West Penwith – Notes from the Far Beyond

Amendments

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.

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.

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.

Love, Palden

Shining Land: https://www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/
Power Points in Time: https://penwithpress.co.uk/product/power-points-in-time/
Podcasts from the Far Beyond: https://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Notes from the Far Beyond: https://penwithbeyond.blog

Aluna

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.

https://youtu.be/ftFbCwJfs1I?si=CgtlNYLO-cFopmSH

About Caer Brân

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).

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?

LINKS
ancientpenwith.org – about Penwith’s geomancy and alignments (the original Ancient Penwith website)
ancientpenwith.org/maps.html – maps of Penwith’s and Cornwall’s ancient sites and alignments
ancientpenwith.org/even-more-maps.html – loads more maps
palden.co.uk/shiningland/ – Shining Land, a book by Palden about Penwith’s ancient sites
ancientpenwith.org/belerion.html – about the Belerion Project
palden.co.uk/caspn.html – The Geomancy of West Penwith, a recent two hour illustrated audio talk given at the annual CASPN Pathways to the Past weekend.

The Geomancy of West Penwith

Or at least, some of it!

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.

With love, Palden

https://palden.co.uk/caspn.html

Big Chief, a simulacrum at Pordenack Point

#leylines #Penwith #cornishancientsites #neolithiccornwall #cornisharchaeology #bronzeagecornwall #penzance # caspn # paldenjenkins #geomancy #dowsing

Turning the Inside Out

Bosigran Castle, a cliff sanctuary in West Penwith

I wasn’t expecting to be alive now. Just over five years ago, it genuinely felt as if it was ‘game over’. But after a year or two I was still here and marginally improving – as it goes with the blood cancer I have, Multiple Myeloma. I’d become partially disabled, ageing ten or more years (it felt different on different days), and squeezed through a big change with no going back. Many elements of my old life were now outside my range of physical and mental possibilities – though, to compensate, my spirits went through a big boost.

This boost was partially a ‘gift of God’ and partially I chose to take it that way. Though perhaps there was only one option. It was a choiceless choice, really. Gifts of God can be like that.

Even so, after two years, early in 2022 I sank into a deep, dark, muddy, wintertime crisis. Hm, this gift was grinding me down, squeezing and pushing me to see how far I could go. Astrologically, Neptune was opposing my Saturn – a revelation of uncomfortable truths, old shadows, limitations, inhibitions and self-sabotaging patterns. Again, I got used to the idea that I might be approaching ‘game over’. There I was, deteriorating, 90% dead and hovering. Part of me was withdrawing from life, giving up, feeling worn out. My hope account was overdrawn.

Then something started happening which, again, wasn’t on my roadmap. By springtime 2022 I started emerging from the shadowlands and reviving. Not back to where I’d been before, but to a new place. I wasn’t ‘better’, yet something in me was lighting up. Something was slotting into place.

Looking back from here, I was going through an archetypal, deep-self change. It necessitated a systems-reboot – a slough of despond trip. Archetype-change is a deep thing, hardly conscious, though clues come through at odd moments. I had no sense of the archetypal identity I was receiving or adopting, yet I could feel the change. There was a feeling of lostness, a lack of anchorage, together with an as yet shapeless feeling of new-foundness. I was switching tracks.

At different phases of our lives, deep down, we live out a succession of selfhoods and archetypes. An archetype is universal, but archetypes of a more personal kind mould themselves around us, our characters and our trans-life storylines. Through these selfhoods we plug into more universal archetypes, acting them out in the context of our lives and our available life-possibilities. These change and develop over time. That is, we learn – sometimes whether we like it or not!

In my experience, one selfhood can be dominant for a period of life while others operate as sub-threads or sub-personalities. Then, at critical points, major life-changes come and a rearrangement can occur. This, for me, is connected with other lives I’ve had, or am yet to have.

In Jungian psychology they talk of twelve classic archetypes: everyman, the innocent, the hero, outlaw, explorer, creator, ruler, magician, lover, caregiver, jester and sage. Well, that’s not a bad attempt, though such classifications of higher-dimensional forms can be rather limiting.

What was slotting into place was perhaps a variant of the sage, spiced with a dash of the creator and the ruler. Deep down, I’ve always been rather old in character, an inbuilt patriarch and natural leader, but something didn’t quite fit when I was younger. I didn’t handle it well and, though a lot was achieved, I came in for painful criticism. As an older soul in a younger body and personality, there was a disjunction. There was guilt hiding in there too, with impostor syndrome and a feeling I wasn’t good enough.

I managed to step out of that around age 42 – helped, no less, by a bunch of ETs. When I asked them whether I was the right person to work with them, they simply said I was the first person they’d encountered for a long time who needed no preparation. Boom – that rather changed things. I’d been kinda talent-spotted by them.

But there’s an advantage to self-doubt, as long as you don’t loiter too long in its shadows: it makes you work hard at life and become good at whatever you’re attempting to do. During my forties I was getting things more right.

Later in life, this ‘old soul’ thing suddenly began making more sense. Cancer came along, inducing a rapid ageing, physically and psychologically. I was in my early seventies and cancer pushed me into my eighties. Suddenly, ‘old soul’ started to fit.

I was starting on a new path. Which was strange, because I had thought I’d reached the end! People were beginning to call me an elder, though I had reservations – especially when standing alongside my friend Ba Miller, who is a sprightly 92. Certainly I was a veteran, having been through stuff that ‘sensible’ people wouldn’t touch. But in true Aspie fashion, I tend not to do fashionable things, and elderhood was becoming fashionable and I didn’t want to sit in that box.

However, in 2022, when I had to work hard at staggering five metres from my bed to the kitchen, I realised something about elderhood. If you’re wizened with experience and advancing in age, and getting to a disabled stage where you just can’t do things and participate in things as you once did, you start moving from veteran to elder. But if you’re still involved in all sorts of concerns and rushing around fixing the world, you might be a veteran but something hasn’t happened yet.

It has to do with dependency and helplessness. Worldly reality and our involvement with it change bigtime. There’s a lot you can no longer do, and death’s hollow eyes are eyeballing you. On the approach to death you acquire a growing incapacity to control things. Ultimately, death is pretty much the most out-of-control thing we ever encounter in life – though birth, sex and life’s rollercoaster do at times come close.

This helplessness forces levels of acceptance that are deeply transformative. Acceptance leads to revelations about the true nature of things. At death, the money you earned and spent is of little relevance – and if it is, perhaps you have a problem. What’s important is what you’ve really done – and what you’ve not done and might have done. It’s about the balance of goodness and harm you’ve brought, the lessons you’ve learned and taught, and the net effect and the underlying meaning of it all – and how it all ended up.

I had an earlier archetypal change at age fifty on the year of the Millennium – astrologically, on a Pluto square Sun and Chiron Return. It was a dark-night-of-the-soul year when I was obliged to question everything I’d done thus far, after thirty years ‘on the campaign trail’. Had I got it all wrong? Was the world going down the tube?

Two deep messages came through: head for the heart of darkness, and do only those things that people ask you to do. Not long after, Palestinians asked me, and I found myself getting involved more and more with them. It was a risky decision but it had an overwhelming feeling of rightness and inevitability to it – it was a classic choiceless choice.[1]

Archetypally, this represented a transition from the imprint of a medieval Muslim holy warrior during my life in the 1980s-90s, to that of an early 20th Century Austrian aristocratic philanthropist in the early 2000s. With the first, I was running camps, editing books and playing a prominent role in Glastonbury, working in the ‘new age’ sphere, and with the second I was involved in humanitarian and geopolitical issues, particularly with Palestine and Syria.

As for the aristocrat, our dynasty, the Habsburgs, had fallen when I was twentyish and I’d spent my twenties and thirties in that life campaigning with other Habsburgs for the uniting of Europe. In WW2 I was a diplomat, involved in discreet manoeuvrings and string-pulling.

And guess what? In this life, when I was sixteen in 1966, I won a schools’ public speaking championship giving a notes-free talk on, of all things… why we should join the European Community (as it was called then). That’s an example of the way that stuff leaks over from other lives into our current life – whether or not we’re aware of it.

In that early 20th Century life, it all ended suddenly at age 46 in a bombing or fire, at the end of WW2. I died with a painful feeling that demanded deep self-forgiveness: despite my efforts as a philanthropist and diplomat, people’s needs in WW2 were so great that I and others like me just couldn’t do enough to help. I felt that responsibility heavily. For every person I could save, ten or a hundred would die. It was an enormous, tragic challenge riddled with oversized moral dilemmas.

Many things suddenly ended in this life too when, in 2019, I keeled over with cancer. Except the chop didn’t come down fully. Instead I was shoved through the mill and squeezed into a different shape – literally. One day, as I was emerging from the 2022 crisis, a rather loud voice within said, in no uncertain terms: “Ah, before you go, there’s something more we’d like you to do”. Part of me groaned and part of me lit up – that’s my pattern.

So now I’m sitting in a new archetypal selfhood. I’ve got the gist of it and am sitting in it, and it’s playing itself out as life goes on each day. In character it’s aged, wizened, megalithic British, fragile and yet strangely strong and lively in spirit.

I did a regression with my friend Jen.[2] When she counted me down I was immediately there, in that version of me, in that time – perhaps the early Bronze Age around 2200 BCE. I was at Bosigran Castle, here in Penwith, at a summertime gathering of our people – a few hundred of them. I was sitting in what I call the ‘druid’s chair’ – people who know Bosigran will easily guess the place. As Jen was counting me down I sank into the granite, melding with it. Despite its solidity, something in me was expanding and extending toward infinity. I realised this wasn’t the ‘druid’s chair’, it was the ‘oracle’s chair’. I wasn’t the oracle, though I was permitted to sit in the chair.

There was an emotional twist to this. As a Bronze Age druid I was peripatetic – I had renounced my home as part of my druidic vows. Here at Bosigran I felt as if I was amongst ‘my people’, except they weren’t my people, though they were welcoming and I stayed with them when I could. I was in charge of the longterm festivals in the isles of Britain – the ones that happened once every twelve or sixty or 500 years. I was at home here in Penwith, but I had to move on – the next stop was in the Glastonbury direction. That’s my story: I’ve always been part of many tribes, always having to move on.

Archetypal shifts come to us all at certain times, though it depends greatly on how much we tune into them and act them out, in the context of our lives and possibilities. Or do we conceal ourselves, playing safe and hanging back from the callings of our souls? This is where free-will comes into play, though ultimately there is only one answer and we know what it is.

Spirit has a plan. When I was younger, I feared disability more than death. The idea of landing up in a wheelchair put the shits up me. Well, the soul delivers specially customised lessons. Eventually I was indeed given disability, though it came later in life so that I could do other things first. It was tailor-made for me – a partial disability, carefully designed to confront me on issues that were specifically mine and even give me a few benefits. The disability was enough to change my life but not too much to completely incapacitate me. It has opened up a new, strangely different chapter of life, with some lenience and mercy to it. Brilliant. Just enough, and not too much.

Seeing things this way has been really useful. What I like about working with past-life regression is this: it isn’t just a matter of gaining information about other lives. That’s useful, but it’s not the whole deal. For me, regression connects me up with those lives more consciously and kinetically – an energy-exchange is set up. The interactive circuitry between me and my other lives has been more fully activated, and they’re cooperating far more.

Inputs from other lives into this life can happen unconsciously, or they can be permitted more consciously – that’s our choice. Bringing them to greater consciousness tends to make them less problematic and more of an asset. Besides, they are there anyway, operating as aspects or sub-personalities of ourselves that sometimes jostle to express themselves.

In a few of my lives I’ve been a public figure – known by large numbers of people, for all sorts of reasons – and, in this life it has helped greatly to understand things in these terms. That’s quite complex. Old lieutenants, friends, wives, foes, fathers, rivals and followers have reappeared and, while this is the stuff of life, it’s also an enactment of bigger narratives on a deeper level. Some of these narratives we can tap into, and others remain a mystery – something that we will perhaps only see and understand in the fullness of time.

Photo by Selina al-Mukhtar. (The rest are by me.)

For this is not really about time, about the linear passage of the future through the present to the past. We are all extensions of the soul, and each of our lives is a bit like an arm of an octopus. Soul exists in a ‘quantum’ realm where time and space do not exist. It extends and inserts itself into time and space through the different lives we live. These are lived in differing situations and historical periods, each acting out amazing variations of a basic, core story that threads through all of our lives.

But, from the viewpoint of soul, all of these lives are being lived and experienced simultaneously. Not exactly at the same time, because there is no time when you’re outside time. But the same soul experiences and computes the whole lot. It doesn’t get involved in the day-to-day details, but it does attend to the overall story.

In these day-to-day, year-to-year details we have a lot of free-will, if we exercise it. This involves aligning a multiplicity of day-to-day details with the wider, deeper story – at least to the extent that we can do it in each life. But equally we can choose to resist, divert or screw up the narrative – and the consequences go into a pile of learnings and corrections we sooner or later will need to go through.

Looking uphill from Bosigran. Carn Galva, a Neolithic Tor, is on the left

Going back to the starting theme of this blog… I still have no idea how long I’m supposed to be here. Many people blithely instruct me to think positively and have a determinedly long life, as if to protect them from facing the facts of death. But then, once in a while, I’ll have a choking fit or a sudden dangerous wobble to remind me that my account could be terminated at any moment. Sorry, but we don’t choose in advance the moment and manner of our passing. It’s possible to feel it coming, but the time and circumstance are unknowns.

This is the case for everybody, but it’s rather different when cancer or another terminal illness comes along. It becomes an acute question that can’t be set aside. Before cancer came, I assumed life would go on and I didn’t have to think about it. But cancer placed a yawning gap in front of me, demanding a fundamental change in attitude. Life became a very temporary thing.

This unpredictability seems to have been a necessary precondition for the emergence of the new archetype that has been surfacing over the last three years. I seem to be on a new mission, though the duration and extent of it remains a mystery. It’s all a matter of making provisional plans based on contingencies and possible realities.

I mean, what on Earth am I doing starting (with others) a new project, when my life’s going down the drain? But there’s something about the approaches to death that accentuates remaining, outstanding issues – things that need to come to some sort of completion before we go.

At present I’m involved with starting the Belerion Project, researching the ancient sites of West Penwith.[3] I cannot be its leader because the clock is ticking on me, so I need to render myself expendable from the beginning. That’s a happy challenge and a refreshing change, for a rather reluctant and jaded leader-type like me.

This project means a lot to me on a deep level – something to do with connecting with the deep memory of an ancient British selfhood. A selfhood who sat in the Oracle Chair at Bosigran, shrinking into the quartz to probe the depths. A man of knowledge who had realised that – as my Tibetan teacher Gyalwa Karmapa once put it – it’s all just like a fart in the Void.

The whole lot… a pile of crap. Life is a surprisingly rapid foray into a very strange world. And here we all are, doing a funny dance on Planet Earth. But remember, the idea behind educational courses is to graduate and then move on, readied for service.

With love, Palden

FOOTNOTES

1. For my three books about Palestine: www.palden.co.uk/pop/
2. Jen Stokes, regressionist, lives and works in Penzance (find her on Facebook).
3. The Belerion Project: www.ancientpenwith.org/belerion.html

Prehistoricals

A HISTORY OF PENWITH’S PREHISTORY

I’ve produced another audiobook. (The other two are about my cancer process and my times in Palestine).

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.

With love, Palden.

www.palden.co.uk/penwithprehistory.html

Ancient Cartographicals

West Penwith, at the far end of Cornwall

It’s funny how sometimes we fall into things unwittingly, then to find that they take up years of our lives. This is what happened with my research into the ancient sites of the area where I live, in West Penwith, Cornwall. It all started one day when I was sitting chatting with Cheryl Straffon, an archaeologist and goddess-oriented pagan who for decades has been a key person here, bringing together a full spectrum of prehistorians, from archaeologists to pagans, and editing Meyn Mamvro, a magazine about Cornish archaeology and earth mysteries.

We were talking about John Michell who, in the 1960s-70s, brought the idea of leylines, sacred landscapes and earth mysteries to wider attention in a seminal 1969 book The View over Atlantis. John came to Penwith, doing fieldwork here to demonstrate his point, producing a catalogue of ninetyish ancient site alignments in Penwith, about which he wrote in his 1974 book The Old Stones of Land’s End.

I asked Cheryl whether anyone had made a map of the alignments John had found. No, she said. Hmmm. In former times, I had made a map of the alignments around Glastonbury… “Would it help if I made an alignments map of Penwith?“. “Oooh, yes, it would.“

I thought at first that it might be easier than it turned out to be. It landed up being seven years of work, starting in 2014, and it still gets tweaks and updates now. I’d had one of those falling-into-things moments, just then.

Carn Galva, a classic Neolithic Tor and the *axis mundi* or world centre of Neolithic Penwith – as seen from Caer Brân

Things had changed since I did the Glastonbury map, hand-drawn in 1982 and revised around 2003. Aerial satellite mapping had arrived on internet. For alignment-oriented geomancers like me this greatly changed the equation, opening up many new possibilities and making alignments maps easily accessible online to the public.

At the beginning it came clear that a genuinely useful map would need to show all of the known ancient sites in Penwith. But there are more than 800 of them, big and small, surviving or destroyed, so this was no small job. They were listed in a variety of online databases which, to complicate things, sometimes gave differing or inaccurate information, so every single site had to be examined closely.[1] I spent months trawling through these sources and building up a base map on which later to mark alignments. Later on I continued the mapwork to cover Scilly and the whole of Cornwall.

Some sites were difficult to confirm, being disappeared, disputed or subject to discussion. Some were visible in the field and others, now destroyed, were beyond trace, though many are mentioned in antiquarians’ records from former times – especially those of one called Dr William Borlase, who tramped around Penwith in the mid-1700s.[2]

Eventually I completed a map of Penwith’s sites. Then it was a matter of working through John Michell’s list of ninetyish alignments, plus others found since his time and listed in Meyn Mamvro.

One can argue till the end of time about the validity of megalithic alignments and sceptics love to do so, claiming an assumed authority of scientific rationality when, to me, all that these complaints demonstrate is that sceptics have not properly researched the matter. There is a simple, evidential, inescapable fact: ancient sites are commonly located in exact alignment with each other. This can be seen and checked by anyone on maps and in the field.

That’s the evidence, whether or not we have an explanation. It happens too much, too exactly and with too many supporting details to be a case of chance or randomness. There are discernable patterns to the specific nature of differing alignments – some are made up solely of cairns or menhirs (standing stones), or they link sites of similar antiquity, or they make some sort of sense in a wide variety of ways. Some alignments are even parallel.

If you look at the online map of Penwith’s alignments [3] it looks like a meaningless jumble with only a modicum of order to it. There’s a ridiculously large number of alignments and it’s difficult figuring out how and why the megalith builders went to the trouble of setting things up like this.

But when you look closer at individual alignments and the sites they connect, they begin making more sense. It’s worth remembering that the ancients walked everywhere, so a lot more happened for them in the space of a mile than it does for us, speeding along in our cars and looking at overview maps.

What is most interesting is that alignments stretch not just between man-made sites, but they also involve natural sites such as hilltops, carns (outcrops) and cliff promontories. The whole system is based on these prominent points – I call them ‘base sites’. The pattern of ancient sites is draped over the three-dimensional canvas of the Penwith landscape and arranged around it. There are also astronomically-oriented alignments and other factors such as energy-vortices, underground and overground energy lines, site intervisibility and even geometry that are involved in the positioning of ancient sites. [For more on this, here’s a talk by me.]

Entering Michell’s ninety alignments on the map, I found that only two were inaccurate and implausible, and I removed them. He had done good, accurate work. While making the map and checking the alignments, I started finding new ones and, before long, the list of alignments grew bigger. Some were found logically, by examining a chosen site to check for alignments, and some were found intuitively, happening on them ‘by chance’. After visiting sites around the fields and moors of Penwith, I would come home to examine their location and possible alignments, sometimes adding a few that way.

Late one evening I had a Eureka moment. I was thinking about Cape Cornwall, a conical-shaped headland in a marine context, and St Michael’s Mount, a conical-shaped island in a marine context (though originally it stuck out of the forest on dry land). They are rather similar. I wondered whether there was a connection. I looked on the map and, lo behold, a line between them intersected a collection of four Bronze Age barrows on top of the hill on the farm where I live!

Gosh. I had sat many times on those barrows.[4] They are not well-known because, being on what’s now a boggy heather-moorland hill, they look unimpressive, but their 360-degree panoramic location is spectacular. In the Bronze Age they would have been far more attractive, situated on sweet hilltop meadows – the climate was more agreeable 4,000 years ago than it is now.

Then I started looking for further alignments emanating from St Michael’s Mount and Cape Cornwall. Within an hour I had found quite a few. This doesn’t happen very often – I’ve never had such a big discovery of new alignments before or since. These proved to be a new kind of alignment that John Michell and others had not seen.

John was looking at constructed Bronze Age sites such as stone circles, menhirs, cairns and barrows, which were built from around 2400 BCE onwards. The new alignments I had found involved Neolithic sites from a millennium earlier, and natural sites such as granite tors and cliff headlands. These alignments acted differently to Michell’s Bronze Age ones, covering longer distances and with fewer points on them. I called them ‘backbone alignments’ – alluding to the main system of fibre-optic cables that connects the internet globally. Connecting Neolithic and natural sites, these alignments were clearly far older than John’s Bronze Age ones.

The very first constructed sites in Penwith, Neolithic tor enclosures, were built around 3700 BCE – over a millennium before the stone circles. There were four – Carn Galva, Carn Kenidjack, Trencrom Hill and St Michael’s Mount – and one outside Penwith that features in its landscape, Carn Brea near Redruth.

Many of the newly-discovered backbone alignments also stretched to what I call cliff sanctuaries. Archaeologists call them cliff castles – a term that persuades many people to believe they were used for defensive purposes, which I would argue they were not. They are customarily dated to the Iron Age around 300 BCE, long after the megalithic period, because Iron Age remains are found on them. But the new alignments, associating them with Neolithic sites, suggest they were much older in the first use. Neolithic artifacts have been found at some cliff sanctuaries, but these have not caused them to be properly re-dated to this early time.

Then came the clincher. I found that Lanyon Quoit, one of the key Neolithic sites of Penwith, built around 3600 BCE, was located exactly at the intersection of three of these alignments. In other words, Lanyon Quoit could not have been placed where it is without these three alignments being known at the time – it was positioned to align with two cliff sanctuaries and three Neolithic tors. This definitely re-dates the cliff sanctuaries to the Neolithic, also making them far more important than they previously were understood to be.

Penwith’s four surviving stone circles are all located on backbone alignments. The Merry Maidens, for example, are located exactly on an alignment stretching between Carn Brea and St Michael’s Mount, both Neolithic tors, and Treryn Dinas, a cliff sanctuary. These three natural sites happen, strangely, to be aligned with each other (there are a number of such cases in Penwith). So the stone circle was located there to reinforce the alignment and to draw on the antiquity and earlier primacy of the three Neolithic sites, which came from what in the Bronze Age was a distant former time, some 1,500ish years before.

Eventually, the alignments map of Penwith became really busy with alignments – around 250 of them. They were all genuine alignments, accurate to within 10ft or 3 metres, checked and verified by three people – so this was not a product of sloppy mapping, wishful thinking or ley-hunting zeal.

Alignments are not energy-lines of the kind that is picked up by earth energy dowsers. They are different, even though overground energy lines, like alignments, are also straight. Some overgrounds coincide with alignments, but we yet need to find out the extent to which this is the case.

Trencrom Hill (foreground) and Carn Brea (background) – two Neolithic tors

I’m of the opinion that alignments are not actually lines that are detectable in the landscape. Some dowsers might disagree, but I think they might be picking up on overground energy-lines, or perhaps the thought that links the two sites involved. Instead, it seems that, when a new site was being built, it was simply aligned with other sites in order, presumably, to associate it with them. If you line up five or six objects on a table with gaps between them, aligning them nevertheless gives their distribution some order and coherence. Rendering order out of seeming chaos was important to the ancients. But aligned sites don’t seem to have a connecting current like overground energy-lines do.

It seems to me that aligned sites are instead programmed with the same algorithm, so that they pulsate and resonate with each other, as if tuned to each other. But there isn’t a ‘wire’ connecting them – it’s an internal, implicit connection. It works a bit like what physicists call ‘quantum entanglement’, and as an informational rather than an energetic relationship. An energetic relationship is created by energy-lines that dowsers identify, but alignments don’t do this. So we’re talking here about two different circuitries that each focused on the same ancient sites. And it’s the sites, not the lines, that matter most.

Many ancient sites are thus placed exactly where they are to align them with other sites, though there is no ‘pipe’ connection between them. Instead, they seem to be remotely associated, programmed with the same intent, frequency or behavioural patterns, so that they do similar things at similar times and in similar ways. But they aren’t necessarily directly connected, unless there is also an energy-line between them.

Thus, the Boscregan West cairn, a prominent clifftop cairn on Penwith’s west coast, is aligned with the Neolithic longbarrow on Chapel Carn Brea, and with the now-destroyed Tregurnow stone circle, which was part of the Merry Maidens complex. So these three sites, associated with each other, somehow co-resonated. Or, put another way, two Bronze Age sites, Boscregan cairn and Tregurnow stone circle, were plugged into a Neolithic site on Chapel Carn Brea.

The cliff sanctuaries, embracing the Radiant Land

Interesting, huh? The megalith-builders had quite sophisticated ideas. They weren’t building ancient sites just to decorate the landscape or because it was a nice thing to do. It was a lot of work. They can only have done it because they perceived a definite benefit.

Here’s a much bigger idea. The density of sites and alignments in Penwith, and the way they seem to be integrated into complex relationships with each other, suggest that they operate as one big system. The fundamental substructure is marked out by backbone alignments (yellow on the map), and while the profusion of local alignments (red on the map) seems chaotic to our eyes, it has a certain order of its own. They all seem to make up one big system.

This leads us to the idea that Penwith is an integrated and perhaps super-charged landscape with hundreds of constituent components to it, big and little. That’s the way we should think about it, and not as a disparate scatter of separate sites. After all, Penwith’s ancient name is Belerion – the radiant land – and a place doesn’t pick up a name like that without good reason.

While Penwith’s stone circles and other sites are each modest in size when compared with Stonehenge, Avebury or Callanish, together they make up an enormous system contained by a necklace of cliff sanctuaries and studded with many subsystems. They constitute what can be regarded as a single, big ancient site that is draped over the peninsula’s natural topography and energy-centres.

Each stone circle has a complex or constellation of lesser sites around it – mainly menhirs and barrows. These supporting sites and the surrounding landscape vista exist as an integral part of the stone circle to amplify its purpose – a stone circle doesn’t exist in isolation. In the case of Boscawen-ûn and the Merry Maidens the surrounding agricultural landscape of hedges and fields obscures their wider complexes, but at Tregeseal and the Nine Maidens, located in wilder landscapes, they are more visible.

Tregeseal, for example, sits in a perceptual bowl of hills with a westward vista featuring the Isles of Scilly – almost as if the sweep of hills collects energy from the cosmos to funnel it toward the Scillies. Each stone circle is associated with a hill or tor that is visible from it and a key part of its landscape setting. These complexes are whole systems. In turn, they are aligned with other sites further away, knitting the whole of Penwith into a wholeness.

The stone circles are located on backbone alignments plugged into Neolithic sites – tors and cliff sanctuaries which, in the heavy-forested Neolithic, were the only places where people could get out of the wildwoods. This changed in the Bronze Age, with far more cleared land, which enabled the building of stone circles, menhirs and cairns, but the stone circles, as the ‘cathedrals’ of the system, drew their primacy, authority or blessing from earlier Neolithic sites.

They are key nodes planted in a landscape energy-system with a natural, topographic, geological and subtle-energy foundation. The system fashioned itself around the lay of the land. Here we come to the idea of landscape temples, or whole landscapes that have been developed and consecrated by amping up the natural energies inherent in the land. This was done not only through ‘megalithic geoengineering’ at sacred sites but also through repeated, longterm consciousness-work by successive generations of people. This was an advanced deep-shamanic culture. They imprinted their sacred sites and landscape with repeated and reinforced psychic traces of the shamanic and spiritual practices they conducted over many centuries. They loved the land that gave them a life to live.

An approximate timeline for megalithic Penwith

There is a key aspect of ancient sites that archaeologists miss, and without it ancient sites cannot truly be understood: it concerns earth energy and its psychoactive effects, especially when they are focused and enhanced at man-made ancient sites. These effects cannot easily be detected scientifically, but any person with a modicum of awareness can feel them when visiting sites. We become changed in mood and spirit, sometimes feeling inspired, healed or as if our problems have evaporated. Some people are changed for life – for me, five decades of preoccupation with ancient sites began in 1970 in the Ring of Brogar, a stone circle in the Orkney Isles off Scotland.

These psychoactive effects are a key factor that should be considered ‘legitimate evidence’, regardless of whether or not it can be measured or slotted into existing scientific frameworks. You do not need a doctorate to feel these effects: simply note your feelings and state of being before you enter and after you leave a stone circle. There will be a real change of feeling. Fascinatingly, it can also be quite different in quality and effect each time you visit.

This, I suggest, is a key reason why the ancients went to so much trouble heaving stones around, digging and piling up earth, and doing regular, intentional, collective consciousness work at ancient sites. They spent centuries building up a sophisticated landscape-wide energy-system, and they must have perceived this massive infrastructure investment to be beneficial and worth the effort.

If they had been deluding themselves, it is unlikely that the Bronze Age megalithic period would have lasted 1,200 years. Delusions don’t tend to last that long. There was something very sensible and realistic about the megalithic geoengineering they developed. With our planetary problems of today, we might do well to learn more about what they were up to.

Here’s a final thought. Since right now the world is rather obsessed with warfare, we might also ask ourselves how and why West Penwith is one of the few parts of Britain that has never been invaded – not by Romans, Saxons, Vikings or Normans. In later times Penwith was quietly regarded as lying ‘beyond the reach of the king’s men’. We’ve had some medieval Corsair raids and in the last century or so a seasonal tourist invasion, but Penwith has never actually been invaded. But that, of course, is pure luck and chance, isn’t it?

NOTES:

The main sources were: Heritage Gateway, Historic England, Cornwall Council, Megalithic Portal, Modern Antiquarian, Meyn Mamvro, The Holy Wells of Cornwall map, The Atlas of Hillforts and snippets from other books and sources.
For a brief history of Penwith’s early antiquarians by Ian McNeil Cooke: www.ancientpenwith.org/menhirs/antiquarians.html
West Penwith alignments map: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1rZQT0gYvH9uD_nxg9f4sNByaHQbbBqTw&ll=50.124895599257094%2C-5.568005112493055&z=12
For a 32-min podcast from Botrea Barrows, called ‘Badger Setts and Platform Barrows’: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/palden-jenkins/episodes/Badger-Setts-and-Platform-Barrows-e297obl/a-aabjqc8

Chûn Quoit – Neolithic, around 5,700 years old. These were energy-chambers, not tombs.

Belerion

Belerion – the Shining Land
West Penwith as a Landscape Temple
Weds 18th December 2024
At The Hive, Penzance, Cornwall.

This is for people living in or near Cornwall. Audio recordings of the talk, with accompanying material, will appear online a week or so after the talk, for those who cannot attend.

In my talk in June about the ancient sites of West Penwith (worth a listen) I proposed that the whole of Penwith is one big ancient site – an enormous cliff sanctuary. It’s not just a scattering of stone circles, quoits, carns, menhirs and cairns. Why did ancient Penwithians bother to build so much of this ‘holy machinery’? What was their thinking and what did they seek to achieve?

I’ve been studying ancient sites since around 1970 in Britain, Scandinavia, Greece and Palestine. Since moving to Penwith in 2009, I’ve been working on mapping Penwith’s sites, researching their (John Michell-style) alignments, and divining some valuable psychic-intuitive clues concerning their possible meaning and function. These observations are outlined on the Ancient Penwith website and in my book Shining Land.

In the first half of this evening’s talk, I go further into the sacred energy-technology of Neolithic and Bronze Age Penwithians, and the patterns that suggest that they function as one big megalithic system. We’ll look into how it all took shape from the beginning, the functions of different kinds of ancient sites, and how it all fits together into one big geomantic system.

In the second half I propose what I feel needs to happen next, in terms of researching and working with Penwith’s ancient sites. We need to find out more about how they actually work, geomantically and energetically, and what we can do now to enhance and re-enliven their energy-fields and world-healing qualities – not just an hour-long ceremony now and then, but sustained energy-work, learning more about the specifics of how to do it.

Penwith is an ideal area for this kind of work because it is concise and contained, with plenty of ancient sites and people interested in them. Also, this is Cornwall, not England, and Oxbridge-style archaeological thinking is not the only way to understand megalithic civilisation – here in Penwith, out of sight and out of mind, we have an opportunity to frame things in a rather different way.

There is the possibility of starting a research project involving 10-20 people, in which (say) about forty local sites are surveyed, mapped and chronicled by dowsers and sensitives over (say) a three year period, for their subtle energy characteristics and place-memory. (See below for a shortlist of sites.)

Steadily and systematically, we can visit the sites and truly listen to what they want to say – not imposing our own ideas and predilections but letting the sites and the landscape speak, using methods such as pendulums, meditation, inner journeying and talking stick as research methodologies. Then a report (or a series of them) or a website can report on the findings uncovered by the project.

So I’m wondering out loud whether we need now to take things further, stepping beyond a ‘Wow’ stage to try realistically to penetrate the minds of the Neolithic and Bronze Age megalith builders, to uncover more about ancient sites’ energy-mechanics, their intention and usage, and what we can do about them now. That’s what this evening is all about and, if you can, you’re welcome to come and join in.

Full details are here: http://www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-penwith.html

With love, Palden.

The Magical Landscape of West Penwith

This is a recording of a talk I gave on Wednesday 19th in Penzance, here in Cornwall. It would interest anyone who knows and loves West Penwith, and also folks interested in geomancy and alternative prehistory.

It’s about energy-fields, ancient site alignments and the geomancy of ancient sites. I make a radical proposition that the hundreds of sites in Penwith all constituted components of one enormous ancient site covering the whole peninsula.

A collection of interesting maps is provided with the recording of the talk, which is 1hr 48mins long.

http://www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-prehistory.html

To follow in autumn in Penzance, there will be four monthly AHA classes, covering activism (changing the world), prehistory (more about Magic Penwith), power points in time (astrology and the way the tides of time move) and extraterrestrials (about life off and on Earth).

I’m speaking at the Glastonbury Symposium on Sunday July 28th, and I return to Glastonbury on my birthday on 5th September. The subject is ‘Sludging through the Void with Muddy Boots – and why ETs have spindly legs‘.

If you want a really special experience, you might consider coming to the Oak Dragon Camp, Friday 26th July to Sunday 4th August in Somerset. I’ll be there. www.oakdragon.org

With love, Palden

Hello, You

Welcome to a rather deep, wide and spirited cancer blog

This blog covers something I never thought I would land up writing about: my experiences as a person with cancer. Bone marrow cancer or myeloma.

And it’s about the wider and deeper life-issues I come upon. Matters of spirit and matters of being alive.

I also do podcasts – they’re here. I’m glad you’ve come.

Best wishes, Palden.

I live in West Penwith, Cornwall, in southwest Britain.

The red marker down on the left shows where I live, on an organic farm. Far beyond. Surrounded by the high seas.

For pics of Penwith, its cliffscapes and stone circles, click here.