic star clock to help the farmers know when to sow their seeds or harvest their crops. Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

The ancient buried village Skara Brae was found in 1850, when a great gale ripped across the Orkney Island off the north coast of Scotland. This mysterious site was then excavated in 1920s. Every thing in Skara Brae was made of stone, and the people seemed to leave their home in a hurry. Did they run away from a nature disaster, or escape from enemy from Norse? My imagination is that God placed those ancient Scottish people there, built a stone house for them, just like He did for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, this was just another settlements on the Earth, where the weather is colder and the environment is extremely severe. But His experiments failed again because of the wickedness of Human, so he drove out them again, and scattered them over the land of  Scotland.

When St Patrick died many communities contended for the glory of having his burial in their grounds. Tradition says that, leaving it to Providence to resolve their claims, the bier was laid on a wagon to which four white oxen were yoked: from the church that was his first foundation, the oxen with their burthen were turned and were permitted to fare on without human direction. On a slope above the river of Quoile they stayed and there, in Dwonpatrick, the body of Patrick was laid in earth. A community grew up around the burial place, and the round tower that still stands was raised. The treasury of Irish Folklore, edited by padraic Colum, P.123

Leonardo da Vinci was not merely a great artist, but also a great genius, a sort of superman of a type that appears in the world's history only at very long intervals. He was splendidly handsome; he had such immense strength that with his bare hands he could straighten out a heavy horse hoe. He was brave to a fault, and brilliant talker. If he had not shone so greatly as a painter he would have gained worldwide fame as a sculptor; if he had never touched brush or chisel he would still have been celebrated for his inventions. In science and invention he was centuries ahead of his time. He was a clever chemist and the author of the first standard book on Anatomy. But Leonardo had no relationships with women, never married, had no children, so many believe that he was gay!

St. Ursula was the daughter of a King of Brittany, whose story is that she was persecuted by a pagan prince who wanted to marry her and was told that in order to escape she must go on a pilgrimage to rome with 11,000 virgins. Where she collected this army of young women and they all sailed up the rhine to Basle and then made their way to Rome. Unfortunately, on their way back they fell into the hands of Huns at Cologne and were all massacred.

Originally, the Greek alphabet was written from right to left, but a form of writing called boustrophedon later developed. In boustrophedon, lines of text alternated direction: One line would run from right to left, then the next line would run from left to right, then the next line from right to left again, and so on in zigzag fashion down the page. Gradually, this system died out and all lines were written from left to right. Boustrophedon was generally seen just in Greek writing, but some early examples of Etruscan and Latin writing also use it, so it's not completely unheard-of for Latin-alphabet text to be written right to left. In boustrophedon, the shape of a letter on a right-to-left line was the mirror image of its shape on a left-to-right line, enabling the reader to tell easily the direction of a given line of text.

Juno, Roman mythology's Queen of the Goddesses, traditionally depicted as a woman of majestic size and beauty. Juno gave us the word "Junoesque," which is used to describe women of influence and femininity. She is a daughter of Saturn and sister (but also the wife) of the chief god Jupiter. Juno is the patroness of marriage, and many people believe that the most favorable time to marry is June, the month named after the goddess.

A hypocaust (Latin hypocaustum) is an ancient Roman system of central heating. The word literally means "heat from below", from the Greek hypo meaning below or underneath, and kaiein, to burn or light a fire. A viaduct is a bridge composed of several small spans. The term viaduct is derived from the Latin via for road and ducere to lead something. However, the Ancient Romans did not use that term per se; it is a modern derivation from an analogy with aqueduct. Like the Roman aqueducts, many early viaducts comprised a series of arches of roughly equal length. Viaducts may span land or water or both. The Roman roads were essential for the growth of the Roman Empire, by enabling the Romans to move armies and trade goods and to communicate news. At its peak, the Roman road system spanned 53,819 miles (85,004 km) and contained about 372 links. The Romans became adept at constructing roads, which they called viae. They were always intended primarily as carriage roads, the mean...

This is the description of a burial fashion of Rome according to a finding in an archeological excavation in Derby, we can see that Romans believe human soul goes to the next world after death, and they burried the dead with lamps, bowls and offterings to guide and sustain the soul on its journey to that world. And we can also see that they has two different kinds of  burial fashion according to the social status of the dead, the high status and norman people. "During an archeological excavation in 1978 in Little Chester, Derby, a burial site was found. The bases of five early second century mausolea, or tombs, were first unearthed. These had stood in a line by the side of the road, after the manner of high status burials at Pompeii and Rome. two of the mausolea had solid stone foundations and may have been memorials but in the other three there were pits containing human cremations and pig bones. these were perhaps soldier graves, buried after the fashion of Rome, with lamps,...

After the English King Edward the confessor died, Harold was crowned king. No sooner did Harold fought Harald Hardrada in Stamford Bridge and killed the Viking leader, he rushed to the south to the battle in Hastings with William the Duke of Normandy. There were three bad omens for these three great warriors. Their attitude toward the bad omen is quite interesting, we can see how a man can change a disadvantage to advantage, and nuisance to encouragement. At the end of April, a couple of nights after Easter, there was a terrifying sign that disaster might be about to strike die English. A weird "long-haired star" appeared in the night sky; a star that seemed to have a tail of glowing white fire. We know it now as Halley's Cormet and it was making its usual 76-year appearance, but to the superstitious people of 1066 it was a supernatural omen; its fiery "tail was a warning of the actual fires that would follow below it, in its wake. Harold stood with members of the wi...

In 1885, the Germans Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler invented the first workabale petrol-driven motorcar. Meanwhile an Austrian diplomat called Emil Jellinek had secured the selling rights on a large number of Daimler cars which he sold under the name Mercedes, after his ten-year-old daughter Mercedes Jellinek. Ironically, history says Daimler, generally considered to be the father of modern automobiles never liked to drive, if, indeed he ever learned to drive. In 1925 Emil Jellink joined forces with Karl Benz, and the cars made by the new company were called Mercedes-Benz cars. via Mercedes-Benz History .

The 1840s was a time of railway madness. Railway companies sprang up like mushrooms. Railways were built by navvies (or navigators).  With pick, shovel, wheelbarrow and dynamite, they blasted tunnels and built embankments and bridges. They wore fancy waistcoats and moleskin trousers and had names like 'Fighting Joe' and 'Gypsy Jack'. they had a terrible reputation for boozing and brawling. Traveller's handbooks advised men to guard their wallets in tunnels. They even suggested that women put pins in their mouths to avoid being kissed in the dark! The first Railway accident happened in 1830. Many important people were invited to go on the first journey of the new Liverpool to Manchester railway, including actress Fanny Kemble and Member of Parliament, Charles Huskisson. There were about eight hundred people aboard. This is Huskisson's story, as told by Fanny Kemble: "The engine had stopped to take on a supply of water and several of the gentlemen in ...

The Crusader Shortly after being crowned, King Richard (1189 - 1199) decided to become a crusader.  Not much good came out of the Crusades except the English learnt about luxury goods such as silks, spices and rice and how to build bigger boats in which to carry them.  On his way home from Palestine, King Richard was captured by the Duke of Austria and thrown into prison. No one in England knew where he was. A legend says that a close friend of Richard’s, a minstrel called Blondel, toured round the castles of Europe looking for him. One day, high up in his prison tower, the king heard Blondel below singing a song the minstrel had once written for him. Richard bawled out the chorus, and Blondel knew he'd found the right place. He rushed home to tell the English nobles, who happily paid a huge ransom to get their king back. The Magna Carta King John (ruled 1199 - 1216) was Richard the Lionheart's youngest brother. He was cruel, greedy monarch, and his barons got so fed up ...

Here is the brief summary of the various dynasties that have ruled England since 1066, William the Conqueror. But the dynasties of Britain could start much earlier, up to 871, King Alfred the Great. And we may use totally different method to divide the dynasties such as that in  Chinese history. Saxon Dynasty Alfred's father, Athelwulf, king of Wessex, died, and so did his four older brothers, and Alfred inherited West Saxon kingdom.  Then Alfred made himself king of England. After he died, his son Edward the Elder inherited the crown, until the last king of Saxon dynasty, edmund Ironside. Saxon Dynasty lasted about 150 years. Danish Dynasty Cnut was the son of a viking king. The Vikings defeated Edmund Ironside, and force him to share his kingodm with Cnut, but a month later Edmund died, and the Danish king, Cnut, was made  to be king of England. This start the Danish dynasty, untill William the Conqueror, which lasted only 50 years. Norman...

The Romans came from Italy and their capital city was Rome. The Roman Empire lasted from around 146 BC to AD 476. They built many defensive walls along the border of the whole empire. Hadrian's Wall in northern England and the Raetien border in Germany are two famous frontiers and they form part of a network of forts and towns that covered the whole roman Empire. A centurion was in charge of a unit of 80 men called a century. Each century had a second-in-command called an optio, a trumpeter and standard bearers. Six centuries made a cohort and often included cavalry. Centurions and decurions had their own quarters at the end of each barrack block.  The cavalry soldiers often shared with their horses! A soldier's life was tough. Deserters could be badly beaten, or even stoned to death. The soldier's daily ration of food was about 1.5 kgs (3lbs) pf bread. 1 lg (2.25lbs) of meat, 1 litre (4.5 cups) of wine and 400 millilitres of olive oil.   Romans built straight roads, so the...

Celtic People lived in Britain before Roman times; the Celts started coming to Britain from Europe around 700 BC. In the year AD 43, the Romans invaded Britain. The Romans mainly settled in the south of Britain. They called this land Britannia. They ruled over it for nearly 400 years. Sea-raiders from Europe invaded and settled in Britain. Some of the invaders were Angles, some were Saxons, some were Jutes. We call them all Anglo-Saxons. In AD 793, raiders attacked the monnastery at Lindisfarne, a small island off the north-east coast of England. They were Vikings from Scandinavia. Vikings terrorized parts of the world for about 300 years. Boudicca Revolt Boudicca was a Celtic Queen.  She  lived in the area that is now called East Anglia. In AD 60, Boudicca's husband died. Teh Roman raided his land and homes. This made Boudicca very angry and she decided to fight back. She led a hug revolt against the new Roman rulers. This made her one of the most famous women in ...