by Lesley Elphick & Toby Hindson
It happens once in an age that a bolt of inspiration strikes, and reveals a pattern in something that always appeared random. This happened in 2003 to Lesley while she was visiting Borrowdale with Toby (Sciethe to some of you) on a mission to carry out monitoring on the ancient Borrowdale yews for the Ancient Yew Group. The yews were fascinating, but she also looked out over the stones, and a pattern formed in her mind. The impetus to investigate fully came after a further visit in 2012, and this co-authored paper is the result.
A survey from above using Google Earth showed that this was not a circle as such, but something far more unusual, a picture picked out in boulders, moreover a picture with internal numeric harmonies and external alignments designed to be seen from above like the Nazca Lines. The form is astounding, and of Druidic significance.
Much of the written work is descriptive of the stones and their alignments, and their relation to the trees, but it has also been possible to relate the find to some lines from a poem of Taliesin, who was (among other things) Bard to Urien of Reghed in whose 6th century kingdom Borrowdale lies. Read more in the PDF here.
