When it came to choosing where to spend her special birthday, I thought my wife, Ros, would probably pick somewhere warm. I had assumed that I would awake in some mild Mediterranean village or even on an exotic eastern adventure. So it was a bit of surprise to find myself in an English January, on a windswept island in the Bristol Channel.
To add to the sense of surreality, Ros chose to fulfil a lifetime's ambition of living in a lighthouse - albeit just for a few days. However, the unseen forces were with us throughout, and what could have been a highly disturbed break in the Island's major focal landmark, turned out to be just the two of us in a two-flat, nine-berth, Trinity House-built private gite.
Despite the age of the Old Light and its, no doubt, varied clientele over the decades, I found no negative energy there at all. Just two benign earth energy lines wandering through the accommodation - one being constantly reactivated as it passed through the open fire and, bizarrely, also two modern storage radiators. Does earth energy interact with central heating? - but I digress . . .
For the dowser, there was the added advantage that the lighthouse is located next to the island's graveyard - always a good place to start. This ancient cemetery contains four remarkable inscribed standing stones, which dowsed to having been former megalithic standing stones, subsequently 'Christianised' sometime before the 10th Century. I came up with a date rather later than that given in the guide book, but in the interests of not wishing to damage the ethical tourism of Lundy, I will freely accept that accurate dating of such things has never been one of my strong points.
The guide book also implies that the stones have probably been moved. My own dowsing answers indicated that two of the stones (including one not inscribed but standing close by) are in fact still in their original positions. Another one was formerly the marker of an important grave, around which the cemetery, and possibly the original chapel of St Ellen, grew up - and the remaining two were relocated standing stones from a series indicating a strong energy path traversing the island from north to south.
The path is still very clear today and in addition to those in the graveyard, there are another three rather weather-damaged and/or fallen menhirs still in their original places in the open fields - and a further one embedded, and perhaps tooled to shape, in the cemetery retaining wall.
We had an object lesson in the use of such way-markers on our return from the Island's pub late one evening, in the pitch dark and thick fog. Lundy is like a little bit of Dartmoor, cast off in the open sea and surrounded by steep cliffs. A few false steps in the days before farm walls and you could be in Davy Jones's Locker in very short order. What seemed a casual ten minute stroll across open grassland on the way out, turned into a much longer expedition across half a mile of featureless grey landscape coming back, to the ghostly accompaniment of the South Light fog siren. I didn't quite have to resort to my own rods, but you could see how someone without a modern torch, and relying on an internal sense of unseen energies, could make their way over seriously inhospitable terrain, with the use of some strategically placed marker stones, acting both as a psychological reassurance and as intuitive rechargers.
Ros felt the stones in the cemetery seemed like a row of 'people', and they certainly had distinctive auras. I could trace at least three bands, radiating outwards. The largest of the stones - and one of those apparently still in situ - had such a strong aura, that I asked if it was in fact located there as some kind of energy-based protection. I got the sort of positive reply which implied I had asked a dozy question, but it was a definite 'yes'.
By way of comparison, we also strolled (no-one moves quickly on Lundy) down to the Victorian church of St Helena. Clearly, a dowser would not expect much from a post-reformation church, and superficially that was the case. Just one earth energy line wanders across the aisle, with no reference to the architecture. However, after a decade of rod-waving, I have come to expect the unexpected. The modern, and presumably rarely used, font is almost at the centre of the confluence of the only two water lines in the building -and it is thus marked with a huge blue spiral which even St Ellen might have admired.
On the last day, while Ros was paying a final visit to the tower of 'her' lighthouse, I went back to the cemetery to carry on the research, but got a surprising 'no' to 'May I dowse here today?'.
Oh well, after a week of interesting wildlife, refreshing walks, a welcoming pub with a choice of real ales, a 'village' store that sells lots of organic treats, friendly locals, mixed - but very acceptable - January weather and some good dowsing thrown in, I couldn't really complain!
Lundy is highly recommended - take your rods - and it was so much more exciting than a few days of unseasonal sunshine.
Nigel Twinn
Tamar Dowsers
February 2004