Sunday 23rd June, 2010 – Caerleon, Newport, South Wales.
On our way back from Glastonbury, having stopped off at the pretty village of Priddy (actually, it was more like a bare triangle of grass, but..) we headed for Caerleon. The damned cheap SatNav I was using on my phone got us totally lost and we ended up having to double back some 20 miles to get here. Add to that the rather confusing one-way system in Caerleon itself, and the roasting hot day, you’ve got a sense of how glad I was to get out of the car and get my feet on the ground to try to find the South-Western ley line that I believed came from Arbor Low down through Caerleon.
Ley Lines in Caerleon
Just to remind you, I was at Arbor Low one day taking compass bearings of the various radial lines that Kal had found in the centre of the site. My compass probably wasn’t very accurate, and neither were my readings (all done with line of sight). However, at least one of the end points has recently been verified by one of this blog’s readers (thanks, Serpenteer – see our comment stream at the bottom of this post) who actually visited Lindisfarne Priory and found our northerly line. In the same spirit I wanted to see whether my South-Westerly line could also be verified.
The search began at the car park on Cold Bath Lane, a lane so-called presumably because the Roman baths are very close by. As is the Roman fortress that was supposedly the site of King Arthur’s court, as mentioned by Geoffrey of Monmouth.
We found the line some two hundred yards further on from the edge of the remains of the roman fortress. It emerged into a playing field used by the local rugby club, and they were in the middle of a training match when we arrived with our rods. So, not conspicuous at all then! We took some surreptitious readings with the dowsing rods and I got out my iPhone to try to get a compass bearing. Strange things began to occur. While in the ley line taking a compass reading we couldn’t work out why it appeared to be 20-30 degrees out from what we expected. We took other dowsing readings but none of them explained why the reading was out. Then my iPhone switched itself off – the screen went blank and no buttons worked, despite having a full battery. I resorted to the rods, and they showed SSW as being where we expected it to be, not where the iPhone had indicated. When I walked out of the ley line the phone started working again.
I have often found that Roman structures rarely lie upon ley lines. They are usually off to one side, safely off the line itself. So-called Roman roads, actually built upon the old corpse roads of much more ancient times, are often built upon ley lines however. It seems that the properties of a ley line is compatible with movement, but not with residence. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was the case here too.
Another possibility is one which I first speculated about when I discovered a ley that ran from the Isles of Scilly to Italy. At the end of that line the ley seemed to curl into a spiral (or at least – that’s the form which best linked the place names I was tracing). I wonder whether the fortress at Caerleon also forms a spiral terminus point. It’s something I will have to go an test. It’s only an idea at the moment.
When I got back home and adjusted the line to align my “on the ground” results with my Google Map of this line several more places whose names ended in “ley” began to surface. I now need to go along the line verifying the locations of the points I suspect have ley lines, and then verifying the exact angle of the ley line, possibly using other navigational aids other than the iPhone! I also still do not know where the line ends, and whether it continues outside of Caerleon.
More soon when I have some better correlating evidence.
Gwas.
