March 2015
The Greenwich Meridian – The Axis of Heaven
A presentation to the Tamar Dowsers by Paul Broadhurst
Meridians are just lines on a map. They link the North Pole to the South Pole – and they invisibly join places of equal longitude. The best-known meridian runs through Greenwich, London, UK – and it has a longitude of 0’00”. So far, so good. Well, not quite.
Meridians first appeared on European maps, such as those produced by Nicholas Mercator, around the end of the 16th century. However, as they appear to link numerous sites of human habitation and sacred significance with much longer histories, yet another of those enigmatic earth mysteries hoves into view.
Paul Broadhurst has been an author and a researcher for longer than most people can remember – and he has a remarkable track record of uncovering major phenomena that have escaped the attention of the rest of us, even though they seem to have been right under our noses all along. Just when you thought you were starting to get a handle on long distance leys and landscape figures, here come the meridians, entering stage left.
For the last 5 years, Paul and his partner, Gabriele Trso, have been investigating a phenomenon that is all too obvious – at least it is once it has been pointed out to you. Look along the Greenwich Meridian on a map, and you will find a whole raft of places that seem to mark or make use of their location on the line. Some are more recent celebrations of the co-location, but many date back hundreds, if not thousands of years. Not a few also relate directly to the birth, life and death of former members of the English royal family – and so the plot thickens.
The statistics are impressive, and the locations are both significant and interlinked. Yet, as Paul remarks with a professionally straight face, it could all be just a co-incidence – but with the old adage of ‘how many coincidences does it take to create a fact’ as an unspoken subscript.
A Cook’s Tour of some of the more noteworthy points on the line took us from a modern marker on the south coast, through Lewes in Sussex, East London itself, Waltham Abbey in Essex, through Royston in Hertfordshire, home of the remarkable bell-shaped cave with its Templar connection, on to Boston in Lincolnshire, with its impressive church tower known as The Stump, past Louth, so proud of its place on the axis, and clipping East Yorkshire, visiting Patrington, where the church has one of the tallest spires in England. It is difficult not to see many of these towns and structures as deliberate meridian markers.
Paul has been keen not to stray too far from geographical and historical actuality at this stage. As someone who has borne the brunt of sceptics and naysayers for so long, he is presenting this field of research for what it is – a line on a map linking significant places. Yet, in true Broadhurst style, the evidence for a huge amount of historical research is only just behind the headline discoveries.
Everyone from Tennyson, Christopher Wren and John Dee (who was the first person to describe an earth energy line in terms that a modern mind could understand), to the Kings and Queens of the realm, all have walk-on parts in this fascinating montage.
To add another dimension entirely, a hypothetical east-west meridian drawn at right angles to the Greenwich Mean, would cut straight through the Round Tower on its mound at Windsor Castle, Cardiff Castle, Syon House and the ancient church of Ogbourne St George in Wiltshire, where this lateral line meets the St Michael ley, discovered by Paul and Hamish Miller back in the 1980’s. The Greenwich Meridian also cuts the St Michael ley at its critical Royston node, producing a right-angled triangle between the three points. But that’s probably just another co-incidence.
Although many of the buildings that form the spine of the line may themselves be post mediaeval, and therefore potentially built after the earliest establishment of the meridian, they are sited on locations that go back thousands of years – long before any maps as we know them today would have been available, and millennia before any fixed idea of longitude came into human awareness.
This raises whole lifetimes of new areas of research for the dowser. Are meridians leys? They certainly connect many ancient and sacred sites, so they would have to be considered ‘Watkins’ leys. Do they contain any earth energies?
The concept of the meridian could indicate that although it is assumed that they were originally intended to be shipping location references, they may – deliberately or intuitively – have also been defining, for the first time, lines of geomagnetism. It is also assumed that the meridians are arbitrarily placed, with Greenwich winning out more due to political clout than academic support. However, this research implies that the meridians are there because that is where they really are – which opens a whole new Aladdin’s cave of potentialities.
As many of the marker sites date back into pre-history, were the builders of those sites also aware of the geomagnetic forces running through them?
People like Wren not only had the academic mind to appreciate the significance of the geography, but potentially he also had access to another tradition entirely, in that he was a Grand Master Mason. While conspiracy theorists could have a field day by putting this group of ideas together in ever more complex combinations, for the practical earth-energy dowser there is a wealth of potential new ideas to be considered.
As a teasing curtain-closer, Paul noted that the ‘Greenwich’ meridian carries on south, through Fontevraud Abbey in France, burial place of Richard the Lionheart, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II. Probably just a co-incidence too!
Many thanks to Paul and Gabriele for starting their World Tour in North Hill – and to the modest organisation team for keeping the show on the road on a Mothering Sunday.
Nigel Twinn March 2015