Boundaries, Metrology and the Implication of

Ancient Remains
Nigel Pennick

Source: ​Journal of Geomancy ​Vol. 2 No. 1, October 1977, pp. 9-13.

Throughout geomancy and surveying for land-measure, a recurrent theme is

the maintenance of boundaries unchanged over the years. In Ancient Egypt
and Rome, elaborate systems of surveying were devized to enable the
guardians of the boundaries to keep them intact, and free from tampering
and alteration. Draconian measures were enacted on those who were proved
to have moved boundary-markers, and, in Roman times, a complex legal
system grew up around the administration of land-measure. Even in the
English Book of Common Prayer the Commination reads: “Cursed is he that
removeth his neighbour’s land-mark”. The Roman survey-officials, the
Agrimensores (literally ‘field-measurers’) had an organization comparable
with that of the later Freemasons. Their training included tuition in
cosmology, astronomy, geometry, orientation, sighting, levelling, land-law,
boundary definition, allocation of land, mapping, scale drawing and
recording.

The Agrimensores were practitioners of a profession which was at once both

practical and religious. The original siting of the survey-points was carried
out by Augurs, members of the college of official diviners who always
observed the prescribed rituals when choosing a site. Once the boundary
lines of whatever was being laid out had been drawn, they were maintained
by ritual perambulation on certain sacred days of the year. The best
recorded example of this in antiquity is the Roman festival of the
Ambarvalia. In this festival, the Magister Pagi, an official appointed by the
secular authorities and given priestly powers, led the people of the area in a
procession around the boundary, visiting sacred groves and altars on the
perimeter dedicated to Sylvanus. The ceremony was carried out with the
intention of promoting crop fertility. A triple sacrifice, of a pig, a sheep and
a bull, was carried out, after the animals had been driven three times around
the fields. This threefold aspect reflected the threefold attributes of
Sylvanus, guardian of the fields, the homestead and the Orientalis, the
sacred grove on the boundary. Even when St. Patrick dedicated the site of
Armagh Cathedral, he did so by a threefold circuit, so widespread was the
practice.

On February 13th (or 23d) was the Terminalia, a festival in honour of

Terminus, the protector of boundaries, in which the symbol of the god, a
post or standing stone marking the boundary-line of a farm, was garlanded
by the cultivators of the adjoining land, each on his own side of the post or
stone. Terminus was originally an epithet of Jupiter.

Later, after Pagan worship was banned by edict of the Emperor Theodosius
in 391, the perambulation of boundaries was applied to Christian church
boundaries. Subsequently, during Rogationtide, the Ambarvalia became
“beating the bounds”, a ceremony still observed in some places. Even during
the Reformation, when fanatics wrecked churches, shattered tombstones,
demolished crosses and desecrated churchyards, the custom was kept going.
An injunction of Queen Elizabeth I on ancient general customs reads: “The
people shall once a year with their curate walk about (ie. around – N.P.) the
parish as they were accustomed … the curate in certain convenient places
shall admonish the people to give God thanks …”.

These ‘convenient places’ were, of course, the ancient mark-trees, such as

Gospel Oaks, Yew Trees etc., boundary mark-stones, crosses and their sites,
all of them geomantically-sited remnants of a former age. The important
positions of these trees and crosses are demonstrated by those which gave
their names to localities, such as Selly Oak, Birmingham; Goff’s Oak,
Hertfordshire; Bracon Ash, Suffolk; Twycross, Leicestershire; Charing Cross,
Westminster; Clay Cross, Derbyshire; Neville’s Cross, Durham, etc.

The usual boundaries of most parishes must seem to the impartial observer
to be irrational or even downright perverse. Examples of beating the bounds
show this deviation from the ‘logical’ method of straight-line grids, which the
Roman Agrimensores applied. Common features ​{10}​ of beating the bounds
show the custom to be a degenerate remnant of ancient geomantic practice.

Before starting a walk, it was customary for each participant to cut a wand of
willow, withy or hazel, for the purpose of striking boundary stones and other
markers. Children in the party were always beaten at important landmarks,
bumped against stones or thrown in ditches and ponds where the boundary
intersected them. On boundary mark-stones and certain cross-shaped
trenches on the boundary, the boys were stood on their heads, probably a
survival from the days when human sacrifices were performed at these
points when the area was first laid out. Ancient art often helps us out on this
score. On the Gundestrup bowl, a figure is shown being cast into what is
usually described as a cauldron, but which is more probably a ritual shaft.
Such ritual shafts, the ‘arcae’ described by Sir Montagu Sharpe as markers in
the Roman survey of Middlesex, have been found at Holzhausen, Bavaria;
Long Wittenham, Berkshire and several other places. These rituals using
shafts or wells were carried out into historic times at the Pagan Temple of
Uppsala (see Journal of Geomancy info, ​page after cover​). St. Victor’s
martyrdom at Xanten in Germany was apparently such a sacrifice.
When a new building was started in former times, sacrifice was always
made. Heinrich Heine writes: “In the Middle Ages the opinion prevailed
that when any building was erected something living must be killed, in the
blood of which the foundation had to be laid, by which process the building
would be secured from falling; and in ballads and traditions the
remembrance is still preserved how children and animals were slaughtered
for the purpose of strengthening large buildings with their blood”.
These points had their human sacrifices to ensure that the ghost of the
sacrificed should forever guard the site from interference, whether human or
satanic. When the King of Ashanti built a palace in 1881, he had 200 girls
killed so that their blood could be mixed with the mortar in order that the
building might stand. Even today in Brazil, voodoo priests sacrifice chickens
in the foundations of new buildings and at the erection of goalposts in
football grounds. Similar rites were universal in Britain until well into the
Saxon period. Although the Romans prohibited human sacrifice, it was
reintroduced. The early Celtic Saint Odhran expressed his willingness to be
the first to be buried on Iona, and offered himself to be buried alive as a
sacrifice.

The obscure courses of boundary-lines can be demonstrated by some

recorded features of beating the bounds in certain places. In an old house
called Hornshayne at Farway, East Devon, where three parishes meet, the
participants in beating the bounds ceremony made a small boy climb along a
beam in the roof, in order that the boundary might be followed in its
entirety. This ritual was last enacted on May 7th 1884.

At Coly House, Colyford, South Devon, there was a hole through which a
child was made to crawl to follow the correct boundary. Both these
buildings obviously date from a period when geomancy was no longer fully
understood, yet the customary rituals were still observed.

These traditional perambulations were not restricted to England and Wales.

In Italy, on Rogation Days, the boundary of each parish was walked and
invoked with the Litania Minor to bring divine blessings on crops and
households. In the Netherlands, a cross was carried around the perimeter.
Breton ‘Pardons’ and Spanish and Mexican Holy Days also have prescribed
ritual circuits, stopping at sacred sites such as crosses and holy wells, where
the gospel is read. Formerly the beating the bounds of Lichfield Cathedral
included stops at eight holy wells. It was held on the Feast of the Nativity of
the Blessed Virgin Mary, September 8th, not at Rogationtide.

One common feature of all such processions, and, indeed, the scouring of
hill figures or the cleansing of sanctified wells, is that the proceedings
occurred on certain holy days, often the patron saint’s day in the case of
wells, and Rogationtide in the case of boundaries. Figures in terrestrial
zodiacs must have been perambulated in a similar manner on sacred days by
the priests in charge of the figure and their inhabitants, preserving {​ 11}​ the
archetypal boundaries and redefining them at their appropriate symbolic
times. In latter days these ceremonies may have been conducted under the
auspices of the chivalric orders such as the Knights Templar, whose holdings
in and around the Nuthampstead Zodiac have been shown.

In ancient times, all boundaries were held to be sacred, as they were believed
to express a divine division of the world, vital components in the
preservation of cosmic order against primeval chaos. To destroy these
sacred boundaries was to disrupt the sacred order and to court disaster.
“Urbs Camboritum”, writing on beating the bounds in the Cambridge Daily
News in his “Cambridgeshire Cameos” column in 1895:– “In some country
places the rustics believe there is some magic in this business, and that the
crops show up better for this periodical farce, fondly fancying that the
Goddess of Nature rewards the observance of the custom”.

This shows that there was still a belief, albeit scorned by the educated, still
current at the end of the last century, that the wellbeing of the area
depended on keeping its boundaries stable and intact.

Certain places were never profaned, even in time of war, a contrast with this
barbarous age. To commit robbery or murder on the sacred highway was a
capital offence under the Molmutine Laws of ancient Britain, hence the
disproportionate sentences passed on the 1963 culprits of the Great Train
Robbery who profaned the Royal Mail – a remnant of the Divine Right of
Kings and Molmutine Laws. Areas such as market places, sacred raths and
churchyards, geomantically-divined sacred sites marked in Christian times
by crosses, or in Pagan times by stones, poles or trees, were bounded by
unalterable lines, having special protection, both from the sacred and the
secular authorities,

“No feud could be prosecuted on the place whereto people came to trade, nor
within a certain radius from it … a stranger who came to trade was a guest,
and he went on under this very name. Even the lord who had no scruples
about robbing a merchant on the high road, respected the Weichbild, that is
the pole which stood in the market place and bore either the King’s arms, or
a glove, or the image of a local saint, or simply a cross. …” wrote Petr
Kropotkin, in Mutual Aid.​1

These stones, poles, maypoles and trees were situated at precise distances in
precise geometrical relationships, as can be seen in the siting of consecrated
points across the whole landscape. Sometimes, these markers were
destroyed when a New Order took over, as when Charlemagne, who had
changed the metrological system from the Roman one to the Pied du
Roi/Toise system, destroyed the Pagan Saxons’ holy pole, Irminsul; or as
when the puritans destroyed many ancient stone crosses. However, the site
always retained its significance – to this day, distances from London are
measured from the site of Old Charing Cross, now occupied by the
equestrian statue of King Charles I.

The prime importance of place has been recognized since the dawn of
civilization countless millennia ago. Scientific research of the present day is
discovering some strange anomalies of place, at present inexplicable. The
so-called ‘Bermuda Triangle’ has been quoted often as an example of a
place-anomaly, though this has been bitterly disputed. Work carried out on
navigational mechanisms in homing pigeons by researchers at Cornell
University has revealed at least two anomalous sites in Massachusetts, from
which their experimental birds cannot ‘home’. These are a fire tower in the
forest at Castor Hill, from which the birds always fly off at 60° from the
correct direction, and Hornell, where a similar phenomenon is observed.
Aircraft instruments, too, often malfunction at this latter site.

Special places were expressed in terms of landscape modification, the most

phenomenal of which are the Nazca and British ground effigies. The original
laying-out of such effigies was probably achieved using a traditional
surveying method – triangulation. That beating the bounds was the method
of keeping British zodiacal boundaries intact is almost certain. However,
because triangulation, not Roman centuriation (right-angled grids of 776
{12}​ yards/706 metres – 20 Roman Actus sides) was used, the beating the
bounds ceremony would have been a Pagan British rather than a Roman
one. The evidence of most terrestrial zodiacs’ non-Roman origin (with the
exception of Professor Lord’s Pendle Zodiac, which is classical in
conception) is demonstrated by the non-centuriated infrastructure, although
a ‘Roman’ foot of 29·53 cm was used. This may be coincidental, and of much
earlier date. It is certainly not Saxon, as some believe the Glastonbury
Zodiac to be, as the Saxon foot is well documented at 33·53 cm, the Norman
foot 29·777 cm, the Welsh foot 25·1 cm and the modern (1305) English foot
30·48 cm.

Much geomantic research has been expended on the detection in the

landscape of direct straight alinements between ancient sites. Workers from
the middle of the nineteenth century, such as Duke, Black etc.​2​ were
followed by more exact surveys and hypotheses of Bennett, Allcroft, Lockyer,
Ludovic McLellan Mann etc. In 1915, Mann wrote in Archaic Sculpturings:​3
“A scrutiny with the aid of Ordnance Survey Charts of certain sacred areas,
covering great stretches of ground both in Scotland and Ireland …
demonstrate that locations marked by the erection of cairns and standing
stones and by rock scribings and by prominent topographical features or
points (often later chosen for the site of forts ) are arranged in an exact
geometrical relationship”.

The work of Alfred Watkins​4​ is too well known to detain us here. His
remarkable works, still the centre of heated controversy in the
archaeological world, are read widely over 40 years after his death, and his
out-of-print works are soon to be reprinted. Terrestrial geometry has
burgeoned in those years, with the outstanding works of Heinsch​5​, Gerlach​6​,
Behrend etc. as but a few examples of the many.

It is to be remembered that most of these ‘lines’ in terrestrial geometry are

not lines in the Euclidean sense, owing to the curvature of the surface of the
planet upon which they are drawn. The difficulties which this involves is
demonstrated in the little-investigated case of long-distance alinements and
macrocosmic geometry, where great circles are shorter distances than
straight lines drawn on the map. A similar case occurs with verticality,
where the line described by a plumbline in one place is not the same, i.e. is
not parallel with, the line in another place. Such an example exists in the
Humber Bridge at Hull, where the tops of the vertical suspension towers are
two inches further apart than the bases. The basic problem is to evaluate
what​ was actually done in the past, inaccuracies and all. Whether or not the
principles used were inaccurate, superstitious or erroneous is irrelevant, or
at least a different question. The only lines which can be laid out without the
use of complex mapping techniques are those utilizing the line-of-sight
principle, such as some of the alinements at Nazca. The complex
mathematics shown by Dr Heinsch and Professor Thom to have been used in
European megalithic works show that some exact science was practised.
Thom’s work has now been accepted by most of the establishment
archaeologists, though they still wish it could be disposed of. The ideas of
Watkins and Heinsch, let alone Maltwood, can safely be dismissed and left
to people like us who do not have public money at our disposal to further our
endeavours.

Proponents of Victorian Science have, consciously or unconsciously,

formulated the modern metaphysic of direct, unbroken progress from
barbarous savage to enlightened modernity. Consequently, anything of the
past is held to be more primitive and less sophisticated than today. Evidence
to the contrary, though overwhelming, is glossed over and dismissed, an
uncomfortable anomaly. Ancient astronomy and surveying were highly
advanced, and constructional ability was high, but, because attitudes were
different from those commonly held to-day, most modern observers of the
academic school do not credit them with anything like the significance they
deserve. With vast works like the terrestrial zodiacs​7​, the credulity of those
who believe in the unbroken upward march of civilization is shattered.
Scarcely being able to admit of the​{13}​ academically-proven advanced
mathematics of archaic megalithic circles, such authorities can hardly be
expected to admit of a vision greater than theirs, especially a cosmic vision of
millennia since passed.

Our approach is scarcely one which can convince these entrenched pundits
whose psittacine knowledge admits nothing new. We are studying an earlier
life-style whose existence we can only glimpse in fragmentary form through
the practices remaining in what has come to be called folklore. Basically
interdisciplinary, we study factors from a dozen ‘subjects’ which usually
remain totally, and artificially, separate. The study of the landscape, which
despite occasional listings by the Department of the Environment as ‘areas
of outstanding natural beauty’, remains almost totally artificial,
demonstrates that the received opinion that the ancients were little more
than gorillas (in the obligatory skins and woad) is erroneous. The lore which
even today surrounds boundaries, foundations and gateways is a remnant of
a once much greater corpus of applied knowledge which it is the aim of the
Institute to rediscover, evaluate and use.

*********

This article is an extract from a forthcoming book on Geomancy written by

Nigel Pennick.

*********

REFERENCES
1* Petr Kropotkin: Mutual Aid: A factor of evolution London 1902.

2* William Henry Black: Pioneer Geomantic Researcher (works

of). Institute of Geomantic Research Occasional Paper 4, 1976.

3* Ludovic McLellan Mann: Archaic Sculpturings. Glasgow 1915.

4* Alfred Watkins: Early British Trackways. London 1922. The

Old Straight Track. London 1925.

5* Josef Heinsch: ​Principles of Prehistoric Sacred Geography​. IGR

edition in preparation.

6* Kurt Gerlach: ​Various works​ in the National Socialist journal

Germanien. 1940–3.
7* Nigel Pennick & Robert Lord: Terrestrial Zodiacs in Britain:
Nuthampstead Zodiac and Pendle Zodiac. I.G.R. 1976.