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The line enters Great St. Mary’s along the edge of a small priest’s door on the
north side of the St. Andrew’s Chapel. This is now blocked, and the site of an
aumbry which, from the light burning above it, holds the reserved
sacrament. This chapel is the venue for evening prayers each night at 6 pm.
From the centre of the Holy Sepulchre church to the priest’s station before
the altar of the St. Andrew’s chapel is 1002 Saxon feet – surely a significant
distance, as further evidence will prove. The ley touches a pillar’s edge on
leaving the St. Andrew’s chapel, crosses the chancel, the south chapel, and
passes out of the church by means of a window. The ley then crosses the
southern part of the churchyard, St. Mary’s Passage, and various buildings
before entering the churchyard of St. Edward, King and Martyr. The ley
penetrates the corner of the west end of St. Edward’s, travels through the
staircase of the turret and leaves for the next site on its path – Bene’t’s.
Before reaching St. Bene’t’s (St. Benedict’s to be precise), the ley touches the
corner of the medieval Friar’s House, now a fancy goods shop, at the
entrance to Free School Lane.
St. Bene’t’s is the oldest church in the city, having a Saxon tower dated to c.
1020. The ley enters through <a> wall and leaves just cutting the edge of a
window. It misses the central pillars of the church. After St. Bene’t’s, the ley
crosses Corpus Christi college before entering St. Botolph’s, which it enters
by a window, passing through { 33} the central panel of the three-panelled
window. In the nave it crosses the radius of the landscape geometry
heptagon (see Landscape Geometry of Southern Britain, IGR). The distance
of this crossing from the Holy Sepulchre centre is 2162·8 English feet,
1968·3 Saxon feet. The ley then cuts directly through the centre of a pillar on
the south side of the nave, cuts the edge of the wall at the entrance to the
Holy Trinity chapel, and crosses in front of the altar of that chapel. Again,
just as in the St. Andrew’s chapel of Great St. Mary’s, the line exactly passes
in front of the altar, directly over the priest’s station at the position in which
he would celebrate the Mass. The distance from the centre of the Holy
Sepulchre is 1998 Saxon Feet. With an error of 0.2%, the centre of the round
church is thus 1000 Saxon feet from the St. Andrew’s Chapel and 2000 feet
from the priest’s station in the Holy Trinity chapel. Such a periodicity on an
alignment is surely an indication of some important, if lost, practice,
perhaps of activating the line by saying mass (or some other ritual formula)
at fixed distances along it simultaneously. The ley leaves St. Botolph’s by a
window, crosses Botolph Lane and goes through some buildings before
emerging exactly through the corner of what is now the Penguin Bookshop.
At this point, the ley traverses the junction of King’s Parade, Trumpington
Street and Pembroke Street, the site of the erstwhile Trumpington Gate of
the medieval city of Cambridge, the point where the artificial watercourse
known as the King’s Ditch formerly crossed the road – an important point in
the geomancy of any city, being the access point of spiritual as well as
secular and military friends and foes alike. After the Trumpington Gate site,
ley enters relatively modern buildings before passing through a Victorian
church – the Emmanuel { 34} United Reformed Church (formerly
Congregational). The significance of nineteenth-century churches on ley
lines remains enigmatic, but just a little further south is the medieval church
of St. Mary the Less (formerly dedicated to St. Peter, the same dedication as
a small, now redundant, church on the other side of the river in the Borough
– the old Roman town). The ley entered St. Mary’s by a door, now blocked,
and left by a window in the west end of the church. It was rebuilt drastically
during the last century, and the whole of the west end now bears little
resemblance to the former layout. However, the reconstructors saw fit to
insert fragments of a pre-conquest stone cross in the wall at the point where
the ley leaves the southern side of the church.
From St. Mary’s the line has been traced as far as the south coast. It passes
20 metres to the east of the former Trumpington mound, which has since
been erased from both reality and the Ordnance Survey maps. It also misses
the Thriplow tumulus by 25 m, this time, to the west.
The most important site which the ley traverses is the Palace of the Bishops
of London at Much Hadham. The Bishops were bequeathed the manor in
950, so the present 16th century building may well be on the site of the
former Saxon manor. The Saxon connexion is continued!
The ley crosses nothing else of any significance between Much Hadham and
the south coast.
ANALYSIS
The ley is characterized by the following: Mainly within the precincts of the
old City of Cambridge, it passes exactly through the centre of the round nave
of the Holy Sepulchre Church. The east wall of St. Michael’s Church is
exactly parallel to the line. It passes through two side chapels, both of which
are still in use, crossing the priest’s station at each one. The separation of
the centre of the round church and the two priests’ stations is 1000 Saxon
Feet. There are 7 pre-reformation churches in the line, 1 post-reformation
church, 3 corners of buildings, 2 road junctions, and the site of a city gate, all
within 3000 English feet. Carried southwards, the line crosses no other
significant pre-reformation site except the Palace of the Bishops of London.
The above points indicate a high degree of deliberation in the layout of this
ley. Its azimuth, 4.31° east of true north, precludes any solar or lunar
orientation, and foils any attempt to date it on astroarchaeological evidence.
The dating of the ley by astronomical evidence, which is the usual procedure
for astroarchaeologists working on American or megalithic sites, is not
possible.
The Saxon metrology (table below), points to a Saxon origin of the churches
on the ley, yet the history of the city shows that it was not only Saxon but
also Danish until the 11th century. In 875, the Danish navy wintered at
Grantabrycge (as Cambridge was then called), and three years later it passed
into the hands of the Danelaw officially under the provisions of the Treaty of
Wedmore. It remained a Danish town – an important seaport, as the river
was navigable from the Wash – with its dock area around the Holm, an area
where St. Clement’s church now stands, just to the north of the Holy
Sepulchre. In the year 1010, the town was burnt down, and the oldest
surviving building, St.Bene’t, dates from the rebuilding of Cambridge at that
period. Because of the destruction of 1010, nothing predating this exists.
{35}
However, we have the problem of the Saxon feet. This is not so much a
problem when it is remembered that the English foot was not instituted until
an edict of king Edward I in 1305. Even then, he did not alter land measure,
which remains to this day (barring metrication) based upon the Saxon foot.
The fundamental measure was the Rod, which equalled 15 Saxon feet.
Edward made the now English foot fit the Rod – 16½ of them. Thus the
mile remained the same, being 5280 English feet instead of 4800 Saxon feet.
As the Saxon foot was in current use until at least 1305, it tallies with the
official estimate that the churches of Cambridge were all built by 1280,
mostly in the 12th and early part of the 13th century.
The origin-point of the ley, the Holy Sepulchre, dates from between 1114 and
1130. It was built upon a pre-existing sacred site, the Churchyard of St.
George. As a dragon-slaying saint, St. George is admirable as a dedication
for an omphalos, as the Holy Sepulchre is a microcosm of the world, the
centre of its rotunda being the omphalos about which rotates the flat circular
earth (in medieval cosmology).
References:
Behrend, M: The Landscape Geometry of Southern Britain. IGR
Occasional Paper No. 1 (1975, repr.1976,1978).
Behrend, M: The Geometry of Cambridge in The Geomancy of
Cambridge(Pennick ed.), IGR (1977).