The Geomancy of West Penwith
Audio
The Geomancy of West Penwith
A talk by Palden at Pathways to the Past, with maps
St Just, Cornwall, 24th May 2025
Pathways is an annual prehistory weekend organised by CASPN
This talk needs two hours of your time and some focus, so save it for a rainy day and get a mug of tea first!
Best viewed on a computer, but possible on a phone.
Listen here
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Useful links to more material
Sometimes I get an uncanny feeling that the hidden hands of John Michell and Hamish Miller manoeuvred me into place to do this work, and they tap on my head with an idea now and then.
Whether or not that's so, the geomantic work I've done in Penwith follows on from research I've done elsewhere, in Somerset, Wales, Sweden, Greece and Palestine.
My starting place is the observation that, every time I go to a stone circle, cliff sanctuary or quoit, I come away changed. Especially if I spend time there and let myself float off, listening and musing, or meditating. There's something here to do with consciousness and other realms of reality.
There's also the matter of earth energy, which geomancers have been studying for many decades. My specialism is alignments (leylines), and in this talk I explain about them, showing how they knit the 600-odd sites in Penwith, big and small, into one integrated system.
That's to say that, in a way, Penwith is one big ancient site, one big cliff sanctuary, at the southwest end of the mainland of the Isles of Britain.
Its ancient name of Belerion, recorded by Diodorus Siculus in 60 BCE, means shining, radiant, or perhaps scintillating, land. And it is, and it does. That's what this is all about.
It has something to do with the future too.
Maps used in this talk
Click on any map to see a larger version
Cornwall's Topography
It's the brown bits that mattered in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages
Neolithic Cornwall
Main sites in the 3000s BCE, the first phase of the Megalithic Era
West Penwith's Topography
In the Neolithic 3000s, most people lived in the hills in the north - the south was then densely forested
Base Sites in West Penwith
These are the places that early Penwithians of the Mesolithic 6000s-5000s BCE will have noticed and revered, long before any constructed ancient sites were built.
Neolithic Sites in Penwith
Early constructed sites of the Neolithic 3000s, built between 3700 and 3200 BCE in the first part of the Megalithic Era
Quoit Alignments in the North
Demonstrating how, even in the Neolithic, the ancients were devising and trialling integrated systems of sites - later to get much bigger in the Bronze Age.
Chronicle of a Eureka Moment
How a spontaneous idea became a rather big discovery, late one evening while thinking about Kilgooth Ust (Cape Cornwall) and
Carrek Los y'n Cos (St Michael's Mount)
The Great Divide
An alignment between Kilgooth Ust and Carrek Los y'n Cos passes through Botrea Barrows, just above my home, dividing the Neolithic north from the Bronze Age south.
Alignments emanating from Carrek Los y'n Cos
When suddenly the backbone alignments system reveals itself
Lanyon Quoit and its positioning
Revealing that the backbone alignments system is Neolithic, and the cliff sanctuaries are far more important than we understand
West Penwith Prehistoric Timeline
Charting the Megalithic Era over time. In Egypt, the Great Pyramid at Giza was built at the beginning of our Bronze Age. Neolithic quoits were a thousand years older.
For a potted history of West Penwith's prehistory, in written or audiobook format, try here.
The Main Sites of West Penwith
The core nodes of the West Penwith system of ancient sites of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages
The Backbone Alignments of West Penwith
Showing how it all knits together into an amazing integrated system of sites, devised in order to link together natural sites such as tors and cliff sanctuaries with constructed sites such as stone circles, menhirs and cairns. Bronze Age sites were located in order to connect with and draw on the antiquity and primacy of Neolithic sites, which were 1,000+ years older.
The Ring of Light
A necklace of consecrated cliff sanctuaries bounds Penwith, also determining the location of many key sites. It guards the peninsula. Penwith has never been invaded.
Local Alignments
The alignments system in Penwith is quite complex, connecting almost every site into the system. It is different yet parallel to the dowsable energy-lines and astronomical orientations that are also in operation, plugging sites into earth, sky and landscape.
The Master Switch
When the Boscawen-ûn stone circle was built, it was a geomantic master-stroke, lighting up the whole system
The Energy-Gateway
Three hills guard Penwith from the East. Trencrom Hill acts as a buffer or filter for energy-connections with Upcountry.
Near-Parallel Alignments across West Cornwall
Problem is, we do not know the thoughts of the geomancers of old. What prompted them to establish a system of near-parallel alignments between Penwith and the Lizard which each varied in orientation by half a degree? Is it terrestrial or astronomical, or does it serve another purpose? Look at the white alignment coming in from the Hurlers on Bodmin Moor, passing through St Michael's Mount to Tol Pedn Penwith, the southwesternmost point of the Isles of Britain. There's an exact alignment parallel to it that connects three of Penwith's most important sites - Cape Cornwall, Carn Galva and St Ives Head.
Mystery Sites
Some sites in Penwith remain a mystery, though studying their alignments can give clues about their purpose.
Tregurnow was the second stone circle in the Merry Maidens complex - possibly larger than the Merry Maidens. Now destroyed by farmers and unbalancing the complex - as also was the case with Tregeseal West stone circle.
Trevorian was a something, now also destroyed, and not very far from Boscawen-ûn. Possibly a stone circle or an enclosure, or something unique.
Treen Common Circle still exists and can be visited, but we don't know what it is. It isn't a classic stone circle but it does have energy. It's close to a Bronze Age barrowfield, probably built around the same time, perhaps around 1800-1600 BCE.
Conjectural Maps
These maps use educated guesswork - field-exploration, map-work and some intuition and interpolation - to visualise how things looked and worked in the Mid-Bronze Age around 1800 BCE, at the end of the Bronze Age zenith (roughly 2200-1800).
Penwith's Wildwoods
Around 1800 Penwith was about 50% cleared of forest - and landscaped to create sightlines and vistas. This is my estimate of where the wildwood remained.
Penwith's Main Trackways
This map is based on known ancient paths (such as the Tinners' Way), field research, map-work, consultation and a degree of guesswork.
Landscape Temples
Penwith is made up of a number of distinct landscape areas and also around perhaps ten clans, each of which would have its own stamping ground. These clan areas probably went back a long way, back to the Neolithic or even the Mesolithic. Each area would have had its own character and practical and spiritual resources. The 'capital clan' probably lived around Carn Galva, though in the Bronze Age the centre of gravity shifted south, and Caer Brân (or Ker Brane) became the likely parliament site for the clans of Penwith.
A Land of Scintillation
This presentation outlines the alignments aspect of the geomancy of Penwith, but there are other aspects too in the fields of dowsing, archaeoastronomy, magical landscaping, geometry, metrology, archaeo-acoustics and psi-research. Penwith is an ideal study-area with clear boundaries and a magical atmosphere that has not been exorcised by English materialistic modernity.
For further information, try the Ancient Penwith website or the book Shining Land - the ancient sites of West Penwith and what they tell us about megalithic civilisation by Palden Jenkins. Or check out the links above.
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