North Sentinel – “The Undiscover’d Country”
February 6, 2010 - 3:15 am
A day or so ago, I noticed a story on the BBC news site concerning the death of the last speaker of Bo, a pre-Neolithic language of India’s Andaman Islands. This in turn led me to read about the island of North Sentinel and then on to this truly fascinating essay by Adam Goodheart.
Long before I started Eternal Idol, it was an article of faith for me that it was possible to peer into the past and to get a glimpse of life when Stonehenge was in its infancy, through the eyes of the people who built the monument and who conducted their ceremonies there. I’m not alone in believing this, and it was admittedly heartening to learn that Ralph Whitlock, author of “In Search of Lost Gods”, came to virtually the same conclusion long before me.
I’m as confident as I can be that I have caught the occasional fleeting glimpse into the past, while this belief is tempered by the certain knowledge that there’s no future or gain in trying to delude myself. I’m optimistic that over the course of time, there will be still more occasions when some aspect of life 5,000 years ago assumes a momentary clarity, but it does no harm at all to cultivate some humility and a sense of proportion about what I’ve chosen to try to do.
In his play Hamlet, William Shakespeare described Death as “the undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns….” and while this is an appropriate reference point for trying to hear the soft voices of the Stonehenge dead, I feel it has a practical and extremely fitting reality when I come to consider the islanders of North Sentinel.
Many insightful and compelling observations have been written about the people who built Stonehenge, all as a result of the careful study of some weathered stones and earthworks, some artefacts and some bones that are fast on their way to becoming the dust from whence their original owners sprang. By way of complete contrast, the island of North Sentinel is visible from the sea and from the air; its 200 or so inhabitants have been photographed [above] and they’ve also been captured on film on several occasions. They’ve been on their island for something in the region of 60,000 years and they’ve been visited, albeit fleetingly, many times over the past few centuries, yet our knowledge of these people hovers around the zero mark.
We do not know what language they speak, we do not know what beliefs they hold, what ceremonies they perform, what their diet is, what their mythology or world view might be, while we don’t even know how they refer to themselves. We don’t know if they have a patriarchal or matriarchal society, or any other for that matter, while we know next to nothing about their customs or skills, other than they’ve learned to tip their arrows with salvaged and beaten iron. We possess several of their wonderful bows, but we have a strong suspicion that they cannot even cultivate fire, relying instead on the conflagrations caused by lightning strikes; however, it seems that they knew that the tsunami of 2004 was approaching and it also seems that they survived it.
In terms of trying to study the people who built Stonehenge, I find it very sobering to think that the island of North Sentinel, the people to whom it is home and their few known artefacts have a physical and ongoing reality, yet we know so very little about them.
One thing we do know for certain about the North Sentinelese is that they don’t share the curiosity we have about them, while to describe them as hostile is something of an understatement. They have a long track record of killing anyone who enters their domain, something that continues to the present day, while they seem to be unconcerned by modern aircraft such as helicopters. During my time on Salisbury Plain, the airfield at Netheravon was home to an Apache squadron and I often saw these fearsome machines at extremely close range while they were on manoeuvre. Clearly, I can’t conceive of not knowing what helicopters are, so God only knows what the North Sentinelese make of them, yet these ‘infernal engines’ or flying demons seem to hold few, if any terrors for them.
On the one hand, the more I read about North Sentinel, the more curious I become, not least because an intimate knowledge of these people’s lives, rituals and language could conceivably shed some light on the lives of our ancestors who built Stonehenge. However, this curiosity is outweighed by an intense admiration for these people and the way they’ve chosen to shun the rest of the world.
It’s a shame that I’ll never be able to tell the man in the photograph below of the respect I have for him, but I very much doubt that his existence will be any the poorer for this. However, my life has been considerably enriched by having seen the striking image, which surely embodies hostility and defiance, so long may it remain this way as far as the islanders of North Sentinel are concerned.
Silburyhenge
February 5, 2010 - 2:47 am
“Imagination takes us to worlds that never were, but without it, we go nowhere.”
As far as I’m aware, the images in this post are those that no human eyes have ever seen before, while the structure they depict never existed. However, as I pointed out in the previous post, I’ve long wondered at the relative dimensions of the top of Silbury Hill and the sarsen circle at Stonehenge, so I’m extremely grateful to my friend Juris Ozols for taking the time and trouble to create the images that show how these dimensions match up.
The sarsen circle at Stonehenge is 33 meters in diameter, while the top of Silbury Hill is roughly 30 meters across, or less than ten feet smaller. My 1968 copy of the the BBC’s Silbury Hill booklet, published to accompany Professor Atkinson’s ill-fated excavation, goes into some detail about Silbury Hill’s cubic volume:
“Today, the apparent volume of the mound is about 12.5 million cubic feet….Originally, however, the mound must have been larger than this, because the huge ditch around its base is mostly filled with silt eroded from the mound by frost and rain. This silt at present amounts to about 5 million cubic feet, and it is safe to say that when it was originally built, the mound must have been about one-third larger than it is today, with a wider base and with sides sloping at a narrower angle.”
So, by my unscientific calculations, the sarsen circle of Stonehenge could have fitted very well atop the mound of Silbury Hill. As far as we’re aware, Silbury Hill was completed about a century before the sarsen circle at Stonehenge, while the structures are only separated by twenty miles or so. Both are surrounded by large ditches, one of which was certainly a moat, but there are many other similarities, to my mind.
On of the earliest known names for Stonehenge was the ‘Chorea Gigantum’, or Giants’ Dance, and as I pointed out in the previous post, we’ve recently learned not only of possible dancing on the site of Silbury Hill when it was in its earliest stage, but we’ve also learned of a 40 feet high post that could have been a ‘totem pole’ or even a form of Maypole, at a push, erected at roughly the same time. Given the sheer size of this pole and the possibility of what kind of ceremonies the locals may possibly have indulged in to produce the hardened layer that apparently exists beneath Silbury Hill, then the idea of a Giants’ Dance of some kind isn’t completely out of the question.
All of which brings something else to mind, because a month or so ago, Dr Robin Melrose wrote in, saying “I’ve just been puzzling over the following description of Kai (Sir Kay) one of Arthur’s earliest companions, taken from “Culhwch and Olwen” (11th century):
Kai had this peculiarity, that his breath lasted nine nights and nine days under water, and he could exist nine nights and nine days without sleep. A wound from Kai’s sword no physician could heal. Very subtle was Kai. When it pleased him he could render himself as tall as the highest tree in the forest. And he had another peculiarity – so great was the heat of his nature, that, when it rained hardest, whatever he carried remained dry for a handbreadth above and a handbreadth below his hand; and when his companions were coldest, it was to them as fuel with which to light their fire.
I thought he might be a sun god, but when I saw this post about the moon as the Land of the Dead, I wondered if there could be a lunar connection. Do you or anyone else on this site know of any connection between the moon and nine days/nights, or between any heavenly body and the number “nine?”
Again, it’s something I learned a long time ago, but I’ve just remembered that there’s every likelihood that Silbury Hill was once a nine-sided pyramid, an observation you can read for yourselves on this English Heritage link and elsewhere.
Does this have anything to do with Kay? I have no idea, but if anyone else has any thoughts they’d like to share, I’d be interested to hear them, while as I said at the beginning “Imagination takes us to worlds that never were, but without it, we go nowhere.”
The Silbury Hill “Totem Pole?”
February 4, 2010 - 3:50 am
View of Silbury Hill from Avebury Trusloe
I’m extremely grateful to Thelma Wilcox for her generosity of spirit and for taking the time and trouble to send in these photographs of Silbury Hill, taken from various vantage points in the area. As Thelma pointed out, and as you can discover for yourselves, there are theories put forward by Julian Cope and Robert Devereux concerning Silbury Hill’s visibility as you wander around the landscape, but I’ll just say that I’m personally not convinced by them. This isn’t to say that I’m dismissing them or that I think they’re completely wrong, by any means, but I’m not persuaded.
View of Silbury Hill from East Kennet Long Barrow
What interests me most, perhaps, is that the hill or its summit is visible at all from these varying points, and that the summit is flat. I’m not convinced by the recent notion put forward that Silbury Hill was originally built as a ‘pointed’ pyramid in prehistoric times and that it remained as such until some undetermined date in the mediaeval era, when the summit was apparently removed so that the structure could be used for defensive purposes.
All these matters aside, I’m also extremely grateful to Mick Davis, Angie Lake and Tim Jones for sending me the BBC link on Silbury Hill and also the Wiltshire Heritage link, both of which deal with the recently discovered letters written in 1776 by Edward Drax to his friend Lord Rivers. You can read about it for yourselves, of course, but very briefly, these letters mention a void inside Silbury Hill that is presumed to have once been the place where a 40 feet tall oak shaft once stood.
View of Silbury Hill from the Sanctuary
I sometimes get tired of the endless arguments at Stonehenge, where it seems that no two archaeologists can even broadly agree on what conclusions to draw from certain evidence. When I say that I don’t necessarily agree with Julian Cope, Robert Devereux, Jim leary and now David Dawson, director of the Wiltshire Heritage Museum in Devizes, you might think that I’m simply being perverse, but such is not the case.
Firstly, let me briefly revisit the notion of dancing at the formative stages of Silbury Hill, something that was discussed at great length in a previous post. In a recent lecture, Jim Leary revealed the existence of a hardened layer beneath Silbury Hill, which suggests that the earth that remained after the turf and topsoil was removed was compacted by dancing feet.
As I understand it, the tunnels made by treasure hunters and archaeologists over the centuries comprise something less than 1% of the hill’s total volume. My ability at maths is virtually non-existent, but I’m guessing that any hardened surface revealed as a result of the various intrusions made over the centuries comprises a very small percentage of the total surface area beneath Silbury Hill, so it’s an assumption that the whole area was treated in the fashion Jim Leary describes. Having said that, it seems reasonable enough to me, but if it’s true that 100% of the original surface area beneath the hill was hardened and compacted, then this suggests to me that it came about as a result of prolonged, frenzied dancing by hundreds of people over the course of weeks, to compact the whole area so methodically or comprehensively. And it’s worth pointing out, I believe, that the area in question is roughly 5 acres.
More likely, the original builders wanted this whole area flattened and hardened for a highly specific reason, so whether the natives were dancing, jumping up and down or playing hopscotch for weeks on end, these activities were secondary to the purpose of flattening the ground, so if the surface beneath Silbury were ever a dance floor, it was as a consequence of the need or desire for the ground to be flattened. As Dr Joseph Bell pointed out, we should pay close attention to “the vast importance of little distinctions, the endless significance of trifles.”
View of Silbury Hill from Waden Hill
All of which brings me to my second point, the suggestion that the presumed wooden structure within the hill was a ‘totem pole’. This description has been applied many times to the huge posts that once stood in what is now the carpark at Stonehenge; the following link from The Independent provides a typical quote “But re-examination in 1996 of a circle of 20-foot pine stakes at the site, which were first discovered in 1966, could offer the answer. Carbon-dating suggests that the stakes were placed in 8,000BC – almost as soon as the islands were habitable. They would have looked just like totem poles and performed the same function – monuments to gods or chiefs, at a ritual site.”
There are plenty of other similar observations and I’m fairly sure I’ve provided one or two in the posts I wrote on the Mesolithic pits at Stonehenge. My point is that whatever these posts were, they could not possibly have been ‘totem poles’ in the sense that we understand such structures today, but I went into this in great detail back in October 2008.
View of Silbury Hill from Overton Down
By the same token, whatever function the post or pole at the heart of Silbury Hill may have performed, it cannot have been a ‘totem pole’. I’m sure that someone will suggest that it was a form of Maypole for the locals to dance around when Silbury was in its infancy, but I’m not really convinced. Nor do I think that it was in any way integral to the structure, representing some kind of central point that the earth had to be piled around for engineering purposes.
Whatever this huge post was, it once stood in a central position at the site of what was to become Silbury Hill, but then the builders not only completely covered it from the sides and from above, but added an extra 90 feet or so of earth on top of it. Others will have their own views on this, of course, but it simply strikes me as being an example of extreme overkill as far as concealing something from sight is concerned, then by way of complete contrast, the structure that resulted from ’something being completely hidden from sight’ is itself visible from a long way away, and it also has a nice flat platform at the top that people can be seen to dance on or perform all manner of other high visible ceremonies.
Coincidentally, I may have my dates wrong, but as I understand it, Silbury Hill was completed in or around 2,400 BC and its summit is roughly 30 metres in diameter. The sarsen stage of Stonehenge was built around a century later and is 33 metres in diameter, so, given the undeniable fact that a considerable proportion of Silbury Hill has eroded over the course of the last four and half thousand years or so, it strikes me that Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ‘Chorea Gigantum‘ would once have fitted very snugly indeed on top of this ‘mountain’.
View of Silbury Hill from the Ridegway
Well, I’m sure everyone will have their own ideas on this, but without going into a huge amount of detail, it’s long occurred to me that, whatever else our ancestors did at Silbury Hill, they went to truly enormous pains to bury some thing or things at the site, to cut it off from the outside world with a moat and to ensure that whatever they hid from sight there remained that way for all eternity….and so it has proved.
“Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal’d within the iron hills?”
Post Scriptum: The verse above comes from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s wonderful poem ‘In Memoriam’. I saw a fragment of this on the Tube when I was in London recently, but although I knew it contained something to do with hills, I couldn’t recall precisely what it was. Be that as it may, it reminded me of Silbury and of other ancient earthworks in Britain, so here’s what prompted the above verse, courtesy of the British Council:
There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There, where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds, they shape themselves and go….
Wonderful, evocative stuff.
Dr Who at Stonehenge
February 3, 2010 - 10:54 pmAt The Mountains of Madness?
February 1, 2010 - 1:09 am
In a comment on the “Missing Years of Jesus” post, Thelma wrote about one particular site in Britain and added that in this place “…perhaps there is another sacred landscape to be found?” I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if this turned out to be the case and it may be that instead of being gradually teased out, the whole thing will appear in a flash, as leylines did to Alfred Watkins.
Thelma’s observation about a sacred landscape waiting to be found reminded me of a news item I saw a little while back, and it was something that positively took my breath away. You can read it for yourselves, if you wish, but it concerns the discovery via Google Earth of what appears to be a ‘Lost City’ in the Amazon jungle, close to Brazil’s border with Bolivia.
Of course, I was extremely interested by the whole article, but I was particularly pleased for the ghost of Colonel Percy Fawcett, a man who has been vilified for decades and dismissed as a madman on account of his belief in the existence of a ‘lost city’. Now, to my amazement, it seems as if he’s been vindicated, while in my view, someone whose family motto was “Difficulties Be Damned” and who went on to die in the Amazon jungle in pursuit of his dream deserves every accolade going. My approval may count for little, but as Fawcett is acknowledged as being the inspiration for Indiana Jones and as he’s due to be played in a forthcoming film by Brad Pitt, then I’m sure that this will make him very happy, wherever he may be right now.
As I’ve written a number of times, I can trace my inspiration and enthusiasm for looking into ‘ancient mysteries’ back to a book given to me by my mother when I was a child, a book by C.W Ceram entitled Gods, Graves and Scholars, in which I read the story of Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of the ‘lost’ or fabled city of Troy.
In brief, at a time when the entire academic establishment was convinced that Homer’s Iliad was a “pretty legend”, Schliemann chose to believe every word of what Homer had written, thereby discovering the lost City of Troy. As anyone who has ever browsed through the various entries on this site will be aware, I’m particularly interested in trying my best to explore whatever the old myths and legends have to tell us about Stonehenge in prehistory and it’s gratifying that I’m not alone in this. Aynslie is similarly interested, while I’m indebted to Professor Melrose for the many things he’s been able to tell me about the meaning and derivation of numerous words related to this study.
Some time back, I corresponded with Dr Angelika Franz of Der Spiegel, after which she wrote and published an account of what I had to say about the “Stonehenge Sentinel“, exactly two years ago today. I was surprised to learn from Dr Franz that Schliemann isn’t held in universally high regard in Germany and there’s no denying that there are good grounds for this. Similarly, Colonel Percy Fawcett doesn’t seem to have endeared himself to sundry establishment figures, and yet I still find myself occasionally baffled by the hostile reactions these people engender in others.
For anyone who isn’t aware of it, in March last year I had a book published, entitled “The Missing Years of Jesus”. It’s an investigation into the legends of Jesus visiting Britain, as suggested in the opening lines of William Blake’s famous poem Jerusalem, and it should be clear to anyone who’s read the book or browsed through this site that there’s no doubt in my mind that Jesus did indeed spend a considerable amount of time in the West of England and in South Wales before returning to his homeland to embark on his famous ministry.
Of course, not everyone agrees with me, but the vast majority of correspondence I’ve received on the subject has been perfectly civil, with the exception of the occasional sarcastic remark, which is to be expected and which I can live with.
By way of sharp contrast, I wrote in great detail a few years ago about my belief that Stonehenge was the circular temple referred to by Pytheas of Massilia and that the nearby Vespasian’s Camp was the ‘City of Apollo‘ that he also described. All the posts are still on this site, if anyone cares to peruse them, while they attracted some attention from the media at the time. What surprised me, though, was the sheer outrage from certain quarters that greeted the posts and the media reports, so there seems to be something about the mere phrase ‘lost city’ that arouses extreme passions in some people today, just as was the case back in the times of Fawcett and Schliemann.
I’ve recently had cause to look into Julian Richards’ “Meet the Ancestors” series and I note that episode 34, in series 6 was entitled “The Lost City of Roman Britain”, so I can’t help but wonder what kind of reception the programme received on account of its obviously highly presumptuous title.
There are other ‘lost cities’ in Britain, most notably Camelot, but there are also lost sunken lands such as Lyonesse and Ys on the coast of Britanny. The enigmatic mediaeval poem The Ruin speaks of a large settlement or city, whose identity is not known to us, while I’m sure there are others still, but they are all surely worth investigating.
As I wrote in a previous post, the existence of Bluestonehenge was predicted back in the 1980s and this astonishing structure came to light last year, as a result of the efforts of the Stonehenge Riverside Project. I could list many other discoveries in the Stonehenge landscape and elsewhere, but it seems to me that the British Isles are an absolute cornucopia or treasure-trove of ancient landscapes, alignments, features and artefacts just awaiting discovery. I understand that Lee Smeaton is making progress as far as his “Kentish Walls” are concerned, while one of the many subjects I’ve been trying to find time to do justice to is the ‘Ghost Avenue’ at Stonehenge, as discovered by Juris Ozols and Alex Down.
With all the means and material available to us, it strikes me it would be madness not to look into these mysteries, so I’ll keep doing so as long as time allows. And it’s extremely gratifying that there are so many others of you ‘out there’ who are just as keen on looking into these matters as I am.
PS: I’ll be away in London on business and pleasure until late Tuesday night, just in case anyone wonders about a lack of response from me.
Silbury Hill lecture by Jim Leary
January 24, 2010 - 1:45 am
Once again, I’m extremely grateful to my friend Alex Down for the following, which is an account of a presentation given by Jim Leary [above] in Devizes, concerning his archaeological work at Silbury Hill. In an email to me, Alex wrote “I found the talk interesting because it seemed apparent that the construction itself is even more important than the final monument”, so I’ll leave you with Alex’s account of Jim Leary’s talk:
It was an alarming situation. In May 2000, a large hole appeared in the top of what’s one of the most important archaeological monuments in Europe: Silbury Hill, in the care of English Heritage. The subsequent repair and restoration work gave Jim Leary, the archaeological director for English Heritage throughout the work, unique insights into possibly the most enigmatic of British prehistoric monuments. He talked about the findings and his ideas in a presentation to the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society in Devizes on 23rd January.
Jim briefly covered previous investigations that all involved significant mining and tunnelling operations. In view of all the activity, it’s not surprising that torrential winter rains caused a slumping of the chalk into the voids left by the excavators. To prevent any further damage, major engineering work was needed, and this presented a wonderful opportunity for archaeological investigation where the engineers worked, using the latest techniques.
Silbury is very low-lying in its landscape, near the Swallowhead Spring, and at the junction of at least three different geological deposits. Cut from the end of a natural chalk spur, it is surrounded by a huge ditch with causeway-like bridges, and what is termed a “ditch extension” that may have had a spring in it. The last excavation was directed by RJC Atkinson, clever archaeologist, but poor at documenting his work, so there are unfortunately few records of the dig. He proposed a long three-stage model of development, starting with a small proto-Silbury, of a few metres in diameter and, later, two further large additions.
Jim’s work completely overturns this model, proposing instead an incremental approach (with as many as 20 stages) over what seems a very short period of 100 years, around 2400BC. While the original Atkinson phase 1 gravel mound is still the core of the new interpretation, Jim showed a thin layer of soil across the site which seems to show that the area was stripped of turf and soil in a preparatory phase. What remained appears to have been beaten flat and hard by hundreds of stamping feet. It’s tempting to think that we can see the evidence of dancing or processional rituals here.
After the first mound, a larger area was staked out, and infilled with organic material – turf, soil, and subsoil … possibly the original surface that had been removed and stored for use later. Within this neat stake-defined mound, pits were excavated in the top. The pits did not seem to contain anything; rather it was as though they were dug, and then almost immediately refilled. And to complement the holes on the mound, other smaller satellite mounds with surrounding gulleys were created, perhaps only 40cm high.
Then, over this puzzling scene of stake-defined mound and satellites, much more material was moved, to create a barrow-sized mound about 5-6 m high. The fill was of different types, including all the different geological deposits from the surrounding area, and small sarsens, described by RJCA as being “seeded like currants in a cake.” As these different elements would all have been hidden from view, there must have been symbolic value in including all the constituents of the builders’ landscape.
In yet another stage, this mound representing the entire landscape was surrounded with a ditch in the manner of a henge and, with a diameter of about 100m, was the same size as Stonehenge’s ditch. This “Silbury enclosure” could have been used for ceremonies, or further constructions of which the tunnels can give no clue. The ditch (buried by later stages of construction of the Hill, is complex: it shows a sequence of incremental growth, as each ditch is deliberately back-filled, and then extended outwards in a new excavation the back-fill being revetted with large chunks of chalk, dry-stone wall style. This was done in four stages. It’s as though the act of creating the ditches was in itself important. The technique of revetting with “dry stone walls” is sound engineering, and is further used within the chalk hill itself and in the huge banks at Avebury.
The hill was completed in multiple stages, using chalk dug from the huge ditch surrounding the final monument. The latest archaeology shows clear evidence of the incremental growth of the hill. In places within the chalk are clusters of sarsen chunks with pieces of antler. These seem to represent deliberate deposits, and must therefore have some sort of ceremonial significance … perhaps the stone representing dead ancestors?
As a coda to the story of the construction, the team’s excavations at the top of the hill showed large post holes dating to around 1000AD with further evidence of mediaeval activity. It appears as though the top of the mound was given a defensive function with a palisade by slicing the top off what, in Neolithic times, was probably a dome shaped summit. At the same time, it was likely that a spiral path was cut to give access to the fortifications. Some of this path can still be seen today.
I’ve spent some time describing the details of the construction as presented by Jim, because it seems likely that the construction itself was what was important, rather than the final monument. Jim stresses that any interpretation must take account of the incremental growth. He’s found parallels in the Hopewellian tradition of North America in which, he says, the construction of the Hopewell mounds was what was important. In many cultures, myths about the creation of the Earth tell of a world of water from which a duck, say, pulls a piece of mud, adding more mud to create the land. Could it be that the incremental growth of the hill represents a creation myth made real?
The hill’s position makes it clearly associated with water, with local springs, the “moat” and the Swallowhead spring that is the source of the River Kennet and, ultimately, the Thames. Jim suggested that the Thames itself, by virtue of the ritual deposits found in it, was a sacred river, in the way that the Ganges is sacred in India today. The source of the Thames would have been correspondingly revered. In support of this idea, he proposed that Marden henge, which has a “sacred hill” in it (I think he means Hatfield Barrow) is close to the River Avon, also likely to be a sacred river.
These are interesting suppositions, and open up a number of possible interpretations for the meaning of Silbury Hill. For what is probably the best-dated monument in Britain, Jim gave an involving account of the highly complex construction. And then, from this context he speculated on its meaning and use. This was a compelling presentation, and considerably advances our understanding of probably the most intriguing monument in Britain … after Stonehenge!
Post Script On a personal note, I’ve just read that, elsewhere, Jim points to the similarity of the final phase of Silbury Hill with Picked Hill – a prominent hill in the nearby Vale of Pewsey. In a flat area like the Vale, a feature such as Picked Hill would have stood out and may have had symbolic value. With which I strongly agree – in a wonderful example of synchronicity, I illustrated my recent posting on the meaning of landscape with a photograph of Picked Hill (though I didn’t know it was called that at the time – I just knew that it was a striking feature in the landscape.) Take a look at the photo – Picked Hill is the one on the left of the two hills – and see if you agree if it reminds you of Silbury.
“Missing Years of Jesus” presentation
January 19, 2010 - 1:51 am
Back in August 2009, I received a very generous-spirited invitation from Margaret Novakovic, Chair of the London Forum for the Study of Crop Circles and Other Mysteries. Margaret wrote to me to ask if I would be willing to speak about my book “The Missing Years of Jesus” on January 21st, 2010, so I was happy to write back and to accept.
The Forum meetings are held in the King and Queen pub, 1 Foley Street, W1, in the Goodge Street area of London, so I’m very much looking forward to this and to meeting everyone who may be there.
Stonehenge and the Druids
January 18, 2010 - 5:00 pm
The Heritage Key site have just published the first in what I understand is a series of lengthy interviews with Franks Somers, the leading Stonehenge Druid. As well as the video interview, there’s a transcript and a lengthy, detailed article for those of you who may be interested in hearing Frank’s views on Stonehenge and other related matters.
Show me more… »
Pat Robertson, Haiti and The Devil
January 17, 2010 - 1:20 am
Every now and again, something so momentous and so tragic occurs that it’s impossible not to mention it here, or to acknowledge that it’s taken place. As everyone who has visited this site is surely aware, I’m interested first and foremost in Stonehenge and its history; this is what I write about and this is something in which we are all interested in our different ways. However, I feel I simply have to mention the earthquake in Haiti, even though I’m certain that you’re all aware of this latest horror that has been visited upon us.
Show me more… »
