About seven months ago, in the snow, we first looked for a stone circle on the moor. Since then, I have examined why I feel megaliths have such significance and I have poked about Europe, waving dowsing rods in a hopeful, if rather inefficient manner, hoping to detect a pattern or two in the subtle energies of the earth. Today, we hunted that elusive stone circle for the last time.
Our first contender had been chosen because we thought this stone looked like a marker:
When the earth was covered in snow, we traced what we thought might be a small circle there. Today, we conceded that our circle had been a delusion affecting frost addled brains. The land looks very different under snow. Returning to that spot in late summer, it was hard for us to understand why we thought we had seen a circle there. We stood and scratched our heads for a while. We looked around. Then, it all started again. LSS had found something else.
Living with someone who is Good at Stuff can sap your strength, sometimes. One day, I am going to be right about something. It is a little treat I am storing up to enjoy.
He followed some whim, further into the bog. Drawn by ties of habit and matrimony, I followed him.
For heaven’s sake. I am the one with the dowsing rods, you know.
Some way from the path, he found this:
Small, granted, but it had the appearance of a menhir; perhaps one which had not been fed enough vitamins when young. It stood in what looked like the ghost of a circle:
It was not very impressive, but surely it was defined enough to start a rumour that there was a stone circle of sorts on this moor.
There was yet more fun to be had. Looking on, we could spot an extension. Just a short distance in a direct line from our baby menhir, a large rectangular stone stood out:
When we stood by that stone, we could see a lump further along on the same direct line. After a short trudge through a pleasant bog this was revealed as a small cairn:
When we stood, dripping, at the cairn and looked back, we traced the line back to the ‘marker stone’ we had found all those months ago. That completed a rough alignment of four noticeable features running north to south. It is only honest to point out here that I am not sure how wide the line would have to be in order to count. We squelched doggedly back along the line to the baby menhir. I fished the Y rod out of my rucksack and prowled around with it for five minutes. A couple of times, I thought I might have felt a tiny twitch, but that was all. Nothing exciting, I am afraid.
Perhaps the moor was a wild goose chase. There is no law against consenting adults chasing wild geese on Sunday afternoons. If the feature we found was an alignment, it was from the bargain range; in an esoteric supermarket, it would have a plain wrapper and be labelled in primary colours. I think, though, that we may have solved the mystery of the circle on the moor. It is a stone doing a passable impersonation of a small menhir, standing on a circular patch of stony earth, in a rough alignment with some noticeable landscape features. We may not have found much, but we had the thrill of the chase.
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