It has taken me 68 years of this cycle, and over twenty years as a dowser to get to this place. Britain’s tallest standing stone in the churchyard of a quiet village in east Yorkshire is something of an enigma. And it is remarkable that it still exists at all, when almost every other megalith for miles around has long since been felled and recycled.
At around 7.5 metres high it is, by some margin, the king pin of its genre – and not that far short of the mighty, and much bulkier, ten metre Menhir at Kerloas in western Brittany, the tallest in Europe.
Perhaps the Rudstone’s relative obscurity has been part of its salvation – nestled (if anything of this size can nestle) behind the parish church, and now somewhat incongruously surrounded by post-medieval graves.
One of the most surprising features of this monolith is the strange piece of lead capping, replaced in the modern era, which would have been an inconceivable accoutrement on just about any other ancient comparator in the UK. Opinion is divided as to whether this heavy headgear was installed to protect the stone, which is the usual explanation, or whether it was retro-fitted to dampen down its non-physical attributes. In either case, my dowsing indicated that, apart from slightly defacing an otherwise magnificent piece of world-class construction, it is actually doing very little. Others may take a different view, and there is a strong feeling amongst many that it was an attempt to neutralise its pre-Christian power. From a 21st century perspective, attacking deep-seated earth energy currents with a lump of lead seems bizarre – but then, maybe the dead-metal was just a witness for the focus of antagonism.
Far more important, is what is still very dowsable at this remarkable site. The most obvious facet is the crossing of leys, one of which also bisects the core of the church, just a few metres away. There is also a swirl of earth energy lines, which create a manifestation shaped like a flattened cog-wheel.
Perhaps a little more surprising is the confluence of three of the interplanetary grid lines, described and rediscovered by Billy Gawn, just a metre or so to the north west of the base of the stone. I found parts of the solar, lunar and jovian grids in a neat triangle. I have not come across such a tight grouping of cosmic fields of this nature at a megalith before. The solar and lunar lines both appear to clip different edges of the menhir on their way past.
Moving on to the earth grids, neither Hartmann nor Curry seem to have had much influence over the siting of the stone. However, the monolith sits squarely inside the edge lines of a crossing of the Benker grid – a Benker box, as I have come to term it, as the Benker grid dowses as being three-dimensional. Given the great size of the stone, it may even be in a double height box. Although it would be a first encounter for me, this concept does accord with some other very old standing stones. Benker boxes may well have afforded some protection to prominent megaliths such as the Rudstone – although, of course, we don’t know which ones have been removed despite their non-physical defence system!
The earliest cultures to have erected larger stone structures seem to have used different architectural guidelines to those of later societies. In Brittany, Dartmoor and elsewhere, the earliest incarnations at such places appear to have acknowledged Benker, and sometimes astronomical, information; whereas later ones seem to have switched more towards earth energies and/or Hartmann and Curry grids.
Leys, as a man-made – or at least man-influenced – phenomena, appear at all such remaining sites – bar none. However, they may not have been an intergarl part of the original ground plans. The incredible age of the Rudstone puts it back to the earliest phase of megalithic construction, and possibly even prior to the widespread use of farming techniques in the British Isles.
As one might expect, there are also lines of consciousness radiating from the menhir. One of these points directly to another stone which, in the gathering gloom, looked more like a broken tree stump as I walked to wards it. However, it is clearly a natural and deliberately placed, piece of rock, not a broken or reused grave-marker – and right on a line of sight.
My colleague, Mike Barwell, has also found another fallen upright close to this stone, which he dowses as previously having been used as a gravestone. It may also be a remnant of a previous megalithic structure – and, potentially, of a circle of stones close to the Rudstone itself. Clearly, the ‘modern’ churchyard has been regarded and revered as a sacred space for millennia.
I am sure I have only just scratched the surface of what can be understood and decoded at this fascinating place on a brief first visit – and I hope to return to it.
Nigel Twinn dowser and author 