Hautville's Quoit

Beyond the river Chew, some 350 metres from the stone circles of Stanton Drew, lies the solitary stone known as Hautvilles Quoit. Situated on the northern edge of a field bordering the B3130 Chew Magna-Pensford road, part of the stone lies hidden beneath the field boundary hedge at Quoit Farm with barely 2 metres of the stone now visible. Lying just over the brow of a ridge, the Quoit,  has been recumbent since at least the mid 17th century but assumed to have originally been upright, possibly part of a larger, now destroyed Late neolithic chambered tomb structure, facing away from the stone circles but looking north towards the promontory of Maes Knoll. Alternatively, it may have functioned as a marker for a routeway or the boundary of a territory.

Robert Mercer excavated around the Quoit in 1969 with the intention of lifting the stone if the original site could be discovered but he was unable to locate any trace of a socket for the stone, concluding that if the stone had toppled from its original position it must have stood on the site of the present road, where of course, any trace of the socket would have been destroyed. Indeed,  Musgrave’s early 18th century sketch plan of Stanton Drew appears to show Hautville’s Quoit, lying in the middle of the Chew Magna-Pensford road.

Stukeley described the Quoit in 1723 as lying ‘flat upon the ground by the road side’ with his sketch showing the Quoit on the southern side of the road. Mercer had come to a similar conclusion that the Quoit’s original position was at the side of the B3130 Pensford – Chew Magna road. However, it seems likely that the course of the road has deviated over the years. And of f course we cannot dismiss the possibility that the Quoit could have been removed from some other location and dragged to the side of the field, as such for ploughing clearance. Yet, it seems a remarkable coincidence that the stone should be moved to a location in exact alignment with other parts of the Stanton Drew circles; Hautville’s Quoit is considered to be an outlier of the Stanton Drew stone circles.

The Quoit lies on a straight line through the centres of the Great Circle and the South South West Circle across the Chew valley. In fact there are two alignments at the Stanton Drew complex; the second runs from the Cove through the Great Circle and Northeast Circles. Today Hauteville's Quoit is not visible from the centre of the Great Circle. However, if the stone were erect, and any vegetation and buildings removed, the top of the stone should be within view.

The Quoit consists of non-local pale brown to grey sandstone with translucent grains of quartz. In the late 19th century Lloyd-Morgan described the rock type of the Quoit as fine-grained sandstone and considered it possible that it may be sarsen. Mercer also thought the stone to be of a ‘Wiltshire sarsen stone’ origin as used at for the stone circles of Avebury and Stonehenge. Field work has noted a number of similarities between the stones at Fyfield Down, the source for the Avebury megaliths, and Hautville’s Quoit, suggesting a similar origin.

The stone has been much reduced over the centuries. According to the Rev. John Collinson the stone originally weighed 30 tons and stood 4m tall. Collinson records that pieces of the Quoit were constantly being chipped off for road mending. Part of the stone was broken off in 1836, and in 1994 Grinsell described it as about 2.2 metres long.

In the 18th century Stukeley described the Quoit as being 13 feet long; sadly it is now about half that length. However, in the 17th century John Aubrey described the Quoit as being 10 feet 16 inches (sic) long, 6 feet 6 inches broad, and 1 foot 10 inches thick. As the stone cannot have increased in size it would appear these antiquarians were not measuring the same stone. Indeed, Stukeley also referred to the presence of a second 'coyt'.

The Second Quoit - The Tollhouse Stone 
This second ‘coyt’ that Stukeley described was also of large size and also lying beside the road but half a mile above the bridge whereas the first one was half a mile below. He named them both "Hautvil's Coyts". Collinson had also reported the existence of a second quoit, but it is unclear whether he was reporting first-hand, or merely copying Stukeley whose work had been published just fifteen years earlier.

Notably, no other writers claim to have seen a second quoit, and its existence was doubted by Charles Dymond, who, in 1896, questioned whether Stukeley was confusing it with the Tyning Stones, though these were in a field and not lying beside the road.

John Richards of the Bath and Camerton Archaeological Society states that Stukeley had included the second quoit in one of his drawings of Stanton Drew clearly labelled ‘another coyt’ and lying on the north side of the Chew Magna–Pensford road. Jodie Lewis named the second quoit as the  the 'Tollhouse Stone' as it was was shown on Stukeley's plan as north of the present B3130 road and west of the tollhouse. No trace of it now remains and probably suffered a similar but more devastating fate to Hautville's Quoit, being broken up for road making.

Today the field boundaries are not so far removed from those of Stukeley's day making it possible to estimate the rough placement of the  Tollhouse Stone in the landscape, lying about 250 metres to the north-west of the Tyning Stones and  about 500m north-west of the Great Circle. However, this position denies an obvious alignment with the Stanton Drew complex.

Antiquarians described Tyning's Stones as two prostrate megaliths, around 5ft long, having lain  recumbent for at least the last few hundred years in a field called Middle Ham at Lower Tyning, to the north west of Hauteville’s Quoit. Grinsell describes them as two stones located just west of a cow shed,  at Middle Ham, Tynings, to the west of Stanton Drew. They may have formed part of the Stanton Drew complex. The Tyning's Stones may have been the two megaliths reported in a field adjoining Sandy Lane apparently being removed in the 1960s but like so much of our megalithic heritage now lost.

*

Sources:
John Richards, John Oswin and Vince Simmonds, Hautville’s Quoit and other archaeological investigations at Stanton Drew, Bath and Camerton Archaeological Society in collaboration with Bath & North East Somerset Council, 2012.
BACAS carried out geophysics and other surveys at the Quoit and its field between 24-27 February and 2-5 March 2012.
Jodie Lewis, Monuments, Ritual and Regionality: the Neolithic of northern Somerset. BAR British Series 401. Oxford: Archaeopress,2005.
Gordon Strong, The Sacred Stone Circles of Stanton Drew, Skylight Press, 2012.
L V Grinsell, The Megalithic Monuments of Stanton Drew, 1994.

* * *

The Cove at Stanton Drew

It is said that the stone circles at Stanton Drew are a petrified wedding party who danced on into the Sabbath due to being entranced by the Devil's fiddle playing. A set of three ancient standing stones known as the bride, groom and parson tried to escape but they too were turned to stone, and now stand as The Cove separated from the main circles by the village church. 

The stone circles at Stanton Drew, situated on the south side of the River Chew, is the third largest collection of prehistoric standing stones in England. The complex consists of a Great Circle, at 113m diameter the second largest stone circle in Britain, and two smaller stone circles linked by stone avenues, a group of three stones known as ‘The Cove’ located in the garden of the Druid’s Arms Inn and to the north of the complex on the other side of the River Chew lies a solitary stone known as Hautville’s Quoit.

Plans & Surveys
The stone circles at Stanton Drew were first noted by John Aubrey in 1664 but his early sketch was dismissed by a later commentator as 'little better than a mere jumble'. John Wood from Bath, made a plan of the site nearly a century later. It wasn't until William Stukeley visited the site in 1723 that we have a set of comprehensive drawings of the site, although these were not published until 1776. The local Reverend John Skinner visited the circles least five times in the early nineteenth century, which led to the first detailed plan, produced by Crocker in 1826 and used by Richard Colt Hoare in ‘Modern Wiltshire’.

In 1876 Charles Dymond, a civil engineer, made a careful large-scale plan of the stone circles, or 'peristaliths' as he called them, and other stones at Stanton Drew. His original plan was hung in Stanton Drew church, and virtually ignored. It was found in an unrecoverable state later in 1976, ruined by damp and a hundred years of neglect. However, a reduced (3/8 size) plan was published in the British Archaeological Association Journal which accompanied his article 'The Megalithic Antiquities at Stanton Drew'.

In his paper, Dymond explains that most of the published plans were regarded by the principal writers on the subject as the best, but were based upon erroneous assumptions, originating on the data given by the survey made in 1826 by Mr. Crocker. Hence, Dymond made a new survey on a much larger scale, in which "scrupulous care has been taken to ensure the most minute accuracy in every part", and to map everything that could be found, uncovering several buried stones after an exhaustive search.  By digging and probing Dymond managed to locate “the positions of several stones which had been buried for generations” and identified twenty-four stones in the large circle, ten more than shown in Crocker’s survey. It is with Dymond then that we have the first accurate plan of Stanton Drew.

Dymond's Plan

Few of the stones now stand erect, and some stones have fallen within the last 300 years. In the seventeenth century Aubrey was informed that the stone circles had been much diminished in the last few years and recorded that the villagers break the stones with sledges to move them out of the way; "as hard as these stones are they a make a shift to break them with sledges because they incumber their good land". No doubt some stones were toppled deliberately but Stanton Drew did not witness anything like the destruction just 30 miles away at Avebury.

However, Stukeley did mention the ease with which he could detect some buried stones because the grass would not grow on top for lack of earth and others could be found by stamping or thrusting an iron rod into the ground. In the early nineteenth century the villagers claimed that a century earlier many stones were broken up to mend the roads. Then the destruction seems to have stopped; William Long wrote in 1858 that it did not appear that any stones had vanished since Stukeley’s visit in 1723.

The Cove
Dymond noted that with respect to the alignment of the remains, it is noticeable that the centre of the south-west circle, the centre of the large circle and Hauteville’s Quoit are nearly in one straight line; and that the centre of the north-east circle, the centre of the large circle, and the centre of The Cove, and by extension to the hill fort at Maes Knoll, are still more nearly in another straight line indicative of a reciprocal relationship between these sites.

The group of three stones known as The Cove, two standing and one recumbent, now split, standing 500m away from the man circle, appears remarkably different from those of the circles and of much older appearance. Only two other stones, found in the SW circle, are of the same type; it seems natural to question if the cove was originally part of the complex of circles?

The NE Circle from the SW Circle

Yet the alignment, as observed by Dymond, from The Cove, through the centre of the Great Circle to the centre of the NE Circle, suggests a deliberate connection. The alignment through the SW circle to  Hauteville’s Quoit, passing through the centre of the Great Circle, is said to align with the midsummer sunrise. Whereas the alignment from The Cove  to the NE circle, again passing the centre of the Great Circle, aligns with the setting sun on the midwinter solstice. The correlation between the individual components appears intentional.

Tradition claims a shaman occupied the sacred shelter of The Cove in order to receive messages from the gods. Other claims see it as a throne or chair of state for the arch-druid, who was even seen sitting within its ample arms several times a day to dispense justice!

Dymond makes the suggestion that it may been a dolmen. But he seems to doubt this himself as he discusses its reconstruction attended by the following difficulties:

“The prostrate stone (which could not possibly have fallen, as it has, if it had been the “table-stone”) must have been a side-stone standing erect where its southern end now is, and at right angles with the other two, on the broken stump which still seems to be traceable in the ground. We shall thus have three uprights of greatly varying height—one 14 ft. 6 ins. high, another 10 ft. 3 ins., and a third 4 ft. 6 ins. It would be impossible to rest a cap-stone on these, as it demands a fourth supporter on the southern side, nearly, if not quite, as high as the prostrate one. Then, over the head-stone there will be a gap about 4 ft. high, in addition to the large square hole on one side of its base; and, over the foot-stone, a gap 10 ft. high, increased by the pyramidal shape of the stone. Now, not only would such a dolmen be of most unusual height, in proportion to its length and width, but its chamber would always be open to easy access, which it would indeed tax the ingenuity of the sternest unbeliever in “free-standing” dolmens to close by microlithic masonry, as a necessary preparation for covering it with a mound.”

He adds, “But, if there were formerly a fourth side-stone and a table-stone, what has become of them?”

However, he could see no reason to suppose that these further stones of a chambered tomb may have disappeared during the present century and dismisses the possibility they may have been broken up to make or mend the nearby country lane, and notes that no fragments of such stones can be seen in any of the neighbouring fences or buildings. He comes to the conclusion that the three existing stones of The Cove are all that this monument ever possessed and cites the fact that two instances of a similar kind formerly existed at Avebury.

Dymond reported cutting test pits around The Cove in 1894 and these had hit stone at two to three feet in depth. In all of them he found pieces of breccia, (a dolomitic conglomerate), and white sandstone in the soil towards the bottom of the holes. In one of them he found a fragment of a medieval church tile about two feet from the surface. He also found traces of a sunken stone to the southern side of The Cove’s fallen stone and suspected it could be the root of the fallen stone. There was no charcoal, or any sign of a fourth stone on the southern side.

Dymond considered it unlikely the Cove was a ruined dolmen. Grinsell is in accord with him on the basis of the distance between the existing standing stones of The Cove and did not think it could be part of a chambered long barrow.

The Site of a Long Barrow?
The possibility of The Cove being the remnants of a dolmen is intriguing. Dolmens are often interpreted as the remnants of chambered long barrows, among the earliest man made structures. It is rather puzzling that there are long barrows in the general vicinity but none is known in the immediate vicinity of the Stanton Drew stone circles, when such a conjunction of stone circle and long barrow is not an uncommon feature of megalithic landscapes.

The Cove

It has been suggested  that The Cove at Stanton Drew might better be explained as a long barrow with the upright stones being either the portals or façade of a chambered tomb. If this interpretation is correct it would extend activity at the site by about 1,000 years and by implication that The Cove was an old and disused barrow by the time that the stone circles were constructed, but the Great Circle and North East Circle respected the ancient site and were aligned to it.

A Geophysical Survey was carried out at Stanton Drew in July 2009 by Bath and Camerton Archaeological Society. The results do not absolutely confirm the former presence of a long barrow at The Cove, and what was found was not on the expected axis, but the data is supportive of the possibility. The similarity between the resistance map at Stanton Drew Cove and those reported for Cotswold long barrows further enhances the possibility of a long barrow. This applies both to the basic structure of the barrow and also to the possibility of a ditch beside it.

Dymond's test pitting results are consistent with the geophysics with the suggestion that these pits were in the soil above any stone layer, so this does not negate arguments. Furthermore, Grinsell's rejection was presumably due to consideration of The Cove as a possible chamber, but as a forecourt there would be no such limitation.

The full outline of a potential long barrow is obscured to the east by the wall to the churchyard, but the orientation of the barrow would be approximately south-south-east, which, although not common is within the known range of alignments. If the barrow extends northwards into the private garden of the Druid's Arms then it could be anything up to 50m long, with a width up to 20m. Again, well within the parameters for known long barrows in northern Somerset, which have an average length of 40.5m and average width of 20.5m.

Dowsing results at the site do not conflict with the indications of the resistance survey. Dowsing around The Cove appeared to indicate areas of buried stone. Further features indicated by dowsing is a possible break in the ditch of the Great Circle to the south-west, and possibly an avenue running from it, directed to the farmhouse, and additional stone positions around the ring of the Great Circle with an extension of the avenues to the river.

Stanton Drew Survey 1997

Geophysical work by English Heritage in 1997 revealed a surrounding ditch of 135m diameter and about 7m wide with a 40m wide entrance on the north east side, and nine concentric rings of postholes suggesting more than 400 pits, 1m wide at 2.5m intervals. It appears the stone circles were preceded by a vast wooden henge. A revised chronology might suggest that a long barrow was constructed first, followed by the wooden henge and finally the stone circles.

Of the three great stone circle complexes of Wessex, Stanton Drew is the least studied. Clearly the story has only just begun; this is merely the opening lines of the next chapter.




References:
CW Dymond, The Megalithic Antiquities at Stanton Drew, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, No 33, 1877, pp.297–307.
CW Dymond, The Ancient Remains at Stanton Drew in the County of Somerset. 1896.
LV Grinsell, Stanton Drew Stone Circles, Somerset. Ministry of Works: Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings, 1956.
John Oswin and John Richards, Bath and Camerton Archaeological Society and Richard Sermon, Archaeological Officer, Bath and North-East Somerset (BANES) - Geophysical Survey at Stanton Drew, 2009. (Report compiled by Jude Harris).
Gordon Strong, The Sacred Stone Circles of Stanton Drew, Skylight Press, 2012.

* * *

The White Horse Stone Vandalised

Just as the White Horse Stone, a listed ancient monument, was beginning to recover from a previous attack, the standing stone has been defaced again with someone painting red 'runic' symbols on the megalith.

The White Horse Stone, a large sarsen megalith said to resemble a 'horse', on Blue Bell Hill near Aylesford, Kent, is all that now survives of a Neolithic chamber tomb that has been subject to the onslaught of road and railway construction and repeated threats of phone mast installation over the years.

The White Horse Stone 

This large standing stone close to the Pilgrim's Way, is situated next to the railway line, between the M20 and the M2 motorways. Close by to the west were nine much smaller stones but they have been all but obliterated by the Channel Tunnel Rail link; a few surviving fragments can still be seen nearby. Access to the stone is now by a footpath from the bridge over the rail track

Once known as 'The Kentish Standard Stone’ the megalith was more correctly known as the Upper White Horse Stone, with the Lower White Horse Stone formerly standing some 300m to the West but this megalithic companion was destroyed in 1823 and the site where it once stood now covered by the A229 trunk road.

Local lore claims that Horsa, leader of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Kent with his brother Hengest, who apparently used the White horse of Kent as his standard, was slain during the Battle of Aylesford and buried beneath the stone.

It is part of the group antiquaries that has suffered particularly badly at man's progression, known as the Medway Megaliths and associated with the "Countless stones", "Kits Coty" and the now lost Neolithic chamber tomb “Smythe's Megalith” (Warren Farm) discovered in 1823 with 3 wall stones, pottery and human remains. Smythe's Megalith was located at the end of the same field as the "White Horse Stone” also on Blue Bell Hill and since been destroyed.

At the end of March 2010 the stone was  discovered sprayed with red paint. Exactly three years on, this hardly seems an unrelated event.

Further details:

White Horse Stone attacked again! - Guardians of The White Horse Stone, 26 March 2013 

 White Horse Stone defaced with red painted 'runes' - Megalithic Portal, 28 March 2013

* * *

Euan Mackie to speak at Megalithomania 2013

Update to Megalithomania Conference on 18th - 19th May 2013

The Man who Cracked the Stone Age Code
The  British archaeologist and anthropologist Euan Mackie has been confirmed as a speaker at Megalithomania 2013. Mackie, a prominent figure in the field of Archaeoastronomy, will speak on The Megalith Builders: British Archaeology and Alexander Thom, the man famous for his theory of the Megalithic Yard and categorization of stone circles. After surveying some 300 megalithic circles, alignments, and isolated standing stones, Thom came to the conclusion that the transition of pythagorean knowledge was from Britain to Greece, reversing the accepted dogma:

“It is remarkable that one thousand years before the earliest mathematicians of classical Greece, people in these islands not only had a practical knowledge of geometry and were capable of setting out elaborate geometrical designs but could also set out ellipses based on the Pythagorean triangles.” -  Megalithic Sites in Britain (1967)

Anne Macaulay analysed about 180 of Thom's sites and showed that the megalithic culture who constructed them used square roots and Pythagorean mathematics two thousand years before Pythagoras.

Yet, despite the evidence Thom is today derided, ignored and almost completely forgotten by British archaeology which has never embraced his radical concepts about the intellectual capabilities present in Neolithic Britain and today the profession generally remains hostile towards him.

Mackie will offer various suggestions as to why the relentless opposition to Thom has persisted and cocks a finger toward Britain’s first and only Professor of Archaeoastronomy, Clive Ruggles, who has said that both classical and Bayesian statistical reassessments of Thom's data "reached the conclusion that the evidence in favour of the Megalithic Yard was at best marginal".

Consequently, Thom’s ideas were 'downgraded’ so that they have little effect on traditional archaeological thinking.

Paradoxically over the last few decades a variety of new evidence, such as the work by Christopher Knight and Alan Butler, has been accumulating which implies that Thom’s original propositions were basically on the right lines, and the more important of these discoveries will be described by Mackie.

Full conference itinerary:

MEGALITHOMANIA TOURS 2013
There are five days of tours, the two day conference and an extra lecture with Robert Schoch on the Monday evening. All Tours include Coach Journey, Entrance to Sites, Guidance with experienced Megalithomaniacs and Geoff Stray driving the Bus! Robert Schoch will be co-hosting all the tours listed below.

Friday 17th May: Stanton Drew and Stoney Littleton.
Afternoon tour with Anthony Thorley.

(Saturday & Sunday 18th - 19th May main Conference)

Monday 20th May: Avebury, Silbury Hill, Waylands Smithy, Uffington White Horse.
A megalithic and geomantic view of these incredible sites with Gary Biltcliffe and Maria Wheatley.

Monday Evening Lecture: Robert Schoch. Assembly Rooms, Glastonbury 7.30pm.

Tuesday 21st May: Belas Knapp, Hetty Peglars Tump and the Rollright Stone Circle.
A full day tour with Gary Biltcliffe, based upon his new book, The Spine of Albion.

Wednesday 22nd May: Glastonbury Walking Tour & Stonehenge private access.
Morning tour with Anthony Thorley. After lunch we go to the area around Stonehenge where we meet Maria Wheatley, exploring Durrington Walls, Woodhenge, the Cursus and numerous mounds, before heading in to Stonehenge for our private one-hour access.

Thursday 23rd May: The Cerne Giant - Landscape and the Stargate.
Peter Knight will lead this tour around the sacred Dorset landscape and view the Iron Age Giant, and learn of its connection with the Stargate of Egyptian myths. The tour will also visit other local sites, such as a sacred spring, the abbey site, churches, isolated megaliths and wayside crosses.

For full information visit the Megalithomania website.

MEGALITHIC IRELAND TOUR 

* * * 

The Stonehenge People

The People from the Aubrey Hole
The Stonehenge Riverside Project (SRP), a team of experts from the universities of Bristol, Southampton, Manchester, Bournemouth, Sheffield, London, York and Durham under the direction of Mike Parker Pearson, was assembled to study Stonehenge in the wider landscape.

The SRP carried out a series of excavations between 2003 and 2008 in the Stonehenge landscape, perhaps best known for the much publicised follow-up excavation of the so-called “Bluestonehenge” site at the terminus of the Stonehenge Avenue by the River Avon in 2009. The project culminated in the excavation at Stonehenge in 2008 when Mike Parker Pearson along with other team members, including Julian Richards and Mike Pitts, purposefully targeted Aubrey Hole 7 to recover the remains from previous excavations in the 1920s, which were re-interred in 1935 when most of the cremated human bone found earlier at Stonehenge was reburied in one pit, a lead plate placed on top of the cremations marking the spot. Recovery of this bone for modern examination was the prime objective of the Aubrey Hole excavation.

The human remains from Aubrey Hole 7 were initially due to be re-interred after 2 years, but following a series of legal challenges by Stonehenge Druids, the Ministry of Justice granted the SRP an extension for a further 5 years to 2015 to allow further study.

Secrets of the Stonehenge Skeletons
The study of the human remains removed from Aubrey Hole 7 was revealed in the documentary in Secrets of the Stonehenge Skeletons, screened Channel 4 on 10 March 2013,  in which Mike Parker Pearson argues they have yielded vital clues to solve the puzzle of our greatest prehistoric mystery.  Whereas previous studies have concentrated on the engineering challenges of the construction of the monument, this program followed Parker Pearson through a series of discoveries that rewrite the wider story of Stonehenge in its landscape.  As the lab tests now draw to a close, this then is one man's story.

Richard Colt Hoare is thought to have been the first excavator to encounter an Aubrey hole whilst digging around beneath the fallen Slaughter Stone in the early 19th Century. Lieutenant-Colonel William Hawley  excavated 25 of the Aubrey Holes in 1920 and then a further seven in 1924. Stuart Piggott and Richard Atkinson excavated a further two in 1950 which brought the total excavated to 35 out of the 56 Aubrey Holes, 21 remaining unexcavated. The SRP dig was the first excavation of an Aubrey Hole in nearly 60 years and yielded 50,000 pieces of human bone where they had lain for the last 5,000 years.

During Hawley's excavations at Stonehenge, between 1919 and 1926, he found many bone fragments which his assistant, Robert Newall, re-buried in 1935. The only clue to their whereabouts was in a 75 year old notebook which stated they were buried under a plaque in Aubrey Hole 7. The plaque was inscribed to identify 'the bones of the people of Stonehenge'. Unfortunately, being buried in a single sack they were all mixed up, so we have no way of knowing which came from which Aubrey Hole.

Hawley originally thought the Aubrey Holes held stones but after viewing the excavation of Maud Cunnington at Woodhenge he changed his mind to wooden posts. Parker Pearson argues that the 56 Aubrey Holes originally held Welsh Bluestones as the chalk showed signs of wear on the sides and crushing at the base consistent with heavy, slim, narrow stones. At Stonehenge, he states, this can only be Bluestones.

Parker Pearson noted that the first bones to be examined were encrusted with calcium carbonate, from the chalky environment which adhered to the bone, indicating that the bones were crushed into the chalk by the weight of the Bluestones. He sees the Bluestones as a sort of gravestone as the cremated bone fragments must have been placed in the Aubrey Holes at the same time, as if each stone marked a grave. He suggests the bones were placed in the holes around the same time as the Bluestones , c.3,000 BC.

But who were these people?

Parker Pearson has a couple of theories on the possibilities. One is that prehistoric Britain was a war zone - burial sites such as the West Kennet Long Barrow reveal evidence of unhealed injuries from the period. Furthermore, prehistoric battle sites are littered with arrow heads. Were the Stonehenge people the victims of a prehistoric battle?

His other theory suggests persons of religious authority. Maceheads are well known in the British Neolithic and Early Bronze, the vast majority without any evident context, but a few have been found in funerary deposits. A macehead found in a burial at Stonehenge was mounted on a staff (revealed by bone mounts, the wood now gone of course), which he argues indicates would be in the possession of a person of authority; a modern comparison might be the prehistoric mace considered similar to a sceptre or the mace used in the opening of parliament.

One of the other grave goods was a a small ceramic object whose concave surface has been used for burning on one side which he suggests could have been used like an incense burner, unique except for one other, found near the similar circular enclosure at the sister monument of Flagstones at Dorchester in Dorset. The symbolism of the ‘incense burner’ is difficult to determine but may signify a religious order.

Christie Willis, UCL, has identified 63 individuals among the bones, comprising men, women and children. The presence of female bones found among them suggests it was neither an army or a religious order. And 63 individuals is hardly the immense prehistoric cemetery that he calls it.

Parker Pearson settles for an elite, the most important prehistoric families immortalised at Stonehenge. 63 buried in a circle in no apparent order does not suggest a society of individuals, but buried as a community, perhaps several families, in a series of regular burials between 3,000 and 2,800 BC, roughly the same period he proposes the Bluestones were first set up in the Aubrey Holes at Stonehenge.

But why here?

Stonehenge is perfectly aligned to the mid-summer sunrise and mid-winter sunset. Parker Pearson says tracking the solar cycle was important to the people of this Age as many monuments constructed during the 3rd - 4th millennium BC share this orientation. With suspicions that the Stonehenge location possessed a natural feature that made it unique, he started investigating the Avenue - once a processional route to the monument but the directional alignment was here before the monument was built. Post glacial meltwater had produced straight lines in the landscape by an incredible cosmological coincidence aligned to the mid-summer sunrise and mid-winter sunset axis making Stonehenge the perfect location, perhaps the centre of their universe.

Three miles away at Durrington Walls, within walking distance of Stonehenge, is the largest prehistoric settlement in Europe. Analysis of animal teeth found at Durrington indicates they were slaughtered in their first year for a massive feast at mid winter. Parker Pearson muses this was 'not so much as bring a bottle but bring a pig or a cow'. He believes the mid-winter celebrations would have started here and then made a procession to Stonehenge down the Avon and then along the Avenue to witness the sun setting between the stones of the Great Trilithon.

He sees Durrington as the camp of the builders of Stonehenge, the people who quarried, transported, worked and erected 2,000 tons of stone in the construction of the monument. He estimates about 4,000 people would have been present at Durrington Walls from a national population of probably only tens of thousands. Construction of the monument as the communal centre, must have been a uniting, multi-cultural event. Central to Parker Pearson's theory is a proposed new chronology with remodelling of the construction phases to ensure it coincides with activity at Durrington, as detailed in his book Stonehenge: Exploring the Greatest Stone Age Mystery (Simon & Schuster, 2012 ) .

Where did they all come from?

Parker Pearson sees this as a central gathering place of prehistoric Britain. Composition of strontium isotopes extracted from the animal bones found at Durrington indicates the majority came from southern England but others came from as far a field as northern Scotland, some 700 miles away a journey which would have taken a month to complete. Whereas this may not prove that people came that far, it certainly confirms long distance livestock trade if nothing else. However, it is known that ancient people did walk great distances and certainly tempting to speculate on whether people of southern Britain travelled to the great stone monuments of the north, like Callanish, to celebrate other festivities.

Yet, analysis of the animal bones and pottery suggests it all came to a sudden end after as little as 45 years, after 2,500 BC Durrington became a ghost town. Stonehenge's days as the communal centre of Britain was over.

What was the cause in this dramatic cultural change?

Parker Pearson sees the answer in the Amesbury Archer, discovered three miles from Stonehenge in 2002,  containing the first gold objects in the richest grave from the early Bronze Age ever found in Britain. Known as a Beaker burial with over 100 grave goods indicating an important individual of high status. The Beaker culture is named from the pottery which was not found in Britain until after the erection of the sarsens at Stonehenge. Neolithic people were rarely buried with extravagant grave goods.

The Beaker people respected Stonehenge but had a marked difference in funerary practice; they did not use cremation. The Beaker people arrived after the construction Stonehenge and buried their dead in round barrows all around the Stonehenge skyline, such as the Cursus barrows and the King barrows, but placed more emphasis on the individual rather than the community; initially one individual was buried per round barrow. The age of the individual had arrived.

The unburnt bones of 360 Beaker bodies buried in the UK has permitted study to reconstruct the individuals origin. The Amesbury Archer for instance came from a cold, continental climate, probably around the Alps. Isotope analysis suggests the French -Swiss Alpine regions.

But many other Beaker people came from Britain, Shrewton Man for example came from the South Downs. It seems the indigenous people readily adopted the Beaker Culture as their own. After thousands of years using rudimentary tools and weapons, they quickly adopted the Beaker culture which brought copper and gold to these shores. Parker Pearson calls it 'state of the art bling'.

After 30 years of research Mike Parker Pearson arrives at the notion that just after 2,500 BC the arrival of the Beaker people brought a cultural change to prehistoric Britain; the end of the Stone Age. And with the arrival of the Bronze Age, Stonehenge fell into ruin.

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All images copyright Channel 4 Television

The Realms of T C Lethbridge

“....one of the most remarkable and original minds in parapsychology”1

Thomas Charles Lethbridge, described as a a man who cared little for the rules laid down by his profession, a maverick who detested the orthodoxy and dogma that surrounded him. He is remembered today for a series of books he wrote on controversial subjects such as ghosts, ghouls, psychokinesis, and dowsing; venturing into the world of parapsychology, the science of the mind.

Born 112 years ago today in the West Country on 3rd March 1901 into a family that had produced a number of adventurous sons. Indeed, following in the footsteps of his great uncle, the explorer John Hanning Speke (1827-1864)  associated with the search for the source of the Nile and the discovery of Lake Victoria, Lethbridge had embarked on three Arctic expeditions and two voyages to the Baltic in square-rigged sailing ships.

At the age of eighteen Lethbridge moved to Cambridge University where he discovered an interest in archaeology. It was as an undergraduate that he had seen a ghost and discovered at a fairly early stage that he was a good dowser. On completion of his degree, he began as a Cambridge archaeologist, working as a voluntary digger for Louis Clarke, the curator of the Archaeological Museum in Cambridge, but he also had a private income and this enabled him to remain a ‘free-spirit’ and not tied to the flatline thinking of academia.

He remained in Cambridge until 1957, becoming keeper of Anglo-Saxon antiquities and was Director of Excavations for the Cambridge Antiquarian Society and The University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology for 30 years, an  honorary post which allowed him to retain his independence. During his time as Cambridge Lethbridge became well known in the world of archaeology through a series of stimulating articles and lectures, such as Recent Excavations in Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk (1931). During this time he wrote a series of books about Early Medieval Britain, commencing with Umiak: The European Ancestry of the ‘Women’s Boat’, self-published, in 1937.

The publication of his first major work was anticipated by his peers and the media when in 1948 Methuen & Co. Ltd published Merlin’s Island: Essays on Britain in the Dark Ages. But this book challenged the orthodox  views of his peers with his interpretation of the change from Roman Britain to Saxon England. The tone of Merlin's Island provided a glimpse of the future direction his writing career would take.

However, he went on to write several 'conventional' books; Herdsmen and Hermits (Bowes & Boews, 1950), Coastwise Craft (Methuen & Co. Ltd , 1952), Boats and Boatmen (Thames & Hudson, 1952), The Painted Men (Andrew Melrose, 1954). But evidently he became bored with what he called “the academic trade-unionism” that existed within his profession and in a complete change of direction authored nine controversial 'occult' books at his home, Hole House, in Branscombe, South Devon, between 1961 and 1971, for which he is better remembered, overshadowing his earlier 'academic' works.

Lethbridge's first step away from academia started with Gogmagog, The Buried Gods (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957) in which he gives his account of his discovery of three lost chalk figures under the turf by probing the ground with canes near the Iron Age encampment known as Wandlebury, south of Cambridge, after analysing the story of Gervase of Tilbury.

"When the turf was lifted it became clear that the group consisted of a woman on horseback, possibly Magog-Epona, the horse goddess of the Celts, a man with a sword and another man with lines radiating out from his head"2

Lethbridge’s discovery of the Wandlebury Giants was frowned upon by the academics of the archaeological world. His cause was not helped by his association with Margaret Murray, who in her book The Witch Cult in Western Europe had suggested that modern day witch cults were evidence of the survival of a prehistoric religion based on the moon goddess Diana. Her theory still has many supporters but just as many opponents who regard it as little more than a work of fiction and refuse to accept witchcraft's existence as an ancient religion. Needless to say, Lethbridge's association with Murray damaged his credibility. But the book proved to be a turning point in his life.

Lethbridge left Cambridge and moved to the 14th century Hole House in Devon to delve further into the hidden powers of the mind. The subject had probably fascinated him since childhood as his mother had been interested in fortune telling and during his first marriage he had shown interest in the powers of a clairvoyant who was able to see things from the past. In Devon he became acquainted with an elderly lady with knowledge of pendulums, pentagrams and such like matters. This lady was apparently able to project her astral body and and wander around and visit acquaintances at night. Lethbridge tried his hand at dowsing with a pendulum and found immediate success. The  pendulum, in its simplest terms a weight on a string, is an instrument used in much the same way as the divining rod but provides much more information. It can be used to detect buried objects and provide precise information as to the objects age. The pendulum can also be used to answer questions which led Lethbridge to the conclusion that it actually serves as some form of contact between a part of the mind that already knows these things, perhaps tapping in to the 'Superconscious', and our limited everyday consciousness. Lethbridge believed at least of a third of mankind were gifted, or cursed as some might say, with this ability and for them the pendulum can produce positive results.

There is insufficient space here to discuss what makes the pendulum move. Sceptics of course claim is it involuntary movements by the dowser but in skilled hands the pendulum can be remarkably accurate in detecting the correct colour of a number of playing cards placed face down when asked back or red for example. The dowser cannot possibly know the answer. Divining rods are known to be particularly accurate in detecting water.

Now unshackled from academic restraints and experienced with a pendulum, Lethbridge wrote his first 'occult' book. In Ghost and Ghoul (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961) he advanced his theory that many ghosts are a form of 'tape recording' that playbacks for sensitive people. This developed from his use with the pendulum which he found responded to different, lengths, or rates. He found a slingshot used in a battle two thousand years ago still provides a reading for 'anger' when a 40 inch pendulum is suspended above it. A 'ghoul' was something Lethbridge described as the nasty, unsettling feeling that is experienced in certain places. Lethbridge's first recorded experience with a ghoul was in 1924 when in a chorister’s school in  a cathedral close, he encountered a 'wall of icy cold' at the bottom of the stairs where he and a friend experienced an atmosphere laden with a feeling of misery. When they stepped towards it the ghoul retreated up the stairs. They followed it step by step up to the roof, wondering if it would suddenly materialise and confront them. Instead it reappeared behind them and ventured back down the staircase to the hall. Lethbridge thought this ghoul had been projected from the subconscious mind of a person that was afraid of a ghost that was reputed to haunt the end room in the corridor.

His next book Witches: Investigating an Ancient Religion (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962) dealt mainly with Margaret Murray and her theories on witchcraft as an ancient religion as part of his search for the ancient gods of Britain, a field which he first ventured into in 1957 in Gogmagog, The Buried Gods.

Ghost and Diving Rod (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963) saw him back on track with further development of the theories he discussed in Ghost and Ghoul. In the earlier work Lethbridge had mentioned seeing the ghost of a seventy year old woman in a garden near Hole House. In Ghost and Diving Rod he advanced the theory that she was the projection of somebody's mind. An underground stream ran under the lane where he was standing, 'imparting to the atmosphere above it a tingly  feeling'.

This was typical of  Lethbridge's style throughout the nine 'occult' books in which he was constantly expanding and advancing theories from previous books. Sometimes changing his mind completely, yet more often modifying a theory discussed in an earlier book. None of the books attempt to present a complete system of ideas but each often leads into further discussion of themes perhaps merely mentioned in a previous work. For example the theme of precognition and dreams briefly mentioned in in Ghost and Ghoul are more fully developed in The Power of the Pendulum.

With ESP. Beyond Time and Distance (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965) Lethbridge entered a new realm. In the preface he mentions an occasion where he fell through the ice during an exploration to Greenland. He states that something similar seems to have happened to him again, yet on this occasion he felt as though he had fallen through into a world where there are more dimensions. Lethbridge’s findings suggest that the mind of man is immortal and outside both space and time. In A Step in the Dark (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967) he recalls his constant experiments with the pendulum which led to all kinds of discoveries, notably that the pendulum 'rate' for death appeared to be 40 inches, and that dead objects also responded to 20 inches, speculating that the 40 inch pendulum may represent a life force on a higher plane. All earthly objects, including danger and time, have rates between 0 and 40. But he found that by extending the pendulum beyond 40 it responds once again, the new length being the earthly rate, plus 40. For example the rate for carbon is 12 which can also be detected at 52 but the pendulum now swung at a 'false position' to one side of the object. He concluded that there is another realm beyond death. By extending the pendulum by another 40 the same thing happened again but now the pendulum gives no rate for 'time' on the second level, as if this realm is somehow timeless. Lethbridge suspected the pendulum was revealing a realm on the other side of  death, perhaps several. He returned to the theme and developed this concept further in The Power of the Pendulum.

In the first part of The Monkey's Tail: A Study in Evolution and Parapsychology (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969) Lethbridge, using his study of extra-sensory perception, explores the concept of genetic memory and devolution in opposition to the accepted theories of Darwin and Wallace. It seems quite clear that this theory unravels in front of both author and reader; as Lethbridge writes, a theory evolves with no real notion of where the final outcome will take him. Part Two of the book covers ground already mentioned in previous books and on completion, the reader is left, perhaps intentionally, without a conclusion.

The paperback edition of The Legend of the Sons of God (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1973) was my first venture into the world of TC Lethbridge. Sadly, I learnt shortly after acquiring my copy that the book had been published after his death in 1971. The Legend of the Sons of God follows on from The Monkey's Tail as Lethbridge continues to explore the evidence for the origin of mankind, arriving at the notion that all life had developed as part of a ‘master-plan’, rather than by chance. However, his concept of an external force, i.e alien intervention, that influenced  mankind's evolution as a child of the stars was not fully developed here; perhaps, as was typical of Lethbridge's writing, he intended to return to this theme in a later book.

Unfortunately for Lethbridge his book covered much the same ground as von Däniken in Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? First published in Britain in 1969, the book popularised paleocontact and the ancient astronaut hypotheses arguing that human evolution had been manipulated through means of genetic engineering by extraterrestrial beings.

Many of von Daniken’s claims turned out to be based on inaccuracies and half truths. Consequently most of the scientific community have ignored or dismissed his hypotheses.  But it captured the public imagination and became a bestseller.

But is was hardly a new theory; Peter Kolosimo argued for the possibility that human civilisation developed under the influence of beings from outer space when he wrote such books as Disowned Planet (1959) and Timeless Earth (1964). In 1960 French authors Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier published Le Matin des Magiciens (The Morning of the Magicians). Three years later it was published in Britain under the title The Dawn of Magic, in which the authors cover objects falling from the sky, objects found in rock, people with strange powers and so on, their sole aim to demonstrate that ‘science has got it wrong’.

There is little doubt that the seminal work by Pauwels and Bergier became the spring board for authors Robert Charroux and Erich von Daniken in the 1960’s. Charroux wrote about lost civilizations, secret societies, ancient astronauts and lost technologies in One Hundred Thousand Years of Man's Lost History in 1963, often referred to as the forerunner of Chariot of the Gods. For many of these authors the huge megalithic structures around the globe were cited as evidence of extraterrestrial contact.

In the introduction to the paperback edition of The Legend of the Sons of God Lethbridge explains that his book had appeared independently of von Daniken's; his wife had nearly finished typing the manuscript when a friend, Group Captain Guy Knocker, sent him a copy of Chariots of the Gods. He says that the books were so similar in many ways that he was tempted to destroy his own, but saw there were points of difference between the two works, comparing the remarkable coincidence to Darwin and Wallace who shared the theory of evolution in 1859. But there was a huge difference between Lethbridge and von Daniken; the former was doing, as he did, kicking a theory about in his book, or as he termed it 'throwing a stone into the pool and see what comes up', whereas the latter's work was based on many errors on the author’s part and unfounded speculation lacking any hard evidence, referred to by some as 'outright fraudulent claims', in the longterm probably doing the theory more harm than good, with its supporters considered the lunatic fringe.

It's tempting to wonder how much conviction Lethbridge actually had in this book himself? He conceded that although he might have seen a couple of ghosts he had never seen a UFO and introduced a couple of the later chapters discussing the possibility of spacecraft as time machines as only really fit for the television program called “Dr Who” and, perhaps inevitably, brings the question of different time dimensions back to pendulum rates.

In his earlier books Lethbridge often remarked that all over the world there seem to be traces of customs and beliefs which appear to indicate that mankind as a whole once knew many things which he has now forgotten; a species with amnesia? This theme shares much more commonality with the likes of Pauwels and Bergier than von Daniken. But the mysteries of the megaliths remains unanswered.

My initial attraction to The Legend of the Sons of God was not the possibility of alien contact in the distant past but Lethbridge's experiments with the pendulum at stone circles and standing stones. My fascination with megaliths had been seeded by a school visit to Stonehenge in the 1960s so that by my late teens I was eager to read anything I could find in an effort to understand the origins of these structures. Shortly after this I first tried dowsing – with a pendulum of course! I remember being quite amazed to read how Lethbridge had estimated the date of the construction of Stonehenge with the pendulum and six little bluestone fragments to a date of 1870 BC, when the official date at the time of his writing was 1650-1500 BC. Later research has pushed that date back even further now. However, the story of the bluestones is still being written with fragments found in the Stonehenge Layer not represented in the extant monoliths at the monument. Lethbridge does not make it clear where Newall obtained the bluestone fragments that he sent to Lethbridge; directly from stones at the monument or elsewhere. It is known Newall recovered some bluestone chips from the Cursus, for example, and this may prove significant in the date derived with the pendulum.

Lethbridge then goes on to tell us about his dowsing over a map which indicated that the Stonehenge bluestones had indeed come from Ireland as Geoffrey of Monmouth had claimed. Modern research disputes this. However, Lethbridge concedes that although Geoffrey's work is a mixture of fairy tale and legend, he knew a thousand years ago that the stones of Stonehenge had been imported to Salisbury Plain.

At the Merry Maidens, near the village of St Buryan in Cornwall, which unlike most stone circle appears to be complete, comprising nineteen granite megaliths, Lethbridge set the pendulum at 30 inches, the rate for age, putting one hand on a stone and with the other set the pendulum swinging. As soon as the pendulum started to swing, his hand resting on the stone received a tingling sensation 'not unlike a mild electric shock' and the pendulum shot out until it was circling nearly horizontal to the ground. The stone, which he estimated must have weighed over a ton, felt as if it was rocking and almost dancing about. However, he stuck to his counting, ten for each turn of the pendulum. At 451 turns it stopped gyrating and returned to a back and forth swing. This provided a figure of 4510 from which he subtracted the current year which supplied an approximate date of 2540 BC.

The next day he sent his wife Mina up to the Merry Maidens on her own to see if she experienced the same thing. She did. The experience has happened nowhere else which Lethbridge attributes to most circular monuments now being incomplete and muses that perhaps something has gone from them.

In is final book, The Power of the Pendulum (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), published from his notes and compiled by his wife Mina after his death on 30 September 1971, he developed further the mysteries of dreams, particularly dreams that foreshadow future events, as a theme briefly mentioned in Ghost and Ghoul, aiming to determine whether the whole question of the world can be described in terms of scientific materialism or if something nearer to the 'religious' view is more correct.

Lethbridge believed he had accidentally stumbled upon a way of establishing that there are other realms of reality beyond this by the power of the pendulum. Lethbridge determined through his studies that each earthly object appears to have at least two pendulum rates, before and after death. This led Lethbridge to speculate on the two worlds revealed; worlds in a different time and different dimension, coming to the conclusion that dreams are another road to this mysterious world.

The Power and the Pendulum is a fitting conclusion to Lethbridge's life-long study of the worlds of magic, mystery and the occult. Yet, the final paragraph from The Legend of the Sons of God perhaps equally sums up his lifetime's work:

“I shall finish now. Many people will think it all rubbish.
Others will see some sense in it, even if I have produced no hard and fast theory. 

At least I hope I have given a few something to turn over in their minds, 

to see whether they can produce anything more satisfactory than I have been able to do.”

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Notes:
1. Colin Wilson, foreword to T C Lethbridge, The Power of the Pendulum, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976.
Wilson describes Lethbridge’s books as a kind of working journal into which he poured fresh discoveries and insights year by year. Wilson suggests that they in fact share this ‘fault’ with the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and other important discoverers. There is no complete ‘system’ in any of his books but collectively they portray an intuitive, developing mind.
2. Marc Alexander, A Companion to the Folklore, Myths and Customs of Britain, Sutton, 2002.

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Network of Ley Hunters Moot 2013

Saturday 6 April 10am - 9pm, Wells Town Hall, Somerset £30

Visit stalls, make friends, share ideas, hear speakers including Gary Biltcliffe, Carolin Comberti, Philippa Glasson, Celia Gunn, Adrian Incledon-Webber, Nicholas Mann, Meghan Rice, Anthony Thorley and Nigel Twinn. 

Sunday 7 April 9am - 5pm Cadbury Castle and Stanton Drew £25

Coach tour from Wells to Cadbury Castle and Stanton Drew (Guided tour by Gordon Strong).

Wednesday 3 April - Friday 5 April Glastonbury Zodiac

Walks on Glastonbury Zodiac led by Laurence Main. Dowse Leys. Free but local bus fares payable.

For further information contact:

Laurence Main

9 Mawddwy Cottages

Minllyn

Dinas Mawddwy

Machynlleth

SY20 9LW

UK

Tel: +44 (0)1650 531354

www.networkofleyhunters.com

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