Cheryl Straffon - Megalithic Mysteries of Cornwall - Megalithomania 2007 - Audlo

Megalithic Mysteries of Cornwall, presented by Cheryl Straffan. Cornwall is a strange and mysterious land, and also has the highest concentration of megalithic sites in almost all of Europe. In this lecture, Cheryl Straffan spoke about these sites, the anomalous phenomena experienced at them and their possible meanings. Recorded live at Megalithomania Conference 2007. But we've had two wonderful days, two days full of ancient sites, megaliths, theories, earth energies, earth patterns, geomancy, geography, geology. We've had the lot. We've been everywhere. We've been across Europe, we've been to Africa to see the African megaliths, we've been to South America, and we've been to Ireland, to the big sites there in the Boyne Valley, we've been to Scotland. Lots of wonderful sites and lots of fascinating and interesting theories. But what I want to do is kind of bring it all down back home, really. I think that it's wonderful to get all this information, and I'm sure we'll all go away buzzing after two days of this, and there are some wonderful books downstairs. I even write wonderful books too. But nevertheless, for me, there's no substitute for actually going out there and being in the land yourself and touching the sites, seeing the places, just experiencing what the sites have to teach you. Not going out with theories or plans, but to just go and listen to what the sites say to you. And that's what I really want to emphasise for the next hour. I come from Cornwall. We've heard something of Cornwall from Paul Broadhurst in the last talk, who also lives there. I was born and brought up in Cornwall, and it's only 150 miles travelling west from here, and you come to what to me is a very, very important, special, and in many ways still very unspoilt landscape. We're not talking about megaliths here. I think we're talking more about miniliths. But nevertheless, I think that the message for me in all of this, because I've been researching this for quite some years now, is that we can all find in our own places, in our own areas, where we live, special sites, special places, special things to see, special things that were left by the ancient peoples, and we can all go and touch these places, walk the land, touch the sites, sing the songlines of the land. We can all go and just be with these places. And if we're open enough to them, then we can learn what they have to teach us. And that's, I suppose, what I want to do for the next hour. I want to say, well, yes, I've travelled, you know, I've been to Malta, and I've spent a lot of time in Crete, where I do research on Minoan civilisations, and I've led tour guides to Malta, and tour guides to Crete, and tour guides to all sorts of places, to the sites. But we can all do it. We can all actually go to our own places where we live and connect with that spirit of the land, that genius loci. And that, to me, is where the spiritual nourishment begins. Because it's not just about the wonderful megaliths, and we've seen some wonderful pictures and heard some wonderful ideas about them. It's also about, where did that go? No, it's not going forward. Is that right? It's the backward one. No? No? I think so. Quite a long way in. OK, that's great. I'll be around. OK, so I want to take us on a bit of a switchback ride through some of the sites of Cornwall, looking at them from some of the different perspectives that we can place on these places. And I encourage you to go to your places and look at your sites with an open mind. And not just at the sites, but at the land in which the sites sit. Because to the Neolithic and Bronze Age, Iron Age Celtic peoples, these were places that didn't just exist in isolation, they exist in relationship to each other. And they exist also in relationship to the land in which they sit, and they exist in relationship to the passage of the sun and the moon and the stars and what's happening in the skies. So it's a question of putting together, I think, a composite picture from the knowledge that we can get through archaeology, from the information that is there if we scratch the surface around folklore and legend by comparing what similar societies do in other places and just pulling it all together. And it's not a definitive answer and it's not, you know, this is what megalithic peoples did. But it is, I think, a way in to peoples in a civilization that by and large didn't leave us written records. But their information and their knowledge is encoded in their stones and their sites and their places. And to be with those places, to go to them with an open heart and an open mind, and to see what the sites speak to you, as well as doing the research, to me is the holistic approach to earth mysteries and to megalithic sites. So, I'm going to start with something as simple as ley lines. When I was attending earth mysteries conferences in the 1980s, organized by the Leyhunter, all the talk was of leys. You don't hear much about leys nowadays. And yet, they are an enigma which has still really not been properly explained. And I'd like to start with this site, which is very near where I live in because it's a beautiful example of what we can find in the land if we just follow the sites, perhaps by dowsing or on maps or simply by following things across the land. And the classic work on this was done by John, John Michel, with the old stones of Lands End. And he visited the Lands End Peninsula. You know, you have a small area, only about 20 miles one way and about 10 to 15 the other. And within that area, there's a huge number of megalithic remains, probably one of the greatest in Europe outside of Brittany. But what he did was focus on a small local area, which is really what I suppose I'm saying. And he found about 50 different ley lines or alignments of sites across the land, at least two or three sites, sometimes many more. And they have the advantage, at least in the West Penwith Peninsula, of being roughly contemporaneous. So they all date from a prehistoric megalithic period. We're not looking at huge amounts of churches or crossroads or things like that. It's not going to be the case everywhere, but we do have that advantage in West Penwith. We still have a lot of megalithic sites remaining. And this is one of the classic leys. It starts, in fact, to the west of this at a burial chamber, but it runs through this circle, Tregassil Stone Circle. It then goes on in a direct straight line to this standing stone, which is interestingly just visible from the Tregassil Stone Circle at the furthest point of visibility on the top of a neighbouring hill. This is Boswens Menhir at a moonrise. That line is also the Midsummer Solstice Sunrise line. It's a direct northeast line. And so the Midsummer sun could be seen rising above that when seen from Tregassil. From Tregassil, Boswens Menhir, it goes on to this site, which is a ruined dolmen, West Lanyon Coit. And interestingly, once again, just at the limit of visibility, if you stand on top of, this was originally covered with an earth mound, and if you stood on top of West Lanyon Coit, you could just see Boswens Menhir on the horizon coming the other way. So the ancient peoples placed these sites, not always in a very obvious place, not always huge megaliths. Sometimes they were just as big as they needed to be, just so they could be seen at the limit of visibility. From West Lanyon Coit, it also goes on to a courtyard house settlement. And some years ago, John and I were following this line, and I have vivid memories of him standing on West Lanyon Coit, waving at me with a flag, and I was a few hundred yards further on at the hedge, trying to get the line of sight. And that sounds terribly crude and unscientific, but it comes in with another thing that I think, which is that megalithomania should be fun. It isn't all serious. And if we can get out there and have some fun in the land, and enjoy ourselves, that's really important as well. Anyway, we were following this direct line, this ley line across the country, and there in the hedge where I was standing, and he was waving the flag at me, we found this megalith in the hedge directly on that line. And I'm sure that there must be masses more of this that could be discovered in all sorts of places. And it's small, and it's low-key. Peter Knight talked about it in his talk about Dorset in passing this morning. But it's really important. There is so much basic work which hasn't really even yet been done, never mind the big megaliths. Just on the small stuff, just on the local sites, there's huge amounts of work which is still to be done. Since those times, we've discovered other ley lines. We've got up to about a total of 70 now. And in the process, discovered new standing stones, and new standing stones, not new, but newly discovered, have also created other lines. So as I say, we've got about a total of 70 or so now, just in that small area. Also, some of the sites appear to be nodal sites. That is, they have quite a number of ley lines passing through them. The one with the greatest number is this one, which is Carthuri Menhir. This is, even for those who know the West Penwith Peninsula probably don't know this site. Very beautiful site surrounded by blue bales in spring. And this has got a total of no less than eight ley lines running through that standing stone. And, you know, I don't think West Penwith was unique in this respect in any kind of way. And I'm sure that a lot more work could still be done even on some of this ley line material from these early days. And it's stuff that we can all go out and do. We don't need specialist knowledge or scientific equipment to be able to go and do it. There are other interesting things as well. As well as the stones themselves, I think also the shapes of the stones are important, and particularly the shapes of the stones in relationship to the surrounding hills and pores. And we can see this in a number of sites as well. This, for instance, particular site in the distance is the Blind Fiddler Standing Stone, which is a well-known menhir in West Cornwall. But a few fields away is this quite small, it's only about this height, little stone. It's not even recorded or registered. It's thought to be just a rubbing post. But if you go in the field where that is, you find that it lines up absolutely beautifully between there, the Blind Fiddler Standing Stone, and that hilltop. And that hilltop is St. Creed Beacon. And on top of that hilltop, there are cairns that were built in the Bronze Age. And these are all Bronze Age standing stones. So we've got a beautiful visual alignment there that you can actually see in the land itself. And the stones line up with what undoubtedly was originally a holy hilltop. Again, we can see sometimes that the shapes of the stones are deliberately created to align with some of these holy hilltops. This stone, you'd pass it by without knowing, because it's a gatepost stone. However, it's also the end of a stone row. This is the Zenna Stone Row in West Penwith. Most of the stones in the stone row are now fallen. But if you walk the stone row from stone to stone, as you approach this beautiful stone, which is now being adapted to a gatepost, you come up to the tip of Trendrene Hill behind you. And as you approach the stone, you can see that the top of the stone points absolutely to the peak top of Trendrene Hill. Again, Trendrene Hill was known to be a sacred hilltop crowned by Cairns. And for those that are interested in the astronomical alignments, it also marks the Imbolc or Thalwain Sunrise. So even in simple ways, you can begin to put together a pattern of landscape. This is a bit further afield, up on Bodmin Moor. This is the Sibley Back Men here. And again, the shape of the top of the stone, it seemed to me when I came here, absolutely mirrors the shape of the hill nearby. And this, I think, I'm certain was deliberate. To the ancient peoples, the actual shapes of the hill were as important. Okay. That woke you up, didn't it? So I think often the shapes of the stones were deliberately done in that kind of way to reflect the shapes of the surrounding hills and tours. And I think we know that the hills and the tours were really important to the people. They saw the landscape in very different terms to how we see the landscape nowadays. To them, the landscape was alive. It was living. They had a different concept, I think, of the one that we have that sees the countryside or the land as a place to be exploited. To them, the landscape was a goddess who supplied them with all their needs. She fed them. She caused their crops to grow. And they saw her shape actually in the land itself. And we'll come onto more of this shortly. But when we say that there are alignments to some of the hills and tours, they're not just interesting because they're hills and tours. They actually have significance in terms of what that land meant to the people who made those alignments. This is Tunequoit. And this is up on the West Pen with Moors. It's a Neolithic dolmen. And I always say to people, if I'm taking them around some of the sites there, that what you need to do is imagine everything more recent to this being taken away. So all the modern stuff, the modern houses, the modern farms, all the... Hello again. Okay, can you hear me? Yeah, great. Take away all the modern stuff. Take away all the tin mines. Take away all the modern farms and houses. Take away all the medieval stuff. Take away all the barns. Take away even back into the Iron Age. Take away the courtyard house settlements. Take away back into the Bronze Age. Take away the standing stones we've been looking at. Take away the stone circles. You get back into the early Neolithic itself. And this is the period when Britain separated from the continent and the hunter-gatherer people started to settle for the first time and came perhaps as being the greatest revolution in the history of humankind and that was farming. They began to settle for the first time and they began to raise sheep and animals and they began to plant crops and they built these. So these are the first monuments ever to be built. They're as old as anything else that we've seen, far older than a lot of things we've seen over the last couple of days. They're small, enclosed places with a number of uprights and a capstone. In many cases the capstone's fallen but this one is still in place. And I think, you know, people say to me sometimes, well, were they burial places? But they weren't simply burial places. We've heard a lot today, for instance, about shamanism and about communion with the spirit world, about the use of psychotropic substances to go on spirit journeys. And I think for ancient peoples all of this was all interconnected. These places would have been covered with an earth mound, at least up to the capstone itself. But the capstone was probably still exposed. And for the people, these dolmens would have been on the hillside and they would have been down in the valley below. So these places would be looking down on them. And I think they went to visit the places in order to commune with the spirits of the ancestors. They didn't have the idea that the living were on one side and the dead were on the other. Life was a continuum and the dead state of being dead was part of the state of being living. And therefore the dead were important people to be able to commune with, to be able to contact the spirit of the ancestors and even to go on spirit trips to ask the spirit of the ancestors for advice, for perhaps practical ordinary day things like healing or the state of the animals or if there was sickness in the tribe. So archaeologists even nowadays say that these are as much dolmens for the living as they are dolmens for the dead. We've heard the phrase tomb and womb and I think these places were that. They were places where, yes, they put the bones of the dead, but they weren't dead bodies. They were disarticulated bones. In other words, they were bits of bones from different people and they would put different bits of bones in at different times and then they would take out bits of bones and put other bits of the most recent dead in. So we have no concept of perhaps of individuality or separateness. This was all part of the whole communal experience and the reverence for the dead and communion with the dead was through a number of individuals that were part of a collective whole. So you had these disarticulated bones of the dead. The latest idea is that the capstones on top of the dolmens were actually platforms for excarnation. In other words, the dead bodies were put on top of the capstone and then the birds of prey would pick all the flesh off and then the bones were buried in underneath. And then perhaps at significant times of the year, the shamans and shamankas of the tribe would go to these places for communion with the spirits of those dead ancestors. So they were complex, I think, multi-faceted places with many layers of different meaning. And this is Chuan Kuoit looking towards a significant notch on the hill nearby. There's a cairn called Cairn Kaniyajak and you can see from the picture that there's a little notch in this natural cairn. And I was up there, it must be 20 years ago now, at a winter solstice, in fact, when I took this slide, just watching the sun beginning to set actually on the winter solstice. And I could see it was coming down towards the notch in Cairn Kaniyajak and realised with a thrill of excitement that the sun was actually going to set into that notch. And we've seen super alignments from all sorts of places, but something as simple as this on a simple dolmen on a hillside watching the sun set on the winter solstice into a significant notch in a cairn, it was a thrill of recognition that even after 5,000 years, megalithic magic can still work and we can still go and see it. And people will say, well, did they intend it? Was it just coincidence and maybe the sun has moved and it wouldn't have worked in that way then? Well, the sun has only moved about half a degree in about 5,000 years when viewed from the earth. And most of these view frames or notches are big enough to accommodate it, half a degree of sun's movement. The precession of the equinoxes takes a massive 26,000 years and the wobble of the earth only affects it to the extent that you get about a half a degree, which is not even a sun's width. Since it was first constructed. And the interesting thing is if you go to this site and you go 100 yards in any other direction, it doesn't work. It only works at this point. So clearly the site was built here for all those other things, honouring the dead, communion with the ancestors, communion with the spirits, but it was also set up in that particular place in order to observe the setting of the sun at the shortest day and its rebirth. So I think it's looking at these sites through numbers of different layers of meaning. And that's the sun beginning to set towards the, you can see the shape of Carn Cennate. There's lots of places where we've discovered that this happens and I'm sure there are lots more still to be discovered. The standing stone I showed earlier, which pointed to the Trendrene Hill. If you go up on Trendrene Hill, you'll find the Cairns up there on the hill. And it's interesting if you're following the path across to the Cairns on the hill, you don't see the, you don't see what's beyond you because you're on an upward slope. All you see is you're approaching the ridge of the hill. And it's not until you come over the ridge of the hill where the Cairns are, you suddenly see this landscape laid out in front of you. And the most prominent feature in this landscape that's laid out in front of you is this lovely hillock in the distance. And this is colloquially known as Buttermilk Hill, which I think is an interesting clue as to its original significance. It was probably seen as a breast of the mother goddess. And from this point, again, the midsummer solstice sun will rise out of the ocean, touch the top of that hill when seen from the Cairns on top of Trendrene Hill. So again, it's putting together the patterns in the landscape and trying to view it through the eyes of the prehistoric people who built these sites. Okay, we've seen lots of Newgrange. We've seen the entrance to Newgrange with the light box. And we've seen the midwinter solstice sunrise coming down the passage of Newgrange. And, you know, there are other sites that are very well known, which have these alignments. Even the archaeologists nowadays some do accept that a lot of these sites are aligned. But you can also find much, much smaller sites where the same thing happened. We have some down in West Penwith. I bet there are plenty in places near where you are. We have a barrow called Basiliac Barrow. That barrow would originally have been roofed. It's up high up on the West Penwith moors, gets very few visitors. But again, its entrance, which you can see here, is aligned to the midwinter solstice sunrise. We call it our mini Newgrange. And exactly the same phenomena was happening there as happening at Newgrange. So I think that we're looking at a megalithic culture where the same kind of things went on in different places. And just because you don't have any huge sites, you know, near where you are, have a look at the other ones. Have a look at the little sites, the little stones. And my betting is that you'll find that a lot of the similar things are going on that's happened on the major sites as well. Okay, this is Merry Maidens Stone Circle, probably known by lots of people who come to Cornwall. I'm just going to get a glass of water. There are a number of stone circles in West Penwith. And the interesting thing about them is that they all have 19 stones, all have or had 19 stones. And as we've seen before, 19 is a significant number. And I think that because 18.6 was the whole period of the moon's passage, it was known as we saw this at Calanish and other places as well. And different places, though, express this in different kinds of ways. This moon stand still happens every 18.6 years. Somebody mentioned the Aberdeenshire Stone Circles, which are amazing, because they have a window frame that's two uprights and a recumbent stone between the two uprights. And it creates a frame in which you can see things like the maximum summer moon set, and the moon goes down directly through the frame. But there were other ways of expressing this concept. The stone circles that we have in West Penwith all have these 19 stones, and I don't think that 19 is a coincidence. 19 is not only the nearest whole number to the 18.6-year cycle, but 19 is also the number of the matonic cycle, where the sun and moon take 19 years exactly to get back to the same place in the sky. Ancient peoples were so much more aware of it. We're so cut off nowadays. Some of us last night saw that wonderful alignment of the new moon in the arms of the old. You could see the full moon and the new moon just shadowed against the black background conjunct Venus. And it's just a wonderful sight. It's still breathtaking, natural phenomena like that. But so much we don't see, we don't observe, we can't see the sky, we have too much light pollution, we're not out in the land, we don't observe the passage of the sun and the moon all the time. Ancient peoples were so much more in tune with this. They saw it, they observed it, they marked it, and it was an important way for them to connect with the spirit of the universe. So they demonstrated it in all kinds of different ways. And again, you could say, okay, well, at Merry Maidens, they put 19 stones up, and that was about the matonic cycle and the standstill. But it was again, it was so much more than that. Because if you go to the Merry Maidens stone circle, and you stand at the stone circle, and you look back in the field behind you, you can see a standing stone, which is right in the corner of that field there. And that's the goon wreath standing stone. If you go to the goon wreath standing stone, and stand with your back against it, and look back towards the Merry Maidens, and then walk slowly towards the Merry Maidens stone circle, following a direct line, you'll go through the Merry Maidens, you'll go through the gap, because in all these stone circles, two stones have a bigger gap than any others, you'll go through the right through the gap, possibly the entrance gap of the of the stone circle, you carry on walking. And after a while, you come to a field, which has a very direct right angle in the field. And it has a standing stone marking the right angle. John Barnett, the archaeologist discovered that you go on a bit further still, and you come to the site of a lost stone circle, the Trinago stone circle, and the line eventually finishes at a farm called Bora. Bora is a Cornish word, and it means the place of the witch, literally. And so therefore, within a space of about, I suppose, three quarters of a mile, you have two standing stones, two stone circles, and a place where people probably met, which was remembered in the designation of the name of the farm, as Bora, the place of the witch, the meeting place of the pagan peoples who use this site, you have a processional way across the land. Now, most of it doesn't exist anymore, you got a stone circle, you got a standing stone, other bits have gone. Although the farm exists. And that's what I meant right at the beginning about other researches on things like folklore, legend, names, it's really important to pull in as well, to studies like this. And some of the work that's been done on Ireland that was talked about this morning does that as well, bringing in legends, and linking them into the stones themselves. So we have a beautiful processional way leading across the landscape. And the other aspect of it is, if you stand with your back at this standing stone, looking towards the Mary Maidenstone circle, at the end of April, quite recently, in about 2000 BCE, what you would have seen would have been the rise of the Pleiades star system. Now, we know that the Pleiades is important. We've seen that over the weekend. It's important in many cultures. In many cultures, it's thought that their ancestors, the gods and goddesses came from the Pleiades star system. It was recognised in many cultures worldwide. The significance of it in terms of earth energies is the rising of the Pleiades at the end of April, actually is a marker, if you like, for the coming of Beltane. So the people when they stood there, and when they saw the Pleiades rising, knew that it was coming up to be time for their Beltane ritual, their great May Day festival. So again, we're looking at something that isn't just about putting sites anywhere in the land, isn't just about putting random numbers of stones up, isn't just about making a route across the land. It's actually about ways in which all these things link together to be of significance to the people. Okay, we talked about sun and moon and stars. There are ways in which the significance of the moon was recorded on its annual 18.6 year cycle. This is an entrance grave on the top of Chapel Cambrai, again a holy hilltop, sometimes called the first and last hill in England. And this moonrise only appears if you're in the entrance grave at the time of the maximum midsummer moonrise, which only happens every 18.6 years. So again, it's beautifully framed by the entrance grave. Now who's this for? Because it's the dead that's in there. And in this particular quite small entrance grave, you're not going to get huge numbers of people doing rituals. So somehow these phenomena of the rebirth of the sun at the winter solstice, the summer solstice, and the passage of the moon at key times like this in its cycle, was linked in to the dead and the spirits of the dead. It's almost like a rebirth for the dead as well. And perhaps it was a way of allowing the spirits of the dead to move on. Or perhaps it was a way of connecting the dead with the living. Or perhaps it was a way in which it was felt that everything was part of a whole and therefore the honouring of the moon and the sun was important because it related to the passage of the living through life and the dead into the afterlife. Perhaps the bones of the dead were only put into this entrance grave once every 18.6 years ready for this phenomenon to occur. We don't know for certain, but it has to be not a coincidence that these things happen at these particular times. The Menentol, it was often thought to be quite an enigmatic site, a hauled stone with two uprights, didn't resemble anything else anywhere else in the country. It's now been discovered that it was originally part of a stone circle. Archaeologists dug it a few years ago and discovered a number of other post holes and remains of stones around to make a stone circle. So it was one that we could add to our list of stone circles. And I remember saying to Cornwall's archaeologist, Nick Johnson, after they did the excavation, out of interest, how many stones do you discover going around this stone circle? Oh, he said, we think there were 19. So I thought, yeah, that's again, not a coincidence. What is different about it is the hauled stone. Now there are hauled stones at other sites. We know, for instance, up on Orkney, there was a stone of Odin that lay between the stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar. And that was destroyed in the last century because the farmer was fed up with too many people going to visit it. We've lost other hauled stones as well. There were hauled stones recorded at some of the entrance graves, burial chambers in Gloucestershire. And it may well be that they were associated with mounds or chambers. And there is some remains of what looks like could possibly be a chamber around that hauled stone. And again, it may have something to do with the spirits because perhaps that the hauled stones were the area in which the spirit could leave the chamber. Or perhaps it was the way in which people could actually enter the chamber to commune with the spirits. But as I say, all these things have multi-layers of meaning because the archaeologists also, when they did the excavation, thought the hauled stone had been moved. And it was originally at right angles to where it now stands. And we then ran through the alignments for that and discovered that at the time when the stone circle would have been built in the Bronze Age, that somebody standing or crouching in the middle of the circle would see the minimum summer moonrise come up over the horizon and be framed perfectly. The moon would have been framed perfectly by the hauled stone. So I think there are ways in which we need to look at these sites which keep us open to many possibilities. This is Tregeffian entrance grave. And again, I think sometimes it's what Maria Gimbuta has called the language of the stones, that at places where there are carvings on the stones, this was perhaps a language used by the Neolithic peoples if we only knew how to interpret it. And earlier on, you know, there was quite a lot of stuff on the symbols and so on, on some of the Irish tombs. We don't have huge numbers of those in Cornwall, but what we do have is some very interesting anomalous things. When this entrance grave was being excavated, because the road was being widened, they discovered a stone inside. It's now standing outside, but it was standing inside the entrance grave. And that's the stone in the foreground there. And it has, as you can see, very distinctive oval shapes and round shapes. And it actually has 13 round shapes carved into it and 12 oval shapes. And again, numbers are significant. 13 and 12 are the numbers of new moons and full moons in any solar year. There are 13 new moons and 12 full moons or 13 full moons and 12 new moons in any year. And that information is encoded in the stone itself. And interestingly, the stone was then placed in the entrance grave, above the bones of the ancestors that were placed there. So somehow, death, life, womb, tomb, moon, sun, the passage of the seasons are all interconnected for these people in a very much holistic way that we've lost nowadays. We're just beginning to discover again. The other interesting thing about some of these places, and Trogithium Barrow is a good example, is that they seem to have some very strange and anomalous energies associated with them. And this was discovered as part of the Dragon Project that some of us took part in the 1970s. And Trogithium Barrow was checked with Geiger count for radiation and was found to have a very high level of radiation. Now a lot of sites in Cornwall are going to have high radiation because they're granite. But the radiation is much higher even than background radiation. At Trogithium, it was several times higher than the background radiation that surrounded it. And some of us then went into monitoring some of the radiation at some of the stone circles, because it seemed to be some anomalous stuff was being thrown up. This is back to Tregocil Circle, and our local Earth Mysteries group checked this, and the centre of the circle was measured and came out surprisingly, the entrance places were higher than background, but the centres of the circles started coming up as lower than background. And this seemed to be a repeated pattern. This is the Nine Maidens at Boskednon. It's a ruined circle, there's not all the stones left now. But again, when this was checked, it was found to be much higher than, in fact, 12 counts per minute, much lower rather, in the centre of the circle against the average Cornish background of 30 counts per minute. So something strange is going on in the middle of these circles. The background is high, you get to the stones in the circle, and that's high. But you get to the middle of the circle, and your Geiger reading drops, sometimes drops away completely, but very often certainly drops to a much lower level. The same was discovered at Boskednon Stone Circle. But what was also found interesting at Boskednon and Boskednon has 19 stones again, it has a centre stone as well, leaning, and it also has this beautiful quartz stone, which is made purely of quartz and is very, very white and sparkly. And when we checked the quartz stone at Boskednon, we found that again, the readings dropped right away. Now the quartz stone is traditionally known as being a healing stone. And many people go to this stone for healing nowadays. Could there be some connection with this? We know that quartz is a significant material. You know, we have quartz in our watches, it creates a piezoelectric effect. And some people have reported the experience of getting tingles from stones like this. Were the ancient peoples aware of this? Did they select this stone particularly for that purpose? Some excavations were done at the Hurler Stone Circles on Bob had a layer of quartz, tiny quartz pieces that was put in as a foundation of the circle. And recently a dowser with one of our local dowsing groups down here has been going around and checking all the stone circles. And he says that in all the stone circles he's checked, there's a layer of quartz stones about a foot below the surface of the ground. People were using quartz. Did they understand it? It had healing purposes in some kind of ways. Somehow the centre of the circles seemed to be like a protected area that perhaps people went to and were unaffected by the high energies elsewhere. At Julo Stone Circle in Cornwall, somebody I know reported one day there were cows grazing in the field round about, and she reported one cow was about to give birth and the cow deliberately went into Julo Stone Circle into the centre to give birth to its calf. So, and animals are often very sensitive to these sites in ways that we don't always understand. So, you know, were ancient peoples aware of these things as well? Were these places in the centre of the circle some kind of sanctuary for them? The Menantol Hole Stone has a very, very high radiation count around the inside of the site. It's about 212%, I think, higher than background. Again, were ancient peoples aware of this? Because the legend of the Menantol is that if you pass somebody through the Menantol three times or nine times with the shins against the sun, they can be healed of backache or crick. Now, you know, is this just a legend? Well, I don't think that people would just go to these places and continue to go for healing purposes unless there's something actually in the legend. And maybe that short, sharp, we know that radiation is bad for us, but maybe a short, sharp dose of radiation acts as in a kind of homopathic way, unlike we get with radium treatment. And perhaps putting it through just briefly like that did actually have a physical effect. There's so much still that we don't know about these places that ancient peoples, even though they didn't have the instruments to measure that we do, perhaps intuitively knew or knew by trial and error. I'll just go on from that one a minute. And it's not only phenomena like radiation, there's also phenomena like light at some of these sites, because maybe it's connected with radiation, maybe it's just another aspect of the energy at some of these places. This is again, we're back to Thunquoit. And some people have actually seen, if you like, the effects of the radiation at some of these places, because it's been observed at some of these places that little lights appear sometimes along the surfaces of some of these sites. This one was actually seen by a couple of archaeologists, John Barnett and Brian Larkman. And they were surveying the site, they set up camp near the place. And they were watching in the evening. And they suddenly saw that in the gap between the side slab and the capstone, they witnessed inexplicable light phenomena. When they looked up at the underside of the capstone, periodic short bursts of multicoloured light, with colours reminiscent of a rainbow, flashed across the surface in short linear bands. This happened intermittently over something like 30 minutes. And they could find no explanation for it. This has been observed at other sites as well. This is Belefugu, dates from a later period, the Celtic Iron Age. But people here also have seen strange light phenomena. Again, it's an underground chamber that concentrates radiation, if you like. Joe May, who used to live at this place and looked after this site, recorded something here. He said, just at the point of dawn, as light was beginning to break, I saw thin spirallic filaments swirling in front of my eyes and around the main capping lintels of the passage. At first, I thought it was a retinal image, much like floaters or dead cells on the eyeball. But I had never experienced such spirallic phenomena before. And they seemed to be moving independently of my eye movements. They most closely resembled the whorls on fingertips, but lots of them interlaced and moving gently. Then I saw hundreds of tiny pricks of light, like stars, again moving gently, with the occasional streak as if some of them were shooting stars. I checked that this was not some kind of subjective or self-produced effect by switching my gaze back to the emerging light at the entrance of the Fugu, and then redirecting my gaze several points within the passage. The stars returned, unmistakably. The whole passage appeared to be filled with what can best be described as a star soup, which flowed in and around the stones. Somehow I knew that what I was seeing was energy, which, although subtle, was clearly there. I suspect that the ability to see it depends on certain fine-tuning of perception, which is probably available to everyone. Is this energy manifesting itself as light in these kinds of ways? And to take it one step further, and perhaps just to leave with some tantalizing possibilities, could this also be the cause of certain kinds of psychic phenomena that people experience at some of these places? Again, this is well attested. This is another Fugu, Kanyuni Fugu, and several psychic experiences have been reported at this particular site. There was one particular woman who wrote to me about what happened to her when she went here, and she wrote and said, My fiancé and I enjoyed a wonderful holiday in St. Just. We chose Cornwall to explore umpteen Celtic pagan sites, but went to the areas open-minded, not with preconceived ideas. One hot day, we visited Kanyuni Fugu. After having explored it, my boyfriend decided to call off in the Fugu itself. I myself couldn't go in. It wasn't an unpleasant feeling. I just knew I shouldn't go in at that particular time. So instead, I propped up against what I took to be a windowsill and started to sketch the entrance. Immediately, I knew I was being watched from behind. I didn't turn around, carried on drawing, and let what would happen, happen. How I knew what I saw or felt, I don't know, but I know that the mother of the house had been preparing some food and came in to the window to see who was there. She had with her her little girl, who asked her mother what I was doing. The mother then picked her up so she could see. I dared not turn around for fear of losing contact. On completion, I called my boyfriend, who was ready to leave. He felt nothing or saw nothing. But again, as we left the village, I had the pleasant feeling of saying goodbye to a friendly community. Other people have reported similar experiences of a psychic nature at places like this. So could somehow radiation as a force be having an effect at places like this? This standing stone is the blind fiddler that we talked about earlier. Somebody here at sunset on midsummer solstice heard what he described as an earth sound, as a rumbling of noise in the ground itself. And it wasn't anything that he could identify. It happened just as the sun dipped down over the horizon. This is Zenochoit, and it was here on an Earth Mysteries outing day that some people heard the noise of what is often called the humerdruz, which seems to be an ultrasound or infrasound, which is below the level of human hearing and manifests at certain times. Some people have described it like a swarm of bees. And it was a very still, airless day. There was nothing else. And some of us that were walking across from here to the next site heard this very strange buzzing sound. And in fact, the place where we were heading was once again that cairn on top of Trendrene Hill. So it was on a ley line. And this humerdruz, as it's called, this buzzing sound seems only to be heard under certain conditions at certain times. So there are strange things out there. There are strange, I think it Shakespeare in The Tempest said, be not afeard. This place is full of sounds and sweet airs that give offense and hurt not. There are strange noises. There are strange sounds. There are strange lights. You never know what you're going to see at the sites. We don't know all the answers to it all yet. But I think we can find out. And if you get the chance, just go out there with the sites and see what you experience. Thanks. This has been a Megalithomania audio production. For more information, visit megalithomania.co.uk