Since it’s solstice, here’s an extract from a book of mine, Power Points in Time, about the cycle of the solar year, for your interest. More about the book below.
We tend to take the cycle of the year for granted, viewing it in a rather reductionist, calendrical and mechanical manner. This is partially because the Western calendar has no natural basis, so we tend to think of a calendar as a matter of dating with no further significance. For a solar-based calendar it would make better sense to anchor it in the solstices and equinoxes, allowing us to move more in harmony with the seasonal undertow of life and nature and with overall energy-conditions.
The seasons are brought about by Earth’s orbital relationship with the Sun, in which she exposes each of her poles to the Sun for half of the year as she orbits around it. Each pole is maximally exposed to the Sun around the time of summer solstice, experiencing the midnight sun, while the other pole is in perpetual darkness during its winter solstice.
Outwardly, the Sun gives Earth light and heat, and inwardly there is a deeper energy-weather cycle activating and modulating life-force on Earth, connected with the solstices. Life-force courses through the subtle meridians of the Earth and the energy-systems and patternings of all living things. In terms of our daily lives, a year takes a while, but for the Earth it is just a short inbreath and outbreath in the long course of geological time.
The ancients took it upon themselves to invoke favourable seasonal change, in the knowledge that change is the essence of earthly life and rhythm is the breathing of life-force. They knew also that subtle energy patternings are the energy-framework upon which physically manifest things are draped.
Psycho-spiritually, the Sun within us resides at the centre of our being, around which all of the constituent parts of our psyche orbit. The Sun represents our fundamental raison d’etre, our will-to-live and our source of aliveness. It gets us up in the morning to meet a new day. You could say it channels the soul through into our personalities and earthly natures. It’s a vibrant, shining place within us which seeks to make something good out of life and to evolve through life’s experiences.
Through the Sun in our birth charts, we seek to become something more than we now are, to evolve and serve our purpose, to be part of the life-process and to contribute to it.
This inner Sun goes through its own cycle of the year. We each relate differently to it, depending on the position of the Sun in our birth charts, but we have a common cycle too – the Earth’s cycle. It’s about the fluxings of energy in life and nature and the thrumming of the resonant sphere of the Earth – we’re bathed in it, even when we live in big cities, even on the 25th floor. The Sun moves around the zodiac in the course of a year, exposing us to different shades and tonalities of life-experience as it moves through the signs. An Aquarian day can feel quite different from a similar Piscean day, and what we make of each is up to us.
There are twelve signs of the zodiac, and the zodiac is anchored in the four quarter-points of the year – the two solstices and two equinoxes. The solstices represent turning points and the equinoxes represent tipping points in the four seasons.
There’s a three-sign sequence in each season. The zodiac has little to do with the stars and everything to do with the solstices, equinoxes and seasonal alternation, outlining the qualitative and archetypal undertow of the four seasons.
An archetype is an image or root-model of fundamental patterning behind and within all happenings and situations. If I say ‘oak tree’ then you will immediately form an image of an idealised oak tree, even though oak trees vary in shape, size and detail. So an archetype represents a basic patterning or template by which living beings and things shape themselves, even though the precise manner of their shaping varies enormously in real life. And yes, trees have thoughts and feelings.
There’s something interesting here. In Britain, NW Europe and other temperate climes (between about 40° and 60° from the Earth’s equator), nature manifests its actual physical changes in an eightfold, not really a twelvefold pattern. This eightfold pattern is marked out by the four quarter points and also by the mid-points (or cross-quarters) between these. These are important in temperate higher latitudes because the alternation of light and dark, day-length and temperature are more emphasised there. This also happens on a subtle-energy level, and it is these changes which pull us around and squeeze us through certain kinds of experiences at certain times of year.
In latitudes closer to the equator, other factors are emphasised by local circumstances or traditions, such as prevailing winds, rainy seasons, river floods, the rising points of stars such as Sirius or the orbital cycles of Venus. Localised cultures saw things in the light of what was visibly important in their own localities. In Europe, the great ocean is westwards, yet in China it is eastwards, and in Brazil the rainy season determined the way indigenous peoples structured their beliefs, while in Europe or Canada spring and autumn do so.
An eightfold calendar is more natural in NW Europe than a twelvefold one, which originated in Mesopotamia – though they interlock. The Sami (Lappish) people of far-northern Europe have an eightfold year, five seasons being different kinds of what most of us would call winter. The ancient megalith builders of Atlantic Europe 4-5,000 years ago, stretched between Portugal and the Baltic, embodied eightfold mathematics into the alignments and placing of the standing stones and stone circles they built. But both eightfold and twelvefold calendars are anchored similarly in the solstices and equinoxes. So they are related.
The energy principles behind each year are represented by the twelve zodiac signs, and manifest seasonal changes are represented by an eightfold subdivision of the year. This interlocking of principles and practicalities has meaning to it. Here we’ll look at the eight annual subdivisions, and in the next chapter we’ll examine the twelve, the zodiac. The eight, the quarters and cross-quarters, were marked in ancient times by festivals when fires, beacons and lights were lit, representing and re-invoking the life-force.
Power Points in Time. This isn’t a normal astrology book – it has little to do with birth charts or specific events. It’s all about cycles of time – cycles big and small, as astrologers see them. But when the original version of this book, Living in Time, came out in 1987, we found that it wasn’t so much astrologers who got excited about it, but it was pagans, druids and lovers of nature, ancient sites and shamanic practices. So, 28 years later, I updated and reworked the book, which came out in 2015.
It’s still available in print, published by Penwith Press and, while it’s a bit late for Christmas, here’s a thought…
If you are a seeker on a quest to understand a bit more about what lies behind and underneath the events of your life, it pays to have a modicum of understanding of astrology as part of your general knowledge – really, the basics should be taught in schools to teenagers.
It takes a while to get your head and heart around the details, but it pays off, since it’s really interesting, and your understanding of it and of life will evolve over time, as the years progress – whether or not you become an actual astrologer. And wintertime is a great time to get focused on it.
If you’re into ancient sites and working with the inner magic of nature and of time, then here’s a secret. The ancients built their sacred sites at power points in the landscape, but they carried out their ceremonies, rites, healings and workings at power points in time. I wrote this book to help my friends identify and understand power points in time.
Time is what stops everything happening all at once.
This might interest those of you who are interested!
These are two chapters from my book about Penwith’s ancient sites, called Shining Land – except these two are about the whole of Cornwall.
From an alternative archaeologist’s viewpoint. With a few speculations thrown in for consideration. Food for thought. With love from the far end in (currently) wind-blown Penwith.
It’s a 20ish minute read (goes well with a mug of tea). I might do an audio version sometime – you never know.
Here’s my latest podcast. It’s all about why the ancients built their sacred sites. Well, my perception of it.
The Nine Maidens, West Penwith, Cornwall
There are thousands of megalithic sites around Britain and in other lands. The ancients didn’t build them for frivolous reasons – it had to bring them definite benefit to make it worth it, however they saw that. It was a big investment with longterm payoffs, going on for many centuries.
It’s all to do with cranked-up consciousness fields and the possibilities that become available when we do focused consciousness work inside them – at power points in space and during power points in time.
Reality’s rules can change and remarkable things can be achieved, even with practical, real-life outcomes. That’s what this podcast is all about. It’s about the way reality can be changed through inner work – or inner work combined with outer work.
Also, we become changed by doing so – this helps solve problems in remarkable ways, also reducing impediments we ourselves create.
The ancient sites of West Penwith and what they say about megalithic civilisation.
Audiobook version
I’m happy to say that the audiobook version of Shining Land is now done and ready. I’ve been working on it for the last month.
I tried to finish it before my birthday (on Friday 5th) but, well, life always has something to teach. I had one episode (of eleven) yet to record, but for two days there was a lot of noise from the rain, and from things going on around the farm, and I couldn’t do it! C’est la vie. I got it done eventually.
So now there is an audiobook version of Shining Land. Although it’s about the ancient sites in this area, West Penwith, at the far end of Cornwall, UK, I’ve adapted the audiobook to make it interesting to listeners far and wide who might never have been here.
The nub of this book and audiobook is megalithic civilisation. It was deeper and far more advanced than we are taught. Their high-tech achievements involved consciousness and energy, working on the nature of matter and the issues that life presents from the inside. It was a sustainable civilisation – in Britain, the megalithic periods of the Neolithic and Bronze Age lasted 500 and 1,200 years respectively.
And there’s a wee chance this might interest you! Audiobooks are great for listening to during long journeys, or while doing other things, or if you’re stuck in bed, or if you need a rest from radio stations.
Both the online book and the audiobook are available free, and voluntary donations are welcome.
The ancients worked with a kind of consciousness technology, and they designed their sacred sites for this purpose. They located them carefully, building them over underground water and energy-vortices, orienting them to the rising and setting points of the sun and moon, constructing them to reflect and embody the fundamental principles of the universe.
They did this to create spaces – crucibles – in which to go into altered states of consciousness. Here they could generate reality-fields that enabled them to reach into things and fix them from the inside.
They lived in a very different world to ours, with no need to build cities or empires since they were advanced in a completely different way. There’s something about this that we need to re-learn in our day, because it concerns our future. And that’s what this podcast is all about.
With love, Palden
It’s an extract from my book Shining Land, which is available online. A new update of the book is coming out soon.
Life has been quite a grind and a test recently. Living as a partially disabled cancer patient makes wading through life twice as difficult, and sometimes I get deeply weary with it. That’s been happening recently.
But there’s a weird psychological program in me that has meant that some of the best work I’ve ever done has been done during such periods, when my Saturnine tough-it-out programming gets activated by life and its grinding difficulties. I tend to tough it out by engaging myself in doing something. A project.
It’s an Aspie hyperfocus thing: if you can’t change your circumstances, change your mood by doing something creative and ultimately useful – even if it yields no immediate benefits. That’s how the program goes – for me, at least. Except there is one big benefit: it changes my mood. And, bit by bit, that can change everything.
That’s how, somehow, over the last forty years, I’ve managed to write fifteen or so books on quite a variety of subjects. Many were written amidst difficult circumstances, or arising out of them. The gratifying thing is that I still agree with pretty much everything I’ve written – or spoken about, broadcast or taught. I have few regrets about it. Which is quite remarkable, really.
Just recently I’ve been at it again. I had a crisis a month ago where I felt uninspired, feeling that I’d said everything I needed to say, and were people interested anyway? Well, as such crises do, it represented a deeper fermentation process going on in the nether recesses of my psyche, and an inner repositioning was going on, unbeknownst to me. I started looking at ‘outstanding issues’ and ‘unfinished bits’ in what I have done. After all, as a disabled oldie who spends more time alone than I would prefer, I do have lots of time.
Just yesterday, my friend Brian Charlton was here. He’s another Glastonbury defector now living in West Penwith – there’s a little secret cabal of us, actually. He lives the other side of St Just, our local village, and he is part a local support group, the ‘Friends of Palden’, that is a blessing in my life. He was on his weekly visit, and benignly badgering me about these unfinished bits. Very perceptive. I realised he was right. I needed to beaver away at clarifying and finalising the signals I’ve been putting out, and there are unfinished bits, and bits yet to evolve further, if life allows.
But there was more: I realised was already instinctively doing it, though I hadn’t realised it until then. It had started with two podcasts, both of which came up spontaneously, about Inner Doctors and Intuition. That got me flowing again, unblocking the logjam that had scrangled up my psyche. That’s one secret that many creators need to understand: if you get blocked up, do something, anything, to get yourself unblocked. And it’s best to forget what you think you ought to be doing, and to be spontaneous and creative instead – because that’s where the taproot of creativity lies.
Then suddenly I found myself starting doing a revision of one of my books, Shining Land, about the ancient sites of West Penwith. Well, there were some typos, readability issues and tweaks to attend to. So I thought. But as things progressed, I realised that new work I have done in the last few years, since I wrote the book, needed adding. I’d gained some new perspectives too, blessed as I am with lots of thinking time.
Most of the book has just needed tweaks and small improvements, but the chapter on Hill Camps has had a rewrite, adding my thoughts on Bronze Age circular enclosures such as Caer Brân, built around the 1800s BCE for tribal gatherings, and their significance. Also, I’ve added new material to the final part of the book, about Megalithic Geoengineering, breaking the last chapter into two and adding new work to both, about landscape temples, wildwood cover in the Bronze Age and ancient trackways in Penwith. And there are some new maps and pictures. I’ve worked on the indexing too (it’s rather tedious).
But here’s the rub. I can’t write books any more. My brains can’t do it. I can do blogs, podcasts and small projects, because they are done and dusted in a day or two. But books? No, they’re big projects. Even so, I can revise books I’ve written before, and the great virtue of revising a book is that the big thinking has already been done. So I can focus on style, details, text-flow, images, maps and new ideas. I can make it a better read.
I discovered this ten years ago when revising an astrology book first published in 1987, Living in Time. It was a good book but it had dated, with out-of-date examples in it from the 1960s to the 1980s. It also needed another spin, since times had changed and many more people were aware of what the book writes about. This is how Google’s AI assesses it:
“Power Points in Time is the title of a book by Palden Jenkins that explores the concept of time and its influence on various aspects of life, drawing on astrology and other cyclical patterns. It examines how understanding these patterns can provide insights into events, decisions, and even the meaning of life. The book uses examples like lunar phases, planetary alignments, and ancient festivals to illustrate how time can be understood as more than just a linear progression.“
Actually, that’s a pretty good summary. That’s the first time I’ve used AI in any of my writings, and it’s likely to be one of the last, since I am decidedly AI-free and Patreon-free in my outpourings. And, for better or worse, I prioritise eyeballs and ideas over monetisation too.
Gurnard’s Head
So I revised Living in Time and it came out in 2015 as Power Points in Time. I really enjoyed doing that revision, precisely because the big thinking had been done, so I could focus on other things. But there was another matter too: in 1987 I had pitched the book to people interested in astrology, though later I found that it was most popular with people interested in ancient sites – a different circle of readers. Meanwhile, over the quarter century that followed, I had developed a clearer idea of the combined importance of power points in space (ancient sites) and power points in time (peak periods). So I re-pitched the book toward this ‘power points’ idea.
Then a few years passed, and a big change came to my life – getting cancer and becoming disabled – and, reviewing my life, I realised I hadn’t written a book about ancient sites, even though, on and off, I had studied the matter for fifty years and had done a lot of research in Cornwall for ten years. So along came Shining Land – the ancient sites of West Penwith and what they say about megalithic civilisation. My core proposition was that ancient sites were built for conducting shamanic consciousness work, and that the 600ish ancient sites of West Penwith actually constituted one big, integrated ancient site.
By making a ‘landscape temple’ out of the whole cliff-bound Penwith peninsula, it was possible to raise this consciousness work to a higher level, to benefit not only the local area and its people but the whole planet. The planet is one being, that we have come to know as Gaia, and if the ancients got themselves into enough of an elevated state to do so, they could commune with Gaia, adding a human touch to her work as a planet-being.
They were practicing what I’ve come to call Megalithic Geoengineering. Big stuff. Planetary stuff. And, of course, there’s something to learn from this today.
Lesingey Round
So, you see, in health and life circumstances I have been labouring somewhat, though in other respects I’ve been quietly chiselling away at generating uplift and raising my spirits by doing those things that I can do, and being creative with it. It fires up my circuitry. Meanwhile I’m de-focusing on those things I can’t do and can’t have – things that weigh me down. As a result, a new, 2025 version of Shining Land will come out shortly as an online book. So there are results to this. Results germinated out of a time of hardship.
Two things happened to help turn things around. One was the spontaneous eruption of the ‘Inner Doctors’ podcast, which revived my creative spirits, and the other was a session with a homoeopath, my neighbour Anna Jenkins (no relation – we Jenkinses are a big Welsh clan). I think the remedies she prescribed have dislodged some fixities and rigidities within me. Well, to be honest, I cannot tell yet, because the last week has been low, lonely and dark and I cannot tell whether my cancer and demise are getting worse or whether this is what homoeopaths call a ‘healing crisis’. But I think I’ll opt for the latter.
It has more hope in it. And hope and belief are motivators. Not as an imposition on evolving reality, but as a way of intersecting fruitfully with it. Hopefully.
Changing the way we see things: inside every problem lies a solution, as long as we allow ourselves to see it.
Sometimes I struggle with that. So, in case you thought you were the only one in this vast universe who struggles with it, think again, for you are not alone.
Aluna, the Void, the Lap of the Mother, out of which everything emerges.
I posted this video a few years ago and it’s worth another spin. Because it speaks of matters I talk about too, though the Kogi Mamas state it far more clearly and unequivocally. It concerns the basis of the way nature works, and it starts in the realm of spirit.
It concerns connecting the power points with each other – the Kogi call them Esuamas – and helping the Earth hum and sing as an energy-being, a conscious being. If she is happy, all will be well, and nature can fix itself when damaged. Ecological reintegration. Rewilding.
This is what we, ‘the younger brother’, are failing to do. Then we wonder why we get flash floods, droughts and storms. We do this by blocking up the energy centres and obstructing their connections.
So, to help the world it is necessary to unblock them.
The Kogi, descendants of the pre-Columban Tairona civilisation, live in the Sierra Nevada of northern Colombia. In a recent article about Caer Brân, a Bronze Age gathering site here in West Penwith, Cornwall, I mentioned the sense of enhanced centrality you can feel at many ancient sites – the feeling of being at the centre of everything – and the Kogi feel that too. It’s a key element in the energy-geography of an area like theirs or like Penwith. They feel that the mountain area where they live lies at the Heart of the World. And it does.
They feel they cannot carry the world any more. In this film, Aluna, they speak of making payments, paying back to the Mother, caring for her and keeping her happy. They practice land management and agriculture that does just this.
In my rants and ramblings about the Neolithic and Bronze Age landscape of Penwith, I suggest that the 600-odd ancient sites in Penwith actually constituted one big ancient site, one big cliff sanctuary. Ancient Penwithians sought to make the land and the wider world hum and glow. Hence the ancient name for Penwith, ‘Belerion’ – the shining or scintillating land. They did it by connecting up the energy-centres to amp them up, to make them operate as one.
The Kogis’ ideas are not unique to them. We in Britain have known them too, a long time ago. We have forgotten. But if, when the time and your mood are right, you watch this film, you too might remember.
A Bronze Age gathering place in West Penwith, Cornwall Palden Jenkins, June 2025
Recently I was at Caer Brân (pronounced Ker Brayne) on a Belerion Project field trip. Nowadays partially disabled, I hadn’t been there for years, even though, when I look out of my window from my desk, it’s on the ridge over the valley, less than a mile away. So I gaze at it a lot.
In former years I had come to the idea that, in the Mid-Bronze Age, Caer Brân served as a kind of parliament site for the whole of Penwith. This came to me after news came out some years ago about a circular enclosure, found using LIDAR scanning, on the cliffs at Pordenack Point, just south of Land’s End. This revealed something: Pordenack, Caer Brân and Castle an Dinas, three circular enclosures, were built in a straight line, oriented to the summer solstice sunrise.
This suddenly gave these three sites a lot more significance than had been seen previously.
However, if we take a line from the centre of the Pordenack clifftop enclosure to the centre of Castle an Dinas, it passes through Caer Brân though not accurately through its centre. It passes across the southeast side of Caer Brân, though within the enclosure. I’m not sure whether there is any meaning to that, but these details are worth observing.
At ancient sites, the main thing I do is a kind of psychic archaeology. That’s not as esoteric or complex as it sounds. All I do is sit there, relax, give it time, and I let feelings and ideas come up. It’s not a matter of trying, but of allowing. Often I use a pendulum, which helps engage both thinking and intuition. I do this in two ways, flipping between them: I use a pendulum while doing ‘intuitive free-thinking’ – it indicates when I’m ‘on track’ or ‘off track’ – and also I ask specific questions about details and dates, seeking a Yes/No answer. I note it all down or speak what’s coming up into a sound-recorder.
As an historian, I’m attentive to historic plausibility before jumping to conclusions arising from these ‘subjective’ researches. Mistakes can often be made in the interpretation of impressions and ideas, more than in their initial psycho-intuitive reception. It’s important to avoid allowing existing ideas, knowledge and preferences to shade and bias such findings, though it’s important afterwards to see how new insights fit with foregoing ones – if indeed they do.
If they don’t somehow fit, then the observation might either be incorrect or something is yet to be discovered that will make sense of it. In one case I had to wait twenty years. You get surprises. Findings might at first make no sense, or no concrete or logical evidence backs them up, but later on things can fall into place. So for much of the time they remain working hypotheses, not facts. One trick is to consider their plausibility and whether they shed light on anything else. Some archaeological findings suffer this problem, or their interpretation is conjectural – as is the case with a few seemingly authoritative statements on the signboard below Caer Brân (more below).
Craig Weatherhill’s survey of Caer Brân
Here are some findings from my recent visit to Caer Brân.
It seems to me that it is not the inherent earth energy of this place that matters, as is the case at a stone circle. There isn’t the same sense of energy here. It seems that the landscape positioning of Caer Brân matters more: there’s a strong visual connection with other key sites in Penwith and beyond, including Scilly, the Lizard and Carn Brea near Redruth. It has a wide, thirty-mile panorama.
Very noticeable are the sightlines from Caer Brân to Neolithic sites which, at the time of Caer Brân’s building, would themselves have been regarded as ancient – about 1,800 years older than Caer Brân.
All of Penwith’s Neolithic sites are visible except Trencrom Hill. Carn Kenidjack and Carn Galva poke above the horizon as if placed there by an enormous geological chess-player’s hand; Carn Brea is distant yet prominent; St Michael’s Mount sits resplendently down in Mount’s Bay. The Isles of Scilly hover in the gap between Chapel Carn Brea and Bartinney Castle. So visual connectedness with other sites was clearly important. Caer Brân is not prominently visible from these sites – it’s a one-way visibility.
Apart from sightlines, it has several alignments (leylines) associating it with other ancient sites, yet these are largely rather unspectacular except for two. Alignments don’t seem to be a dominant factor here – sightlines are more important. (Click for an alignments map of Penwith.)
One alignment (83) goes from the summit cairn on nearby Chapel Carn Brea through Caer Brân’s SW edge to St Erth church (on an Iron Age round that might be older) and finally it heads for the Neolithic tor of Carn Brea.
The other (199) goes from Cape Cornwall to Caer Brân, then to the Blind Fiddler menhir and Kerris Round, then over Mount’s Bay to Predannack Head, a clifftop site on the Lizard that feels a bit like a geomantic control tower – it’s worth a visit. The first alignment links two Neolithic hills and the second links two major cliff sanctuaries.
Caer Brân doesn’t feel like a high-energy place, though it does have atmosphere. However, as a former gathering place, it feels to me as if it misses the human attention and ‘hwyl’ that it once witnessed and hosted. (Hwyl is Welsh for fun and stirring, special experiences).
Archaeologists commonly use the term ‘ceremonial’ for sites like this, but this is inaccurate. This was a gathering place, a people place. The enclosure uphill on Bartinney Castle was clearly ceremonial and magical, but I believe Caer Brân was mainly social in character and purpose.
These two adjacent sites, hardly a mile apart, formed a pair – Bartinney more spiritual and Caer Brân more worldly. During their moots, people assembled at Caer Brân probably trooped up to Bartinney for the spiritual high point of their gatherings, or to seal the deal. Tradition has it that inside the enclosure on Bartinney evil cannot touch you.
Sancreed Beacon, Caer Brân and Bartinney, arrayed along a ridge, were part of a local landscape temple also comprising Botrea Hill, Chapel Carn Brea and Boscawen-ûn stone circle. This ridge seems to act as a kind of fulcrum for the whole of Penwith, and Chapel Carn Brea, Botrea Hill and Boscawen-ûn anchor and stabilise it on either side.
This is all about a geomantic quality we could call ‘perceptual centrality’ – the feeling that you’re standing at the centre of everything. This is common at many ancient sites: a subtle sense of emphasised hereness and nowness that is one of their key psycho-spiritual effects. It seems odd that Boscawen-ûn acts as a peripheral anchor to this string of three hills. Yet this is how it seems at Caer Brân, standing at the centre of its own psycho-geographic gravity-field. Yet at Boscawen-ûn, sitting at the centre of its own perceptual gravity field, it seems as if Caer Brân and Chapel Carn Brea are peripheral appendages to it.
Each major site in Penwith is a gravity-centre of psycho-geographic experience. In one sense this is a perceptual matter, while in another it’s a very real, a repeatable experience shared by many people. In a pre-literate society with no maps or aerial photos, people were psychologically part of their world and it was part of them. They perceived their world differently to us.
This was particularly so in the Neolithic. As the Bronze Age progressed, man-made landscape expanded in extent and people started developing more of a sense of mastery of nature rather than of being guests in it. Even so, their ancient sites were stretched over and fitted to nature and the landscape without imposing on them. Bronzies’ nature-interventions were largely sympathetic. Rampant resource exploitation came later in history.
On the signboard downhill from Caer Brân I think they got a few details wrong. They associate Caer Brân with Carn Euny, a nearby ancient settlement, suggesting that the villagers had built and used it. That’s logical, though I think it is incorrect.
The impression I get is that Caer Brân was a Penwith-wide social-infrastructure project. People were called up from all over Penwith to build it. It was to be a neutral space, owned or hosted by no individual clan. It was to act as a meeting place for all of the Penwithian clans, or their representatives. It’s possible there were around ten clans.
Its geographic centrality in Penwith and its location at the crossroads of two major ancient trackways are clues suggesting this (see trackway map below), together with the solstice alignment of the three circular sites. So while Carn Euny looks like a logical ‘owner’ of Caer Brân, I don’t think this was so. Neither was Castle an Dinas, Penwith’s other big gathering site, controlled by one clan. It is likely it was built around the same time as Caer Brân, and that they were built with different purposes in mind.
Using a pendulum, I asked how long it took to build Caer Brân: I got ‘two summers’. That was surprising: I expected longer (such as five years). This would have involved quite a mobilisation of available hands and backup support, including supplying tools and food and maintaining life’s normal demands back home. They wanted to get the job done quickly.
Perhaps there was an urgent need. Perhaps they had reached a kind of political juncture in Penwith, where a pressing need came up to reorganise things, reflecting emergent needs and realities. Or perhaps there was a generational shift in a time of social change and population growth, necessitating the building of new gathering places.
The signboard got one thing right: the ‘ring cairns’ inside Caer Brân are older than the enclosure. I date-dowsed them to the 2200s BCE, while the enclosure came 400ish years later in the 1830s. Except that the ‘ring cairns’ were roundhuts. The one in the centre of Caer Brân gave me the sense of a Hopi Kiva, a place for focused magical-spiritual work – I got the image of a crucible. It was placed there not because of a major energy-vortex at that place, but because of its visual, almost geometric connections with other places in the wider landscape.
I found that three main gatherings were held each year: on the fullmoons around Imbolc and Lughnasa, and another in early December. I asked why this third one was not at winter solstice and got a straight reply, ‘Everyone wanted to be at home then’. Well, indeed. And since fullmoons light up the night, often marking shifts in the season or in weather patterns, the Bronzies were probably not as concerned with exact cross-quarter days as with the fullmoons near to them. The moon provided no-cost solar-powered lighting. And a taste of magic.
The climate was a bit warmer then, less windy, stormy and Atlantic-dominated than it is now. This changed around the 1200s at the end of the Megalithic period – the jetstream moved south, bringing more wind, rain and changeable weather. It made sense in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages to be on panoramic hilltops like Caer Brân. In the Late Bronze Age after 1200ish, people moved downhill, abandoning or sidelining many of the megalithic sites.
Date dowsing suggests that Caer Brân was built in the 1830s BCE and was in use until the 1330s. This is longer than archaeologists reckon – it’s that signboard again. They give Caer Brân a short active life, on the basis that a gap in the ‘ramparts’ in the southwest of the enclosure represents an unfinished segment, and that, ergo, the enclosure was abandoned at the end of its construction.
This seemingly logical conclusion seems to me to be flimsy. Abandoning a project that is 95% complete is a bit strange. The abandonment idea was probably adopted in the days when archaeologists saw Caer Brân as a ‘hillfort’ built for defensive purposes. But, nationwide, the majority of hillforts were not built for this – especially in Penwith, where there are no signs of prehistoric conflict. There is no evidence of outright abandonment of Caer Brân either – it’s a best guess. No, I think that gap was deliberate. However, I cannot figure out why it was built so, and this question needs more work.
While we’re here, it’s worth observing that the second roundhut toward the southwest edge of the enclosure, marked on Craig Weatherhill’s survey, is also at the crossing point of four local alignments and close to the Pordenack to Castle an Dinas solar alignment, which crosses Caer Brân off-centre. From this we can surmise that this was probably no ordinary residential roundhut, instead having some sort of magical meaning. If alignments pass through a roundhut, in my experience it is likely that it was not residential in purpose.
In a moment of vision, I saw twentyish elders sitting in an arc, presiding over long discussions. I feel this was the political meeting place in Penwith. What came to me was this: it took until 1800 BCE to build Caer Brân because only by that date had the newly-colonised south of Penwith really been fully established. The south was colonised in the Bronze Age as population grew and bronze tools for clearing trees and land came into common use, probably around 2200-2000 BCE. A gradual southward population move would follow, shifting the balance of population. Until then the traditional power centre was around Chûn, Carn Galva and Zennor Hill in the north.
So by 1800 the centre of gravity had shifted south. The Boscawen-ûn and Merry Maidens stone circle complexes had been built, together with strings of menhirs, and the area had been opened up. By then, about half of Penwith was forested. Areas were cleared with landscape perspectives and sightlines in mind – these avenues highlighting features in the wider landscape were a key part of an ancient site and the geomantic thinking behind it. The Bronzies were not the nature-rapists that we moderns have become, and felling trees manually and harvesting their timbers was a big, slow job. They did it thoughtfully, needing to keep the gods and spirits happy too. So they felled trees selectively, creating a parkland landscape with open, grazed areas and patches of wildwood.
This is probably why it took until 1800 BCE for Caer Brân to be built. Only by then did people realise there was a need for it. Or perhaps only then did the perceived need override the inertia of carrying on as they’d always done. It’s the connectedness and centrality of this place that is a large part of its reason for being. But in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age it was not central to people’s lives – it became so in the Mid-Bronze Age, by 1800 BCE.
Castle an Dinas, Penwith’s other big gathering site, is very visible from Caer Brân. The summer solstice sun rises above it. Clearly they were connected, though they probably served contrasting or complementary purposes. There is evidence of trading at Castle an Dinas, and it is likely that it hosted gatherings at other times of year such as Beltane and Samhain. Two astronomical alignments from its centre suggest this: one to Trencrom Hill and the other to Conquer Cairn. Gatherings were possibly held at summer solstice too – suggested by the solstice alignment from Caer Brân. I get the feeling there was more socialising and celebration at Castle an Dinas than at Caer Brân. Perhaps Castle an Dinas needs further investigation.
Caer Brân stood near the crossroads of two major trackways. So I think this is an ideal place for a kind of parliament, for decision-making moots and occasions for the settling of inter-clan issues. Decisions would not only have involved discussion but also deep-level processes, consultation with the gods and the ancestors – perhaps up on Bartinney. There would be meetings with relatives and old friends from around the peninsula, social rites, discussions and late-night ceilidhs around campfires – a festival for a few hundred people, for 3-4 days.
Downhill there’s a smaller, non-circular enclosure. I asked what this was for. A simple answer came: animals. I saw two possibilities. In between gatherings they probably kept animals in Caer Brân to graze and mow it, moving them down to the lower enclosure for the duration of a festival. Alternatively, when horses came into use around the 1500s, it was where they kept the horses. In other words, methinks the lower enclosure was built to serve practical purposes.
The Belerion Project is a citizen research project and stream of consciousness in West Penwith. We seek to encourage psycho-intuitive investigation of the ancient sites of West Penwith, and hopefully to make such work more systematic. It’s in its early stages at present. At minimum participants will acquire a habit of building up their skills in such intuitive work, and keeping and collating notes. Possibly, after a few years, a comprehensive body of work might emerge too – an energy survey and magical assessment of Penwith’s major ancient sites.
If it interests you to join the project and you live in or near Penwith, check out the Belerion link below and come on a field trip. This project can run alongside archaeological research and, I believe, contribute many clues. Of which I hope this study has a few!
So this has been a study of a site that is, I believe, underestimated in its significance and importance. It is very central in Penwith, and its main remains are simply a circular embankment in a prominent hilltop place. But I suggest that it was the place where people periodically assembled to discuss and sort out tribal matters concerning the whole of Penwith. And if not this, then what?
Last Saturday, at the Pathways to the Past weekend in St Just, Cornwall, organised by CASPN, I gave a rather kaleidoscopic talk with copious maps about a big idea: Penwith as one big ancient site with 600 components to it.
If you were there, you might want to peer through the maps and hear it again. If you weren’t there and it interests you, well, you can hear it whenever you wish.
It’s two hours long, so save it for a rainy day or a quiet evening.
I really enjoyed giving this talk. It was great speaking to a group with local knowledge and an understanding of the subject.
If you don’t know Cornwall but you’re into ancient sites, you’ll still get something from this. For Penwith, dense with sites, is one of the fifteen or so key megalithic regions of the Isles of Britain.
At the other end of Britain is Orkney. Penwithians and Orcadians, between us, anchor Britain and stop it floating away.
I believe we’re coming to a time now where it will help to widen and deepen the spectrum of evidence we deem to be acceptable in studying prehistory, to see what else we find and come to understand. The schism between archaeology and geomancy is something best left in the twentieth century, methinks.
This is about the ancient sites of West Penwith in Cornwall, where I live. It runs through the prehistory of this area from the Mesolithic, through the Neolithic and the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, featuring particularly the megalithic periods of the Neolithic and Bronze Age – the time of the quoits, menhirs and stone circles.
It will be of interest to locals in Cornwall, or people from elsewhere who visit our ancient sites, or people with a general interest in prehistory and megalithic times.
It’s in four episodes – and for binge-listeners there’s a three-hour omnibus edition. If you prefer reading, there’s a PDF version of this short book that can be read on-screen or printed out.
Originally it was part of my book Shining Land, about the ancient sites of West Penwith, but I took it out because it made Shining Land too long. It works well on its own.
Britain has had two periods of national greatness. One was the 250-year empire-building period in relatively recent times, and the other was the Bronze Age and a megalithic civilisation that lasted a thousand years. This is its story, as it happened in West Cornwall, one of the hubs of megalithic activity in NW Europe 4,000 years ago.
If this interests you, I hope you enjoy the book! It’s free to stream or download.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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