with Caroline Hoare and Gary Biltcliffe
A talk to the Tamar Dowsers at North Hill Village Hall
Any presentation by Gary and Caroline can be experienced on several levels at once.
Superficially, it usually documents a highly alternative tourist joyride through some of the most interesting and iconic landscapes that are on offer in the UK. Behind, or maybe beneath, that facade is the epic tale of a couple of surprisingly ordinary and approachable beings who have embarked on an unheralded transcendental pilgrimage - and in so doing, have become able to interpret and to experience the world they traverse in a much deeper and more nuanced way.
Throughout, the off-piste sightseeing and the strange and subtle experiences are infused with a realisation that the world around us is only a veneer - one which we are obliged to create in order to garner some understanding of what is actually going on around us and within us.
W e are forever taken from the hard tarmac and the muddy byways, through to the half-imagined spirit paths and leys (whatever they are), right up to the point where some can sense the surrounding landscape from alternating viewpoints, without moving an inch. But before considering the multiverse, let's get back to travelguide.
This talk - loosely based around their latest book The Holy Axis - documents, in their inimitable style, their multi-legged trek along a powerful ley that crosses North Eastern England and South Western Scotland. It drifts from romantic, religious Lindisfarne and battle-scarred Bamburgh, through enigmatic Rosslyn and stone-strewn Kilmartin, and on to the island sanctuaries of Iona and Tiree.
It takes in places you would love to visit one day, but also many that will never reached your ear. Cairnpapple and Kelso, Torphichen and Inchtavannach - places from our fairy stories - or from tales we might have written (or is it Bodmin and Tavistock, Brent Tor and Brent Knoll that are secret places in the science fiction of the northern borderlands?)
Since those far-off days when Gary first sought guidance from the late Hamish Miller on his initial quest for the Belinus Line, much water has flown down the Tamar and the Clyde. What started as a glorified ley hunt and ended up two decades later as The Spine of Albion, a sprawling, spectacular multi-layered inventory of wonders, festooned around the etheric backbone of the UK - in the process transforming the outlook of the Dorset-based duo beyond their own recognition.
Today, a pilgrimage presentation by Gary and Caroline is prefaced by an introduction to the essence and the nature of the journey and to some of its more esoteric elements. We hear about the nature of leys, consider the various ways we can sense the landscape, think about the relationship between the mythological, the historical and the physical inhabitants, the people, the places, the ancestors and their energy traces. And we haven't even reached the Tyne at this point.
In any ways, the dowsing duo's unique modus operandi now has more of a resemblance to an Aboriginal songline walkabout than a traditional British hike. Indeed, it speaks volumes about their humility that, having criss-rossed the veil border so often and for so long, they can still put on a great show, full of academic information and copious good humour, yet touching on subjects that would have many shying away in disbelief.
Another distinctive facet of the Hoare/Biltcliffe approach is to examine the input by – and sometimes the effect on - people who have played a part in shaping, or being shaped by, the various sites and cities en route. For example, in this latest work, the output of Sir Walter Scott is considered in depth - much as the life of William Shakespeare was wound into The Spine of Albion.
Legendary figures, spiritual warriors and cosmic deities also make an appearance from time to time, and are discussed very much as potentially tangible forces, if not actually beings. It has long been a trademark meme in the work of G & C that one person's everyday realty is another's theoretical storyline - and vice versa. Journeying as a way of life has brought them to an understanding that all of us see the world from different angles and in different time frames, yet we are all looking at the identical information matrix from a subtly different angle.
Throughout, Gary and Caroline felt they were being led to and on their quest, just as Hamish had felt he was being drawn through his later life by his own divination. Time and again, they go off in search of something specific, only to be spirited away to witness something else far more interesting and unusual.
I have a feeling that in generations to come, people will be unearthing these travelogues from the pre-AI era and wondering at their scope and breadth, their erudite approach and their astonishing insight. Just who were these strangely intuitive multidimensional beings, artfully disguised as a quietly understated couple from Weymouth?
Such was the interest in the Q & A session at the end that it was a discussion that it could probably have carried on indefinitely. Who knows, it may indeed be doing just that in someone's alternative reality.
Many thanks to Gary and Caroline for taking the somewhat shorter trip down the coast from Dorset to speak to us. You will always be welcome here.
Nigel Twinn
Tamar Dowsers
April 2024
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