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The first outdoor event of the season went off well, raising a few pounds for the society, in spite of the fact that it clashed with both football and Formula One motor racing. The event was at Chedworth Roman Villa, near Cirencester and the weather was baking. The format was the usual free “quickie” dowsing lessons for anyone who wanted them and a labyrinth laid out with sawdust. This event was in addition to our usual August visit when we hope to see some you.
The joint talk from Peter Vaughan [the dowsing chef], and beekeeper Fred Swift went down a treat, as did the honey and muesli pancakes that Peter prepared while Fred did his parts of the talk.
Originally Peter was to give a solo talk, but he has recently enjoyed taking part in a mass audience with the Dalai Lama, one of the highlights of a charity walk that Peter made to the Himalayas earlier this year. The Dalai Lama talked about how much he enjoyed having honey for his breakfast, and about his feelings with regard to food, and Peter was inspired to use Honey as the basis for his forthcoming talk.
Fred is a beekeeper and makes honey in a non-intensive way, talking to the bees as he tends them, producing excellent honeys and beeswax products, some of which are stocked in Peter’s whole-food shop in Devizes and used by him in his bistro across the road from the shop. Try the beeswax hand-cream – superb!
Before starting the talk, Peter and Fred had prepared a number of dowsing exercises for the audience to try, including dowsing for health properties, detriment due to over-heating, etc., so we all got stuck in. The pancakes tasted so good that most people dowsed that they needed another one [or two]!
After the interval there was more dowsing, bee anecdotes, questions and a chance to stock up on the range of products that Fred had brought along.
An excellent talk from Peter and Fred and if you would like to visit Peter’s shop to buy more, or the restaurant, they are both in Devizes.
The Healthy Life is the shop, situated in The Brittox, and The Bistro is in the same street almost opposite the shop.
The Gower Peninsula is a scenic part of Wales with many ancient sites that are well worth visiting. The only site not worth a visit was the camp-site, which did not live up to the brochures claims, or the details given us when we had a look at it early this year. If you want to know which one to avoid, ask and we can give you the details!
Still, we have had good luck with camp-sites up until now, so I suppose we shouldn’t complain.
The hot dry weather meant we were able to get access to places such as the spectacular King Arthur’s Stone, the chambered long-barrow remains at Parc Breos, and the caves at Parc Breos without difficulty. The mass of fallen stone around the remains of the long-barrow yielded a number of “ringing stones” with similar acoustic properties to the ones discussed by Paul Devereux at his most recent talk. It was tempting to bring some back but honesty prevailed.
Unfortunately a number of the churches are locked most of the time when not in use, but St. Illtud’s is worth visiting even to look around the exterior, and there is a nice old Yew, not to mention a very friendly robin who seemed to enjoy posing for the tourists. St Cenydd church at Llangennith was unlocked just as we arrived and the key-holder was only too pleased to show us around, explain the more interesting features and point out [sorry!] the stalagtites hanging from the limestone roof of a short passageway which leads to the tower. Part of the floor is very uneven due to subsidence caused by a spring rising beneath the church. Just across the street there are the remains of mediaeval well-house along with a strongly flowing spring. The well water is still used for communion services today.
Port Eynon, where we were based, is right on the coast so it seemed a good opportunity to go onto the beach during the evening low tide to have a labyrinth-building session. First of all Shaun showed how to start the basic shape for a traditional 7 circuit labyrinth and several members helped to draw the lines.
After walking this one Shaun and Pete decided to try drawing a “Chartres-style” outline, a much bigger and more complex labyrinth composed of 4 inter-linked sections. Due to the amount of space needed this was the first time any of us had drawn one of these full size, so it was gratifying when it was completed without any real problems. We all enjoyed walking this one but it does take considerably longer to complete the circuit.
Lastly a simple spiral was drawn, but we were all agreed that walking it made us feel giddy and slightly disorientated.
12th Century Oystermouth Castle, at The Mumbles, is a great place to dowse – a beautiful ruin with lots of atmosphere. A number of the remaining rooms are said to be haunted, there are unexcavated rooms below ground level, strange passageways and creepy spiral stairs. The custodian was very “dowser-friendly” and is himself learning to dowse as a way of checking some of the castle’s mysteries. He was so thrilled to have a party of dowsers visiting that he let us in free and even closed up the pay-desk so that he could take us to parts of the castle that that public is not normally allowed in.
If anyone would like to let him have details of things they dowsed there, he would be pleased to hear from you, as he is trying to write up experiences connected with the site. Shaun, or Pat Cannings, would be happy to forward the info. Thanks to Rob and Pat Cannings for their valuable help in setting up the visit to Oystermouth Castle, and thanks to Shaun for all his efforts to ensure a good weekend.
The glory of being at a cricket match is that you don't have to watch all the time.
You can do a crossword or a three-dimensional Sudoku.
If you're at the Rose Bowl in Southampton, you can sit there and wonder how long it's going to take you to get out of the car park when the game is over. Opportunities for a little spread betting there, I would think. Buy at 90 minutes, that seems to be the general advice.
Of course, if a batsperson is going great guns out in the middle, inspired by the Native American medicine wheel, as Ermintrude was, in the Dowsers v. Archaeologists grudge match at Avebury, you might just want to drink it all in, occasionally clapping Dave's monocular to your eye in a nautical way, to try and keep track of the ball as it flies into the long grass.
Then again, of course, there are always interesting conversations to be had with the likes of young Jeremy our (hopefully) demon fast bowler, who wanted to discuss New Testament miracles with me.
I sat up. The modern coach has to be ready.
"How loud do you think the miracles were?" he demanded.
"How would I know?" I demanded.
Cyril was faffing about nearby. "You mean the miracle of the loaves and fishes?" he said.
"Yes, well, no, not really
"You're thinking that some energy displacement would have had to take place, for a multitude to be fed from five loaves and fishes, aren't you?
"I think you're right. There'd have to be a small shift in reality wouldn't there, like the world tilting off its axis, and in the circumstances there might have been a click, or a loud bang, like Concorde going supersonic. Of course, miracles are quite common these days. Aeroplanes; Ermintrude scoring all these runs -"
"I was thinking of the Pentecost," said Jeremy.
"Good for you," said the Longcake.
Ermintrude hit another six. Her half century. We all leapt up and applauded. Dave hugged her and she danced around like Boudica on the ramparts.
Steady, girl. Concentrate. This is a dangerous moment. Oh, sod it! Have a party! When had I ever got to 50?
"It says in the Book of Common Prayer that the Holy Ghost descended on the faithful with a sound like a rushing mighty wind."
"Yes, well," I said, "the Book of Common Prayer is propaganda for the C of E, of course. First introduced in the reign of Edward VI, son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, the Book was really the work of Edward's reforming friends."
"How do you know?" said Jeremy.
"Because he only reigned for six years and died when he was sixteen. He was succeeded by his half-sister Mary, also known as Bloody Mary."
"How's the beer?" said Cyril.
"Fine," I said. Thought I wouldn't mention the Icelandic Sheep Dog. "Mary undid all the Protestant reforms and restored Catholicism. She undid the laws which brought the Book of Common Prayer on to the statute book so that when Elizabeth I came to the throne, she had to revoke Mary's revocation; and that established the Prayer-Book as the manual and calendar and rule book of the English religion."
"I especially like the service for a Burial at Sea," said Cyril. "We therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption...
"It says in the Book of Common Prayer that the Holy Ghost descended at the Pentecost with a sound like a rushing mighty wind," said Jeremy patiently.
"Well, of course," I said, "the Pentecost is one of those primary moments for the theory that God was an extra-terrestrial alien with access to a lot of special effects. Bright lights, loud noises, people being stunned and starting to talk in tongues. It's all there."
"And who is the person referred to as the Comforter?" said Cyril. "Could be rather sinister."
"A bit of Orwellian double-talk, do you think?" I said.
"But what I want to know," yelled young Jeremy, "is, how loud was the rushing mighty wind?"
"Keep your voice down!" I said.
"Well," whispered Cyril, "how loud is a typhoon?"
"It depends, I suppose, on whether anything is standing in its way," I said.
"How loud was it," said Jeremy, "and how long did it go on for? I was at a Larry Miller concert on the eve of the Pentecost and it occurred to me that here was a man in whom the godhead was manifestly at work."
"I hear he's from Guildford," remarked Cyril.
"It just goes to show," I said.
"Miller was both the inspiration and the one inspired - inspired to a frenzy of delight by his own playing on the Larryocaster."
"Forgive my ignorance on this," I said, "for I like to be hip, but what is a Larryoc aster""
"It's a 1974 Fender Stratocaster with maple neck, large frets, five-way switch and Kinman pick-ups. His favourite guitar."
"Right."
"The concert was taking place at a volume far in excess of what was normal in Biblical times. You could hear it all over town. In fact I don't know why I bothered to buy a ticket, I could have stood outside."
"I tell you what interests me about the Pentecost," said Cyril. "It's the cloven tongues of something like fire that came and sat on everybody's head."
"St Bridget was never without them," I said. "She'd be talking to bishops or holy men and such, and they'd see flames coming out of the top of her head. I think it was quite a common thing, in the fifth century."
"Any danger of singeing?" said Cyril.
"Apparently not. She may have been tonsured by that stage, of course. She was a bit of girl, one way and another. Had a herd of cows who could be milked three times a day, to feed the poor."
Meanwhile, out in the middle, Ermintrude continued to milk the bowling.
Grey Wolf
Marfa is a little town in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert in West Texas that is famous only for being the place where James Dean filmed his last movie, Giant, and for the presence of a viewing platform that teems with people at dusk.
For, when the sun goes down, garden chairs are set up and binoculars and cameras firmly fixed on the horizon as people hope they will experience one of the most famous unexplained phenomena in the US, the Marfa Mystery Lights.
The lights have been described as glowing balls around 4m in diameter that bounce up and down, a little like the ‘ping-pong balls’ used to denote when you should sing when watching an old musical.
Brad Smyth, of Texas Economic Development & Tourism, had a 40min Marfa Lights experience three years ago. He says: ‘It was after dusk when three or four lights seemed to appear on the horizon. They then started to move and glow brighter and changed from bright white to subtle yellows and pinks.’ The first recorded sighting of the lights was in 1883 by the rancher Robert Reed Ellison in an area of the desert called Mitchell Flat. They are thought to have occurred many years before that and were described in Native American folklore as ‘stars falling from the sky’.
Inevitably, in the 1950s, American pop culture conspired to describe the lights as navigational signals for flying saucers, but despite the recent debunkings of many UFO myths sightings persist.
Explanations that have been touted include suggestions that they are the result of plasma, swamp gas and piezoelectric phenomena - where minor earthquakes cause an accumulated charge in underground seams of quartz that is released into the atmosphere as balls of lightning.
There have also been less plausible explanations, such as them being the ghosts of the Spanish conquistadores looking for gold.
James Bunnell, a retired aerospace engineer and author of the books Seeing Marfa Lights and Night Orbs, has been studying the area for three years and has more than 60 images of the lights taken by a surveillance camera that photographs Mitchell Flat every 1.4 seconds.
He believes the lights occur when high-energy subatomic particles from the Van Allen radiation belts that surround the Earth are drawn to the Earth's magnetic field. These particles would normally be absorbed by the Earth but in Marfa he thinks they may be halted by an opposing field created by zeolites - metallic crystals formed millions of years ago by an erupting volcano - of which Mitchell Flat has an abundance.
He says: ‘Once the particles get trapped by the atmosphere they spiral down try to go into the Earth and come to a halt thanks to the zeolites. That energy is then converted in heat, which creates the lights.’
Sceptics believe the lights’ origin is more mundane: head and tail lights of cars on US Highway 67 reflecting from the surrounding Chinati Mountains.
The Society of Physics Students at the University of Texas at Dallas conducted a four-day study into the lights last year, concluding: ‘It is the finding of the research expedition that all the lights reliably observed during the experiment were car headlights.’
Smyth disagrees, asking: ‘If that were the case, how come the lights were seen more than 100 years ago, before the automobile was invented?’
He also counters other claims that the lights are the product of an over-imaginative tourism board ‘There's more to the area than the light,’ he says. ‘We have amazing parkland and wildlife and Marfa is a thriving little community. Plus the fact remains that no one has come up with a plausible explanation for all the sightings. Until they do they remain a mystery.’
Thank you to Mick and Barbara Withers who spotted the above in their local newspaper the ‘Metro’ 12-6-2006