The Bardsey Beacon is the newsletter of the Friends of Bardsey. It is published three times a year. Its main aim is to keep the Friends of Bardsey in touch with the latest events on and off the island. All Friends of Bardsey automatically receive their copies of the Beacon as part of their membership package.

If you would like to receive any past copies, please contact the Beacon Editor.  You can in fact see recent past copies by scrolling to the bottom of this page.

The following is an extract from a previous issue of the Bardsey Beacon:

Ancient Weather Lore

During my stay at the Obs. I managed to run to earth one of the local witches, she being one of the few people who remained faithful to the ancient British religion known as Wicca. She said that when the Christians first colonised the island in the 4th century, they tried to stamp out all local practices and divinations, but an underground movement had kept alive some of the ancient weather lore from that time. My friend had been lucky to be in the line of witches who had passed down some of this lore, and after we had imbibed a few jars of her local brew, she told me how the Old Folk had been excellent students of bird behaviour, of course long before the science of ornithology had ever been thought of. She recited to me one of the high points of their ornithological culture and I have great pleasure in passing this on in the interests of science:

If five young choughs stand in a line,
It might come to rain, it might come to shine.

But if they’m all crowded together,
Maybe there’ll not be any weather

Those Bardsey Ancients could certainly have taught us a thing or two about Chough behaviour.

Peter Hope Jones (under a table on Bardsey)

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Past Issues of "The Beacon"

Issue 130 - January 2008      Issue 131 - May 2008     Young Person's Newsletter

Please note that the 53rd AGM will be held in July 2009 not in February 2009 as stated in my  'Secretary's Bit' in the May 2008 Issue of the Bardsey Observatory Beacon. My error for which I apologise.    Mike West (Secretary)

It is proposed to put the latest issue of  each of The Beacon newsletters on this page.  A notice to all Friends of Bardsey has been sent out with the May Issue advising them of how they can log on to it online.   If you forward your email address to the Webmaster (chough at bbfo dot org dot uk) it will enable us to notify you of any changes we make to where we publish the newsletter on the website.