Rusty Quill presents

This month the Black British Lives Matter podcast is brought to you by NHS Blood and Transplant.

We urgently need more blood donations from Black African, Black Caribbean and mixed ethnicity people.

We're not all family, but many of us share the same blood.

Our blood can better treat patients with sickle cell and other life-threatening diseases most common in people of Black Heritage.

The power to treat sickle cell is in our blood.

And making a donation is quick and easy. Search, give blood.

Old Gods of Appalachia is a horror anthology podcast and therefore may contain material not suitable for all audiences.

So, listener discretion is advised.

Salt to the earth.

A tale for the season.

Talk about Appalachia.

And coal is the commodity that tends to come most immediately to mind.

The Black Diamond that folks have been killing and dying over since white settlers started digging it up to fuel military operations up at Fort Pitt.

Across the Mononga Halif,

from Pittsburgh, way back in the mid 1700s.

But coal is not the only secret these mountains have to give up.

For millions of years ago, part of the land we now call Appalachia was home to a shallow inland saltwater sea.

Time passed and continents drifted, mountains rose and those waters formed veins of sodium chloride like ribbons of snow through the stones of the mountains.

And carved deep salt caverns out of the earth below.

In part of what we now know as Virginia, some of the remaining waters formed a natural salt marsh.

A fertile valley that attracted wildlife of all kinds, living and breeding, bleeding and dying, their bones and blood feeding the marsh and the mountains.

...