Twinn
Earth Energies Group
Herefordshire - 2012
British Camp Decoded
Intuition evading Inundation
There are good EEG weekends and there are exceptional events. This was certainly one of the latter. The weather forecast was dire and, with a couple of days to go, we seriously talked about calling it off. However, thankfully, we went with our gut reactions rather than our common sense - and it paid real dividends.
Our base, Castlemorton Village Hall, is homely and comfortable and was very adequate for our needs. More importantly, it sits, reassuringly, a few feet above the flood plain of the River Severn.
In response to calls to provide earth energy coaching for less experienced members, the EEG organised this ‘summer’ event into two days of varied field dowsing for practitioners at differing stages of their respective journeys.
With the help of local archaeologist, Paul Remfry, we set out to examine the magnificent complex of natural and modified geography known as British Camp, situated on the border between Herefordshire and Worcestershire. To make the most of the time available, the more experienced members divided into three teams, with everyone else moving between the disciplines as they wished. The areas of study were to be the archaeology, the earth energies and the emerging realm of pictograms & manifestations.
As an opening gambit, Paul gave us a summarised history of the site and its previous incarnations. Like all such elevated places, there has been a sequential use and reuse of the location through the passage of time. The last stage of building was the construction of a ‘fort’ on the summit by the Norman invaders seeking, like those before them, to make a grand statement about just who controlled the area. Paul posed various questions as prompts for our dowsing, such as why the ‘defensive’ platforms seemed to have no ramparts and whether there had ever been megaliths on the summit.
EEG Chair, Adrian Incledon-Webber, had drawn up his own comprehensive list of questions that he felt were relevant to the weekend’s activities. One of the main issues to be addressed was ‘What was British Camp used for?’ As it looks far too large to be a purely defensive structure, he felt there must be other reasons why people in times gone by had spent so much time in creating the massive earthworks that we see in the Malvern Hills today.
Ridings dowser, Bill Holding, has been following one of the more significant portals opened by Hamish Miller - and he set out to examine a number of pictograms and manifestations around the Camp. These etheric features are such a new field of endeavour that it is often difficult at this stage of its development even to know which questions to ask. However, the results of the work of Bill’s teams were quite startling - and would, I’m sure, certainly have impressed HM himself.
Adrian and I took a more conventional approach to the examination of earth energy lines and formations, but we soon found ourselves also studying both the residual human activities and the natural emanations of the land. Intuition is so embedded into the way we understand the world around us that it refuses to be pigeonholed by mere mortals such as ourselves.
Following the standard run through of the (mainly geological) earth energy phenomena, we were also drawn to address Paul Remfry’s question about the potential for standing stones to have once stood on the summit. Various members dowsed that there had been a number of them - originally in a ‘ring’ on, or close to, what is now the remains of the Norman ramparts. Later, these were toppled by the Romans, only to be reused by the Normans either as building material or as foundation stones for their wooden structures. Three of the stones in particular seemed to be almost adjacent to one dowsed wall of the wooden ‘fort’ - and were perhaps employed as buttresses against the fierce and prevalent westerly wind. Several dowsers found, unprompted and with a good consensus of dates, that the last stones had been removed in mediaeval times.
It had long been mooted that a stone circle had been originally erected on the top of the hill and we were keen to examine if this had indeed been the case. Adrian, working with Malcolm Peters, Mary Lynne Durrell and Francis Archer, discovered that our ancestors had dragged some large stones to the summit, further enhancing the energies at this sacred site. In all, 23 stone positions were found and marked using flags - and they wee also recorded electronically, using Adrian’s new computer app for the first time at an EEG event.
Additionally, Bill’s colleagues, Gill and Alison, discovered that there were radial energy lines spraying out from the sites of some of the former stones - and that a ‘spider’s web’ energy pattern could still be sensed on the ground and in the ditch. These radials could be clearly dowsed as they crossed the Norman rampart below the motte.
We also located the sites of three pre-Christian ‘altars’, one of which had a flight of shallow steps leading up to it. Interestingly, one altar location was right next to some bunches of flowers left by a family, who had recently scattered the ashes of a loved one on this awe-inspiring hilltop.
At Paul’s instigation, we investigated the incompleteness of a circular rampart on the western section of the second tier of embankments from the top of the camp. The conclusion drawn from the questioning was that the ditch was not primarily banked for defence, but to reduce visibility during ritual activities. We also found that the bank had once been more extensive, but that part of it had been removed and recycled during later building works.
As Adrian describes the process:
“Man is a great plagiarist, re-using anything that he finds that might be functional - and so it is with the ‘ramparts’ of British Camp. Today, they hide a processional way carved out of the hillside by our ancestors. It seems that they walked around the hill in an anti-clockwise direction (known as widdershins; in opposition to the apparent motion of the sun). Eventually, after a long climb, they may have reached the summit exhausted, dehydrated and possibly even in a hallucinogenic state. Maybe they felt that that was the best way to commune with divine!”
During the latter part of the session, we were obliged to call a halt to the structured dowsing as so many members of the passing public were requesting an explanation as to what we were doing. It was too good an opportunity to miss - a precious chance to spread the word that dowsing is not just for nutters.
The earth energy survey found a raft of energetic lines of various sizes and orientations, which doubtless collectively add to the special quality of the spirit of place there. Seven major leys were detected and marked with flags, giving the top of the camp something of the feel of an Olympic Stadium. We were assisted in the task of pinpointing these leys by the presence at the meeting of leyhunter-in-chief, Laurence Main.
We then worked on the major earth energy lines bisecting the beacon, and found three of them. After map dowsing, a few days later, Adrian found that they followed fault lines in the ground. This concurred with the research of Tamar Dowser, Alan Neal, who described this phenomenon at the EEG’s Cheltenham meeting in the spring of 2012.
We also found a number of water energy spirals, two of which seemed to coincide with transient semi-circles of fungi - not something I had come across before.
We had a cursory look at some of the manifestations inside the Norman motte, but in that respect we were spectacularly eclipsed by the findings of Bill Holding and his colleagues.
Bill had asked each of his groups to find a pictogram, and to trace it out using the metal pegs and survey tape he had provided. This they duly did - and a varied selection of fascinating pictures appeared on the grass. Two in particular, described on the ground by Helen Caradon, were rather striking. She found the first on the Saturday afternoon. It consisted of a design with ‘leaves’, spirals and ‘antennae’. It seemed naturalistic in style, and was quite unlike anything I had seen in this context previously. The second, a few yards away and marked out on Sunday morning, contained a series of doglegged ‘spokes’ each terminating in an ‘arrow head’ that pointed towards a feature on the horizon. This pictogram was additionally interesting, as it appeared to expand in response to the input of the dowser. It also appeared to be communicating in some ill-defined manner with Saturday’s feature, which we had left in place overnight.
Bill, who has carried out more research in this field than most, explains that:
“Whilst we are using words like communicating, it is important when dowsing these subtle energy patterns that we stay focused, and follow precisely where our dowsing tools take us. This will ensure good positioning for the marker flags, and thus show us the energy pattern clearly. I am not keen on using too many flags as this can easily add to the confusion. So, I suggest that once the basic shape is set with marker flags, the researcher uses small metal pegs and hazard tape, which can be acquired from any builders’ merchants.
It is so easy to get complacent when dowsing the shape. You can dowse the shape of, say, a daisy, and believe that that is all that’s being manifested. However, on many occasions I find there is a lot more to the energy shape than you pick up in the first instance. My advice is that when you believe you have finished, ask the additional dowsing question “Is there anything more to this shape?”
Perhaps the most important point of all is to try and establish what is actually happening. Why is this subtle energy pictogram present, and what purpose is it serving? As energy dowsers, we tend to dowse in two dimensions, but always remember that the shapes you find will be three-dimensional patterns.
Although we are at an early stage in the understanding of manifestations and pictograms, I will be bold and state that I believe they are communicators of energy - one using the other to manifest a huge network over a large area”.
These observations raise two important points. One is that if the patterns respond to the interest of the observer, it is likely that they contain, or may even be composed of, natural earth energy. This is also a conclusion drawn by Billy Gawn using his ‘visual’ dowsing technique. The other is that as the pictograms discovered at British Camp were so different from any previously found, it is more than likely that there was some inter-action between the dowser and the dowsed design. The forms looked more like crop ‘circle’ phenomena than interference patterns, and their evolution during the weekend tended to substantiate that link.
Given the huge variation in portrayals, it now seems likely that there are various sources of the pictogram templates in the ether and that, rather like less-symmetrical snowflakes, they may all be unique in some way.
The size of the weekend’s designs also took me by surprise, as the ones I had encountered up to that point had been much smaller and simpler. Perhaps this, too, is leading us in the direction of the derivation of crop ‘circle’ templates, which have also developed in scale and intricacy over the decades.
The weekend finished with an enthusiastic summing up session, with profuse contributions from all and sundry - and an excellent send-off spread prepared by Trish Essery (to whom many thanks).
Congratulations to all those who performed behind, and indeed in front of, the scenes! What looked like being a weekend to get soaked, actually turned out to be one to savour.
Nigel Twinn