THE WANSDYKE

It’s May bank holiday 1995 and I drove down to Exeter to pick up several cacti from a specialist supplier. I decided, for the return journey to London, to avoid the motorway I had taken on the outward journey and follow some of the smaller roads to the south of the M4, which would give me the opportunity to get to know the Wiltshire countryside. Having stopped off at Glastonbury I continued my journey east and, passing through Devizes, found myself on the A361, on the road to Avebury. I must have got about halfway along this road when I had what I can only describe as a ‘magical’ experience; a ‘z-i-i-ng’, half sensory, half almost audible, and the rolling landscape on both sides of me seemed to call from another age. My first visit to this land and the impact left an indelible mark. I’m not one for hyperbole but this was really something else.

I have travelled around the British Isles, and elsewhere, and have not found any other place which carries the same energy. Although I have never had a repeat of this ‘z-i-i-ng’ on my regular return visits to this part of Wiltshire, I can pick up instantly the energy of the place as I arrive, to the point where I began to be able to actually map it out, and I found that the wide swathe of land situated between Avebury and Alton Barnes and known as the Wansdyke was where it was at its most powerful, that is, from the feelings I have had walking around there.

Below: Tan Hill, Alton Barnes and the Wansdyke.

The map here was to be my attempt to show the greatest concentration of this energy. I cut up an old Ordnance Survey map of the area, stuck it onto a board and photographed it. My plan was to take a hard copy and pencil-shade the parts with progressively darker tones where the energy appeared to fade, leaving the areas with the strongest energy white. It appears that the camera has done the work for me, and I’ll leave it as it is. The camera has taken the initiative, leaving the Wansdyke white while giving a bluish tinge to the areas of lesser energy, more or less exactly as I would have done with my pencil. So the lighter central part, the Wansdyke, is exactly where I imagined this energy would be the strongest. The red arrow is roughly where I had the z-i-i-ng experience back in 1995, looking across the low hills to my right whilst travelling towards Avebury. The orange '>' is the approximate position from which I took the aerial photo above.

Apparently the Wansdyke was originally constructed as some sort of defensive ditch, possibly by early Celtic peoples and, as such, some people were probably occupying it then, although there appear to be only sheep up there now; at least that’s all I saw when, in September 2009, I crossed it on foot from Avebury to Alton Barnes. It’s not obvious if anybody actually owns the Wansdyke, or has specific rights over it. It appears that many of the fields on its edges are the property of the Crown, the ‘Crown’ here being an unclear denomination for several possibilities including our Royal Family and/or the British Government.

Whoever or whatever this Crown is, it/they certainly seemed ok with a film company bringing all its equipment, including several four-wheel-drive vehicles, a crane which served as an elevated filming platform, and a helicopter onto the East Field for a production called ‘A Place to Stay’; a love story in which crop circles were to play an important role. Permission would surely have been sought from the East Field landowners before undertaking such a project. This granted, it makes you wonder what, if anything, would have been in it for them.

We know that members of the Royal Family, and in particular the Queen and Prince Charles, as he was then, were extremely interested in subjects like crop circles and the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident. Films such as ‘The King of UFOs’ (Amazon Prime), in which director Mark Christopher Lee states that ‘The Queen was into crop circles’, bear testament to this.

The UK Government was no less interested, and Margaret Thatcher sought answers to both the crop circle question and the Rendlesham Forest event. When author Georgina Bruni asked Margaret Thatcher for her opinion on the Rendlesham Forest UFO she famously replied, ‘... you can’t tell the people’, which became the title of Georgina Bruni’s book on the subject.

It does appear to be rather difficult to know, as far as the ownership of the land around here is concerned, who – that is, which people – the ‘Crown’ actually represents. You would normally expect the landowner to live on or near their land, though I’m not aware that any member of the Royal Family has residences in that part of Wiltshire, and the nearest British Government activity as far as I know is Salisbury Plain. At any rate, if I was, like this ‘Crown’ may be, the most powerful player in the game, I think I would want to be where the energy is.