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Postscript

It is now the best part of a decade since this book was first published: and it's interesting to see how much has changed since then.

One area of 'earth mysteries' research that hasn't changed much is dowsing. This has been carried on much as before, with more data being collected and compiled, particularly by the Dragon Project (of which more later). Underwood's patterns, and the general concepts of overgrounds and the like, have been confirmed by an increasing number of dowsers, but there have been no significant advances in our understanding, from a dowsing point of view, of whatever it is that is perceived at sacred sites.

There has, however, been a lot of activity on the ley-hunting front. Two of Paul Devereux's projects stand out in particular: his original Leicestershire study of the correlation of ley-type alignments, 'hauntings', folklore and UFO incidents with geological faulting was expanded into his book Earth Lights; and his mammoth survey with Ian Thomson of some forty 'alignments of ancient sites' throughout Britain was published as The Ley Hunter's Companion.

There has also been plenty of argument around one of the questions we've looked at in this book: namely, what is a ley-line? Or, to put it another way, when is an alignment a ley, and when is a ley an alignment? Purists, including Paul Devereux, have held strictly to the Watkins definition of a ley as an alignment of sites; while others such as Sig Lonegren, whose book Spiritual Dowsing was published in 1986, have taken the other extreme, regarding the Watkins-type alignment as secondary evidence only for what Sig and other American dowsers describe as 'energy leys' – roughly equivalent to the 'overgrounds' discussed earlier in this book. It's an interesting debate, and one that, among other things, has caused a great deal of confusion on terminology.

The archaeological debate on alignments has taken a number of twists and turns. For the most part there has, as before, been a resounding silence from the academics. The main exception was Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy's Ley Lines in Question, published in 1983, which claimed to be a serious study of leys from an archaeological point of view. Sadly, though, it was clear that it had a rather different purpose in mind:

Williamson and Bellamy wrote the book whilst archaeology students at Cambridge, and it's all too noticeable that they took to heart the comments of Glyn Daniel, who happened to be teaching in Cambridge at the time: 'It used to be said by my teachers, mentors and advisors that the lunatic fringes of archaeology were an amusing whimsy to be disregarded. This is not so: one of the tasks of archaeology and archaeologists in the 1980s is to see that the lunatics are exposed, and that the truth as it appears to us at the moment is properly, cogently and frequently presented.'[2]

As a result, the book was not so much a studied debate with their discipline's 'convincing and coherent rival' as a crude and often distinctly unscholarly attack upon it. It's sad that the book is fatally flawed in this way: they should have had much of value to say, but so much of their data is presented so selectively, and so often wildly out of context – deliberately so in many cases, as they themselves admitted – that the result is pointless. It's noticeable, too. that whenever they had real problems, real evidence to face, they had an infuriating habit of backing out and crying 'coincidence' instead!

Like many other writers, Williamson and Bellamy were caught on the tangled terminology of ley-hunting, and made the mistake of confusing ley alignments, as historical artifacts, with ley-line concepts, as a part of earth-mysteries studies: they attacked both indiscriminately. But while the historical evidence for the former (or lack of it) is a valid concern of archaeology, the latter – since it is primarily concerned with present-day realities – is not theirs to claim: archaeologists are no better qualified than anyone else to pronounce upon them, especially if they have no practical knowledge of the research involved. The book is, however, well worth reading, if only to see how some archaeologists would like to debate – or dismiss – the ley-line issue.[3]

Despite this, a few archaeologists – most notably R.J.C. Atkinson, the veteran excavator of Stonehenge – have had the honesty to discuss the statistics of ley-type alignments properly;[4] and more recently there has been one debate (if somewhat one-sided) at an archaeologists' conference, while other sessions, taking the subject rather more seriously, are projected for the near future as I write this. One paper on earth-energies has appeared in the normally conservative weekly New Scientist,[5] along with considerable correspondence on ley-hunting and related topics; and more serious scientific debate is on the way.

The main reason for the change in attitude in scientific circles has come from the results of the Dragon Project, a small, desperately under-funded research effort organised by the ley-hunters themselves. It was this project that has at last proved the reality, beyond any reasonable doubt (though not, unfortunately, unreasonable doubt), of earth-energies of some kind at sacred and other sites.

Founded in 1977 (inevitably, it seems, in a London pub near Paddington Station), the project's aim was to co-ordinate and correlate research from every angle – from physical to psychical and back – into earth-energies at sacred sites. There was a surprisingly wide spread of specialists at that first meeting: electronics engineers, dowsers, geologists, a trance-psychic, a handful of physicists and chemists (mainly working in archaeological research), an astrologer, folklore researchers and historians, even a zoologist – the Dragon Project was and still is a truly multi-disciplinary study. Dr G.V. 'Don' Robins, a specialist in piezo-electricity in archaeological research, took on the task of co-ordinating the physical research; the dowsing and general psychical data was co-ordinated by John Steele, a Californian archaeologist and parapsychologist; while the thankless tasks of logistics and fundraising fell to Paul Devereux and the team from The Ley Hunter. Between them and the work of countless volunteers, the data for the reality of earth-energies mounted up.[6]

Much of the early work was done at the Rollright stone circle, partly because of its useful combination of circle, dolmen (the Whispering Knights) and standing stone (the King Stone), partly because of access from London, but also because of the facilities provided by the owner, which allowed the project to maintain a semi-permanent presence there for several years. More recently checks have been made at hundreds of other sites, including 'control' sites well away from areas of archaeological interest.

Over the years the physical researchers of the project have used a wide range of tools: geiger counters, ultrasound detectors, the inevitable photographic emulsions (visible light, false-colour infra-red and the rest), resistivity and electro-photography equipment and, more recently, purpose-built magnetometers adapted from medical equipment. Some academic departments have taken an increasing interest, and helped with the loan of very expensive specialised kit, such as a scintillation counter from Oxford University and a precision magnetometer from Professor John Hasted of Birkbeck University.

Following up a discovery from the zoologist, the first studies were done using an ultrasound detector adapted from one used by researchers to study bats. The first design used a wide-band receiver working in the 25kHz to 80kHz band: interestingly, no results were obtained from a narrow-band 40kHz receiver. There were, of course, a few problems with bats; but the Dragon Project monitors were able to detect a repeatable 'click' at dawn and dusk at various stones, and an often-repeated pulsing in ultrasound levels that brings to mind parallels with the pulsing of overgrounds detected in the dowsing surveys.

Rodney Hale, one of the project's electronic designers, developed an ultrasound detector with audible feedback (much easier to use than watching a meter) and was able demonstrate a link between ultrasound – which is a physical vibration – and radio signals - which are electromagnetic – at the King Stone at Rollright. This was a vertical signal in small isolated areas (typically 3ft 'cubes') of radio reception where the signal was clearly shown to be coming out of the ground or travelling at ground level – emerging from nowhere and stopping within only two or three feet. Similar results were obtained elsewhere at Rollright, and also at a Bronze Age cairn group above Baltinglass in Eire; and total radio silence – without background noise – was noted at NewGrange and in Cairn T at Loughcarew in Eire.

But it was the results of radiation and magnetic surveys that proved the most surprising.[7] Just as the dowsers and psychics had been saying for so many years, there were very definite physical anomalies: and yet, just like most psychic-related phenomena, they were highly elusive, with glaring differences at one visit, and nothing at all the next. Some places showed natural radiation levels higher than the 'background' level for the surrounding area; and some, like the Merry Maidens circle in Cornwall, showed both above-background and below-background radiation levels in tightly-defined areas – a theoretical impossibility:

In effect, the circle was shielding the area inside its circumference: literally a shield-ring, paralleling the earth-acupuncture concept we saw earlier. And, paralleling the earth-energy/orgone concept, Alan Bleakley recorded at Boskednan Nine Maidens circle in 1982 a steady drop in background radiation levels as a thunderstorm developed, suggesting that an atmospheric component of background radiation was being suppressed by the electrical activity of the atmosphere.[9]

The project continues, with occasional special sub-projects within it. 'OM1' and 'OM2' (Operation Merlin), two lengthy studies at Rollright including a month-long round-the-clock survey, were held in 1980, and their results are still being processed. The Gaia Programme radiation study – a follow-up to the early Dragon Project experiments - involved up to sixty volunteers throughout Britain in an eighteen-month long survey: each volunteer did a 'spot-check' (typically a ten-hour session) at sites ranging from Callanish on the Isle of Lewis to the Land's End circles, and from Welsh sites like Moel ty Uchaf to Kits Coty House in Kent. Early material was under analysis at the time this was written, and was due to be published in The Ley Hunter's issues 101 and 102, during 1986.

Looking back on my own dowsing research at Rollright, I find it fascinating that the physical research has given much the same images of activity at the site. The radiation surveys showed something very similar to the 'spin' pulse I found at the edge of the circle; there was a magnetic pulsing effect at various points on the site, analogous to the image of pulsing that I sensed in my survey back in 1974; and there was the ultrasound 'click' at dawn and dusk.

But most interesting of all was the amount of activity centred on stone 62, the larger stone on the western side of the circle. It gave an extraordinary short-term magnetic anomaly – dropping right off the scale by several orders of magnitude – during a survey in July 1983,[10] along with a fair contingent of other physical oddities over the survey period; but its tour-de-force was a visual phenomenon, the subject of an almost incredible photograph taken by Paul Devereux during a survey in January 1986. In the picture there is something that looks exactly like a flame-type spark discharge from the top of the stone; the image was visible for only a few seconds at around midnight, and Paul was lucky to catch it on 1000-ASA colour film.[11] Yet someone else seems to have known of this stone's properties, and put them to use in a different way: for it was also the focus of that grim 'sacrifice' incident described in Chapter 7.

And this brings us back to the other side of the Dragon Project, its non-physical research. Very little of this has been published in detail – there are summaries in the reports in The Ley Hunter, but that is all.[12] The obvious problem with this kind of work is that it is very difficult to correlate, since everyone sees things slightly differently: it will take years to sift through all the data before full publication is possible. For example, though, the 'OM2' study at Rollright included some experiments to see whether dowsing could affect the physical energies emitted from standing stones: and indeed my old dowsing teacher Bill Lewis clearly affected the reading of a voltmeter attached to a stone in the circle when he touched one of the stone's energy nodes.

There has been a lot of standard psychic work – or at least, as standard as psychic work can be. One example from the Project's files was a tape-recording of a supervised visit in August 1985 to Cerrig Duon circle near Trecastle in the Brecon Beacons in mid-Wales. The woman involved had recently acquired a (definitely unwanted!) secondary vision, and it was the first time she had visited any site of this type. Looking at the outlier stone, known as Maen Mawr, she perceived a horseshoe-shaped field – seen as 'like a heat-haze off a desert' – moving off the stone in a direction that turned out to be magnetic north. Later she saw this energy – whatever it was – 'in a more kinetic way' with people touching the stone. I think I know what she means by this 'heat haze': I've seen something very similar around students' dowsing rods when teaching people to dowse – in fact I used the presence of this haze as a check that confirmed, to me at least, that they were actually doing it properly.

The dowsing results have so far been erratic, but in many ways that's hardly surprising: with no common terminology, and very little common experience, every dowser sees each site in a different way. In a fascinating experiment at Rollright, the team drew an imaginary line just outside the circle and asked every visitor to try to dowse for it. Almost everyone picked up the imaginary line – exactly as if it were a 'real' one -and in exactly the same place. So it seems that a 'thought-form' can be more real than something physical when working in the image-world of dowsing; which sheds a rather different light on Underwood's results, and on Lethbridge's 'ghost' studies for that matter.

It also leads to another problem for the researchers. Magicians of various kinds do visit these sites, and do, intentionally, place images or thought-forms into the site: the healing group Fountain International, for example, make a particular point of imaging their concept of the energy forms at all manner of sites. Well-intentioned though this may be (or not, in some cases), this does make it very difficult to see what is actually there: and since we always end up seeing the sites through this clutter of other people's filters and imagined world-views, it is almost impossible to be 'objective' about them.

Earth-energies exist: we cannot reasonably doubt it. Yet it's all too easy to get confused and tangled up with routine side-effects of the ordinary physical energies on the one side, or with thought-forms and the rest of the mystical menagerie – very real and totally imaginary at the same time – on the other. Our understanding of these energies, whatever they are, is about the same as that of electricity in Benjamin Franklin's time, two centuries ago: in other words, not much at all. When you consider what we can make electricity do for us now... we've a long way to go.

We have had a great deal of 'beginner's luck' in working at the sites: people have arrived at exactly the right time on many occasions, with the definite feeling in hindsight that they were told what to look for and when.[13] Yet it's well worth remembering that while Franklin survived his highly dangerous experiment with a kite in a thunderstorm, his Russian contemporary Richmann was only too successfully fried by the thunderbolt in a repeat performance: we need to approach this whole area with a great deal of care. Like the cartoon sorcerer's apprentice, we need all of the magician's skills before we can work on the world in a truly magical way.

The arguments between the archaeologists and the 'golden-agers' have become irrelevant: the sacred sites have moved out of prehistory, and very firmly into the present day. Whatever happens there, whatever it is that we are finding, it is happening not in some distant past, but here, now. The 'earth mysteries' are becoming part of present-day reality, a present-day magical technology. And yet we must beware: we must preserve that sense of mystery, of wonder, or we will lose all sense of meaning with it, and possibly ourselves as well.

So perhaps it's time now to stop, to think and, above all, to listen, to what those 'needles of stone' have to tell us: for there is certainly much to learn.

Notes

[1] Williamson and Bellamy, Ley Lines in Question, p.28.

[2] Glyn Daniel, A Little History of Archaeology, p.196.

[3] For some details of the book's distortions and abuse of data, see the review in TLH 97 (Winter 1985) by Paul Devereux and statistician Bob Forrest.

[4] See the correspondence in TLH 90 (June 1981) and subsequent issues.

[5] Don Robins, 'The Dragon project and the talking stones', New Scientist, 21 October 1982, pp.166-171.

[6] Most of the material published so far has appeared in a series of articles and reports in TLH, from 1978 onwards; summaries appeared in Don Robins' New Scientist article and Paul Devereux's Earth Lights; while Don Robins' book Circles of Silence gives considerable detail of the physical research, mainly at Rollright, from 1978 to 1983. (I owe Paul Devereux many thanks for his help in compiling notes on the Dragon Project). It's worth noting that, apart from a grant from the American Threshold Foundation, the project was funded largely by small private donations from The Ley Hunter's readers – a far cry from the sizeable government funds available to most archaeological research!

[7] See 'Magnetic Stones', TLH 98, Spring 1985, and 'Radiation at Megalithic Sites', TLH 98, TLH 99 and TLH 100, 1985-6; also Don Robins, Circles of Silence, pp.75-80 and 126-135.

[8] Paul Devereux, in TLH 100, p.35; see Don Robins, Circles of Silence, p.135, for his graph of the Merry Maidens radiation pattern.

[9] Paul Devereux (ed.), 'Radiation at Megalithic Sites – Part 3', TLH 100, April 1986.

[10] Paul Devereux (ed.), 'Magnetic Stones', TLH 98, Spring 1985, pp.9-12.

[11] The photograph has not yet been published: it is due to be included, along with the technical description of the circumstances under which it was taken, in Paul's forthcoming book The Earth Mysteries Compendium, co-authored with Nigel Pennick.

[12] These examples are taken from reports in the Dragon Project files.

[13] Don Robins describes this sense of 'being told what to look for' very clearly in Circles of Silence, pp.39-46; see also the two different graphs of magnetic levels at Stone 62 at Rollright in 'Magnetic Stones', TLH 98, pp. 11-12.

Copyright © 1978-98 Tom Graves

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