Twinn
Tales from the West of Eden
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Paradise is where you are. You don’t have to venture to some exotic idyll to find it – at least, that’s what most of the world’s main spiritual philosophies seem to suggest. Having said that, in any ‘Rough Guide to Way-Stations on the Golden Path’, the western tip of Cornwall must feature pretty strongly.
Between the Lizard and the Atlantic Coast, an ageless way of sensing the world, using massive stones to mark or induce flows of subtle energies, still underlies the now flaking veneer of Celtic and - later - Roman Christianity. It’s a place where the pattern of the past is all around you, often unexpectedly concealed in the fading jumble of the present.
My wife, Ros, and I took the ‘inland’ path back from Lamorna to Mousehole – inland in the sense it was one field from the cliff edge. The route dowsed to being over 2000 years old and had little to do with the transcendently beautiful, but essentially modern, Coast Path. At one point, this ancient track comes to an awkward accommodation with a sprawl of grey and prefabricated farm buildings. It squeezes between two modern barns, crosses a concrete yard, resplendent with modest amounts of ‘slurry’ (as we townies call it), continues between two further buildings and seems to end at a blanked out gate. This is not classic walking territory, let alone a promising dowsing environment. Yet, as any dowser knows, things are not always as they appear in the here and now. Opening the gate, and half expecting to be confronted by a group of those excessively inquisitive young male cattle, we saw instead, at the edge of the building and the corner of the field, a time-honoured Cornish stile.
Forming the northern pillar of this stile was a large upright stone – and on top of it the unmistakable shape of a Celtic cross. There is always a little yelp of excitement in finding something special – especially something not on the OS map. This was no exception. The cross still marked a strong energy spiral. The supporting stone dowsed to the age of the path, with the cross dating to 900 - 1000. At the end of the next field was another similar stone and spiral, this time with no cross. I asked ‘Was there once a cross here, too? Yes. Is it still near here? Yes. Can it be shown to me? Yes.’ I dowsed to a spot deep in the brambles at the foot of a nearby wall. At this point, I decided to leave the item obscured from our acquisitive age; hopefully it will still be there for a more sensitive community to restore. At the next field corner there was another stile, stone and spiral - but this time the cross no longer existed. This path is appropriately called the String of Pearls.
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In the nearby Parish of Paul, a remarkable stone stands embedded in the churchyard wall. It, too, dowses to a time well BCE, but would hardly be noticeable at all if it were not topped by another Celtic cross, seemingly hewn from the beheaded tip of the original menhir – and looking, for all the world, like a cloaked granite giant peering over the wall into the cemetery. The powerful energy spiral around this stone spends half of its life bathing the mortal remains of its former Victorian parishioners and the rest playing in the road with the new millennium traffic. Such is the juxtaposition of the fleeting with the eternal.
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Just when you think you’ve got to grips with this dowsing thing, it raps you across the knuckles in a firm, but friendly, way.
For reasons too complex to explain here, a fellow guest at our hotel had his room keys thrown down to him from a first floor bedroom window to the patio below. They fell short, bounced once on the paving and out onto a small rockery. He stepped forward to pick them up and was clearly surprised to find – nothing. After a few minutes of poking about, scratching of head and mild expletives he had still found – nothing. Being in nice-man-on-holiday-on-a-sunny-afternoon mode, I wandered over to assist and also found – nothing. As men do, when things aren’t going according to plan, we tried to complicate the proceedings by judging trajectories, angles of bounce and the like but found – nothing. Ros, with her librarian’s nose for locating the terminally lost, joined us, peered around for a while and also found – nothing.
As you will have guessed, at this point, I retired to get my rods and short-circuit the process – with, so I thought, a sound intent in mind. I wandered about with my Sig Lonegren patent copper specials and was immediately directed to a spot, just where they must have landed anyway and bent down confidently to pick up the missing artefacts, only to find – nothing. Assuming I had not quite my concentration into gear, twice more I dowsed the patio. Twice more I was given unequivocal directions to the same spot and each time there was definitively - nothing. After 20 minutes or so of this nonsense – and feeling rather deflated, defeated and not a little silly, we all shrugged and went back to the serious business of sipping tea in the afternoon sunshine. How can you lose a bunch of bright metallic keys, with a large goldy-coloured key fob in an exposed rockery with a little sparse vegetation? More importantly, why did the rods, which help me to do these things so often at home, not come up with the goods?
Assuming I might have been a closet show-off, just before we checked-out, and when no-one was around, I went back for one last dowse to tidy up this loose end and found – nothing.
On the way home, we mused that the keys might have fallen through a tiny doorway to another world! However, if the portal to the next dimension really is in the rockery of a small hotel in Penwith, I would suggest we should all be very careful which walls we lean against next time we are on Kings Cross Station.
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