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Les Jumelles Celtiques (the Celtic Twins)
The BSD Earth Energies Group on Tour in France – Summer 2007
The historical display board in the Abbee de Paimpont proudly and, I thought, rather pointedly stated that the Bretons are descended from people who migrated across the channel and are therefore essentially Britons (or at least Celts), rather than Francs. Even to a card carrying Saxon like myself, this seemed a good omen for a warm welcome – and we were not to be disappointed. There is indeed much in common between the people of the regions of the Atlantic Arc, as we were to find in our dowsing of the Archaeological sites en Bretagne.
Despite le Foret de Paimpont being the epicentre of the French version of the Arthurian legends, readers in Cornwall, England, Wales and Scotland who seek to lay claim to the intangible king will be pleased to know that this pretender is given the heavily romanticised treatment and even the official literature tacitly accepts the lack of evidence for placing him there. What the parallel mythology does show is a shared oral heritage of the Celtic peoples, which is born out by dowsing their prominent sites.
Le Table Ronde may not have been much in evidence, but there were a series of interesting sites in the Forest, many with equivalents in the British Isles. Le Jardin aux Moines, seemed to have little to do with either gardens or monks, but it is a scaled down version of the enigmatic Arthur’s Hall on Bodmin Moor – a series of energy spirals enclosed in a sacred space delineated by modest standing stones. This was the first time I had dowsed such a site outside of the UK. Les Fontaines (springs) de Bereton and Jouvence (youth) were surprisingly energetic holy sites, despite being all but swallowed up by the encroaching vegetation and then worn bare by the tourist footfall. Le Tombeau de Merlin was the saddest site of the week – its dozen or so stones having been cleared by a local farmer earlier in the last century and now consisting of just a couple of broken shards and a dead tree. Interestingly, I could find no site guardian in evidence. Le Tombeau du Geant dowsed as having been a chambered grave constructed from at least four former standing stones, the sites of which we traced nearby - such is the nature of the successive use of sacred sites. Probably the most energetic spot in this area was our last stop at the compact L’Hotie de Viviane – a full-on sacred site with crossing water, energy and ley lines, panoramic views and a site guardian to whom we inadvertently entrusted our bags. This is a hard site to find, even with the use of rods (!), but well worth seeking out.
Leaving Paimpont, we made a detour to visit Les Roches aux Fees (fairies) – a
massive, almost Disney-scale, version of a chambered tomb. With energy spirals in abundance and ‘blocking’ leys at either end, as well as across the structure - and some interesting trees in the vicinity too - this is a must-see site for anyone passing through northern France. Strangely surrounded by park benches and supported by just a few paragraphs of interpretation, this is one of the great understated wonders of both European Archaeology and Geomancy. The largest hoarding in the car park advertised a motorcycle scramble and the toilet was a classique hole-in-the-ground job, but the Roches themselves are a dowsers dream. Some of us found the energy almost too strong to handle, despite the stones being so accessible to all and sundry. Yours truly traced the former position of a prone outlier to a spot in the middle of the road, while Elspeth kept an eye on a no doubt somewhat bemused postal van making ts way up the tarmacadam towards me. The eccentric Brits had well and truly arrived.
On our way to Morbihan, we stopped off at another breathtaking site, Les Megalithes de Monteneuf. Only rediscovered in 1989, after a wild-fire cleared the area of vegetation, a veritable forest of megaliths has now been re-erected – by the side of a busy main road. Many of the menhirs compare to anything at Avebury – and here there are 400 of them! In fact there are so many objects, and the alignments and groupings are so complex, it’s difficult to know where to start in comprehending the energies associated with this extensive landscape. We traced various combinations of water and earth energies, visual and energy leys, Hartmann and Curry grids – but this is a site worth a week’s concentrated effort on its own and we just had to acknowledge the importance of it rather than try to disentangle its detail.
Arriving in le Golfe de Morbihan, it would have been tempting to rush straight to the gargantuan stone rows of Carnac and be lost there until the ferry arrived to go home, but there is much more to this magical area than its trademark multitude of menhirs.
Our visit to Carnac itself was actually quite a low key event – with good reason as it turned out. The main alignments are out of bounds for most of the year anyway, and we sought out a more easily accessible (if much less visited) location, still half-obscured by woodland. Here I found the same four-braided energy lines that I had only ever dowsed before at Merrivale and Drizzlecombe on Dartmooor – except at Carnacthey are braided across eight alignments and with intermediate braidings between the rows, seemingly kept in place by the auras of stones themselves. It’s a phenomenon that’s actually easier to dowse than to describe! We investigated the Hartmann/Curry energy grids in relation to the stone rows, as it had been suggested that these might form the template for the whole site. Our own dowsing implied this was not the whole story – and that the global grids could only potentially account for the placing of a proportion of the stones. We did pay a visit to the Geant de Manio – Carnac’s monolithic megalith that is only given some semblance of scale by the towering pine trees that surround it. In the glade in front of the Geant, Lesley found a pattern of energy spirals similar to that described by Guy Underwood. This is an unusual phenomenon, especially when it is laid out in such a geometrical format. To add further intrigue, we found a ‘map’ of this energy network etched on one of the inscribed stones at Gavrinis, later in the week.
Much of the rest of our dowsing focused on the definitive Breton site, the chambered tomb. In the Neolithic period, much of what is now the Golfe de Mobihan was dry (well probably increasingly marshy) land. Many of the important sacred sites were, as ever, on hilltops - and are consequently now on peninsulas and islands. The classic Breton chambered tomb has a substantial stone portico, a long stone-lined passage (or allee) and a number of side chambers. It is often covered by a mound of smaller stones forming a cairn and sometimes also has an earthen cover. Across Morbihan there are a string of such enigmatic sites, startling in their grand scale, surprising in their state of preservation - and really energetic.
Ceasar’s Tumulus is a stone and earth cairn, about half the size of Silbury Hill (from which Caesar allegedly surveyed his fleet). Nearby, Petit Mont near Arzon not only has a massive stone cairn, but also contains a whole unreconstructed WWII nazi gun emplacement. I had expected this site either to be sinister or full of sadness - but never expect anything when dowsing. Here the earth energy, water and ley lines all cross and spiral in a small former military room to produce an atmosphere that is light, bright and extremely uplifting. The sacred centre of this remarkable place is acknowledged only by a crude round mark scratched onto the modern floor – perhaps by the 28 members of the Ulster Dowsers who had preceded us by a few weeks. The chamber itself was quite dull by comparison – and it led us to muse if the tons of rusting steel in the reinforced concrete bunker was magnifying the force fields.
On the island of Gavrinis, the passage is lined with remarkable inscribed standing stones. Here the friendly and helpful young guide was having none of our cross-channel sequential-use-of-sacred-site stuff. The book said it was a tomb, so a tomb it was. On the adjacent bird sanctuary island of Er Lannick a stone circle is half engulfed by the rising sea level, leaving the impression of a group of stone people standing Canute-like on the beach. A twin second circle lies beneath the waves.
In Locmariaquer there are several chambered sites, of which Pierre Plates, now virtually on the beach, is probably the pick. Here we met an ‘informal’ guide, who spoke no English, but did have a couple of torches and got his own pendulum out when he realised he was among fellow eccentrics. The better known site, Le Table de Marchands, is nicely restored and has both an excellent stone cairn and a beautiful internal ‘altar’ stone with a runic pattern of carved ‘croziers’ - well that’s what the guidebook calls them. Here we got thoroughly drenched and retired to the gift shop!
In dowsing terms these ‘chambered tombs’ have much in common. A ley (usually a visual ley) crosses the entrance from the right at an angle of about 45°. The ley then goes through one or more of the chambers, with the whole massive structure of the passage sometimes seeming to bend to the left to stay on it. Along the confined allee is a series of between four and eight energy spirals, depending on the length of the structure, often in - or adjacent to - the chambers. There are usually two or three water spirals in the allee too – and very often a particularly strong one at the entrance. All of the ‘tomb’ sites we investigated seemed to have a clear astronomical component, usually solar, but occasionally lunar - and often associated with the midsummer sunrise. Even given the great passage of time and the damage and neglect of millennia, these sites are energetically very lively. Several times, I was caught unawares by the vigorous pull of the rods.
Our last site was a lesser-known example, beleaguered in an estate of holiday homes. It reminded me a little of the stone-filled bomb-site gaps between buildings that I had seen a child in Southampton in the early 1950s. It had many of the lines described above, but the ley was an energy ley which strode out across the mouth of the Gulf straight to a distant menhir on the opposite shore. Closer inspection found this to be a modern concrete sculpture of a Madonna and Child, more Unicef calendar than Celtic Christian shrine. Was this image smack on the line by chance, by intuitive placement, or had it usurped the site of a former standing stone? We shall have to return another year to find out.
Many thanks to all those Bretons (and Francs), who made our stay so enjoyable. Thanks also to Maria for putting so much work into a trip she was unable to undertake herself, and especially to Graham and Elspeth for getting the show on the road and for sharing some of their own special sites with us.
Nigel Twinn BSD Earth Energies Group