The Lime Kilns at Solva.

Solva sunset, by Alicia Almond (http://www.flickr.com/photos/alicia__almond)This is a very brief thinking-out-loud piece about how it might have felt to be a miner and also, stemming from this, how it might have felt to be a member of the most powerful nation in the world during the industrial era, and how that might influence the type of fantasy worlds you'd create if you were a certain Anglo-Saxon philologist by the name of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Jotted down on the fly during a visit to Solva in January 2012 and resuscitated here to constitute the eighth of the twelve blogs of Christmas.

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