Psychogeography | how the land is seen - Ancient Penwith | Cornwall

Ancient Penwith
The prehistoric landscape of West Penwith, the Land's End peninsula, Cornwall
Ancient Penwith
Ancient Penwith
The prehistoric landscape of the Land's End Peninsula
Ancient Penwith
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Psychogeography | how the land is seen

Psychogeography


While the maps of ancient sites and alignments were first being made in 2015, new alignments discovered in the process often had a different character to many existing alignments discovered by previous researchers, particularly by John Michell. This difference has something to do with variant perceptions of the magical landscape.

Many of the newly-found alignments were longer-distance. This was possible thanks to the facility of Google Maps, with their zoomable function and the map projection they use which, unlike printed Ordnance Survey maps, accounts for the curvature of the Earth.

This permitted the study of longer-distance alignments, and it gave a view of the terrain that is different from what one would see on taped-together, tea-splattered Ordnance Survey maps spread out across the floor.

Seeing
Chapel Carn Brea from Caer Brân
Chapel Carn BreaWhat you discover has a lot to do with what you’re looking for. This applies to geomancy and archaeology.

Alignment hunting in Penwith developed out of John Michell’s seminal work around in the early 1970s, detailed in his book The Old Stones of Land's End. He ranked stone circles and standing stones highly, paying less attention to hills and headlands. So he found alignments reflecting those criteria.

Meanwhile, in seeking new alignments while making the alignments map, hilltops, headlands, stone circles and quoits were examined more carefully than in John Michell’s time. This led to different results. Both approaches are valid and complementary.

In previous decades much thinking in ley-hunting was affected by rancour and scepticism in public debates in the 1970s and 1980s, causing researchers to tighten their criteria and restrict their imaginations. Such argumentation helped to improve accuracy and verifiability of discovered leylines, but it also constrained intuition, souring creativity and driving many people off ley-hunting. So progress slowed down.

This meticulousness largely failed to convince sceptics, who flatly refused to take up the challenge offered by geomancy, resorting to discrediting researchers and making sweeping and incorrect public statements about ley-hunting. They made an a priori decision that it cannot work, therefore it doesn't. So, as far as they were concerned, the matter was closed.

This state of denial continues today, constraining the findings of both archaeology and geomancy and the interpretation of such findings. Things are now beginning to loosen up as younger researchers enter the field,  using new technologies that tend to reveal results backing up many of the things geomancers have talked about for so long.
Unmethodology - Botrea Barrows

Botrea Barrows and cairnfieldIn researching the alignments map and discovering new alignments, sometimes I made logical assumptions, looking at a site such as Gurnard's Head and experimentally seeking out possible alignments leading from it.

The best discoveries were more fortuitous and intuitive, found on an impulse, 'by chance'.

By way of an example, the thought came to me of the topographical similarity of St Michael’s Mount and Cape Cornwall - both conical hills with a seascape backdrop.

On a whim I checked whether there was an alignment between them and, lo behold, an alignment did indeed exist, passing straight through the Botrea Barrows, just up the hill behind my house, also passing through nearby Caergwydden Round. This was a bell-clanging discovery.

Botrea Barrows, four old, rather large, nowadays unexciting and flat Bronze Age platform barrows, took on a new significance that hadn't been visible before. They prove now to be far more important and central than they seem to be.

Two indicators are their placing between St Michael's Mount and Cape Cornwall, and the intersection of a number of other backbone alignments at the barrows. They sit on the peak of a watershed ridge separating the two mounts.
Botrea Barrows (darker grass patch). Behind, Carn Kenidjack
Botrea Barrows with Carn Kenidjack behindThe alignment between the Mount and Cape Cornwall separates the two different zones or clusters of ancient sites in Penwith, one in the uplands of the north and one in the lowlands of the south.

Botrea Barrows serve as a sort of hinge or axle connecting these two clusters of ancient sites. There is a gap between the two clusters in the valley lying between Botrea Barrows and Caer Brân. The alignment between St Michael's Mount and Cape Cornwall, alignment 77, slices between these two clusters, marking a divide between them.

John Michell wouldn't have found this alignment because he didn't give attention to cliff sanctuaries. It awaited someone with an interest in them to come along and see things in a different way.
Caer Brân

Botrea and Caer Brân are intervisible, just over the valley from each other and connected by an ancient trackway. Caer Brân, also on the hinge mentioned above, was a gathering and meeting place, a neutral space and a kind of parliament place for the people of the two sectors of Penwith. It stood at the meeting place of two major trackways in Penwith.

Caer Bran mapIts roundness is uncanny. Its location doesn’t make a lot of defensive sense, even though it is often designated a 'hillfort', the default interpretation for such enclosed sites.

But it was social interaction that went on at Caer Brân, not defensive activities.

There is a feeling at Caer Brân of its being a sealed-off space inside its ring of banks, insulated from the surrounding landscape.

When you stand on the southern bank, the panorama is spectacular, but inside the enclosure banks the landscape disappears from view. The focus inside Caer Brân moves inwards and upwards, intentionally sealed off even though it is in a panoramic location. Thus it was intended to be a neutral space where nobody could see anyone else's territories, where everyone was equal, part of the larger Penwith clan.

The banks operate like the principle of a Faraday cage, filtering out energy-noise from the wider landscape environment. It might be what Tom Graves, the dowser, identified as a 'cyclotron' - a way of generating an energy-spin and quantum shift for utilisation in magical rites or in actions taking place at Caer Brân. It's the interiority of the site, its visual insulation and its upward connection with the heavens that seem to be important. It's out of this world.

An ancient trackway between Botrea Barrows and Caer Brân suggests that these two sites were connected in purpose, that they shared a ceremonial or assembly purpose. Their location and design - platform barrows on Botrea Hill acting like stages and a quasi-henge at Caer Brân acting as a container or insulator - suggest this and serve as a plausible interpretation of the purpose of these two sites.
Dating

The additional ancient site on alignment 77 between the Mount and Cape Cornwall is Caergwydden Round, an Iron Age round that was built, as far as we know, roughly between 300 BCE and CE 100. Yet the alignment on which it sits is 2,000 or more years older.

So does this mean that, in the Iron Age, Caergwydden Round was located where it is because of the pre-existing alignment? Or does it mean that it is older than Iron Age, perhaps coeval with the Bronze Age Botrea Barrows, later to be modified into a round during the Iron Age?

Geomantic evidence - alignment 77 - would suggest Caergwydden Round is possibly two millennia older than is currently thought, though archaeology would question this unless physical evidence is found to verify such a dating.

A similar dating issue applies to Chûn Castle, except here archaeologists do know it is older than Iron Age. It is very close to Chûn Quoit, which suggests it is older than Iron Age in origin. It was a prominent stronghold in the Iron Age, involved in the tin trade, but its position suggests its use is older.

Craig Weatherhill, in a detailed survey of the site, identified Neolithic enclosure banks slightly northwest of the main Iron Age enclosure, also pointing out that the Iron Age enclosure had been moved slightly to align with other neighbouring sites.

This raises an important side issue. In many cases, it is likely that many ancient sites around Penwith were perceived as special places long before anything was built on them. Or they might have been wooden and degradable constructions, undetectable today by archaeological means. Or perhaps they were recognised as special places but no constructions were built on them. In dating these sites, we can date only constructions or deposited artefacts, not the sites' first use. Geomancy widens the evidential range, allowing inference of a sometimes greater antiquity to a site.

Sometimes commonsense has to come into the equation. Chûn Castle is a prominent hill, and logically it is likely to be one of the earlier sites of Penwith because of this prominence. If you were an early inhabitant of Penwith, you would definitely have known the hill on which Chûn Castle sits.

On the other hand, Caer Brân is not greatly remarkable in its immediate landscape setting, located on a slope with no major bumps or outcrops to highlight the location. It does have a noteworthy panoramic view though. It's the kind of site that the locals would have thought of after they had established other sites such as Chûn Castle or, closer by, Sancreed Beacon or Bartinney Castle, both of which stand out and draw attention their way.

Sancreed Beacon is lower than Caer Brân but it stands out in the landscape, a natural site with a calmly brooding magic of its own. But Caer Brân was built as a product of thought-through human ideas - it didn't mark and enhance a prominent landscape site, as would be the case with many sites.

Caer Brân was built as a human place, a place for gatherings and meetings - and periodic parties, fayres and social ceremonies for Bronze Age Penwithians. Its central location and character suggest this. It doesn't feel as magical or rarefied as neighbouring Sancreed Beacon, Bartinney Castle, Botrea Hill and Chapel Carn Brea - it's more of a social place.

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