Stone Cross Addressing

Like a pair of chrysalises emerging into the New Year mist, 2022 found the Tavistock Two in a farmer’s field just east of Porthcurno in south central Penwith, in the wild west of Cornwall. Beside us was a legacy of past travellers, who had inhabited this patch of precious ground around 5,000 years ago.

With the area now stripped bare of all vegetation save the stumps of last year’s maize, it is sometimes difficult to visualise what Bronze Age people would have been thinking whilst standing on this same spot. Their stature would have been little different to our own, and their brains would have been of a comparable size - but what would their perception have made of the earth energies flowing through us and around us, standing on this unremarkable terroir of higher ground, looking out to sea?

The wayside cross is unimposing, and probably all-but invisible prior to harvest time - a diminutive stump of stone, insignificant to the movers and shakers of intervening generations and probably only preserved at all by the presence of the public footpath, now shorn of its hedges, that leads to St Levan’s Church. But, like all things, it has a significant history in time and space.

The stone dowses as having first been erected in around 3,000BCE. Perhaps before that, people could see or sense the energies that ran through it and only later needed the visual marker to remind them of its significance.

It has crossing earth energies and a modest sharp-pointed-star manifestation. I found no water of note. A ‘ley’ runs directly through it, heading straight towards the tower of St Levan’s church, just poking above the bank, which drops away steeply to the west - and bisecting it at a right angle. Nothing out of the ordinary there, except that when you look at the OS map, the ‘ley’ seems to have no other locations of note on it. It could be that I need to get myself a longer or straighter ruler - or a more detailed map. However, a ‘ley’ by definition, is a dead straight line in the landscape joining at least four or five places of sacred or ancient origin. Here, we only seem to have two, yet the response to my request for the nearest ley was unequivocal. More musing on this later.

Asking for the nearest celestial grid line, I was shown a very definitive flow, which dowsed as a Jovian line - which is considered to be the interaction of the Earth and the Planet Jupiter perceived in the form of a grid (think Mercator, but with an other-planetary component). Being a fairly distant cosmic object, the Jupiter grid is around 100m across, and the ‘line’ itself is just a few centimetres wide. So, to plonk your granite waymaker slap on that flow by chance alone would be a considerable co-incidence. Did our predecessors living and working around this place really know or sense the full importance of the specific site in that sort of detail, and if so, why mark it up?

The mystery is compounded by the fact that the original petrified post was subsequently Christianised - determined by dowsing to have been modified in the 8th or 9th century. It seems the purveyors of the new philosophy were merely re-carving the existing artefact for a new era. But were they also commemorating the Jovian connection, the ley or the earth energy crossing? Presumably not. But they, too, may have sensed the significance of this exact spot, as opposed to any other a few metres away - or at least to have appreciated that others could do so.

Our dowsing indicated that this stone, near the settlement of Rospletha, had still been used, at least occasionally and in the traditional manner, right up to the 14th century. The old ways only died down slowly in places far away from the central power bases, leaving us with tantalising etheric connections to what they might once have sensed, and what we are just starting to re-appreciate for ourselves in our emerging worldview.

St Levan’s Church is an interesting building in its own right, with well-balanced earth energies - and traversed by the ley mentioned above. However, it seems that the church itself is just the latest structure to grace the area. The main interest here is the large split boulder in the graveyard. It dowses as being a natural piece of protruding bedrock, but crossed by two powerful, and very female, earth energy lines. Gender-wise, I dowsed them as 7 and 8 out of ten respectively, indicating a very significant location indeed. Blokey blokes beware - this is the realm of the Green Goddess. It also still hosts the spirit of place. I renewed our acquaintance, and was given the tacit nod to continue, with attitude. While the rock is a natural outcrop, and the split is geological in nature, the crack was enlarged at some point by local people. This was in the pre-Christian era, so it is unlikely to have been the work of stonecutters. It seems far more likely to have been humans seeking to enhance the effectiveness of the ‘shrine’, by enabling someone to squeeze or lie inside of it.

It is noticeable that the new religion did not attempt to remove it entirely, which would have been perfectly feasible in a mining and stone carving community, but instead erected a full-scale church just a few metres away. Some of the older gravestones in the churchyard also dowse as possibly having being sited to detract from the strength or the attraction of the matriarchal stone - but seemingly without much success. Even a gravestone placed incongruously right at the end of the split seems to have made little or no impact. These energies run deep and are all-but eternal, at least in human terms.

Our revisit to St Levan would not have been complete without seeking out Chapel Porth, the ancient monastic site on the cliffs below the village. It had been a decade or more since the last time we were there, but we found St Levan’s Well by the coast path easily enough - with the surface water quality dowsing at a desultory 3 out of 10 and only 5 out of 10 for the water at a lower level. However, the site - together with its water and energy lines - is still very much there, and maybe COP99 will sort out the environmental pollution one day.

What we were not expecting was the sign nearby stating that due to landslips Chapel Porth was no longer accessible. From the other side of the gulley, we could see that part of the chapel had already made its way down to the beach and other sections looked distinctly dangerous. Can I dowse here today? Only from a distance, chum. To lose a sacred site to redevelopment seems sacrilege, but to see it vanish, almost in real time, gives rise to more complex emotions about the passing of the ages, and of ourselves. Dowse what you can while you still can.

Coming back to the beginning of this piece, Ros and I went to find another cross - this time in the hedge bank near to the Merry Maidens stone circle. It, too, had a ley, linking it to a nearby site - this one to the circle itself. It, too, had crossing energy lines, albeit a bit difficult to examine in detail between the brambles on one side and the busy road on the other. However, again, the ‘ley’ seems to go nowhere else in particular.

While so much of the pre-industrial landscape has disappeared, it seems strange to detect two such similar sites in quick succession. I have become aware over the years that concepts I would do well to understand are being brought to my attention. I am not a deist as such, but I do feel that some mechanism is operating to attract the questor to the quest - or at least towards the next step along their path.

With the idea that all future, and possibly present, perceptions of reality only ever exist as potential alternatives, could it be that I am being shown potential leys here - lines that could have become alignments if the world of humanly modified space time had worked out differently?

Hmm - rather a lot to think about before tea and cake time.

Nigel Twinn,
January 2022