Wisdomkeepers of Stonehenge

by Graham Phillips

  These solitary standing stones can be found all over the British Isles. In England, in the county of Hereford, for example, we find a variety of different shapes, typifying the diversity of such monoliths found elsewhere. We have the usual tall, slender ones, such as the Pentre House Stone, which measures 10 feet tall, 3.5 feet wide, and 2.5 feet thick, now lying flat and overgrown in woodland close to the village of Bredwardine. Then there are shorter ones, such as the 4-foot-high, 1.5-foot-wide Wergins Stone, near the town of Hereford, which stands in the middle of an open meadow, surrounded by a rather ugly metal framework for its protection, and bulky ones, such as the Queen Stone in a farmer’s field near the town of Goodrich: over 7 feet high and 5 feet wide, this squat megalith is heavily grooved by millennia of rainfall.2

  Hundreds of menhirs survive in Wales too. In North Wales, near the town of Criccieth in the county of Gwynedd, is the Betws Fawr (Big Chapel) standing stone. Around 8 feet tall, it stands serenely among grazing cattle in a grassy pasture. In Mid Wales, in the bleak mountains of the Brecon Beacons, stands the 12-foot-tall Maen Llia, which is Llia’s Stone in English; it still retains its Celtic name, as modern Welsh is derived directly from the ancient Celtic tongue. And in South Wales, on the edge of a scenic forest in the valley of the River Usk, near the village of Llangynidr, is the aptly named Fish Stone: 14 feet high and 4 feet wide at its broadest, it is shaped like an enormous fish standing upright on its tail.3

  Fig. 8.1. Southwestern England sites discussed in this chapter.

  Because of its extensive regions of wilderness, Scotland probably has more surviving menhirs than any other part of Britain. Typical of the more accessible examples are the 9-foot-high, 4-foot wide Airthrey Stone, which stands beside a playing field on the campus of the University of Stirling; the 10-foot-tall Macbeth’s Stone on the grounds of Belmont Castle near Dundee, named after the famous eleventh-century Scottish king who is reputed to have killed a sworn enemy nearby; and an 11-foot-tall menhir that stands right beside the busy A949 road near Loch Ospisdale in the north of Scotland: called Clach a’Charra, Gaelic for “stone of vengeance,” it is said that enemies of the local clan were hanged on a tree that once stood beside it.4

  There are also hundreds of menhirs in Ireland, but as the Megalithic culture seems to have been abandoned there around 3000 BCE before being readopted about a millennium later, it is a special case we shall be examining later (see chapter 11).

  These are just a few examples of the menhirs that still survive. The vast majority have been obliterated over the years, and not just in well-populated areas. In sparsely inhabited districts, solitary standing stones were broken up to repair walls or farm buildings as late as the twentieth century, before being protected under law. In Cumbria, for instance, only one of six menhirs recorded in the area around the village of Cumwhitton during the 1800s now survives. Even in a really remote location such as the Isle of Lewis, megalithic standing stones were being destroyed for building material well into the modern era. Scotland’s tallest monolith is Clach an Trushal (the Stone of Compassion) at Ballantrushal on the northwestern side of the island. About 5 feet wide, it stands almost 19 feet high and is the last of at least ten similarly sized menhirs documented in this part of the island during the eighteenth century. The last of these others was only removed in 1914 to be used as a lintel stone for a new building. We do, however, sometimes find menhirs that have managed to survive in the most unlikely locations. At South Zeal in Devon, one particular standing stone was used to support the wall of a medieval priory erected around it. The building is now a pub called the Oxenham Arms, where the 14-foot-tall monolith can still be seen in the corner of the bar, standing in the same location where it was originally erected thousands of years ago.5 Some such stones have even survived in the middle of busy conurbations. Just off the main shopping street of the bustling harbor town of Gourock on the Firth of Clyde in Scotland, for example, there stands a 6-foot-tall menhir called the Granny Kempock Stone, protected by an ornate set of railings. For centuries, local sailors believed it was good luck to touch the stone before setting out to sea. So seriously did townsfolk take the superstition that in 1662 a local woman was, somewhat ironically, burned for witchcraft when she tried to have it removed. In more recent times it was said that no one dared move the megalith as they feared being cursed by the spirit of the alleged witch (oddly, the same woman who wanted it moved).

  Often such stones managed to survive because they stood in what became Christian cemeteries. When Christianity first became established in Britain, at the end of the Roman era (in the mid-fourth century), many megalithic monuments were still being revered by the native Britons, although the Megalithic era ended there three hundred years before (see chapter 10). As was their practice throughout the newly Christianized late Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, rather than demolishing existing pagan shrines, tended to build their places of worship on ground already considered hallowed by the local population without destroying their preexisting shrines. And these often included stone circles. More elaborate medieval churches were later erected on the sites of these earlier chapels, usually with no attempt to demolish the surrounding megalithic rings, the reason being that land immediately around the church had been consecrated as a graveyard. We have already seen an example of this: Church Henge in southern England, where the ruins of a medieval church stand inside what was a 330-footdiameter stone circle (see chapter 6). A Welsh example is found in the tiny hamlet of Ysbyty Cynfyn (King Cynfyn’s Hospice) in the county of Ceredigion. There, the church of Saint John the Baptist stands in the middle of a stone circle whose megaliths, up to 11 feet high, survive in its surrounding wall. And in Scotland, a remarkably well-preserved recumbent stone circle survives in the graveyard surrounding the church at Midmar in the county of Aberdeenshire. It consists of seven upright monoliths, the tallest over 8 feet high, and a huge, 14-foot-long, horizontal megalith, weighing an estimated 20 tons, in a circle about 55 feet in diameter. Likewise, there are numerous examples of churches being erected next to single menhirs, and many of these stones still survive in their ancient graveyards. In the extreme southwest of the British Isles, for instance, there is one in the graveyard of Saint Laudus Church in the village of Mabe in Cornwall, and in the far north there is one in Strathblane churchyard in Scotland. Most are no larger than 8 feet tall, but some are very much bigger. The largest of all surviving menhirs in the British Isles stands in the graveyard of All Saints Church in the village of Rudston in the county of Yorkshire: at 25 feet high, it dwarfs the Christian tombstones around it.

  Interestingly there are many examples of menhirs having been erected in what were clearly intended to be alignments. The largest such stones are found in North Yorkshire: five monoliths, up to 22 feet high, stood in a straight line about 200 feet apart, crossing fields in the district of Boroughbridge. Called the Devil’s Arrows, only three now survive, the others having been pulled down to be used in the construction of a nearby bridge in the eighteenth century. Such alignments were created from megaliths that were erected relatively close to one another, but in 1921 the English amateur archaeologist Alfred Watkins proposed that even the solitary menhirs had been raised at locations that formed straight lines across the British countryside. In his book The Old Straight Track, published in 1925, he advocated that menhirs were created as markers, set along age-old trackways.6 Although such monoliths usually stood alone, miles apart, Watkins believed that on maps they could be shown to fall in alignments linking ancient settlements. They either acted as marker stones, he argued, or were erected as sacred obelisks along the archaic roads that the Neolithic people once traveled, similar to the way that shrines to saints are found along modern roads in Catholic countries such as Ireland. Watkins found that many of his supposed menhir alignments ran through places containing the syllable ley in their names, such as the villages Amberley, Bowley, and Foxley in his native Herefordshire, and concluded that this may have been the original word for the ancient roads. Accordi
ngly he called his alignments “ley lines” (pronounced “lay”), and the name stuck. The academic community was not convinced. The suggested alignments, it was countered, were down to pure chance. One particular opponent plotted the locations of post offices on maps in an attempt to show that they fell in straight lines with just as much probability. Whether or not menhirs were deliberately erected in straight lines, modern archeology has shown that Watkins’ reputed alignments have no link to ancient tracks. Apart from the fact that aerial surveys, geophysics, and excavations have failed to find evidence that they followed the course of Neolithic roads, many of the proposed “old straight tracks” ran right across huge obstacles, such as rivers, estuaries, marshes, and even mountains, and not around them, as would be expected with trackways.

  Although archaeologists were loath to accept Watkins’ ideas, the hippie movement in the 1960s came to embrace them with a passion. The notion that ley lines had been roads or trading routes was abandoned, and instead they were seen as channels of mystical power. The first person to write about the new theory, and possibly the one who initiated it, was British author John Michell. In his book The View over Atlantis, published in 1969, Michell advocated that ley lines marked conduits of “spiritual force” that ran through the Earth and were tapped by ancient priests, similar to the concept of feng shui in China.7 According to this hypothesis, ley lines were—or were thought by their creators to be—the ancient equivalent of electric power lines, conducting some kind of supernatural energy through the Earth. These lines had been sensed by Neolithic dowsers, it was proposed, and the menhirs were erected to mark their course, with stone circles being built where ley lines crossed, marking locations where the power was at its strongest. Further elaborations to this theme were proposed by other researchers, with the eventual, most popular idea being that standing stones could somehow tap into this energy, in the way that acupuncture needles allegedly manipulate the so-called meridian channels of the human body. The energy of ley lines, it is argued, had been used to heal the sick, fertilize the land, gain spiritual enlightenment, commune with deities, and induce heightened states of mind.

  Today, New Agers still congregate at stone circles and solitary menhirs in the belief that they can, even now, experience or manipulate this magical power. The notion of ley lines as some kind of paranormal power grid has found popularity around the globe, many people believing that they exist throughout the world. In this modern rendering of the theory, originally propounded to account for the apparent alignment of British menhirs, ancient cultures all over the Earth built sacred monuments on ley lines. Regardless of whether or not such psychic contours actually exist, the important question we need to address here is this: Do the megalithic standing stones of the British Isles really fall in straight lines as Watkins first proposed?

  The big problem with ley lines is that, since Watkins’ time, it is not only monuments from the Megalithic era that have been used to plot them. As we have seen, many old churches were built within stone circles or beside standing stones, and Watkins drew attention to this, often using them as his ley markers. Subsequent ley line enthusiasts jumped to the conclusion that all medieval churches ended up being built where stone circles or individual monoliths once stood and consequently included them as feasible ley markers. Additionally as Watkins had surmised that ley had been the original name for such alignments, many “ley hunters,” as they came to be known, also included any locations with that syllable in their name, as well as its apparent variants, such as lay, lea, or leigh. From the 1960s all sorts of ancient sites that had nothing to do with the Neolithic period were added to the list of locations to pinpoint when plotting ley lines: Iron Age hillforts, medieval moats, holy wells, natural springs, even castles and ruins of any kind, to name just a few.

  Watkins himself had included holy wells in his list, and one of his proposed ley lines, on the Malvern Hills in the county of Worcestershire, ran from Saint Anne’s Well, through several natural springs and two other holy wells and only passed through two actual menhirs.8 Natural springs are precisely what their name implies, places where an underground stream bubbles to the surface as a consequence of the terrain, while holy wells were built around such springs and dedicated to saints during the Middle Ages, when they were thought to be have miraculous healing properties. Such wells and springs were often venerated by the Celts before the Christian era and may also have been considered sacred by the Megalithic people, but their locations were set by topography, and they were not deliberately created to mark out tracks or lines of any kind. Some researchers have argued that “energy-carrying” ley lines were in part created by such springs, which seems to be a rather self-defeating argument, as nature does not fashion water systems in straight lines.

  Fig. 8.2. Sites in Wales and western England discussed in this chapter.

  If we really wish to determine whether megalithic monuments actually do line up more than would be expected by chance alone, then we should only include sites known with a fair degree of certainty to date from the Megalithic age. These would include stone circles, menhirs, stone rows and avenues, passage graves, henge earthworks, and artificial mounds such as Silbury Hill and Gop Cairn. Ley hunters tend to include all ancient burial mounds when plotting ley lines. However, long barrows and dolmens date from before the Megalithic era (see chapter 3), while round barrows—usually marked on the map as “tumuli” (singular tumulus)—date from the right period but are far too numerous to help draw any real conclusions concerning alignments (see chapter 9). For some reason ley hunters also include ancient military structures, such as castles, hillforts, and moats, as ley markers. Not only were these created centuries after the Megalithic era had ended, but they also were specifically built at readily defendable sites, compelled by the landscape; these were seldom the same kind of locations chosen by the Neolithic people for erecting their monuments.

  When we examine many proposed ley lines—even those most cited by ley hunters to support their case—they don’t really stand up to scrutiny. There are hundreds of proposed ley lines all over Britain, but let’s concentrate on the area with the most elaborate megalithic monuments: the county of Wiltshire, which includes Avebury and Stonehenge. If there are going to be genuine ley lines anywhere, then surely it’s going to be there. One of the most cited alleged ley lines in the British Isles is the so-called Stonehenge Ley, an approximately 19-mile alignment said to follow the course of the original 1,500-foot-long avenue at Stonehenge.9 It is delineated by eight sites. Drawing a line on the map from the center of Stonehenge, along the avenue, and continuing in a northeasterly direction, it passes through Sidbury Camp, an Iron Age hillfort about 7 miles away, and ends a mile farther on with two tumuli in fields called Barrow Plantation. In the other direction, the ley is defined by a further tumulus, a second Iron Age hillfort called Grovely Castle, and an old pond thought to have been sacred to the Celts, and it ends at yet another Iron Age hillfort called Castle Ditches, some 11 miles from Stonehenge.

  Out of these eight sites, only Stonehenge and its avenue are megalithic stone monuments. Three of them are forts, built on hilltops for defensive reasons centuries after the Megalithic period had ended, and three are Bronze Age tumuli. Although stone circles and other megalithic monuments were still being erected during the Bronze Age, so it could be argued that their locations might have been influenced by the same considerations that dictated where standing stones were erected, there are literally hundreds of such burial mounds in the Stonehenge area (see chapter 9). Draw a line virtually anywhere on the map around Stonehenge and it is difficult to avoid its passing through a number of them. One of the apparently ancient sites on this purported ley line is actually a duck pond, which may or may not have been considered sacred at some point in the past, leaving us only with Stonehenge itself as a site worthy of consideration in any serious attempt to determine whether megalithic monuments were deliberately aligned. All we can say with certainty about this supposed ley line is that Stoneheng
e did have an avenue of standing stones leading in a northeasterly direction. At present no evidence has been found for the existence of any other megalithic stone monuments anywhere along this line.

  Another famous ley line in the area, known as the Old Sarum Ley, includes six sites and runs in a roughly north-south direction for approximately 20 miles, between a tumulus just to the north of Stonehenge and Frankenbury Camp on the edge of the New Forest.10 It passes through the stone circle and on for 5 miles to ancient earthworks called Old Sarum before continuing through Salisbury Cathedral and Clearbury Ring to end at Frankenbury Camp. Frankenbury Camp is an Iron Age hillfort, and so is Clearbury Ring (although, confusingly, its name sounds as though it might be a stone circle). Old Sarum consists of various earthworks on and around a hill, some 2 miles north of modern Salisbury, which include Anglo-Saxon and medieval defensive embankments. Archaeologists have determined that the site was occupied during the Megalithic era, but it was a Neolithic village and extensive excavations have uncovered no evidence for any kind of megalithic monument ever having been erected there. As for Salisbury Cathedral, it was certainly not built on a pre-Christian sacred site. The original cathedral stood elsewhere and was re-erected in its present location during the thirteenth century, on land belonging to the wealthy bishop who initiated the project. If, as before, we also exclude the tumulus, due to the sheer number of them in the district, we are again left with only Stonehenge as a known megalithic monument on this celebrated ley line.

  As discussed, ancient churches were often built within or beside stone circles and next to menhirs, but ley hunters tend to include all old churches when plotting alignments. The problem here is that although pre-Christian shrines were often the locations where the first chapels were built, the majority of such sites would not have been megalithic monuments, but pagan temples of the later Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and Vikings, and during the Middle Ages (from around 1100 to 1450 CE) many churches were built in completely new settlements. Without knowing for sure that Neolithic standing stones existed at the site of an old church, it would be unwise to include it as a proposed ley marker. Nevertheless, many assumed ley lines include medieval churches, regardless of their history.