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Belas Knap and Bryn Celli Ddu

Belas Knap and Bryn Celli Ddu

Both of these barrows have special standing stones inside a covered chamber.

The small standing stones within Belas Knap are unusual, since they have seven dowsable horizontal bands, whereas most stones of this size only have five. These can be verified by a sensitive magnetometer.

The free-standing stone within Bryn Celli Ddu is unusual, since it is a fossilised tree trunk, showing horizontal cut marks, made while the tree was still alive. This was probably caused by an animal claw, since fossilising wood is usually too slow for it to have been done by human hand.

We deduce that free-standing stones, surrounded by a chamber, are deliberately chosen on the basis of rare characteristics, which were obvious to neolithic peoples, but not so obvious to us.

The unique nature of the Bryn Celli Ddu menhir was only noticed when the inside of the mound was being filmed, requiring very bright lighting, making tiny surface details readily apparent.

The unusual nature of the Belas Knap menhirs was only noticed when dowsers crawled to into the mound and experimented in the gloom.

Sometimes erosion knocks out obvious deductions.

Bryn Celli Ddu is built upon three concentric circles of upright stones, which makes perfect sense as a barrow, but when the earth has been removed, the remaining circles are mystifying. Hence the people filming Bryn Celli Ddu also filmed the concentric circles on Dartmoor without realising their purpose.

This illustrates the value of a multi-disciplinary approach, where archaeology, geology, dowsing and physics combine to reveal a previously unknown aspect of our heritage.

The threads of this argument were brought together from the following sources:

(1) '' Standing With Stones'' DVD by Michael Bott & Rupert Soskin
(2) '' Disciplines Of Dowsing'' Liz Poraj Wilczynska and Tom Graves
(3) '' Barrows in England and Wales '' by Lesley Grinsell
(4) '' The Modern Antiquarian '' by Julian Cope
(5) '' Dartmoor Atlas of Antiquities '' by Jeremy Butler

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MartinStraw Posted by MartinStraw
28th February 2010ce
Edited 28th February 2010ce

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