Maker Church and Rame Chapel
Where the River Tamar reaches the great expanse of the English Channel lies the Rame peninsula. There is so much natural, social and spiritual history here that we could not do it justice in just one day last year, so we went back to take a look at some different sites – with some different people.
A dozen TDs turned out in the middle of the peak holiday season to be greeted by the brisk sou’westerly of a Cornish August Sunday. Our first stop was the ancient ruined chapel of St Michael on Rame Head.

This is a site that has seen the passage of human history from the earliest of times. The current structure dates back 500 years, but dowsing took us back way beyond that - through various stone structures on a similar floorplan, to a wooden building and then to an open sacred site. The wooden structure appears to have been destroyed in a storm, but why the stone structure was enlarged by a modest amount is less clear – especially as one corner of it now stands in the middle of a strong energy spiral, which would normally be designed out or brought into an old church layout. Perhaps the architect understood the importance of earth energy and felt the extra few feet would help to energise his structure by neatly describing the pattern of energies and leys – as it does.
For anyone to build here, on this seriously exposed headland, required considerable determination and enthusiasm. But no wonder - the tiny chapel, barely big enough to house a dozen curious dowsers from a passing scurry, encloses in its compact footprint three crossing leys, at least two strong earth energy lines, plus water markers. As a microcosm of earth energies, it is a veritable demonstration piece.
This location, with its magnificent views across Plymouth Sound and out to the Eddystone lighthouse and beyond has also been a beacon site and defensive lookout for millennia. The presence of the nearby coastguard station and the concrete platform of the WWII gun emplacement, built into the side of this ancient structure, demonstrate this very clearly. We found the sites of beacons and the former lodgings of a person who lived in the chapel building, though whether he was a hermit or a mediaeval coastguard was less clear - maybe both.
A little closer still to the sea was the crossing point of other energies, previously revered, but now unhelpfully absorbed by gorse – and yet another, even further south, which displayed a peculiar dowsing pattern. At first I thought the wind was blowing my rods around, except that the wind had dropped in this more sheltered spot. The spiral had a serrated edge, just like the one in our dining room acquires when you put a certain crystal in the middle of it. I concluded that the underlying composition of the rock was causing this – and, if so, this was the first time it had been shown to me on a field trip.
The location of graves of shipwrecked sailors, possibly Spaniards, was dowsed nearby – souls too foreign to be brought to the main churchyard at Rame, but too Christian to be left to rot in unconsecrated ground. The spiritual, former pagan, Rame Chapel site might have seemed a reasonable compromise to the outlook of the age.
The wind dropped, the drizzle disappeared and the sandwiches came out. We mulled over our findings, discussed the meaning of life - as you do - and our little convoy moved on.
Passing the fascinating Rame church, which we visited last year, we made our way to the refurbished church of Maker, on the edge of the Mount Edgecumbe Country Park.
