Earth Force, Life Force

A magical landscape surrounds the fort. It contains the densest concentration of prehistoric sites in the British Isles. This is particularly true of the parish of St Buryan in which the fort lies. Nowhere are you further than a short walk from some ancient or sacred site, a stone circle, standing stone, well, cross, ancient village, fort, beacon hill, logan stone, burial chamber or mysterious grove.

These sites conform to a pattern and the experiences that many people have had at them also seem to have a pattern. Later I shall be looking at these experiences, but first we need to understand the physical context in which they occur.

If you look beyond the roads, villages and agricultural development, you can glimpse a much older order. This is not difficult in the Land's End area because it is still relatively unspoilt. This order seems to be concerned with the shape and natural features of the landscape itself. Or, putting it another way, it shows sensitivity to the body of a living planet - Mother Earth.

Today, we build for convenience, roads are cut through hills, and fields are enlarged, to suit the needs of machines and banks. Past cultures lived in greater harmony with the earth, partly because, lacking the technology, they had to. But more than this, they saw the earth as the great provider and based their religion on it. Supernatural powers and subtle energies were all around them. Because of this, the order they imposed on the landscape harmonised with these energies and drew from them.

The fort site lies within a network of ley lines. These are lines or currents of energy which flow above and below the surface of the earth, in much the same way that acupuncture meridians convey life force, or Chi, through the body. The ancient people of prehistory, necessarily living in close communion with nature, the seasons and the body of the earth, were sensitive to these currents and the way they ebbed and flowed.

Some suggest that animals have this sensitivity and this explains their preferences for certain tracks across the countryside, and also the migratory movements of birds. It may also account for the ability of certain native peoples to navigate without modern instruments. The planet is a living organism. Ancient peoples knew this and sited their sacred places and temples on points of the earth where this power was felt to be strongest. Many of these 'power spots' are to be found at naturally occurring places of change or movement in the landscape, such as hills or wells.

The Chinese science of Feng Shui is directed at locating dwellings and other buildings at places in the landscape where the flow of energy is favourable to those living there, and to readjust the flow when it isn't.

Stone circles, holy wells, beacon hills, many churches and other prominent features of our familiar landscape do not occur randomly, but are linked by an invisible interconnecting web of ley lines. Those who argue against these lines say that you can draw a line almost anywhere on a map and find a consistency about the kind of features that fall on it. Railways and petrol stations, for example, are connected in straight lines that occur statistically above chance and there is nothing mysterious about them.

But it is perhaps more helpful to look at things the other way around. Ley lines do not exist because ancient sites can be connected by straight lines on a map. Rather, the pattern or flow of the landscape suggests what is appropriate to build. The purposeful meanderings of railways and roads determine where the appropriate stops should be. In the same way, the flow of energy through the earth indicates, to those who are sensitive, which spots will be most powerful or sacred. In the end, the test is to see whether there is anything special about these places.

At least three ley lines meet at the fort site. One of these is 'local' and runs for about five miles, beginning at the site of a ruined chapel on the coast at St Loy's Cove and passes through three standing stones, the Merry Maidens stone circle, a Bronze Age grave, the fogou, the site of a Medieval chapel, two wells and the parish church of Penzance.

The second line could be called 'national' since it runs from the abbey at Bury St Edmunds and passes through Avebury rings, Glastonbury Tor, St Michael's Brentor, the Cheesewring on Bodmin moor, and St Michael's Mount. This is the 'Michael Line', so named because it passes through several churches and other sites dedicated to St Michael. Extended westwards beyond St Michael's Mount it passes right by the fort. John Michell calls this a 'dragon line'. (St Levan Church, which lies near the end of the line, has an old oak rood screen emblazoned with Celtic dragons.)

The third ley line which passes through the site may be part of a much larger system coming from the continent. It seems that there is a major flow of terrestrial energy connecting the Land's End with Brittany which meets the British Isles somewhere off Mount's Bay and then curls off in three directions. One branch goes up the Michael Line, a second heads off to the Isles of Scilly, and the third goes straight up the Lamorna valley across the peninsula.

This idea comes from Peter Dawkins, who, with Sir George Trevelyan, visited the fogou in the early '80s with a party from the Gatekeeper Trust. Although it is virtually impossible to verify, there are certain physical links between Brittany and West Penwith that are consistent with the idea. Mont St Michel in Brittany is oriented towards St Michael's Mount in Cornwall on a bearing of three hundred degrees. This is the bearing of a major alignment at Carnac, the massive concentration of sacred sites in Southern Brittany. The Lamorna ley is itself oriented directly towards Brittany. Rock formations and strata below the surface of the earth, as indicated on geological maps, seem to echo this energetic flow. This ley line connects the mouth of Lamorna Cove, the fogou, a Celtic cross at a well-known haunted site, a major stone circle - Boscawen-Un , Bartinney Hill and castle (the highest in Penwith), the parish church of St Just, and Kenidjack Castle - a promontory hill fort on the north coast.

The area around the Lamorna ley line has a natural symmetry which Peter Dawkins calls a 'Landscape Temple'. A landscape temple is an area which has a unity and harmony in its physical features which ancient occupants venerated and imbued with sanctity.

The Lamorna 'Temple' has at its head three hills - the tallest being Bartinney which is flanked on either side by Chapel Carn Brea (the first, or last, beacon hill in the land) and Caer Bran (an Iron Age hill fort). At the base of Bartinney are the twin holy wells of St. Euny (notable for their legendary healing powers) from which rises a sacred stream which courses down to Lamorna Cove. The ley runs straight up the valley containing this stream.

Near the twin wells lie the remains of the Iron Age village of Carn Euny, which also has a well-preserved fogou. Carn Euny has many features similar to the better known ancient village of Chysaucester nearby, which is generally accepted as having been a kind of 'university' or Druidical place of knowledge, given the layout and construction of its 'courtyard houses'. Carn Euny, too, may have had a similar function as a seat of Druid learning and guardianship of the landscape temple.

Not far from Carn Euny is Boscawen-Un stone circle, the central circle in a network of Bronze Age temples at the Land's End, and, as late as the Dark Ages, the site of one of the three Gorsedds - or meeting places of the Bards - in the British Isles. This may have been the centre of the most important megalithic complex south west of Stonehenge.

Further down the valley, wherever a road crosses the 'sacred stream' there is a Celtic Cross. Just south of St Buryan Church, which was built on the site of another circle, a few square miles bordering the stream appear to be 'fenced off' by no less than six Celtic crosses.

In the middle of this area and not far from the stream are the remains of a site known as 'The Sanctuary', a small group of buildings surrounding a holy well which were still occupied by Celtic monks when the Saxons invaded. Legend has it that before Athelstan, the Saxon leader, crossed over to the Isles of Scilly to complete his occupation of Cornwall, he visited the monks, stayed the night as their guest, and, as a result of a dream, promised them that if his expedition was successful he would grant them special privileges. On his return he declared the area to have the right of sanctuary, where anyone could stay unmolested. One can only guess that Athelstan sensed something about the area that made it worthy of protection.

Today, the site is little more than a couple of ruined walls in the bank of a hedge at the bottom of a muddy field. But you may still see the remains of a garden of fruit trees tended by an old farm-worker who was drawn mysteriously to the spot up till twenty years ago. Ruined and forgotten, it exudes a feeling of peace and power.

From the Sanctuary traces of a path lead to the Merry Maidens stone circle, centre of another megalithic complex originally containing two other circles and many other outlying stones. This site's name comes from the Cornish 'Daunce Maen' meaning 'dancing maidens', which may be a corruption of 'Zanz Meyn' - 'sacred stones'. The layout of the circle and surrounding stones suggest a 'via sacra' or sacred processional route.

Several people have had strange experiences at the Merry Maidens, perhaps the best known being Tom Lethbridge's account of a stone rocking wildly whilst he was dowsing it. The farmer who owns the land told me that during the last war a team of Shire horses was hitched to the largest stone to pull the circle down so that the field would be easier to plough. Local feelings that this was a bad move were confirmed when the lead horse dropped dead.

The circle was probably originally used by priestesses for ceremonies based on lunar cycles. Its nineteen stones - a lunar number - form two crescents of nine stones, the waxing and waning moon, pincering a king - or solar - stone. Every nineteen years a calendar based on the moon's movement coincides with our solar calendar - they both have the same number of days. One of the oldest paintings in Europe depicting some form of religious ceremony apparently shows nine women, representing the New Moon (Virgin), the Old Moon (Crone), and Full Moon (Mother), advancing in a crescent to devour a young male - the 'king' or 'sun'.

The processional route passes through the centre of the circle by the 'king stone' and out again between the two crescents. Continuing eastwards a few hundred yards it aligns with Borah, 'the place of the witch'.

At one time this whole area, more densely populated than it is now, was witness to intense spiritual activity. Almost certainly this owed something to the nature of the landscape itself. Ancient people knew that there were powerful energies here and they worked with them in their own ways and for their own reasons. When Christianity came, these ways were forgotten or went underground. People feared the witch, sometimes rightly when her art, for selfish ends, was black, but often wrongly through ignorance of a much older religion.

Whatever form this activity took it was close to the body of Mother Earth. Their temples were not sited by accident, they form a pattern, they relate to the heavenly bodies, they incorporate features of the landscape.

The Lamorna temple is like a microcosm of the human body with energy centres in the landscape corresponding to chakras in the human body. The three hills of Bartinney, Caer Bran and Carn Brea are said to be the spiritual centres of the temple, where the energy in the land is at its most refined and vibrating at the highest frequency, the realm of higher beings and angelic forms. Boscawen-Un circle is the heart centre of the system, radiating energy to the wider landscape. And the fortified settlement at Rosemerryn is the sacral centre, the seat of the will, the energy here vibrating at a lower rate, manifesting itself as devas and nature spirits and other energetic forms more easily detected by human senses. This energy is immediately 'felt'.

Casual visitors may simply sense a special atmosphere, but to live here and become more familiar with it is to experience how the energy in the land interacts with our own energy, fuelling it or depleting it depending on what sort of state we are in. It shows in changes of mood, in the way we react to situations, in variations in our sensitivity and also in the kinds of things we become sensitive to. If the pattern of our lives is to hold down energy and suppress feelings because we are afraid of them, then the energy here will accentuate this.

We are then forced either to become aware of what we are doing and be different, or else to escape because we can't stand it. And this is an act of will.

The possibility of an 'energy effect' is borne out by a similarity between the fogou and Willhelm Reich's 'orgone accumulator'.

Reich spent the later part of his life researching 'orgone', or life energy. He was Freud's favourite student for a while until they disagreed about fundamental principles of psychology. Dr. Reich's experiences in treating patients led him to discover that life energy and the way in which we prevent it from flowing through our bodies, was at the root of psychological disorder. Although considered a crank during his time, his work has had an impact on psychotherapeutic techniques in recent years. Towards the end of his life he built an apparatus for accumulating energy - the orgone accumulator - which he used for restoring vitality to, and healing, his patients.

I met his daughter, Eva Reich, at a workshop in London. She is a medical practitioner and she told me that she still uses small accumulators with her patients to assist the healing of wounds. Orgone accumulators are constructed of alternate layers of organic and inorganic material. Organic matter attracts energy from outside and inorganic matter reflects it back inside. The accumulator works by sucking in and holding energy. A powerful accumulator would have several alternating layers, although one layer is sufficient for it to work.

The fogou is constructed in a similar manner. It was built by cutting a deep trench, lining it with (inorganic) granite and covering the whole thing with (organic) soil. A well-recorded property of an orgone accumulator is the effect it has on body temperature. After being in one for a few minutes, body temperature rises even when the air temperature is kept constant inside and outside the accumulator. A similar effect occurs inside the fogou. This has nothing to do with the air temperature but can actually be measured with a clinical thermometer. Body temperature rises betwen point two and four of a degree after a few minutes. This effect is consistent and repeatable.

Another curious physical phenomenon which indicates an accumulation of energy is the 'Geiger counter effect'. The fogou was the subject of a survey for the 'Dragon Project', an enquiry conducted by associates of 'The Ley Hunter' to provide scientific evidence for the possible original purpose of stone circles and other ancient sites. One anomaly they discovered was high frequency sound vibrations emanating from stone sites which varied with sunrise and sunset. The second kind of variation they recorded was radioactivity. Choosing West Penwith because of its high density of granite, which naturally has a high level of radioactivity, they compared Geiger counter readings at several stone circles and also in the fogou. They found that the level of radioactivity inside the stone circles was half that outside. The circles seem to create a protected space. By remarkable contrast, the reading inside the fogou as compared with the outside was double. The fogou seems to act as an accumulator.

The fogou is an energetically powerful place which is worthy of respect. Its dark and silence can assist you to go inside yourself and listen to an inner voice, see with your inner eye, or feel the heightened sensations of energy in the body. It still has healing powers and can give guidance to those who seek it - as we shall see.

From "Fogou - A Journey into the Underworld", by Jo May, published by Gothic Image.

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