December 2005 - May Cottage

The Stone Circle at May Cottage

A Talk by John Moss

Director of the British Society of Dowsers

North Hill Village Hall has now become firmly established as the spiritual home of the Tamar Dowsing group. With excellent and improving facilities, a warm welcome and the Racehorse Inn nearby, we feel we have found a very appropriate pied a terre for what is, almost by definition, a somewhat peripatetic occupation.

A record 41 members, friends and relatives turned up in December to hear John Moss recount the story of how he came to have a modern-day stone circle on his back lawn of his house.

Like most of the best ideas, this was one that seemed to have crystallised out of thin air - from a vague idea that it would be an interesting thing to do. John and Jill Moss have been fascinated by megalithic sites for many years and soon after moving into their cottage on a wooded hill in the Forest of Dean four years ago, they decided to build a stone circle.

It’s an idea that appeals to many people - but just how do you go about it? Dowsing for an appropriate site is a good start. Needless to say, the spot indicated to John by his rods was not the nice flat bit he had first considered, but a sloping grass bank at the bottom of the garden, hard up against the encircling fir trees of the Forestry Commission.

Having found a location, the next decision was what to erect - a single iconic menhir, a fully-functional modern-day Stonehenge? In the end John and Jill settled for a traditional (?) circle, flattened at one side to form more of an egg-shape. This design, which incorporates a raft of sacred geometry, is more common across most of the British Isles than the simple circle of the tabloid imagination.

Having got the blueprint, it was time to source some building materials. The Mosses chose local stone, extracted (but not blasted) from a nearby quarry. John showed some amusing and alarming slides of the chosen stones arriving at the house on the quarryman’s aging lorry. Having unloaded the stones onto the lawn, there was then a period of ‘getting to know’ them as they lay in a row on the path, awaiting erection.

Having selected the right ones for each slot, the little matter of setting them upright was achieved with much brute force - and a tractor mower. As John mused, it’s not something you do every day - and you’ve just about got the hang of how to do it properly by the time the work is complete. A sentiment I am sure would have been shared by his Celtic predecessors.

With the configuration in place, it was time to turn it on. As the then organiser of South Herefordshire Dowsers, John was able to call on the services of visiting dowsing luminaries such as Billy Gawn, Joey Korn, Hamish Miller and Sig Lonegren to assist with this process.

The net result of all this activity is a brand-new, fully-functional, stone-age energy concentrating machine. We have seen on our own visits how large stones seem to attract, as well as mark, earth and water energies. What John has found is that, although the circle was sited on a ‘blind spring’ (where water wells up from deep underground, hits a rock before surfacing and splits into a number of component parts), the resulting water and earth energies have been magnified and manifest. The one spot where John decided to erect a stone on a place that previously had no energy - to improve the visual impact of the structure - now has a water line flowing beneath it. Whether it is the water itself that has been attracted, or just the dowsable effect of that water, would, of course, be a task for investigation-by-JCB.

Jill has noted that the energy spiral now emanating from the centre of the circle has expanded out to encompass their conservatory, some distance from the circle itself - indicating that the beneficial force being generated is filtering out into wider environment of Herefordshire.

Just for good measure, John has aligned the circle to midsummer sunrise. However, the serried ranks of pine trees currently obscure the full benefit of this feature being observed. John and Jill will have to wait for the arrival of the woodman’s chainsaw in due course, to replicate the actions of the axes of the acolytes of the druids in times gone by.

This was a fascinating, stimulating and endearing study by someone who has put his dowsing knowledge to a very solid purpose. We were delighted to have John (a local Launceston lad, who went away to find a fortune – and indeed did find it in a number of guises) with us to complete this record-breaking year. With several new members joining on the day, the paid-up membership of the TDs has reached the 50 mark.

Many thanks indeed to Pete & Jenny, Ruth & John and Annie for their support and administration - and to John and Jill for making the journey.

Nigel Twinn Tamar Dowsers December 2005