More Mysticism

Jun 28, 2005 Alun Science 1 Comment New Age, Scepticism

I’m told that June 26’s post wasn’t my first exper­i­ence with the New Age at West Ken­net. I don’t remem­ber my first trip there, which was when I was five. My Da does though.

Inside the West Ken­net long barrow

We went on a fam­ily trip one sum­mer. I went run­ning off and climbed up the bar­row to look around. There’s not a lot to see from the top of the bar­row apart from fields. There’s Sil­bury Hill, but when you’re five you don’t real­ise that hills aren’t meant to be per­fect hill shapes. I did man­age to find some­thing interesting.

Who­ever restored the site had given some thought to illu­min­a­tion. Long bar­rows are nat­ur­ally dark places. In this case the con­crete roof built into the site wouldn’t have helped. To solve this prob­lem little sky­lights were fixed into the con­crete. They were trans­lu­cent, so you could see through them but from the inside they let a little light in. I was five, so I thought stamp­ing on it might be a good idea.

It was a ter­rific idea.

The bar­row was hol­low, so I found that by stamp­ing on the sky­light I could make a big boom noise. For a five year old this is the a dis­cov­ery as excit­ing as find­ing a new planet or a new con­tin­ent. So I stamped and I stamped. Boom. Boom. Boom. My Da came up to see what trouble I was get­ting into*. He saw what I was doing and, being a respons­ible par­ent, told me to stop it. Being curi­ous he then had a stamp him­self. I took that as a sig­nal that I could stamp too and we got quite a rhythm going. We car­ried on doing this until my da was dis­trac­ted by some people leav­ing the bar­row. They were plainly stoned, but non­ethe­less also ter­ribly excited. He caught the word “heartbeat”.

This doesn’t mean that all mys­tical exper­i­ences in bar­rows are fake, but if you’re an ardent believer of paranor­mal stuff it’s use­ful to remem­ber it’s not just the truth that’s out there. I am too.

*the thought that I was half a mile from any­where and there­fore couldn’t get into trouble never crossed his mind.