1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:04,000 The Light 2 00:00:25,000 --> 00:00:26,000 Lights. 3 00:00:26,000 --> 00:00:28,000 Good morning everybody. 4 00:00:28,000 --> 00:00:31,000 Oh, is it good afternoon? Good afternoon everybody. 5 00:00:31,000 --> 00:00:33,000 Can you all hear me? 6 00:00:33,000 --> 00:00:34,000 Okay, great. 7 00:00:34,000 --> 00:00:39,000 I've got an hour to squeeze in something that may not be squeezable into, 8 00:00:39,000 --> 00:00:45,000 but we'll give it a go about the sacred landscape of Dartmoor. 9 00:00:45,000 --> 00:00:49,000 Dartmoor is a place I've been connecting to for many years, 10 00:00:49,000 --> 00:00:52,000 and for some of you who don't know it too well, 11 00:00:52,000 --> 00:00:54,000 it's probably just slightly smaller than the Lake District. 12 00:00:54,000 --> 00:01:02,000 It's a national park, 954 square kilometres, 25 miles north-south, 20 miles across. 13 00:01:02,000 --> 00:01:06,000 Dartmoor is very much about the interplay of granite and water. 14 00:01:06,000 --> 00:01:09,000 The whole of this is a huge granite batholith. 15 00:01:09,000 --> 00:01:15,000 These are the exposures of this huge granite outcrop that defines really south-western England. 16 00:01:15,000 --> 00:01:18,000 Granite is the bones, the fire in the belly, if you like, of Dartmoor, 17 00:01:18,000 --> 00:01:22,000 which makes it different from other landscapes, such as Wiltshire where I live. 18 00:01:22,000 --> 00:01:25,000 It's very chalk, very organic, very gentle landscape. 19 00:01:25,000 --> 00:01:28,000 Are we still getting a bit of fuzzy on here? 20 00:01:28,000 --> 00:01:30,000 Fuzzy, am I fuzzy? 21 00:01:30,000 --> 00:01:32,000 Is that better? Is that better? 22 00:01:32,000 --> 00:01:34,000 Oh, is that better? 23 00:01:34,000 --> 00:01:36,000 Right, I won't move. 24 00:01:36,000 --> 00:01:38,000 Can you see? 25 00:01:38,000 --> 00:01:41,000 So there's a lot of fire in the belly underneath you. 26 00:01:41,000 --> 00:01:45,000 All the time, most of Grannies is composed of quartz. 27 00:01:45,000 --> 00:01:49,000 So if you can imagine the whole of Dartmoor as a big quartz crystal, 28 00:01:49,000 --> 00:01:52,000 it's really a given idea of how powered the whole place is. 29 00:01:52,000 --> 00:02:00,000 And a lot of the major rivers of the south-west run north, south, and east and west from this huge area, 30 00:02:00,000 --> 00:02:05,000 this huge world that's been called the last wilderness area of southern England. 31 00:02:05,000 --> 00:02:12,000 The three main periods, prehistoric periods, are represented, Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Age. 32 00:02:12,000 --> 00:02:14,000 People are often unaware. 33 00:02:14,000 --> 00:02:18,000 They go straight past Dartmoor on the way to Cornwall, which we all know, we've all been to, we all love. 34 00:02:18,000 --> 00:02:22,000 But there's 20 stone circles and cairn circles in that small area. 35 00:02:22,000 --> 00:02:27,000 20. 80 stone rows, the greatest concentration, even more than Brittany in a small area. 36 00:02:27,000 --> 00:02:29,000 Some of them are up to two miles long. 37 00:02:29,000 --> 00:02:33,000 Can you imagine walking a stone road two miles long? 38 00:02:33,000 --> 00:02:36,000 488 prehistoric settlements. 39 00:02:36,000 --> 00:02:40,000 It's not quite as wild and up and downy as the Lake District, 40 00:02:40,000 --> 00:02:46,000 so a lot more prehistoric settlements are around 5,000 stone-walled hut circles, 41 00:02:46,000 --> 00:02:48,000 which is an amazing amount. 42 00:02:48,000 --> 00:02:53,000 You notice in most of the lowlands of Britain, most of the hut circles get eroded away, 43 00:02:53,000 --> 00:02:57,000 and they just kind of find evidence of the postholes. 44 00:02:57,000 --> 00:03:02,000 But on Dartmoor, you've actually got the foundations and the lower walls all preserved. 45 00:03:02,000 --> 00:03:09,000 And over 700 cairns and round burrows, so there's such a lot of archaeology squashed into a small area. 46 00:03:09,000 --> 00:03:11,000 It's about shamanism into the dream time. 47 00:03:11,000 --> 00:03:15,000 I'll go into shamanism at quite some depth in the book. 48 00:03:15,000 --> 00:03:18,000 You're all aware of what shamans do, I guess, around the world. 49 00:03:18,000 --> 00:03:24,000 Universal principles seem to be undertaken by elders and other shamans 50 00:03:24,000 --> 00:03:28,000 that never met each other, but they're doing the same things around the world. 51 00:03:28,000 --> 00:03:33,000 What space is, I've come to believe, is actually depends on who is experiencing it. 52 00:03:33,000 --> 00:03:38,000 I take dowsing groups into a church, and they'll all douse 20 different things, 53 00:03:38,000 --> 00:03:41,000 which is why scientists hate dowsing, doesn't it? 54 00:03:41,000 --> 00:03:45,000 But to me, I'd be surprised if they all doused the same thing, 55 00:03:45,000 --> 00:03:48,000 because it's all about the personal experience. 56 00:03:48,000 --> 00:03:53,000 To the shaman, there is never one landscape, but rather many landscapes. 57 00:03:53,000 --> 00:03:56,000 Very much about ancestral tripping. 58 00:03:56,000 --> 00:03:58,000 We know that Flyergaric was... 59 00:03:58,000 --> 00:04:01,000 Oops, hello. I'm not using my own remote. Apologies for that. 60 00:04:01,000 --> 00:04:03,000 We know that Flyergaric was around... 61 00:04:03,000 --> 00:04:07,000 There was 15 psychoactive mushrooms growing in southern England in the Neolithic, 62 00:04:07,000 --> 00:04:09,000 which is one more than we have today. 63 00:04:09,000 --> 00:04:10,000 Damn. 64 00:04:10,000 --> 00:04:14,000 And so all the elements were there, what shamanic cultures use today, 65 00:04:14,000 --> 00:04:17,000 to contact the ancestors. 66 00:04:17,000 --> 00:04:23,000 And very much a rite of passage, I know personally, requires a certain submission. 67 00:04:23,000 --> 00:04:27,000 Get rid of the ego. And I'll go on about that shortly. 68 00:04:27,000 --> 00:04:30,000 Acoustics as well. Sacred sound. 69 00:04:30,000 --> 00:04:35,000 The ancestors and the land are not only watching us, I believe they're also listening to us. 70 00:04:35,000 --> 00:04:41,000 So you pick any culture or religion, you will find that sound is very much an important part. 71 00:04:41,000 --> 00:04:46,000 Paul Devereux in the mid-90s, he first really got into this idea of symbolic landscape. 72 00:04:46,000 --> 00:04:48,000 Some of you will have his books. 73 00:04:48,000 --> 00:04:54,000 Still a subject that hasn't entirely been taken on by archaeologists, but things are changing. 74 00:04:54,000 --> 00:05:02,000 The idea that unusual things in the landscape are regarded as the product of giants or the ancestors. 75 00:05:03,000 --> 00:05:06,000 They are symbolically and culturally relevant. 76 00:05:06,000 --> 00:05:10,000 This is a place on Sardinia I went to, this hole. 77 00:05:10,000 --> 00:05:14,000 You can see, can you just about see me? Perched like a little gnome under the rock. 78 00:05:14,000 --> 00:05:19,000 This is about 30 feet high and it's known as alfungi, mushroom rock. 79 00:05:19,000 --> 00:05:22,000 I would love to see the frying pan that this would go into. 80 00:05:22,000 --> 00:05:26,000 But the point is, it's surrounded by Bronze Age sites all around. 81 00:05:26,000 --> 00:05:31,000 So in ancient times, they regarded this as culturally relevant. 82 00:05:32,000 --> 00:05:36,000 To Aboriginal cultures today, the land is an ancestral creation. 83 00:05:36,000 --> 00:05:42,000 And its striking features can also be sacred places, striking natural features. 84 00:05:42,000 --> 00:05:46,000 A professor said that, one of the forward-thinking archaeologists, the new breed coming along. 85 00:05:46,000 --> 00:05:52,000 He also says that archaeology can be natural features. 86 00:05:52,000 --> 00:05:56,000 Land and space can be archaeology. 87 00:05:56,000 --> 00:05:59,000 A land is captured on the very outlines of a landscape. 88 00:05:59,000 --> 00:06:02,000 I believe the land actually gives us the myths. 89 00:06:02,000 --> 00:06:07,000 The land possesses myths. We merely pick up on them when we tune in. 90 00:06:07,000 --> 00:06:11,000 Knowledge through osmosis. We're getting the wisdom whether we know it or not sometimes. 91 00:06:11,000 --> 00:06:16,000 This is Vixen Tor called the Sphinx of Dartmoor. 92 00:06:16,000 --> 00:06:21,000 That has looked like that. I did some geomorphological studies and geologist studies of Dartmoor. 93 00:06:21,000 --> 00:06:28,000 And these big rocks and faces I'm going to show you on Dartmoor have only eroded 3 or 4 millimetres in 3,000 years. 94 00:06:28,000 --> 00:06:35,000 So therefore anything I show you today, the Neolithic and Bronze Age shamans were also looking at them thousands of years ago. 95 00:06:35,000 --> 00:06:42,000 Granite is so incredibly hard as you know from buildings that are made from it. 96 00:06:42,000 --> 00:06:46,000 It's about seeing through ancient eyes as I say. 97 00:06:46,000 --> 00:06:50,000 And also realising the power of metaphor in dreamtime landscapes. 98 00:06:50,000 --> 00:06:55,000 Metaphor is everything in ancient cultures. Every rock, every symbol. 99 00:06:55,000 --> 00:07:00,000 You go to Egypt and see all the squiggles on the temples. Every little squiggle is so important. 100 00:07:00,000 --> 00:07:04,000 But also metaphor as well. All ancient cultures use it. 101 00:07:04,000 --> 00:07:08,000 If something looks like something, that is not a coincidence. 102 00:07:08,000 --> 00:07:11,000 Coincidence doesn't exist really in my book anymore. 103 00:07:11,000 --> 00:07:16,000 And as I go across the landscape, the landscape and I share experiences. 104 00:07:16,000 --> 00:07:21,000 Although the landscape makes an imprint on me, I also can make an imprint on the landscape. 105 00:07:21,000 --> 00:07:28,000 It's a symbiotic process. And as a lot of you will already realise, landscapes hold a resonance of power. 106 00:07:28,000 --> 00:07:33,000 And another way of putting that I think is wisdom. 107 00:07:33,000 --> 00:07:39,000 Landscapes may be beautiful to look at, but even more beautiful to understand. 108 00:07:39,000 --> 00:07:44,000 So symbolic landscapes all over the world, things that resemble something are held as sacred. 109 00:07:44,000 --> 00:07:48,000 So why not on Dartmoor and elsewhere? 110 00:07:48,000 --> 00:07:53,000 This is, you can probably see this one here, very much Sphinx like, isn't it? This tour on Dartmoor. 111 00:07:53,000 --> 00:07:59,000 And these rocks surrounding Meribail, these big tours surrounding Meribail stone rows, they just look like the ancestors looking on. 112 00:07:59,000 --> 00:08:02,000 Is that how people regarded them thousands of years ago? 113 00:08:02,000 --> 00:08:09,000 The ancestors are overseeing the rituals, if you like, that are going on on the stone rows below. 114 00:08:09,000 --> 00:08:15,000 Christopher Tilly found a big stone just like this at Les Carnic on Bodmin, just a few miles from Dartmoor. 115 00:08:15,000 --> 00:08:20,000 And he regarded it as culturally relevant. And this is one, a similar one I found. 116 00:08:20,000 --> 00:08:23,000 There's a whole valley here with no other large stones in it. 117 00:08:23,000 --> 00:08:27,000 Then you come across this stone looking with its head there and like its big hump. 118 00:08:27,000 --> 00:08:30,000 And the energy coming off that stone was incredible. 119 00:08:30,000 --> 00:08:37,000 And it makes me wonder whether that stone held some cultural power thousands of years ago. 120 00:08:37,000 --> 00:08:43,000 There's a relatively new brand of archaeology now called cognitive archaeology or phenomenology. 121 00:08:43,000 --> 00:08:51,000 What a catchy word that is. And it's about the new brand of archaeology is Chris Tilly, Sue Hamilton, Barbara Bender are all saying, 122 00:08:51,000 --> 00:08:57,000 if we want to know what went on in the mind of ancient cultures, go and try and experience what they were. 123 00:08:57,000 --> 00:09:02,000 Sit out in the field in the rain, you know, see what they were looking at at certain times of the year. 124 00:09:02,000 --> 00:09:06,000 Chris Tilly, when he does an excavation, he has a site poet. 125 00:09:06,000 --> 00:09:09,000 Wow, archaeology is moving on, isn't it? 126 00:09:09,000 --> 00:09:12,000 And so these three authors, I can recommend all their books. 127 00:09:12,000 --> 00:09:18,000 Chris Tilly's book, Stoneworlds, is one of the most significant archaeology books I've ever written. 128 00:09:18,000 --> 00:09:23,000 And he did all the work on Bodmin, looking at Bodmin in a different way. 129 00:09:23,000 --> 00:09:28,000 It's almost like archaeology is discovering paganism, you know, it's really quite exciting. 130 00:09:28,000 --> 00:09:37,000 And so because Bodmin is quite close to Dartmoor, I kind of carried those principles over to Dartmoor because nobody else had until this time. 131 00:09:37,000 --> 00:09:41,000 So it's to learn about ancestors through experiencing with all our senses. 132 00:09:41,000 --> 00:09:47,000 Chris Tilly tells a story in one of his books about sniffing and tasting rocks. 133 00:09:47,000 --> 00:09:50,000 So, of course, I had to do it. 134 00:09:50,000 --> 00:09:55,000 We must study any landscape from the inside. It is a mirror. It is our personal mindscape. 135 00:09:55,000 --> 00:10:02,000 When I take shamanic workshops out on the moor and everybody comes back with a different experience, 136 00:10:02,000 --> 00:10:05,000 and I'm saying, right, you've all got it then. You've all got it. 137 00:10:05,000 --> 00:10:09,000 I don't want you to experience the same thing and see the same things that I've seen. 138 00:10:09,000 --> 00:10:14,000 If you do, then I've failed. You know, every experience should be personal. 139 00:10:14,000 --> 00:10:22,000 Because there are secrets on the land which we can discover and feel. Feel the love. 140 00:10:22,000 --> 00:10:26,000 So my journey was about going out to Dartmoor in all seasons. 141 00:10:26,000 --> 00:10:30,000 How on earth the mountain rescue didn't come out and rescue me? I do not know. 142 00:10:30,000 --> 00:10:34,000 But I went on to the moor at times in awful weather. 143 00:10:34,000 --> 00:10:39,000 But knowing I probably had the moor to myself, that was a bonus. 144 00:10:39,000 --> 00:10:43,000 I went out in day and night, sun and foggy whiteouts. Very hot, cold. 145 00:10:43,000 --> 00:10:46,000 In solitude was the important thing. 146 00:10:46,000 --> 00:10:52,000 Even if you go out with light minds, that's still a distraction in my view. 147 00:10:52,000 --> 00:10:55,000 And each time I went out, it was a unique experience. 148 00:10:55,000 --> 00:10:59,000 Not always mind blowing revelations. Sometimes it was enough. 149 00:10:59,000 --> 00:11:05,000 And it was all I was going to be given was a sense of appreciation that I was acknowledging something bigger than myself. 150 00:11:05,000 --> 00:11:11,000 That was sometimes all you get rather than something that's going to start a religion. God no. 151 00:11:13,000 --> 00:11:18,000 So I've got a term I use in the book. Same landscape, different landscape. 152 00:11:18,000 --> 00:11:21,000 Some of you have probably experienced it here. You're a stone's throw from the late 60s. 153 00:11:21,000 --> 00:11:24,000 You've all probably been to the same site. Castle rig on a sunny day. 154 00:11:24,000 --> 00:11:28,000 You go and it's raining. Totally different experience. 155 00:11:28,000 --> 00:11:31,000 This is the same hill, Ripon Tor. 156 00:11:31,000 --> 00:11:36,000 I went up on a whiteout day where I could see the Tor when I was about 20 feet from the top and a sunny day. 157 00:11:36,000 --> 00:11:39,000 I call these mists and fogs the dragon's breath. 158 00:11:39,000 --> 00:11:42,000 I think it's an old Celtic term I think as well. 159 00:11:42,000 --> 00:11:48,000 So whenever I go walk into fog and total whiteouts, I greet the dragon. Hi. 160 00:11:49,000 --> 00:11:52,000 But it's a kind of initiation. 161 00:11:52,000 --> 00:11:55,000 The pain enabled the gain and we can always do it. We can all do it. 162 00:11:55,000 --> 00:11:59,000 There's nothing particularly special about me. I'm not an intellectual. 163 00:11:59,000 --> 00:12:02,000 I'm a normal guy from Birmingham. 164 00:12:02,000 --> 00:12:04,000 Somebody's got to be here. 165 00:12:04,000 --> 00:12:07,000 And I think that's what's important. 166 00:12:07,000 --> 00:12:10,000 What I have discovered, anybody can discover. 167 00:12:10,000 --> 00:12:12,000 And I found poetry came through as well. 168 00:12:12,000 --> 00:12:17,000 When I'm sitting there in the whiteout with the rain dripping off my pen, I find an overhang. 169 00:12:17,000 --> 00:12:20,000 And it's not Wordsworth. It's not Keats. 170 00:12:20,000 --> 00:12:23,000 But it's authentic. It's what was given to me. 171 00:12:23,000 --> 00:12:27,000 The dragon's breath, the sweat over the hill to consume me. 172 00:12:27,000 --> 00:12:29,000 All is silent and still. 173 00:12:29,000 --> 00:12:35,000 It caresses my face with moist flirtation, kissing me a most sumptuous hydration. 174 00:12:35,000 --> 00:12:38,000 My senses are tickled like a lover's attention. 175 00:12:38,000 --> 00:12:42,000 I am blissfully lost in this sensuous dimension. 176 00:12:43,000 --> 00:12:46,000 All your senses can be activated. 177 00:12:46,000 --> 00:12:50,000 There is a sexuality, a sensuality to the wild, to wildness. 178 00:12:50,000 --> 00:12:52,000 Some of you might have experienced that. 179 00:12:52,000 --> 00:12:55,000 It's about engaging all your senses. 180 00:12:57,000 --> 00:12:59,000 Shedding inhibitions. 181 00:12:59,000 --> 00:13:05,000 I wanted to know, you know, what is my experience if we came across this longstone lying on the ground? 182 00:13:05,000 --> 00:13:07,000 What's it like to lie on the ground? So I lay with it. 183 00:13:07,000 --> 00:13:10,000 I gave it a cuddle and it seemed to appreciate it. 184 00:13:10,000 --> 00:13:13,000 And what's it like, whoop, hello. 185 00:13:13,000 --> 00:13:19,000 What's it like if I cram myself into this tiny space just about big enough to hold me and drum 186 00:13:19,000 --> 00:13:22,000 and feel the power of the acoustics as the granite reverberates? 187 00:13:22,000 --> 00:13:28,000 What's it like if I go sky cladded to say goodbye to the sun before it sets? 188 00:13:28,000 --> 00:13:34,000 You know, feeling the cold air on your skin, feeling the granite crystals between your toes. 189 00:13:34,000 --> 00:13:39,000 But feeling more than that, feeling alive. 190 00:13:41,000 --> 00:13:44,000 Chris Tilly talks about movement being as revelation. 191 00:13:44,000 --> 00:13:51,000 In most of the Aboriginal tribal telling of the myths, they often do it while they're in motion. 192 00:13:51,000 --> 00:13:55,000 The elder will often take the initiate and walk the lines. 193 00:13:55,000 --> 00:13:58,000 The knowledge is being given as they're walking the sun lines. 194 00:13:58,000 --> 00:14:03,000 So I think it's about walking in the footsteps, if the moccasins, if you like, of our ancestors. 195 00:14:03,000 --> 00:14:06,000 It really is a road less traveled. 196 00:14:07,000 --> 00:14:11,000 Movement as revelation. Again, it's about perspectives. 197 00:14:11,000 --> 00:14:15,000 When you think about skylines, they're not fixed geographical features. 198 00:14:15,000 --> 00:14:20,000 They move up and down. They go close and far. 199 00:14:20,000 --> 00:14:24,000 All of a sudden, you know, everything's relative. What was over there can soon be over here. 200 00:14:24,000 --> 00:14:28,000 So skylines are real. It's the same with how we perceive features. 201 00:14:28,000 --> 00:14:36,000 From one stone site here in the middle of the moor, Great Staple Tor is to the right of Roostor. 202 00:14:36,000 --> 00:14:40,000 But by the time I got round to the next stone circle, they changed places. 203 00:14:41,000 --> 00:14:45,000 So again, it's all about looking at landscape settings. 204 00:14:45,000 --> 00:14:49,000 Settings in the landscape, I think, was probably the biggest revelation for me. 205 00:14:49,000 --> 00:14:52,000 That things aren't plonked down anywhere willy-nilly. 206 00:14:52,000 --> 00:14:55,000 A couple of examples here about those perspectives. 207 00:14:55,000 --> 00:15:01,000 Bristworthy Stone Row, fantastic stone circle with a row and carn circle next to it. 208 00:15:01,000 --> 00:15:05,000 Again, this beautiful, look at the scenery, look at the setting for this. 209 00:15:05,000 --> 00:15:09,000 Again, from this stone circle, Legis Tor is on the left of Hentor. 210 00:15:09,000 --> 00:15:15,000 But by the time I walked round to the nearby carn circle, Hentor is now left of Legis Tor. 211 00:15:15,000 --> 00:15:18,000 And these tors here mark the midwinter sunrise. 212 00:15:18,000 --> 00:15:24,000 So have I moved or have the tors moved? Have they changed places or have I moved? 213 00:15:24,000 --> 00:15:29,000 Discuss. Discuss over four points. You get quite good answers to that question. 214 00:15:30,000 --> 00:15:32,000 The sanctity of high places. 215 00:15:32,000 --> 00:15:36,000 Dartmoor, some parts of Dartmoor reach up to 650 metres. 216 00:15:36,000 --> 00:15:40,000 The average height above sea level of Dartmoor is 400 metres. 217 00:15:40,000 --> 00:15:46,000 So it's pretty high. All over the world, high places are regarded as sacred. 218 00:15:46,000 --> 00:15:51,000 There's Olympus there, Fuji, there's an Hawaiian sacred site there, and of course, Glastonbury. 219 00:15:51,000 --> 00:15:55,000 Anybody from Glastonbury here? No, you wouldn't be here yet, would you? 220 00:15:55,000 --> 00:15:57,000 You'd be on Glastonbury maybe time. 221 00:15:57,000 --> 00:16:00,000 So everything starts late in Glastonbury, I've discovered. 222 00:16:00,000 --> 00:16:05,000 But all these are examples of sacred high places that are regarded as sacred. 223 00:16:05,000 --> 00:16:08,000 The abode of the gods, the abode of the ancestors. 224 00:16:08,000 --> 00:16:11,000 The sanctity of tors, I believe. 225 00:16:11,000 --> 00:16:14,000 150 named tors on Dartmoor. 226 00:16:14,000 --> 00:16:17,000 You know, how did the ancestors explain this? 227 00:16:17,000 --> 00:16:23,000 Surely only the gods and the giants had the might and the strength to pile these rocks up on top of each other. 228 00:16:23,000 --> 00:16:26,000 And what are these rocks saying to each other? 229 00:16:26,000 --> 00:16:30,000 Is this an initiation passage you go through there into some other realm? 230 00:16:30,000 --> 00:16:38,000 On bottom in Britain and Wales, Professor Christopher Tilly noticed every time that tors and hills are cultural foci. 231 00:16:38,000 --> 00:16:44,000 In other words, a lot of sacred sites are focused on the hills, where the ancestors are. 232 00:16:44,000 --> 00:16:48,000 And also a maximum tour visibility from sacred sites. 233 00:16:48,000 --> 00:16:50,000 I've been to several stone circles on Dartmoor. 234 00:16:50,000 --> 00:16:54,000 And when you're just outside the circle, you can see two or three tors. 235 00:16:54,000 --> 00:16:58,000 As soon as I walk into the circle, 15 tors. 236 00:16:58,000 --> 00:17:00,000 Suddenly pop into view. 237 00:17:00,000 --> 00:17:05,000 Everything is so intricately positioned on the landscape. 238 00:17:05,000 --> 00:17:07,000 Were the high places to be places? 239 00:17:07,000 --> 00:17:10,000 Perhaps people like you and I didn't go up to the top of the tors. 240 00:17:10,000 --> 00:17:13,000 They weren't allowed like a lot of sacred hills and mountains today. 241 00:17:13,000 --> 00:17:19,000 Perhaps only the shaman with initiates would go up to the tors in times gone by. 242 00:17:19,000 --> 00:17:26,000 Which makes them places of separation, liminal spaces where you can be alone with a guide or on your own. 243 00:17:26,000 --> 00:17:32,000 To be up the top of a tor in the middle of the night is a challenging experience and sometimes scary. 244 00:17:32,000 --> 00:17:35,000 And there's nothing wrong with that. 245 00:17:35,000 --> 00:17:39,000 I noticed going around the places that there's a very well known place. 246 00:17:39,000 --> 00:17:40,000 Somebody might have been there. 247 00:17:40,000 --> 00:17:46,000 It's the honey trap really where the Louie's the visitor center and the ice cream van at Hator. 248 00:17:46,000 --> 00:17:48,000 And I noticed it looks like horns. 249 00:17:48,000 --> 00:17:52,000 A lot of places around the Mediterranean and elsewhere. 250 00:17:52,000 --> 00:17:57,000 They say these twin hills Devereaux found this years ago represent the horns of the goddess. 251 00:17:57,000 --> 00:18:02,000 And I found when I got to many, many sacred sites, only five examples here. 252 00:18:02,000 --> 00:18:05,000 The horns were visible from a stone circle, from a cairn. 253 00:18:05,000 --> 00:18:08,000 They pop up from this standing stone here. 254 00:18:08,000 --> 00:18:13,000 The Hator only becomes visible 12 miles away because this hill dips. 255 00:18:13,000 --> 00:18:15,000 So you put this stone over there. 256 00:18:15,000 --> 00:18:16,000 You don't see that. 257 00:18:16,000 --> 00:18:21,000 Look at this stone row lined up with the horns of Hator again and these two stones here. 258 00:18:21,000 --> 00:18:28,000 So again, some sites, I think some tours are particularly relevant. 259 00:18:28,000 --> 00:18:31,000 There's also Tilly found on Bodmin. 260 00:18:31,000 --> 00:18:33,000 He found something that's called enculturing. 261 00:18:33,000 --> 00:18:36,000 It's when man changes something. 262 00:18:36,000 --> 00:18:38,000 It changes a hill. 263 00:18:38,000 --> 00:18:40,000 Three examples here. 264 00:18:40,000 --> 00:18:41,000 This is a Ogbury tour. 265 00:18:41,000 --> 00:18:45,000 This natural outcrop was once covered completely by a cairn. 266 00:18:45,000 --> 00:18:48,000 And this is another example here on White Tour. 267 00:18:48,000 --> 00:18:54,000 You can see how these natural outcrops are where the Neolithic walls, they're the focus for the Neolithic walls. 268 00:18:54,000 --> 00:18:57,000 And also pieces of place are sometimes moved. 269 00:18:57,000 --> 00:19:00,000 There's several tours on Dartmoor where there's no granites. 270 00:19:00,000 --> 00:19:02,000 They're a metamorphic rock. 271 00:19:02,000 --> 00:19:07,000 But huge lumps of red granites have been taken up to those rocks in ancient times. 272 00:19:07,000 --> 00:19:10,000 Devereaux calls it moving pieces of place. 273 00:19:10,000 --> 00:19:13,000 So it's like the cultures in prehistory are staking a claim, if you like. 274 00:19:13,000 --> 00:19:18,000 They're seeking permanence by associating themselves with these outcrops. 275 00:19:18,000 --> 00:19:23,000 They're tethering themselves to the place and to ancestors, I guess. 276 00:19:23,000 --> 00:19:26,000 Dewar Stone is one of the Neolithic sites on Dartmoor. 277 00:19:26,000 --> 00:19:31,000 And I found that the stone row focuses on this huge Logan stone. 278 00:19:31,000 --> 00:19:33,000 No one had spotted that before. 279 00:19:33,000 --> 00:19:36,000 Where the wall changes direction, there's a megalithic rock. 280 00:19:36,000 --> 00:19:40,000 There's a megalith standing with a rock basin in which I'll come back to lately. 281 00:19:40,000 --> 00:19:46,000 And where the wall changes direction again in the Neolithic, there's this huge, this lovely little cave. 282 00:19:46,000 --> 00:19:49,000 And you can see like almost like a panther creature there. 283 00:19:49,000 --> 00:19:53,000 It's almost smoking an enormous spliff out the side of his mouth. 284 00:19:53,000 --> 00:19:54,000 Can you see that? 285 00:19:54,000 --> 00:19:59,000 And these are very cultural relevant, but not mentioned in any of the site's excavations. 286 00:19:59,000 --> 00:20:02,000 Aren't we not surprised? 287 00:20:02,000 --> 00:20:08,000 There's also something that Chris Tilly calls substitution, where you can have a blank hill. 288 00:20:08,000 --> 00:20:10,000 Nothing on it. It's a really boring hill. 289 00:20:10,000 --> 00:20:15,000 And then, of course, you put something on it. It's now culturally relevant. 290 00:20:15,000 --> 00:20:17,000 It's now got features on it. 291 00:20:17,000 --> 00:20:23,000 Two examples there on the left where not boring, but featureless hills then become culturally relevant. 292 00:20:23,000 --> 00:20:28,000 And when we see these cairns, we shouldn't assume that they were always just lumps of rock. 293 00:20:28,000 --> 00:20:35,000 You can see examples on the right there of the Sami tribes of Finland, Lapland, the Siberia, 294 00:20:35,000 --> 00:20:41,000 where they brightly decorate their cairns today, their sacred sites where they make offering to the ancestors. 295 00:20:41,000 --> 00:20:48,000 Who's to say that the cairns on Dartmoor and elsewhere weren't also once covered like that? 296 00:20:48,000 --> 00:20:55,000 An interesting thing that I've been into already, I dealt with it in the symbolism book I did, is about Sumulacra. 297 00:20:56,000 --> 00:21:00,000 I'm going to say Sumulacra. It's where something resembles something. 298 00:21:00,000 --> 00:21:05,000 You can see we've all seen dolphins in clouds and faces in the trees. 299 00:21:05,000 --> 00:21:09,000 And these have a very long association with man's cultures. 300 00:21:09,000 --> 00:21:15,000 We know that a lot of Avery's Dreamstones were chosen purposely because of the features on them. 301 00:21:15,000 --> 00:21:20,000 This is Elephant Rock on Sardinia, where Bronze Age tomb was built underneath it. 302 00:21:20,000 --> 00:21:25,000 This is Sherry Tor on Bodmin, which was once almost completely covered, believe it or not, with a cairn. 303 00:21:25,000 --> 00:21:30,000 And this is a Native American example. This is Buffalo Rock, sacred to the Native Americans. 304 00:21:30,000 --> 00:21:35,000 You can see why it's sacred to them. All of those are natural features. 305 00:21:35,000 --> 00:21:40,000 So why not on Dartmoor? So in my travels I've come across some fabulous examples. 306 00:21:40,000 --> 00:21:43,000 The only one you'll find in the guidebooks is this one. 307 00:21:43,000 --> 00:21:47,000 And again, these have only weathered a few millimetres in thousands of years. 308 00:21:47,000 --> 00:21:53,000 Sticky Daniels is a good one. We're not sure why it got its name, but it's on Eastern Hill, which translates as Hill of the Eagle. 309 00:21:53,000 --> 00:21:56,000 This rock is right at the top of the Hill of the Eagle. 310 00:21:56,000 --> 00:22:00,000 What a coincidence. And this is a huge one with like a beak. 311 00:22:00,000 --> 00:22:03,000 You can just about see me standing underneath it. 312 00:22:03,000 --> 00:22:08,000 And I believe these were sacred places and focuses of cultures in prehistory. 313 00:22:08,000 --> 00:22:13,000 Look at these all on one tour. No Photoshopping, I can assure you. 314 00:22:13,000 --> 00:22:18,000 These don't need any Photoshopping. Can you all see those? 315 00:22:18,000 --> 00:22:21,000 Yeah, this one is about 10 feet high. That's 20 feet high. 316 00:22:21,000 --> 00:22:27,000 This is a 40 feet high cliff. I call that the hag or the crone of Hound Tour. 317 00:22:27,000 --> 00:22:33,000 If I'm seeing these as important and I'm seeing these quite easily, surely our prehistoric ancestors did. 318 00:22:33,000 --> 00:22:37,000 Four more examples here. Amazing. 319 00:22:37,000 --> 00:22:43,000 You can get 20 people under that. It's like a huge dragon coming out of the land. 320 00:22:43,000 --> 00:22:52,000 Amazing. This one here, Christopher Tilly found this on Bodmin, where they're erecting weird shaped stones, sometimes with simulacra on what he calls a grounder. 321 00:22:52,000 --> 00:22:58,000 You've got a flat rock and you find something perched on it. It's nothing like a glacier just dumping a rock on the thing. 322 00:22:58,000 --> 00:23:02,000 It's been purposely placed. I call this the hag of Coombe Stone Rock. 323 00:23:02,000 --> 00:23:07,000 Look at that. Very alien, elongated heads. Don't even go there. 324 00:23:07,000 --> 00:23:11,000 So, yes. 325 00:23:11,000 --> 00:23:17,000 This is another one that Sue and I went to recently. Again, I call her the old lady of Little Miss Tour. 326 00:23:17,000 --> 00:23:22,000 Look at the eye. She's almost pulling her tongue out. 327 00:23:22,000 --> 00:23:28,000 But I believe I'm not the only one that's ever stood under that crone. 328 00:23:28,000 --> 00:23:33,000 Thousands of years ago, people were also doing that. Look at these two wonderful ones. 329 00:23:33,000 --> 00:23:39,000 Incredible, isn't it? And they looked like that at least as far back as the Bronze Age, I can assure you. 330 00:23:39,000 --> 00:23:44,000 We're not on about the limestone of the Pennines, you know, and all that sort of easily eroded rocks. 331 00:23:44,000 --> 00:23:48,000 We're on about rock hard granite, literally. 332 00:23:48,000 --> 00:23:54,000 Incredible, isn't it? That is about 40 feet high, 30 feet high, that one. It's even got little teeth. 333 00:23:54,000 --> 00:24:01,000 Unbelievable. Until he did find evidence on Bodmin that he thought some of the simulacra had been enhanced in ancient times. 334 00:24:01,000 --> 00:24:07,000 Look at this one. Look at this one. I assure you, this has had no Photoshop at all. Can you see the eye there? 335 00:24:07,000 --> 00:24:12,000 I wonder whether this has been enhanced in ancient times. Like a dinosaur. Look at his speaking. 336 00:24:12,000 --> 00:24:17,000 The speaking stone. Were these taken as evidence of spirit of place? 337 00:24:17,000 --> 00:24:22,000 I believe the land lives. And are these the giants and dragons of myth and folklore? 338 00:24:22,000 --> 00:24:26,000 At least a perpetuation of them. There's a great debate at the moment about giants. 339 00:24:26,000 --> 00:24:31,000 And, you know, there's a lot of evidence that huge people once did exist. 340 00:24:31,000 --> 00:24:41,000 But whether they did or not, at least things like this were perhaps perpetuating the folklore and myths that there were giants in the land, dragons in the land. 341 00:24:41,000 --> 00:24:45,000 There they are. 342 00:24:45,000 --> 00:24:52,000 Great staple tour. This is a couple of heads I came across. This is that head from the other side. And this rock was underneath. 343 00:24:52,000 --> 00:25:00,000 Can you see it? And when it rains, the rain will come down here and come out of its mouth. 344 00:25:00,000 --> 00:25:07,000 I'm literally being dripped on out of its mouth. Here's another view when I took a group up there on one of our shamanic weekends. 345 00:25:07,000 --> 00:25:13,000 It's all about interaction. All about interaction with the landscape. Letting it talk to you. 346 00:25:13,000 --> 00:25:19,000 We found Tilly on Bodmin and elsewhere has found a lot of relevance in pyramidal and triangular stones. 347 00:25:19,000 --> 00:25:25,000 And there's some beautiful ones on Dartmoor which have taken groups to. This is one in Wismans Wood somebody might have been to. 348 00:25:25,000 --> 00:25:32,000 This triangular stone is just standing up. And wow, it is such a portal for energies. Unbelievable. 349 00:25:32,000 --> 00:25:37,000 I went to Haetor, those horned hills, a triangular stone just standing up there. 350 00:25:37,000 --> 00:25:45,000 Not on any map, not thought to be culturally relevant, but I was told by spirit to walk around the stone clockwise with one hand on the stone. 351 00:25:45,000 --> 00:25:52,000 And say the words, I send out love and healing across the land with an open heart. And sometimes that's all you have to do. 352 00:25:52,000 --> 00:25:55,000 Sometimes that's all you have to do. 353 00:25:55,000 --> 00:26:00,000 Balanced rocks. Again, these are significant culturally all around the world. 354 00:26:00,000 --> 00:26:05,000 Brim and rocks there. I don't know how that surely is. How is earth is that? 355 00:26:05,000 --> 00:26:10,000 John, how is that standing, mate? How is that still standing? 356 00:26:10,000 --> 00:26:15,000 It's quite amazing. It's unbelievable. 357 00:26:15,000 --> 00:26:19,000 Here's a huge one in America called the ship. Look at this one. 358 00:26:19,000 --> 00:26:24,000 Sacred to Tibetans perched on the rock. And a lot of them have druid folklore. 359 00:26:24,000 --> 00:26:30,000 I know the druids could have erected these, of course. And only they were so big, only the giants could erect them. 360 00:26:30,000 --> 00:26:34,000 All around the world, these sacred sites. 361 00:26:34,000 --> 00:26:39,000 Oh, that's not me, is it? 362 00:26:45,000 --> 00:26:49,000 I know I'm getting old now, but I don't think that's me. 363 00:26:49,000 --> 00:26:54,000 So I found them on Dartmoor. 364 00:26:54,000 --> 00:26:59,000 It is. It's the mic. You got the other mic, Neil? That one's a whistling, mate. 365 00:26:59,000 --> 00:27:02,000 Yeah. 366 00:27:02,000 --> 00:27:06,000 Thank goodness it was. Thank goodness it's not me, is all I can say. 367 00:27:06,000 --> 00:27:09,000 Yeah, so did I, mate. Right. 368 00:27:09,000 --> 00:27:15,000 So I found these balanced stones all over Dartmoor. Some of them do have folklore. Some of them are known as Logan stones. 369 00:27:15,000 --> 00:27:20,000 And look at this one. How on earth is that balance? This is about six foot high, that stone. 370 00:27:20,000 --> 00:27:26,000 Look at it. How on earth is that balance? This is called the whale stone. And look at these, almost like toppled. 371 00:27:26,000 --> 00:27:30,000 You can see why the ancients thought these were relevant. 372 00:27:30,000 --> 00:27:36,000 You know, only the giants could stack things up like this. These are... get your imagination going. 373 00:27:36,000 --> 00:27:41,000 Look at this one. How on earth is that? You can see how big this is. I'm under that ledge here. 374 00:27:41,000 --> 00:27:46,000 And this is a trip for megalithomania. Where's Hugh? There he is with his camera filming. 375 00:27:46,000 --> 00:27:49,000 He can't resist it, mate. We love him. 376 00:27:49,000 --> 00:27:53,000 And there he is filming me, hoping probably that the rock will fall on my head. 377 00:27:53,000 --> 00:28:03,000 And that would be a great shot. But you can see why these are held with wonder, because even today people hold these with wonder. 378 00:28:03,000 --> 00:28:06,000 Another thing is prop stones. Oh, the words have moved here. 379 00:28:06,000 --> 00:28:11,000 And then Neil's thing trying to interpretate my stuff. That's moved over a bit. 380 00:28:11,000 --> 00:28:17,000 Prop stones. You get lots of stones around the world, which are huge boulders balanced on others. 381 00:28:17,000 --> 00:28:23,000 Some of them are glacial. You've got some good examples in Northern England where a boulder will be brought down from Scotland or wherever and plonked on the Pennines. 382 00:28:23,000 --> 00:28:29,000 But you can usually tell which are glacial erratics and which are not. 383 00:28:30,000 --> 00:28:36,000 And this is one from Sweden. That's a USA example. Sacred to the Native Americans, that one. 384 00:28:36,000 --> 00:28:41,000 This is one from Canada. This is 10 feet high. I could crawl under there. 385 00:28:41,000 --> 00:28:47,000 And Chris Tilly found several of these prop stones on Les Koenig when he did the excavation. 386 00:28:47,000 --> 00:28:54,000 In fact, he said the prop stones were the focus of the culture. These settlements were built around the prop stones. 387 00:28:54,000 --> 00:29:02,000 So this one actually is lined up so the summer solstice sunset comes through the gap every year. Amazing. 388 00:29:02,000 --> 00:29:07,000 So no one would any work on the prop stones at Dartmoor at all. Did they even exist? 389 00:29:07,000 --> 00:29:14,000 Well, yes, they do. This is one, I think, that has been slid off there and a stone put underneath. 390 00:29:14,000 --> 00:29:17,000 This is in southwest Dartmoor called Hawke's Tor. 391 00:29:17,000 --> 00:29:24,000 And one way we can tell it's been moved and rotated, on the bedrock there, there's a quartz vein going through it. 392 00:29:24,000 --> 00:29:27,000 And on the capstone, it suddenly changes direction. 393 00:29:27,000 --> 00:29:34,000 And then on the rock itself, the quartz vein carries on up there but doesn't go through that pebble, that boulder. 394 00:29:34,000 --> 00:29:38,000 So all of this has been moved. 395 00:29:38,000 --> 00:29:42,000 So I can't believe this wasn't reached thousands of years ago. 396 00:29:42,000 --> 00:29:46,000 There's a little altar at the back where we placed a sheep's drawer as a thank you. 397 00:29:46,000 --> 00:29:50,000 Sometimes it's about drumming is funky and, you know, dowsing is great and all that sort of thing. 398 00:29:50,000 --> 00:29:58,000 But I find the most profound moments that I've had is when I just sit and do absolutely nothing. 399 00:29:58,000 --> 00:30:00,000 Some fabulous examples here again. 400 00:30:00,000 --> 00:30:03,000 Bellstone Tor. You've seen the pictures I've just shown you of the States. 401 00:30:03,000 --> 00:30:07,000 This is right on the top of the Tor. That should not be there. 402 00:30:07,000 --> 00:30:13,000 And almost identical to a rock called Elephant Rock on Bodmin, that tilly found. 403 00:30:13,000 --> 00:30:15,000 This is another one on Bag Tor. 404 00:30:15,000 --> 00:30:17,000 This one is just sliding off the rock. 405 00:30:17,000 --> 00:30:22,000 And it's almost as if these stones have been put under there to stop it disappearing downhill. 406 00:30:22,000 --> 00:30:26,000 So it's almost trying to make its mind up. 407 00:30:26,000 --> 00:30:30,000 Shall it be today when I throw myself off this high Tor? 408 00:30:30,000 --> 00:30:33,000 There's a place called the Healing Stone near Scorrol Stone Circle. 409 00:30:33,000 --> 00:30:36,000 And a friend of ours, Jim, took us here. 410 00:30:36,000 --> 00:30:40,000 And as soon as we got there on Ashmanic weekend, all the women sat on the stone. 411 00:30:40,000 --> 00:30:43,000 I didn't ask them to. They all just couldn't resist it. They were off. 412 00:30:43,000 --> 00:30:46,000 And it was only after they all got up I had a look underneath. 413 00:30:46,000 --> 00:30:48,000 And it's a prop stone. It's held up by three stones. 414 00:30:48,000 --> 00:30:51,000 And it is known locally as the Healing Stone. 415 00:30:53,000 --> 00:30:56,000 Found another one here at Huck and Tor. 416 00:30:56,000 --> 00:30:59,000 I think this has been slid off and propped on that stone. 417 00:30:59,000 --> 00:31:02,000 The gap lines up with the equinox sunrise. 418 00:31:02,000 --> 00:31:05,000 And I spoke to a lady earlier on. Where's the dragon lady? Where are you? 419 00:31:05,000 --> 00:31:09,000 There she is. She's got a brilliant Facebook site about dragons. 420 00:31:09,000 --> 00:31:13,000 Right next to this is a sacred rock basin site. 421 00:31:13,000 --> 00:31:17,000 And just out of shot up here is what I call the Huck and Tor Dragon. 422 00:31:17,000 --> 00:31:20,000 Not photoshopped. It's looked like that for thousands of years. 423 00:31:20,000 --> 00:31:23,000 Right next to the propped stone. 424 00:31:23,000 --> 00:31:28,000 That surely was seen by our prehistoric ancestors. 425 00:31:29,000 --> 00:31:33,000 There's a couple of places which have got everything. 426 00:31:33,000 --> 00:31:35,000 One of them is Roost Tor just north of Maryvale. 427 00:31:35,000 --> 00:31:37,000 Everybody goes to the double stone rows. 428 00:31:37,000 --> 00:31:39,000 Everybody goes to stop the hill to here. 429 00:31:39,000 --> 00:31:43,000 It's got everything. It's got rock basins, some mulecra, huge caves. 430 00:31:43,000 --> 00:31:45,000 All in a tiny area. 431 00:31:45,000 --> 00:31:47,000 This balanced stone you can sit under. 432 00:31:47,000 --> 00:31:50,000 I wonder whether thousands of years ago the initiate would have been under there. 433 00:31:50,000 --> 00:31:54,000 And the shaman, probably a woman, he's on the top rocking it. 434 00:31:54,000 --> 00:31:56,000 That'd be quite something wouldn't it? 435 00:31:56,000 --> 00:31:59,000 Initiation. Not fluffy bunnies. 436 00:31:59,000 --> 00:32:01,000 So this site has got everything. 437 00:32:01,000 --> 00:32:04,000 I think I've got some more. Yes. 438 00:32:04,000 --> 00:32:06,000 All in this one place we've got that rocking stone. 439 00:32:06,000 --> 00:32:11,000 We've got rock basins and a Logan stone with another rock basin on the top. 440 00:32:11,000 --> 00:32:14,000 Look at this. Look at the height of this. 441 00:32:14,000 --> 00:32:17,000 I know you get huge stones like this up north. 442 00:32:17,000 --> 00:32:19,000 With the glaciers and movers. 443 00:32:19,000 --> 00:32:21,000 This is actually an in situ stone. 444 00:32:21,000 --> 00:32:23,000 There's Sue underneath. 445 00:32:23,000 --> 00:32:25,000 There's this rock shelter that had an old wall there. 446 00:32:25,000 --> 00:32:28,000 Okay, more modern shepherds might have used it as shelter. 447 00:32:28,000 --> 00:32:32,000 But you get the feeling that this was once a shelter. 448 00:32:32,000 --> 00:32:34,000 For perhaps initiations coming up here. 449 00:32:34,000 --> 00:32:39,000 We just about got under there one day and the heavens opened with hail and snow. 450 00:32:39,000 --> 00:32:41,000 And it was just... 451 00:32:41,000 --> 00:32:45,000 We just thought, well we're not the first people to shelter in this cave. 452 00:32:45,000 --> 00:32:52,000 And it got me thinking about these natural crevices and stacks that occur all over the place on Dartmoor. 453 00:32:52,000 --> 00:32:54,000 You can use them as shelter sometimes. 454 00:32:54,000 --> 00:33:00,000 And did that give them the inspiration to create these prop stones where you get this huge boulder 455 00:33:00,000 --> 00:33:03,000 and you put it on top of three or four underneath. 456 00:33:03,000 --> 00:33:08,000 And did that give people the idea of dolmens? Who knows? 457 00:33:08,000 --> 00:33:11,000 Prop stones occur all over Europe. They occur up Brittany. 458 00:33:11,000 --> 00:33:16,000 They occur in Iberia where the megalithic culture is supposed to spread up the western seaboard. 459 00:33:16,000 --> 00:33:18,000 So the similarity is quite amazing. 460 00:33:18,000 --> 00:33:22,000 Natural, enhanced natural feature, dolmens. 461 00:33:22,000 --> 00:33:27,000 Who knows? The similarity, I just had to kind of throw that out there really. 462 00:33:28,000 --> 00:33:33,000 Another thing which was kind of brand new to me when I started studying Dartmoor was rock basins. 463 00:33:33,000 --> 00:33:36,000 These are all over the world regarded as culturally relevant. 464 00:33:36,000 --> 00:33:41,000 They are natural or sometimes enhanced circular features of water. 465 00:33:41,000 --> 00:33:44,000 You sometimes get them in the bottom of riverbeds and things like that. 466 00:33:44,000 --> 00:33:51,000 And this is a Native American one, sacred to the Native Americans. 467 00:33:52,000 --> 00:33:58,000 One researcher of Aboriginal sites found that nearly all the song lines have a rock basin on them. 468 00:33:58,000 --> 00:34:01,000 Okay, you could say that's the functionality of water. 469 00:34:01,000 --> 00:34:02,000 You need to find water. 470 00:34:02,000 --> 00:34:07,000 But I'm not aware the Aborigines ever have a job of finding water even if they don't need a rock basin. 471 00:34:07,000 --> 00:34:09,000 So I thought that was irrelevant. 472 00:34:09,000 --> 00:34:12,000 And Neil might take you to Malta. 473 00:34:12,000 --> 00:34:13,000 Neil, where are you? Yeah. 474 00:34:13,000 --> 00:34:18,000 This is right outside, so when you go to Malta, right outside the entrance of the Targsyan temple, 475 00:34:18,000 --> 00:34:20,000 there's half a dozen boulders with rock basins on them. 476 00:34:20,000 --> 00:34:22,000 And I think they were regarded as sacred. 477 00:34:22,000 --> 00:34:24,000 This one is right next to the entrance. 478 00:34:24,000 --> 00:34:26,000 You know the piscinas that you get in churches. 479 00:34:26,000 --> 00:34:32,000 You walk into the church, you take the holy water out and you, you know, it's interesting, isn't it? 480 00:34:32,000 --> 00:34:36,000 So, of course, I'm looking through my old snaps and I'm finding rock basins everywhere now. 481 00:34:36,000 --> 00:34:37,000 Some of them are huge. 482 00:34:37,000 --> 00:34:39,000 This is King Arthur's bed. 483 00:34:39,000 --> 00:34:42,000 Look at that. You can see why it got its name in Bodmin. 484 00:34:43,000 --> 00:34:47,000 Long enough to lie into for a dream sleep, an initiation. 485 00:34:47,000 --> 00:34:48,000 This is in the middle of nowhere. 486 00:34:48,000 --> 00:34:56,000 And Christopher Tilly and other archaeologists now say that Menantol, that round stone, is a rock basin that's been upended. 487 00:34:56,000 --> 00:34:59,000 It's been taken off the outcrop and upended. 488 00:34:59,000 --> 00:35:01,000 And there's lots of these in Cornwall. 489 00:35:01,000 --> 00:35:04,000 Again, this is Chapel, this is Carn Bray. 490 00:35:04,000 --> 00:35:10,000 The whole of the prehistoric village of Carn Bray is centered around that outcrop with the rock basin on the top. 491 00:35:10,000 --> 00:35:13,000 And all these fill with water, undefiled water. 492 00:35:13,000 --> 00:35:16,000 They haven't even flown, flowed an inch. 493 00:35:16,000 --> 00:35:18,000 Pure water straight out of the sky. 494 00:35:19,000 --> 00:35:21,000 This is another one on Rough Tour. 495 00:35:21,000 --> 00:35:22,000 You can actually sit in. 496 00:35:22,000 --> 00:35:24,000 There's half a dozen rock basins on the top there. 497 00:35:24,000 --> 00:35:31,000 This is the highest outcrop where the shaman or the chief would sit and talk to his people, perhaps, through divination. 498 00:35:31,000 --> 00:35:33,000 And I found a similar one. 499 00:35:33,000 --> 00:35:34,000 This is on Brittany. 500 00:35:34,000 --> 00:35:38,000 This is a stone on Brittany and it's full of rock basins on the top. 501 00:35:38,000 --> 00:35:44,000 And this is where the local village lasses used to go to procure fertility, to ensure they weren't barren. 502 00:35:44,000 --> 00:35:47,000 So there's this association with water fertility. 503 00:35:47,000 --> 00:35:49,000 And this was really interesting. 504 00:35:49,000 --> 00:35:56,000 Christopher Tilly found several of these rock basins on Dartmoor where they hadn't just eroded out of the side through weathering. 505 00:35:56,000 --> 00:36:04,000 This U-shaped notch had been cut into the rock to enable, as you can see, for me to get my head in there to drink the waters. 506 00:36:04,000 --> 00:36:10,000 And most of these rock basins, because they're on granite, the rock basins, as well as being full of water most of the time, 507 00:36:10,000 --> 00:36:15,000 they are full of thousands and thousands of little tiny quartz crystals. 508 00:36:15,000 --> 00:36:19,000 So all the time, 24-7, that water's been charged up with quartz. 509 00:36:19,000 --> 00:36:23,000 You can see why they were regarded as magical. 510 00:36:23,000 --> 00:36:27,000 Entrances to the other world. 511 00:36:27,000 --> 00:36:30,000 Any crevices, wells and springs usually are. 512 00:36:30,000 --> 00:36:34,000 This is Kes Tor, the deepest and biggest one on Dartmoor. 513 00:36:34,000 --> 00:36:36,000 Sometimes it's covered in ice. 514 00:36:36,000 --> 00:36:40,000 You go there overnight under the moonlight and I'm thinking about screaming or scrying. 515 00:36:40,000 --> 00:36:45,000 Is that another purpose for the rock basins, to see them in the light of the moon? 516 00:36:45,000 --> 00:36:52,000 Masaru Imoto very famously said, water is the mirror that has the ability to show us what we cannot see. 517 00:36:52,000 --> 00:36:56,000 And I think that very much links with the divination of the rock basins. 518 00:36:56,000 --> 00:36:59,000 And there's me just having, it's a hallowed gift. 519 00:36:59,000 --> 00:37:04,000 Usually at the top of all the tours, because it's only the largest, highest outcrops that have been exposed, 520 00:37:04,000 --> 00:37:08,000 the longest that have had time for the rock basins to erode. 521 00:37:08,000 --> 00:37:18,000 And one geologist said, you could be talking about 100,000 years for one of these rock basins to erode deep enough to hold water. 522 00:37:18,000 --> 00:37:21,000 So these were around in prehistory. 523 00:37:21,000 --> 00:37:23,000 The most famous one is probably the Tolman Stone. 524 00:37:23,000 --> 00:37:26,000 It has druid association. It was mentioned in my novel. 525 00:37:26,000 --> 00:37:30,000 The hero strips off and jumps into the river through this hole. 526 00:37:30,000 --> 00:37:36,000 It's a hole of initiation. You'll be in rebirth through the vulva of the Earth Mother. 527 00:37:36,000 --> 00:37:39,000 And as you see, it's big enough for people to carry through. 528 00:37:39,000 --> 00:37:42,000 That stone actually has druidic folklore. 529 00:37:42,000 --> 00:37:47,000 Sometimes rock basins are encultured. 530 00:37:47,000 --> 00:37:53,000 Two rock basins here are now so weathered they can't hold water on the top of this big tour. 531 00:37:53,000 --> 00:37:57,000 But here are two new rock basins. The crystals are very rough. 532 00:37:57,000 --> 00:38:02,000 The sides are very rough. I think these are manmade back in prehistory. 533 00:38:02,000 --> 00:38:04,000 There were other examples of this on Bodmin. 534 00:38:04,000 --> 00:38:08,000 And there are some examples of cup and ring marks on Dartmoor. 535 00:38:08,000 --> 00:38:12,000 This is one called the Dunstone, very famous stone on Dartmoor. 536 00:38:12,000 --> 00:38:14,000 Cup marks there, all artificial. 537 00:38:14,000 --> 00:38:17,000 But if you go there during the winter, they're all full of water. 538 00:38:17,000 --> 00:38:19,000 How sacred does that make them? 539 00:38:20,000 --> 00:38:23,000 People that have done work on the cup and ring marks in Northern England, 540 00:38:23,000 --> 00:38:26,000 you have a great selection of cup and ring marks up here. 541 00:38:26,000 --> 00:38:35,000 A lot of authors have noticed that sometimes great concentrations of cup and ring marks happen on stones that have got rock basins in. 542 00:38:35,000 --> 00:38:41,000 So there is this association with collecting sacred water and enhancing what's already there. 543 00:38:41,000 --> 00:38:44,000 And there's what I call the wow factor. 544 00:38:44,000 --> 00:38:50,000 I always imagine the shaman or the priest going up there for sometimes weeks or nights. 545 00:38:50,000 --> 00:38:52,000 And he comes down, halfway down. 546 00:38:52,000 --> 00:38:55,000 Perhaps the local villagers are allowed to come up. 547 00:38:55,000 --> 00:38:58,000 He's standing on the rock. Perhaps he's doing an invocation. 548 00:38:58,000 --> 00:39:02,000 And of course there's a rock basin there, but nobody else can see it. 549 00:39:02,000 --> 00:39:06,000 Nobody else even knows it's there because it's a taboo place. 550 00:39:06,000 --> 00:39:13,000 And then at a certain moment, the shaman produces water out of seemingly solid rock. 551 00:39:13,000 --> 00:39:19,000 And when I did that, because they were my guinea pigs, I did that for my group last year when we took them out for the weekend. 552 00:39:19,000 --> 00:39:23,000 And nearly everyone went, wow, because they weren't expecting that. 553 00:39:23,000 --> 00:39:26,000 And I thought, wow, was that happening thousands of years ago? 554 00:39:26,000 --> 00:39:30,000 Was there a wow factor that the shaman was producing thousands of years ago? 555 00:39:33,000 --> 00:39:37,000 So I mentioned earlier about a rock basin that was turned into Menantol. 556 00:39:37,000 --> 00:39:39,000 This is Middle Tor on Dartmoor. 557 00:39:39,000 --> 00:39:42,000 There's the rock basin still there. It's on top of that tour there. 558 00:39:42,000 --> 00:39:45,000 But you can see here an eroded rock basin that's been erected. 559 00:39:45,000 --> 00:39:49,000 It's been turned into a megalith because this is so sacred. 560 00:39:49,000 --> 00:39:51,000 You can see that's an eroded rock basin. 561 00:39:51,000 --> 00:39:54,000 And Christilius found several in Cornwall. 562 00:39:54,000 --> 00:40:00,000 This is Canbre again. You can see this is a former rock basin that's still culturally relevant. 563 00:40:02,000 --> 00:40:04,000 And I found one on Dartmoor. 564 00:40:04,000 --> 00:40:08,000 This was one of them. If I'm remembered for anything, let it be this one. 565 00:40:09,000 --> 00:40:12,000 We went up to Overtor. A little on a two-minute swimming tour, 566 00:40:12,000 --> 00:40:15,000 we found this what's been called the bear or the eagle. 567 00:40:15,000 --> 00:40:18,000 Can you see it? A little white rock there, lips. 568 00:40:18,000 --> 00:40:19,000 Can you all see that? 569 00:40:19,000 --> 00:40:23,000 But on the one side are two huge eroded rock basins. 570 00:40:25,000 --> 00:40:28,000 You can see how it's been pinned there. 571 00:40:29,000 --> 00:40:30,000 Completely vertical. 572 00:40:30,000 --> 00:40:34,000 And when you go into a nearby cave, the bear is looking straight into you. 573 00:40:34,000 --> 00:40:36,000 And we went there overnight, Sue and I. 574 00:40:36,000 --> 00:40:40,000 And Sue, you just have to climb on every time, don't you? 575 00:40:40,000 --> 00:40:41,000 Yeah, she does. 576 00:40:41,000 --> 00:40:44,000 And we had some great messages there. 577 00:40:44,000 --> 00:40:46,000 Please go overnight. 578 00:40:46,000 --> 00:40:49,000 And what we found that this bear, the bear is, Sue regarded as a bear. 579 00:40:49,000 --> 00:40:51,000 It doesn't matter what it was regarded of in ancient times. 580 00:40:51,000 --> 00:40:53,000 That's not relevant. Sue regarded as a bear. 581 00:40:53,000 --> 00:40:59,000 And when I did the astronomy on it, where the bear was looking at in Bronze Age and Neolithic times, 582 00:40:59,000 --> 00:41:04,000 in the spring, the Ursa Major is looking straight at Ursa Major as it rises. 583 00:41:04,000 --> 00:41:05,000 I thought that was interesting. 584 00:41:05,000 --> 00:41:09,000 And also I did some experiments flickering torches. 585 00:41:09,000 --> 00:41:13,000 And of course, as you flicker a torch, the shadows behind change. 586 00:41:13,000 --> 00:41:15,000 And I've done this at Avery with Groose. 587 00:41:15,000 --> 00:41:16,000 We have some night walks around Avery. 588 00:41:16,000 --> 00:41:21,000 I'll get everybody to whizzle their flashlights around. 589 00:41:21,000 --> 00:41:24,000 And of course, the shadows change and the rocks become animated. 590 00:41:24,000 --> 00:41:28,000 So can you imagine around here thousands of years ago, 591 00:41:28,000 --> 00:41:34,000 with perhaps a party with all the flames going, all the rock, all the flickering flames, 592 00:41:34,000 --> 00:41:37,000 the simulacra appears to move. 593 00:41:37,000 --> 00:41:39,000 I mean, that's a pretty powerful effect now. 594 00:41:39,000 --> 00:41:42,000 Can you imagine seeing that with a load of mushrooms inside you? 595 00:41:42,000 --> 00:41:46,000 So pretty trippy stuff, I think. 596 00:41:46,000 --> 00:41:50,000 That's not on my tour, by the way, mushrooms. 597 00:41:50,000 --> 00:41:52,000 So Sue was inspired to write this. 598 00:41:52,000 --> 00:41:55,000 That's over tour. The simulacra is just there. 599 00:41:55,000 --> 00:41:56,000 There's a lovely cave under there. 600 00:41:56,000 --> 00:42:01,000 At first the rocks appear dead, inert, lifeless, or at least slumbering. 601 00:42:01,000 --> 00:42:05,000 So sit with them a while. They pulse, vibrate, emanate. 602 00:42:05,000 --> 00:42:08,000 For eons they've reclined here, silently observing, 603 00:42:08,000 --> 00:42:13,000 observing every action, every thought, every moment, recording what has happened. 604 00:42:13,000 --> 00:42:19,000 No judgment, just storing the memories, only to reveal them to the privileged few. 605 00:42:19,000 --> 00:42:23,000 Take the time to sit, to connect, to listen to what they have to say. 606 00:42:25,000 --> 00:42:29,000 Stone Rose. Over 80 of them on Dartmoor. 607 00:42:29,000 --> 00:42:31,000 It's all about a choreographing of our movement. 608 00:42:31,000 --> 00:42:34,000 We've been invited to walk in a certain direction. 609 00:42:34,000 --> 00:42:37,000 It's been discovered that they're all about water. 610 00:42:37,000 --> 00:42:40,000 They're nearly all near rivers or in sight of the sea. 611 00:42:40,000 --> 00:42:45,000 And in the winter they all get saturated because they're all on very gentle slopes. 612 00:42:45,000 --> 00:42:48,000 It's about the earth energies that pulse down them. 613 00:42:48,000 --> 00:42:51,000 There's over 80 of these on Dartmoor. 614 00:42:51,000 --> 00:42:53,000 And they're all different. 615 00:42:53,000 --> 00:42:57,000 Here's the Scorrol down one, which goes from a cairn. 616 00:42:57,000 --> 00:42:59,000 Two of them go down to the river. 617 00:42:59,000 --> 00:43:01,000 Gentle slope river. Time and time again. 618 00:43:01,000 --> 00:43:03,000 And that big stone you could go through the hole of. 619 00:43:03,000 --> 00:43:04,000 It's just down there. 620 00:43:04,000 --> 00:43:07,000 You can see we've been invited down to the Tolman Stone. 621 00:43:09,000 --> 00:43:12,000 And this is a great one, the Brisworthy Stone Row. 622 00:43:12,000 --> 00:43:16,000 If you're standing at the cairn circle at the top, Sheeps Tor. 623 00:43:16,000 --> 00:43:18,000 It's just about visible over the skyline. 624 00:43:18,000 --> 00:43:23,000 But by the time I get down to a circular setting halfway down, oh, it's gone. 625 00:43:23,000 --> 00:43:26,000 Just where that circular setting. 626 00:43:26,000 --> 00:43:33,000 And when I get down to the very bottom of the stone row, where I started, the cairn circle is on the top. 627 00:43:33,000 --> 00:43:36,000 So everything is so intricately positioned on the landscape. 628 00:43:36,000 --> 00:43:39,000 Drizzle Coombe Stone Row, one of the wonders. 629 00:43:39,000 --> 00:43:43,000 If there is a Stonehenge equivalent on Dartmoor, I guess this is it. 630 00:43:43,000 --> 00:43:46,000 Three huge stone rows, several hundred meters long. 631 00:43:46,000 --> 00:43:49,000 And they start off with a cairn. 632 00:43:49,000 --> 00:43:50,000 They end up with a long stone. 633 00:43:50,000 --> 00:43:52,000 And the river is down this end. 634 00:43:52,000 --> 00:43:54,000 So you're talking about the dead, if you like. 635 00:43:54,000 --> 00:43:57,000 And then of course, phallic stones represent the phallus, the living. 636 00:43:57,000 --> 00:43:59,000 And you're coming down to the living water. 637 00:43:59,000 --> 00:44:06,000 So there's almost like a progression from the land of the ancestors down to the living water via the phallic stone. 638 00:44:06,000 --> 00:44:10,000 And of course, when you're going up, you're going in the opposite direction. 639 00:44:10,000 --> 00:44:13,000 There's loads of maps explaining all this in the book. 640 00:44:13,000 --> 00:44:16,000 Again, alignments with certain tours in Drizzle Coombe. 641 00:44:16,000 --> 00:44:23,000 And everything's done with a sacred tours in mind. 642 00:44:23,000 --> 00:44:24,000 Even the cow got curious. 643 00:44:24,000 --> 00:44:29,000 What's this weirdo hippie guy doing leaning against this stone? 644 00:44:29,000 --> 00:44:34,000 There's loads of these huge big stones across Dartmoor. 645 00:44:34,000 --> 00:44:35,000 This is a great place I recommend. 646 00:44:35,000 --> 00:44:38,000 We're going here on my second shamanic weekend this year. 647 00:44:38,000 --> 00:44:40,000 The Hingston Tour Stone Row in the middle of nowhere. 648 00:44:40,000 --> 00:44:44,000 This huge big stone row goes across the landscape for about half a mile. 649 00:44:44,000 --> 00:44:47,000 Cairn circle with a burial this end. 650 00:44:47,000 --> 00:44:48,000 The cairn is there. 651 00:44:48,000 --> 00:44:49,000 Associated with river again. 652 00:44:49,000 --> 00:44:51,000 There's a sacred river head there. 653 00:44:51,000 --> 00:44:55,000 And the sun shines on this big stone at the midwinter. 654 00:44:55,000 --> 00:45:01,000 But when you get down to the far end, Down's Tour appears right where they've ended the stone row. 655 00:45:01,000 --> 00:45:06,000 And then up where they built the actual enclosure where everybody lives. 656 00:45:06,000 --> 00:45:12,000 These three just break into the skyline, as you can see. 657 00:45:12,000 --> 00:45:14,000 And this appears for the first time. 658 00:45:14,000 --> 00:45:19,000 So everything is so intricately positioned in the stone in the landscape. 659 00:45:19,000 --> 00:45:21,000 Here's another one I take people to. 660 00:45:21,000 --> 00:45:22,000 Look at this lovely stone row. 661 00:45:22,000 --> 00:45:24,000 A couple hundred meters long. 662 00:45:24,000 --> 00:45:26,000 Goes right down to the river. 663 00:45:26,000 --> 00:45:27,000 The cairn's up there. 664 00:45:27,000 --> 00:45:28,000 The place of the dead. 665 00:45:28,000 --> 00:45:31,000 The living river is down here. 666 00:45:31,000 --> 00:45:34,000 And sometimes all you have to do is sit. 667 00:45:34,000 --> 00:45:35,000 Why is this here? 668 00:45:35,000 --> 00:45:36,000 Why am I here? 669 00:45:36,000 --> 00:45:39,000 I often ask that. 670 00:45:39,000 --> 00:45:40,000 What am I meant to understand? 671 00:45:40,000 --> 00:45:42,000 Just ask some questions. 672 00:45:42,000 --> 00:45:44,000 If you don't get an answer, so what? 673 00:45:44,000 --> 00:45:48,000 I believe knowledge can be withheld as well as given. 674 00:45:48,000 --> 00:45:51,000 You know, spirit knows what's in your heart. 675 00:45:51,000 --> 00:45:53,000 It knows your intent. 676 00:45:53,000 --> 00:45:54,000 Look at this one. 677 00:45:54,000 --> 00:45:55,000 This is another place we take people to. 678 00:45:55,000 --> 00:45:56,000 Concentric circles. 679 00:45:56,000 --> 00:45:58,000 No burial in the middle. 680 00:45:58,000 --> 00:45:59,000 Look at this. 681 00:45:59,000 --> 00:46:02,000 I'm trying to work out whether there's a spiraling path there. 682 00:46:02,000 --> 00:46:06,000 Circles usually are sighted with an optimum number of tours. 683 00:46:06,000 --> 00:46:09,000 The most amount of tours you can get in this valley is from this stone circle. 684 00:46:09,000 --> 00:46:11,000 And what no one had noticed before. 685 00:46:11,000 --> 00:46:14,000 Look at those little tiny little peaks there. 686 00:46:14,000 --> 00:46:16,000 No one's commented on that before. 687 00:46:16,000 --> 00:46:22,000 If we have a close look at that, these two tours are lining up to give us the horns of the goddess again. 688 00:46:22,000 --> 00:46:26,000 When you go that way or this way out of the circle, you lose that. 689 00:46:26,000 --> 00:46:29,000 You go down the valley or else the tours turn into one. 690 00:46:29,000 --> 00:46:31,000 It's quite amazing. 691 00:46:31,000 --> 00:46:38,000 And this is three stones at Skarl lined up exactly on Kez Tor, which is the midwinter sunrise. 692 00:46:39,000 --> 00:46:46,000 So the famous St Michael line, which we probably all heard of, goes across the northern part of Dartmoor, goes through the nine stones. 693 00:46:46,000 --> 00:46:52,000 These little red sticks we put in the ground when we doused the energies up over Belston Tor. 694 00:46:52,000 --> 00:46:55,000 These arrows were real sod to get up the hill, I tell you. 695 00:46:55,000 --> 00:46:58,000 So these are the ones bits that I have photoshopped in. 696 00:46:58,000 --> 00:46:59,000 So fabulous. 697 00:46:59,000 --> 00:47:05,000 And also I found something, a couple of examples at the nine stones, what you see at Castle Rig and the grey weathers, 698 00:47:05,000 --> 00:47:10,000 where the shapes of the stones can mimic distant skyline features. 699 00:47:10,000 --> 00:47:12,000 I haven't got time to go into Merrivale. 700 00:47:12,000 --> 00:47:15,000 There's a whole chapter devoted to Merrivale. 701 00:47:15,000 --> 00:47:21,000 There's the famous Stone Rose, double Stone Rose, but totally surrounded by tours. 702 00:47:21,000 --> 00:47:25,000 Bit like Castle Rig, you know, where you can see all those tours. 703 00:47:25,000 --> 00:47:29,000 But whereas Castle Rig is quite high, the settlement and the Stone Rose are right at the bottom. 704 00:47:29,000 --> 00:47:34,000 Again, I haven't got time to go into all that, but it's like the Stonehenge of Dartmoor. 705 00:47:34,000 --> 00:47:39,000 But look how a lot of these sacred sites at the Stone Rose are lined up on the tours. 706 00:47:39,000 --> 00:47:43,000 Not necessarily astronomical events, although a couple of them are. 707 00:47:43,000 --> 00:47:47,000 They're lining megaliths up with the physical tours. 708 00:47:47,000 --> 00:47:51,000 They're associating themselves with the places of ancestors. 709 00:47:51,000 --> 00:47:53,000 Here's one here. 710 00:47:53,000 --> 00:47:57,000 Semulacra, long stone, great staple tour. 711 00:47:57,000 --> 00:48:00,000 The whole of this Bronze Age Reve lines up with Ruth's tour. 712 00:48:00,000 --> 00:48:03,000 And this stone itself is lined up with great staple tour. 713 00:48:03,000 --> 00:48:06,000 So again, they're aligning themselves with the tours. 714 00:48:06,000 --> 00:48:09,000 At Merrivale, there's about 40 hut circles. 715 00:48:09,000 --> 00:48:12,000 People are living right next to the Stone Rose. 716 00:48:12,000 --> 00:48:16,000 But there's one hut row slightly separated from the others. 717 00:48:16,000 --> 00:48:20,000 And Sig Longren adows, I said, oh, what if this was the Shaman's hut? 718 00:48:20,000 --> 00:48:25,000 Because it's so close to the Stone Rose, slightly separated from the village. 719 00:48:25,000 --> 00:48:31,000 And when you stand in that hut circle, the Stone Rows are on the skyline. 720 00:48:31,000 --> 00:48:34,000 You don't get that anywhere else except from that one circle. 721 00:48:34,000 --> 00:48:39,000 It's like the ancestors are marching across the skyline there. 722 00:48:39,000 --> 00:48:42,000 Sacred space also possesses sacred time. 723 00:48:42,000 --> 00:48:44,000 There's a whole chapter on astronomy. 724 00:48:44,000 --> 00:48:47,000 Some lovely examples from the Stone Rose at Merrivale, 725 00:48:47,000 --> 00:48:51,000 where the sun and the moon goes into these notches 726 00:48:51,000 --> 00:48:54,000 at certain times of the year on the lunar cycle. 727 00:48:54,000 --> 00:48:57,000 And Gnomon is created there at midwinter. 728 00:48:57,000 --> 00:49:01,000 This one stone shines onto the middle of the blocking stone. 729 00:49:01,000 --> 00:49:04,000 It's quite a special place. 730 00:49:04,000 --> 00:49:10,000 So for me, to sum up, it's all about stepping out of our comfort zone, 731 00:49:10,000 --> 00:49:14,000 like the prehistoric shamans of Dartmoor long ago. 732 00:49:14,000 --> 00:49:18,000 Come to the edge, he said, but we are afraid, they said. 733 00:49:18,000 --> 00:49:20,000 Come to the edge, he said. 734 00:49:20,000 --> 00:49:24,000 They came to the edge, and he pushed them off, and they flew. 735 00:49:24,000 --> 00:49:28,000 Sometimes it's about going beyond your comfort zone. 736 00:49:28,000 --> 00:49:30,000 It's not all sweetness and light. 737 00:49:30,000 --> 00:49:33,000 The wilderness can be a ferocious teacher. 738 00:49:33,000 --> 00:49:37,000 This was given to me, not a sweet, lovely, fluffy poem. 739 00:49:37,000 --> 00:49:40,000 I was sheltering from the rain under this pixie rock here 740 00:49:40,000 --> 00:49:42,000 with the crone overlooking me. 741 00:49:42,000 --> 00:49:44,000 I'm crouched in this little rock. 742 00:49:44,000 --> 00:49:45,000 Pen had to come out. 743 00:49:45,000 --> 00:49:49,000 So you thought you were alone at this place of the overseeing crone. 744 00:49:49,000 --> 00:49:52,000 This is a place of truth, pixie rock. 745 00:49:52,000 --> 00:49:56,000 I gaze out to eternity, always have, for I am puck. 746 00:49:56,000 --> 00:49:59,000 Come shelter beneath, let me keep you dry, 747 00:49:59,000 --> 00:50:02,000 but tarry not too long, for you may die. 748 00:50:02,000 --> 00:50:05,000 But the death of which I speak is not of the flesh, 749 00:50:05,000 --> 00:50:07,000 but of your sanity, which I shall thresh. 750 00:50:07,000 --> 00:50:11,000 I will crush and knead you, your mind, or she'll grind. 751 00:50:11,000 --> 00:50:15,000 For at pixie rock you shall become mine. 752 00:50:15,000 --> 00:50:17,000 So leave this place while you can. 753 00:50:17,000 --> 00:50:21,000 In return, if you dare, become more than a man. 754 00:50:25,000 --> 00:50:29,000 We have been suffering as a species from cultural amnesia. 755 00:50:29,000 --> 00:50:33,000 Truths have become myths and folklore. 756 00:50:33,000 --> 00:50:37,000 We are now being invited to retrieve ancient awareness 757 00:50:37,000 --> 00:50:40,000 from the mists of time in the nick of time. 758 00:50:40,000 --> 00:50:44,000 Landscapes are living interfaces, 759 00:50:44,000 --> 00:50:47,000 saturated with accessible memories. 760 00:50:47,000 --> 00:50:51,000 So I invite you all to step out from the back of the wardrobe. 761 00:50:51,000 --> 00:50:53,000 Look down the rabbit hole. 762 00:50:53,000 --> 00:50:54,000 Feel the love. 763 00:50:54,000 --> 00:50:56,000 Let it heal you. 764 00:50:56,000 --> 00:51:01,000 And just as important, give love back. 765 00:51:03,000 --> 00:51:07,000 Today we're overloaded with information, but do we have meaning? 766 00:51:07,000 --> 00:51:09,000 Does life have meaning anymore? 767 00:51:09,000 --> 00:51:11,000 We couldn't have any more information, could we? 768 00:51:11,000 --> 00:51:13,000 Our eyes and minds can again be opened, I believe. 769 00:51:13,000 --> 00:51:15,000 They are, I believe. 770 00:51:15,000 --> 00:51:17,000 I see that a little bit now. 771 00:51:17,000 --> 00:51:21,000 We can perceive the world as it really is, not how we have been told it is. 772 00:51:21,000 --> 00:51:25,000 So please, be still, be humble enough to hear the earth's voice. 773 00:51:25,000 --> 00:51:29,000 Sometimes you don't have to do anything but just sit there. 774 00:51:29,000 --> 00:51:35,000 My road now is now rocky, squelchy, with the moor, and winding, often perilous. 775 00:51:35,000 --> 00:51:38,000 My personal mindscape is leading me home. 776 00:51:38,000 --> 00:51:42,000 At last I feel I am walking in the right direction. 777 00:51:42,000 --> 00:51:49,000 Being on the moor has not been about finding myself, but rather about losing myself. 778 00:51:51,000 --> 00:51:59,000 Please come to my convention, because I'm talking about the stone rows of the whole of Europe in more detail. 779 00:51:59,000 --> 00:52:02,000 So it's a great event. 780 00:52:02,000 --> 00:52:05,000 Come, I've got some tickets today, by sheer coincidence. 781 00:52:05,000 --> 00:52:10,000 And we've got these mindscape landscapes I've been mentioning, where we take groups out onto the moor. 782 00:52:10,000 --> 00:52:13,000 And if you're good, we might even bring you back again. 783 00:52:13,000 --> 00:52:19,000 And there's the three major weekends I'm doing on Dartmoor this year. 784 00:52:19,000 --> 00:52:22,000 They're all on the website. Please inquire. 785 00:52:22,000 --> 00:52:28,000 So I'll just end really with an invite, not from me, but from the earth. 786 00:52:28,000 --> 00:52:31,000 Ched gently on the earth, literally in the footsteps. 787 00:52:31,000 --> 00:52:37,000 But as I have discovered, in the presence of our ancestors, be of open heart and open mind. 788 00:52:37,000 --> 00:52:39,000 And be authentic. 789 00:52:39,000 --> 00:52:42,000 I have found... 790 00:52:42,000 --> 00:52:48,000 I am constantly making sure I'm doing talks and tours for the right reason. 791 00:52:48,000 --> 00:52:51,000 For the right reason. And I think at the moment I am, hopefully. 792 00:52:51,000 --> 00:52:54,000 For the spirit of the land has been waiting. 793 00:52:54,000 --> 00:52:58,000 The spirit of the land has been waiting. 794 00:52:58,000 --> 00:53:00,000 For you. 795 00:53:00,000 --> 00:53:02,000 Thank you very much.