The Werewolves of Staffordshire

Lycanthropy, the ability to transform in to a wolf, appears to have been deeply etched on the human psyche since the beginning of time. The first literary evidence of werewolves appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh written down around 2,000 BC. Giraldus Cambrensis reported the tale of an encounter with an Irish werewolf couple he came across in Ireland in the 12th century. Reports of werewolf sightings persist into modern times in Britain with the majority by far coming from Staffordshire.

Of the 21 werewolf sightings reported over the last thirty years all but one have been on Cannock Chase in Staffordshire according to a recent survey of the supernatural. [1] The Chase is notorious for UFO sightings and strange lights but also for tales of ghostly encounters, even “stone age” and “subterranean" creatures .
The Paranormal Database records an odd event in Eccleshall, Staffordshire in April 1975 as a “Suicidal Lycanthrope” when a teenager reported that his friend had called him just before midnight saying that his skin was changing and that he was turning into a wolf. His friend was later found dead at the village crossroads having apparently killed himself with a knife. [2]

The same year a paranormal research group visited Cannock Chase with several of them claiming they saw a snarling wolf-like creature rear up on its hind legs and run into bushes.

In April 2007 the Stafford Post newspaper printed the following account after the West Midlands Ghost Club had been called in to investigate claims from local people who had seen a ‘werewolf-type creature’ prowling around the Chase:

"A rash of sightings of a 'werewolf' type creature prowling around the outskirts of Stafford have prompted a respected Midlands paranormal group to investigate. West Midlands Ghost Club says they have been contacted by a number of shocked residents who saw what they claimed to be a `hairy wolf-type creature' walking on its hind legs around the German War Cemetery, just off Camp Road, in between Stafford and Cannock. Several of them claim the creature sprang up on its hind legs and ran into the nearby bushes when it was spotted."

Nick Duffy of the West Midlands Ghost Club took what they called ‘credible eyewitness accounts’ from a local scout master and postman, who claimed they had come face to face with the Werewolf saying that the stories of werewolf sightings in the Chase area were something that he had encountered before. He said: “The first person to contact us was a postman, who told us he had seen what he thought was a werewolf on the German War Cemetery site. He said he was over there on a motorbike and saw what he believed was a large dog. When he got closer, the creature got on his hind legs and ran away."

Duffy added that: "I've spoke to many witnesses and I know when they are putting it on. But what struck me as strange about this was the way he told it. I'm in no doubt that he was telling the truth."

Over the past decade there have been a high number of pet disappearances reported in the vicinity of the German War Cemetery and the area has been the site of a number of a animal mutilations.

The most recent werewolf sighting was reported in the Sunday Mercury in January 2010 when a local resident out walking her dog on Cannock Chase came across an enormous wolf-like animal that stood and stared at her for a while before turning and disappearing in to the woods. [3]

Perhaps the most well known case of a werewolf encounter in recent times is not from Staffordshire but the Hexham Heads in the 1970's when renowned Celtic scholar Dr Anne Ross, then working at the University of Southampton, took possession of two apparently Celtic carved stone heads and placed the heads among her own collection prior to making an assessment of them and experienced the eerie presence of a strange figure at her home that “was about six feet high, slightly stooping, and it was black, against the white door, and it was half animal and half man. The upper part, I would have said, was a wolf, and the lower part was human and, I would have again said, that it was covered with a kind of black, very dark fur”. [4]

Today the whereabouts of the Hexham Heads is not known.

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Notes:
1. According to The Fringe Weird Report by Lionel Fanthorpe, there have been more than 250 official reported cases of paranormal occurrences in the UK over the past 30 years, including 109 UFO sightings and 21 werewolf sightings.
2. Werewolf and Vampire reports from the Paranormal Database.
3. Sunday Mercury online 13 January 2010
4. Don Robins - The Secret Language of Stone, Rider & Co, 1988.

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BLUESTONE MAGIC

A Guide to the Prehistoric Monuments of West Wales
by Robin Heath

With the sad loss of John Michell, the father of modern day earth mysteries, in 2009, megalithomaniacs have been looking for a new champion and Robin Heath, Britain’s foremost researcher into the relationship between megaliths, sky and landscape, does not disappoint in his new book Bluestone Magic (Bluestone Press, July 2010) claiming to be an alternative look at the megalithic monuments of West Wales.

Comprising some of the oldest rocks in the world, the Preseli region tucked away in the South West corner of Wales, is home to an amazing number of megalithic sites. An area particularly abundant with cromlechs and stone circles. But there are surprisingly few books dedicated to this popular area of Wales and the megalithic sites therein. [1] Perhaps this is due largely to the fact that Preseli is of course home to the Stonehenge bluestones, those exotic dolerites foreign to Salisbury Plain, as most books on the monument provide an account of the mystery of the bluestones. However, the Preseli 'Bluestone country' offers much more than just eighty odd stones imported into Neolithic Wessex.

Inevitably a book on Preseli cannot avoid a discussion of the bluestones of Stonehenge. Whether the Preseli bluestones were transported to Stonehenge by Neolithic man or by glacial action, they were certainly important in prehistoric times, being employed in various stages of the construction of Stonehenge. Heath discusses both sides of the argument, new and old, and, rather diplomatically, does not come down clearly on one side or the other. However, this is not the main theme of this book with Heath providing a comprehensive survey of the Neolithic landscape, taking the reader on a journey of discovery around the megalithic sites of Preseli; dolmens, standing stones, stone rows and stone circles are all included, detailing the many miles Heath must have covered researching this unique area.

Ynys Enlli

Then we enter “A First Glimpse of the Otherworld” where folklore meets landscape in which Heath recalls how during a casual walk across Carningli common on a clear, windless day he could see the whole of the Lleyn peninsula across Cardigan Bay in North Wales. At the left hand end of this land mass he could see Ynys Enlli, Bardsey Island, some fifty odd miles directly North. Bardsey, an Otherworld island, is said to be the burial place of twenty thousand saints and according to Heath the only place where both Arthur and Merlin are said to be buried. On further investigation he found that the trig point marking the top of Carn Meibion Owen in Preseli was sited directly on the precise North – South line from Bardsey on the Ordnance Survey map. Heath discovered that five thousand years ago the builders of Pentre Ifan, the defining monument of the Preselis, had also noted this Northern alignment and targeted the island with their megalithic construction of the cromlech. In addition, 3.8 miles directly North of Pentre Ifan is another distinctive cromlech, Llech y Drybedd, acting as a foresight to Bardsey, which when viewed from behind, the capstone seems to directly mimic the shape of the Otherworld island.

Pentre Ifan

The setting of these monuments in the landscape combined with the significance of their inter-visibility and deliberate targeting of natural features is becoming more apparent and in the next chapter, “Drawing Down the Sun and Moon” Heath details the alignments of heavenly bodies with these megalithic structures of the Preselis making the myth that these monuments were burial chambers once covered in tons of earth look rather shaky to say the least.

“Megalithic Wizardy,” the penultimate chapter, Heath provides an explanation for so many of these megalithic sites bearing Arthurian names, such as 'Arthur's Quoit' and 'Carreg Coetan Arthur', the capstones of these cromlechs often referred to as 'Arthur's table'. In discussing the Preseli Arthur Alignment, continuing the work Heath started in The Secret Land with Paul Broadhurst, in which he proposes that many megalithic sites associated with Arthur are connected with polar alignments and Northness. In The Secret Land, Heath employed surveying techniques to quantify Broadhurst's research into a series of giant effigies outlined in the landscape which go back to the very beginnings of the Arthurian Mythos and the later Grail Quest. These figures were found to correspond to certain star constellations and earthly reflections of the 'Round Table' of the stars.

In conducting a Quest for the Prehistoric Arthur, Heath argued that these islands were surveyed in prehistoric times by a people who were engaged in astronomical and geometrical practices; a technology which survived to the medieval period. Heath found an abundance of North-South alignments connected with Arthur stretching from Cornwall to Wales. A remarkable number of significant 'Arthur' site alignments found contained within a narrow longitudinal band between two precise polar axes which Heath names The Lundy Axis and The King Arthur's Hall Axis.

Continuing this field of research in Bluestone Magic Heath discusses the reason why megalithic sites are sited where they are. He shows that the Station Stone rectangle at Stonehenge, a 5:12:13 Pythagorean triangle, is reflected on a much larger scale of the same ratio running directly west through Glastonbury, into the Bristol Channel forming the right angle elbow of this Pythagorean triangle on Lundy Island. Then running north to the Preseli Bluestone site at Carn Wen before returning to Stonehenge and closing the triangle.

I am a little sceptical about drawing long lines across the landscape to join megalithic sites but Heath's argument is further demonstrated with another Pythagorean triangle, this time 3:4:5, running due north from Stonehenge to Arbor Low, the Stonehenge of the North, in Derbyshire, before turning due West and Bryn Celli Ddu in Anglesey, and then returning to Stonehenge to complete the triangle. It is important to note that Bryn Celli Ddu (The Mound in the Dark Grove) started as a late Neolithic henge monument with a stone circle surrounded by a bank and internal ditch before being converted to a passage grave in the early Bronze Age. Heath then drew a line directly south from Bryn Celli Ddu to Morte point, due West from Stonehenge. This seems a random location with no special significance until you read that there were earthen barrows constructed here and that the Northerly line from Morte Point to Bryn Celli Ddu runs across an abundance of sites named after either Arthur or Merlin; yet another Arthur Axis associated with Northness.

Three Monuments Triangle

Heath seems to be on to something here and this may explain the reason for so many megalithic sites in these areas being named or associated with 'Arthur'. This an interesting book with much ground covered with The Secret Land for future research.

Unfortunately, currently the book only seems to be available from the Author's website and would benefit from a wider promotion. However, get it if you can.


Notes:
1. NP Figgis provides a refreshing approach to the archaeology of the Preseli Hills in Prehistoric Preseli (Atelier, 2001) – compare with the depressingly negative account of the Stonehenge Bluestones provided by Brian John in The Bluestone Enigma (2008, Greenstone).
2. Stonehenge – Preseli Rectangle & Three Monuments Triangle Graphics copyright Bluestone Press.
3. Robin Heath's website: Sky and Landscape

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Silbury

Resolving the Enigma
Michael Dames

The mystery of Silbury would appear to be something that keeps author Michael Dames awake at night; in his latest book Sibury: Resolving the Enigma he returns yet again to the largest man-made mound in prehistoric Europe.

In his first book The Silbury Treasure: The Great Goddess Rediscovered (1976) Michael Dames set out to interpret the meaning of Silbury Hill, the largest man-made prehistoric structure in Europe. Suggesting that the hill was constructed as a symbolic landscape effigy of the ancient Mother Goddess associated with fertility rituals marking out the course of the year, Dames proposed that Silbury was founded during the month of August, the festival of Lugnasadh, celebrating the first fruits of the harvest. Five hundred yards south of Silbury the source of the River Kennet rises on the hillside below the West Kennet Long Barrow which according to Dames was formerly called the “Cunnit”, a name he connects to the fertility Goddess, for obvious reasons. [1] He went on to propose that Silbury and the local landscape features formed a gigantic effigy of the pregnant Neolithic harvest goddess, delivering an annual birthing of “first fruits”. However, he ultimately concluded that the monument remained a massive man-made enigma.

Dames investigated the harvest Goddess theme further in his second book The Avebury Cycle (1977) exploring the landscape centred on Avebury, proposing a collective purpose of seasonal rituals for Silbury and its associated sites of West Kennet Long Barrow, Avebury henge, The Sanctuary, and Windmill Hill, from which the summit of Silbury Hill, the Goddess, maintains visibility. Dames makes use of archaeology, ethnography and folklore to propose that these monuments were fundamental in the worship of the harvest Goddess, each representing different aspects of the annual fertility cycle corresponding to the agricultural year.

In The Silbury Treasure, Dames included a short appendix 'Silbury in the Roman Period', a topic he returned to again in 2007 with a short booklet entitled Roman Silbury and the Harvest Goddess in which he discussed the interpretation of the discovery of a Roman settlement at the side of Silbury as evidence for Romano-British pilgrimage, following in the footsteps of their prehistoric ancestors, to worship at the massive mound. The Romans often merged their deities with native counterparts and Dames argued that these Romano-British pilgrims to Silbury would therefore have been familiar with Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture. In his discussion Dames highlights provocative parallels between Ceres and Silbury as a Neolithic harvest Goddess with the Classical cyclic myth of Ceres fitting well with the seasonal aspects of the Silbury Goddess as revealed in his earlier book The Avebury Cycle, arguing that the Romans recognised the annual renewal of Silbury and the Avebury monuments as evidence that the Silbury Goddess may have been worshipped at the start of each prehistoric harvest cycle from 2500 BC onwards.

Questioning whether Romano-British offerings at the nearby Neolithic West Kennet long barrow could be associated with Ceres' annual loss of her daughter, Proserpina, to the winter Underworld, Dames suggests that only 350 yards from Silbury is the Swallowhead spring, the birthplace of the River Kennet, and that such a site would be ideal for revering the Roman Tellus Mater or 'Mother Earth'.

In this latest work Silbury: Resolving the Enigma (2010) Dames considers that the substantial new discoveries at Silbury, both inside and immediately around the monument, made since his earlier works on the subject, support his hypothesis that the gigantic effigy of the Silbury Goddess as a divine 'Lady of the Lake' squatting on her right side in the act of giving birth. He states that we share with our ancestors essentially the same bodies and brains within the same terrestrial, subterranean and celestial realms which underlies the sense of continuity of his argument.

He opens the book with a discussion of the state of the monument that still persists through the passage of time after surviving the hostile efforts of the Christian Church in its attempt to eradicate pre-Christian religion forms of worship at pagan temples inherited from our Neolithic forebears which destroyed so much of the Avebury complex. However, excavations of the last few hundred years by archaeologists and treasure seekers have ultimately led to the monument becoming unstable with the emergence of a large hole appearing on the summit in 2000. By 2008 this crater was 8 metres across and some 15 metres deep. The collapse is thought to have been caused by the shaft dug by the Duke of Northumberland and Colonel Drax in 1776, which was almost certainly not filled in properly after the excavation was completed. But still Silbury survives despite these later day desecrations.

Dames recaps and brings up to date his earlier works on the Silbury Goddess including the relevance of the Swallowhead spring before going in depth about Silbury's Roman town and Roman August at the site of the mound, emphasising that the Romans merged their own corn goddess, Ceres, with the Neolithic deity of Silbury. Dames recounts how the Neolithic pregnant Mother Goddess, in superhuman form, could turn into a Sacred Pig, which he suggests probably follows an early Neolithic tradition found widely across Europe where the Mother Goddess is often depicted as a white sow. In addition, the Romans brought with them to Silbury traces of a Neolithic sow-venerating tradition. At the end of the harvest a sow was sacrificed to Ceres, while at Roman funerals a sow was offered to her daughter Prosperine, the ancient Roman goddess whose story is the basis of a myth of Springtime. Similarly, in a ritual offering in ancient Greece, young pigs were thrown in to the abyss which were said to be the goddess in her form as Persephone, daughter of Demeter and Zeus and Queen of the Underworld; the descent and return of the goddess bringing about the change of seasons.

Although Silbury is certainly unique, Dames argues that people were drawn to evocative features in the natural landscape and as such isolated hills were seen to embody the same procreative theme of the pregnant mound, being artificially 'modified' to enhance its suitability for 'First Fruits' ritual performances. He includes a survey of Britain's 'Mother mountains', such as Mam Tor in Derbyshire, to which folklore from Celtic and English traditions of pagan worship to the Silbury prototype has adhered.

Dames views are not popular with all, least of all Archaeologists [2] who cannot see beyond the surface of Silbury and whose excavations over the centuries have been obsessed with digging into the hill. Since the publication of the The Silbury Treasure in 1976 most archaeologists have ignored or dismissed Dames interpretation of the mound, yet for all the tons of chalk rubble they have turned over they fail to offer a credible alternative and seem incapable of grasping the spirituality of the Neolithic by persistently placing 21st Century values and perceptions in the minds of the mound builders.

Perhaps Dames is correct in his hypothesis that we shouldn't be looking inside Silbury but in the wider context of the relationship with the surrounding environment; evidently Neolithic religion, the Language of the Goddess, was a spirituality man shared with the landscape; they were one - a situation we cannot hope to fully understand in our plastic hi-tech modern world.

Table of Contents:
1. Excavators' Tales
2. Earthing the Monument
3.Silbury and Swallowhead
4. Central Ideas
5. Silbury's Roman Town
6. Cuda, Matres, Sil
7. Silbury's Roman August
8. Transfigurations
9. A Bevy of Silburies
10. The Vanishing Effigy
11. The Plough-Jags and Durga
Postscript: The Drax Letters
Notes
Bibliography
Sources of Illustrations
Index
Index of Illustrations

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Notes:
1. Footsteps of the Goddess in Britain and Ireland – Michael Dames
2. Review by Jim Leary in British Archaeology Issue 114, September/October 2010 who states: “Throughout Dames portrays archaeologists as feckless academics, over-reliant on science and closed to the outside world”, adding that the book is “full of factual errors”.
Jim Leary was Fieldwork Director of the Silbury Hill Conservation Project for English Heritage, and is co-author with David Field of The Story of Silbury Hill, which sets out to tell the archaeological story of the mound, due to be published by English Heritage on 1st October 2010.

Michael Dames books:
Roman Silbury and the Harvest Goddess – 2007, Heart of Albion Press
Taliesin's Travels: A Demi-god at Large – 2005, Heart of Albion Press
Merlin and Wales: A Magician's Landscape – 2002, Thames & Hudson
Mythic Ireland – 1992, Thames & Hudson
The Avebury Cycle – 1977, Thames & Hudson
The Silbury Treasure: The Great Goddess Rediscovered – 1976, Thames & Hudson

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