The Stone Seeker Tour of Avebury

The Stone Seeker Tour is a tour given by author and guide Peter Knight, who is based close to Avebury. He offers a range of activities and tailors his tours to the group or individual. I did not come to this tour with an especial interest in pagan religions and ancient sites, though I should also add, I am not against them either. I would count myself as one of the curious who has visited a few stone circles, mostly in Scotland, and once by chance ended up at a Beltane festival in Wales where I found myself in a sweat lodge with the great unwashed whilst shamanic drummers deep in psychedelic revelries circled the flimsy structure connecting with the ancient ones. At least, that is what they said they were doing afterwards, while sitting around a fire, smoking up a storm. Today's tour was to be a good deal more proper; I was, basically, getting an Earth Mysteries 101 tour of Avebury and the West Kennet Long Barrow. 

The tour started inauspiciously enough at Chippenham train station. It was a short, 12-minute ride out of Bath but it felt like a significant step in terms of atmosphere. Whereas Bath is very cosmopolitan and urban, albeit according to an 18th Century design, Chippenham felt like it belonged far more to the countryside.  

My guide, Peter, picked me up in his car and we drove to Avebury. The stones are accessible free of charge to visitors and not fenced off at all, unlike Stonehenge. This meant we could walk amongst them, touch them, sing at them, perform magic with them, check their auras, ley lines and everything else that was on this afternoon's esoteric agenda. He told me that while he was not such as fan of the restrictions at Stonehenge, they were probably necessary to deal with the sheer volume of visitors. For the type of interactive tour that we had lined up, Avebury was clearly the better location.

We began by looking at the stones with Peter explaining his theory of the stones being gendered with alternate masculine and feminine stones. He knew from which angles to best observe them from, having taken many pictures of them himself.

We noticed these impressively large mushrooms and this provided the cue to discuss the role mushrooms might have played in the rituals that took place here. He said there were no less than 12 varieties of psychoactive mushrooms growing in the area, back in the day. While it is tempting to say that such speculation and ritualistic use of drugs is more a product of the present, such as the Beltane I witnessed, some things in people, like the desire to get out of your head now and then, are, I suspect, fairly constant. What's more, we were not talking about a Friday night down the pub sort of scenario, we were talking about  the use of hallucinogens within sacred rituals.

The next thing we did was to look for faces in the stones, such as this stern face looking out to the side. It is a human capacity to find faces in abstract shapes and the idea here was that the people who constructed the stone circle chose the stones and positioned them such that there would be faces everywhere. I had the feeling the way he had developed his theories had been to read the literature, as it existed, and then spend a lot of time around the stones coming up with ideas of his own and connecting his observations to alternative beliefs from related fields. As such, it all hangs together because it comes from a consistent position but it would be difficult to say with absolute certainty that much of it is definitely true. That is one of the beauties of the stones, that their past usage has been lost in the depths of prehistory and then rediscovered through a mixture of scientific study and contemporary sacred practice. 

I then had a go at dowsing. Avebury, he told me, was on the Michael and Mary ley line which crosses Southern England. He said that it was possible to detect this line using dowsing. I had a go myself and something certainly happened, namely, at a certain point the metal rods pointed together and then, taking a few steps further, returned to a parallel position. This they did without me directing them at all. When he was telling me about the ley line from Cornwall to Norfolk I immediately thought to myself, "that would make a great tour!" I have since noticed that The Avebury Experience already offer an 8-day tour of the line line. Alternative tourism is a definite niche business. Peter did say that he sometimes shows dowsing groups around Avebury and they can spend a full hour on just one small part of it, so much is this a central point on their map. 

This brought us to the so called 'Devil's Seat.' Spending some time with Peter I had the impression that he was quite well suited to being a guide. He knew his stuff, which is a first pre-requisite, and then he also quite liked answering questions. I was a bit afraid I'd say something very dumb but he was easy going and made a few jokes here and there which made things relaxed. 

At this point a group of Americans on some sort of pagan package tour appeared out of the ether. They were mostly women of a certain age with one or two men in robes tagging along. They were clearly here on a mission: three of the women were carrying metal swords. They seemed to be circling the stones but then took a wrong turn and were backtracking looking for a way to cross the road that annoyingly bisects the circle. Peter put them on the right path and then told me that he gets significant interest in his work from the USA and from time to time flies over to give talks or workshops. California, it seems, is where the greatest amount of interest in this sort of stuff is to be found. It was interesting to note how the US has ancient religious sites of its own but that these belong to the people the settlers have largely displaced. Peter, to his credit, said he recognised this and tried to incorporate these into his talks and work when over there as he viewed these cultures as being essentially alike. I am usually rather sceptical of essentialist beliefs, in the sense of we are all one, as they usually conceive of this oneness in very particular terms. Still, I understand the impulse in this case and I wouldn't be surprised if there is something to it. 

At this point we had a go at testing the acoustics of the stones. Many of them had cavities and Peter would speak and make sounds into them. Of all the parts of the tour this is the one which, to the outsider, must have looked the most puzzling.  

There were quite a few other groups visiting the stones for different reasons. There was a school group having their lunch there and I spotted another 'alternative' looking group pounding the ley line. Peter told me that at mid-summer it can get very lively indeed and look a bit like a fancy dress party. I want to go!

Stepping away from the stones we went to the National Trust cafe for lunch. It was strangely normal. We did see some of their guides who were showing the sort of people sitting at the tables here around Avebury. I suspect their tour was very different to mine.

We then drove a short distance outside of the circle to look at a double row of standing stones that branch out from it. Again they all had faces and I was put on the spot by being asked, what do you think this one is? I was quietly happy when I guessed correctly that it was known as the shark stone.

We then drove a little further and stopped close to Silbury Hill. This, I was informed, was a man-made structure and another one of the sacred sites in the area. A huge truncated cone, it is, apparently, a special place for dreaming. Sadly, I didn't have the time for an overnight stay to put that to the test.  

We walked up a gradual hill to the top where the West Kennet Barrow is located. A barrow is a burial chamber and I had seen many small round ones but this one was something else as it was long and narrow one which, happily, is open to the public. 

Again checking the acoustics of the stones, Peter built up a rhythm with his drum and then invited me to stand in front of the stone. He played the drum in front of and around me, I could feel the vibrations moving through my body. This built up over a few minutes and where I was at first rather self-conscious I relaxed into it. This is a tour which itself blends into action, I was no longer just the observer but also the observed and it was all the better for it.   

An elderly couple then entered and asked us to be quiet. Peter told me that this was the first time in the fifteen years that he had been coming here that he had been asked to stop drumming. It's a pity I didn't get a decent picture of how the couple looked, they had the countenance of those who like order. In fact I think they probably prefer order to the barrow: they sniffed around for a couple of minutes and then left. When we were leaving a little later we did some informal cleaning; there were a good few tea lights and the remains of rituals past. Seeing how popular Stonehenge is and also how flat the experience can be, I'm surprised that more people don't try this sort of tour. I daresay there is some marketing and communication issues which conspire to make things how they are, but with just a little effort there is a great deal more you can experience at these ancient sacred sites and the Stone Seeker Tour is a great way to do this which does not demand you be an initiate or anything, you simply have to turn up with an open mind, ready to see faces in stones.

The Bath City Trail

I realised today that I have been walking over a tourist route these last few days that I hadn't even noticed. I'm probably in company with pretty most of the people in the city centre as The City Trail is anything but noticeable.

Upon emerging from the Tourist Information with some leaflets on further tours, such as The Tour of Britain coming to Bath very soon, I looked down and by chance spotted this plaque below.

Each of these brass plaques, sunk into the pavement, has a quote about Bath from a British writer or notable figure of the past. What they have to say is rarely interesting or important, all that matters is that Dr Samuel Johnson said something about Bath.

Unexpectedly then, I was off once more on a tour, excited to see where it would lead me. I somehow managed to miss plaque 2 and passed directly to 3. The arrow seemed to be pointing in the right direction. When I thought about it further, the work involved in laying out this trail is not simple at all and there is scope for error both in the design of the plaques and in their installation too.

The arrow gives you the direction of the next plaque but not the location. It could be 10 metres away it could be 10 kilometres, there is no way of telling. This made the game more interesting as it introduced an element of uncertainty that kept the eye busy. In practice the distances were never that great but they were certainly not uniform either.

The route was also designed to make it easy, as far as possible, by avoiding obstacles in the path from one point to another. It would have been possible to have made two points on either side of a building, so that you would either have to walk through the building or else walk around it, thus going off the line of the arrow in order to return to it. I would have rather liked it more if they would have done this as that would have brought the intervening structures and spaces more fully into the frame of the trail. 

Thinking about that further, such a trail cutting straight lines through space is somewhat reminiscent of the colonial divisions of newly acquired territories. When conquering powers had a duty of administering land over which they had little familiarity, the line was the abstract and arbitrary method of delineating one area from another. It is precisely this possibility of making a line that passes through someone's house and then turning that line into a meaningful border that displays both power and insensitivity. The line can be a potent thing. These lines, however, were not.

As I fell into a rhythm moving from plaque to plaque, I started to think of the work of the Boyle Family too. Some of their works present pavements as wall mounted artworks and I remember how these had the wonderful effect of reawakening the senses to the complex compositions under the feet. The least loved of the directions of looking, down is where these abstract social sculptures abound.  

As I was fully expecting, there were locations where the trail met unforeseen obstacles. The arrow pointed in the direction of this construction site and at the far end of it no plaque was to be found. With the pavement claimed and closed off, I had to assume the plaque was there but I could not be sure, which made it far more interesting.   

I found my way back on the trail again easily enough as it passed through the tourist attractions. I only had to pause and think, what is the most obvious place to walk to next, go there, search for the plaque and there it was.

The trail made me think of the trail of plaques put up by The Museum of London along the length of London Wall. I really should write that up as a tour sometime since I have taken it and it was a really worthwhile stroll. It was enjoyable partly because of its limitations and neglect: the Roman wall has been largely destroyed and exists only in fragments. The contemporary plaques have also fallen into neglect making it a trail of double neglect. Following such a tenuous route became a challenge.

This plaque struck me as a sad one. The designer must have run out of quotes to add so it remained blank with just a number and an arrow in its centre.

After a while the distances between the plaques enlarged and it became increasingly difficult to find them. What also happened is that my eye became more attuned to looking for them. I spotted, for instance, the plaque on the far side of this crossing.

I here realised that there was another quoteless plaque and that the previous ones had attempted to make the quotes relevant for the locations they were sited in. That must mean that there was nothing much to say about Queen Square, which was sad in itself too. Surely, even staying within the frame of the work, it would have been possible to find enough specific quotes for the locations that had them and keep enough generic Bath quotes to spread around the rest. But no, the trail became a simple game of directing the walker from point to point. To be honest I didn't miss the quotes that much as they added little and were written in a circle that makes you have to stand above them, twist your head, turn around and even stoop down to read more closely when there is an interior line of text with a smaller font size.   

Thank God for number 14, then. and a return of words! My impressively practical though less than beautiful shoes, by the way, are for a skyline walk tomorrow which I was instructed to come suitably attired for.

I found this plaque a curious one as it was quite different to the others. It was on the right direction, more or less, but it seemed to not belong to the series. It had no number in the middle and was embedded in a newer concrete slab which was itself framed by tarmac. I suspect that this may have been a later addition but I could not say for sure. If it were a newer addition it makes me ask, is the trail still maintained or was there a year when it ceased to be?

The trail seemed to fall apart all together at this point so I took a picture of a water cover instead, as it was in the area the plaque should have been. That's when it struck me just how invisible these plaques are. With a little bit of weathering they fade into invisibility and become a variant of the utilities cover.

By the time I got to 18 my will to pursue this City Trail was failing. I started to wonder if anyone had really bothered to come this far before, except for the people specifically invited when the trail was first set in place. I suspect there may be a handful, but this really is one of those public art projects that must have seemed like a good idea at the time but which is now near forgotten.

At the circus I felt sorry for the designer of this trail as he or she had an obvious problem to contend with: how to point with a straight line around a circular space? Their solution, pointing towards where this woman is coming from, was not a good one but then again this was always going to be a challenge. Following the arrow on its word would have led me into the building behind her so I instead interpreted it to mean, follow the circular path of the pavement.

This I did and I failed to find another trail plaque so settled for this gas cover. With that I concluded the City Trail.

Stepping back to Tourist Central I noticed this woman posing for the camera. Following up on an observation I made on the Pingyao Tour about there being a very interesting range of culturally specific poses that tourists pull when getting their picture taken, this was a new one for me. I cannot locate this body gesture at all. It looks very deliberate, like it might be part of a traditional dance or a pose common to statues, yet there is always the possibility that it's a more personal mannerism.  

The tables were soon turned and she was in the camera crew taking pictures of the monks. There's something funny about monks doing typical tourist things, you somehow imagine they would be above that. 

On a similar note, I saw this picture of Obama in Stonehenge this morning, he visited it after the NATO summit in Newport, which itself is also slightly mismatched. This opens up the question of appropriate and inappropriate costume for tourists which narrows down to casual and smart casual in the UK. Going round the Roman Baths dressed as a soldier, a nurse, a cleaner or a homeless person would not look at all right. A businessmen in a suit mixing work with leisure is somewhat acceptable but even that looks like it belongs more to the 1970s than to today. Practical solution: remove the tie and jacket.

The Occupy Tour: an anti-capitalist tour of The City of London

Finally I have got round to taking The Occupy Tour, a tour that is based upon the financial crisis and London's role within the historical development and current state of global capitalism. If that sounds like a lot of digest, you're right it is, but it all boils down to an anti-capitalism tour, more or less, and one that proved to be very well attended too.

The tour started on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral, the site that the Occupy protesters took after being prevented from occupying the London Stock Exchange back in 2011. I remember standing on these same steps back then and listening to the geographer David Harvey speaking to a large crowd on the relation of capital to city space and how he strongly supported the Occupy initiatives that were taking place worldwide. I think his writings should be worth looking at in relation to both this tour and The Tour of Tours more generally as he does go into the contested functions of public space quite considerably. This tour began not with a reading from Harvey, however, but instead with a reading from the letters of St Paul about possessions and money, a reading that addressed, rather aptly, the church's compromised role in finally supporting the eviction of the protesters.

The tour made its way from point to point taking shelter whenever possible from the rain. It should not be a shock in London to have to deal with a bit of rain when on a tour, but it has been a particularly damp time recently and I have the feeling I been enduring one sodden tour after another of late. Between stops we were encouraged to play "Spot the Tax Dodger". Predictably enough Starbucks was on the list and so too was Boots who, we were told, have assigned their corporate headquarters to a post office box in Switzerland, a move detailed in the UK Uncut campaign. 

We stopped outside many buildings that belonged to the different people and institutions who, we were told, were in their own ways responsible for the crisis. Our two guides took it in turns to explain the roles each of these different institutions played such as here describing the evolution of the Lord Mayor of London's office. This was quite interesting but what gave the tour an extra twist were the responses of the people inside the buildings. Here, we had someone opening the door and asking the tour to move away. We did... about 10 meters to the right, so that we were now assembled in front of another of their doors. The man then banged futilely on this other door from the inside to show his displeasure, but the street belonged to the crowd so the quotes from then Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2006 and 2007 on the wisdom of light touch regulation of financial services, kept on flowing.

We came to the headquarters of the Rothschild family's businesses in London and heard how they built their empire, in part, through acting as the financier of national war bonds. Their present status is less important, we were told, as they had relaxed into being merely super wealthy and producing hyper-expensive wine in their vineyards in France. Now I think of it, I was once shown a large number of bottles of their wine whilst taking a truly surreal tour around the Reignwood Wine collection in Beijing. I might have to repeat that wine tour this spring when I will again be in Beijing so I can cover it here on the blog.

Once again we came across disapproving security guards speaking into their radios and not quite knowing what to do with us. Finally a colleague of his emerged and said, "No photographs, private property." It was the best he could come up with, a symbolic way of saying, "We don't like you, you are not welcome."  

They used a lot of laminated A3 pictures to illustrate their stories, such as this one on the founding of the stock exchange. I'm quite familiar with this use of cards having seen it on many other tours but the one thing that was more novel and which I rather liked was their hats. The rest of their clothing was relatively normal and would not attract much attention but their hats gave the whole tour a theatrical, not to say sartorial, lift. Top hats function as historical references that reminded me of the Victorian and Georgian eras, which was quite appropriate with this tour in which the past and present constantly intermingled. This mixing of time frames was, in fact, both the tours strength and weakness. It allowed them to make connections and explain how we got here, however, it was at the same time so scattered that it was impossible to extract a clear argument or thread from the tour, which instead felt like a catalogue of annoying and unjust things about the City of London.

The two of them performed well as a double act; here they are talking about Monty Norman the Nazi sympathising Governor of The Bank of England. What's more, they didn't just rely upon each other, they also brought members of the audience into their act by asking them to answer questions, translate phrases and even sing songs. Compared to the last time I took a tour with two guides who were at crossed purposes, this was a very harmonious duo. 

The tour came to The Guildhall, a site already known to me from The Machiavelli Reinterpreted Tour and here they made a gently provocative gesture through writing on the wall of The Guildhall in chalk. This diagram explains the medieval system of representation in The City of London which today ensures the mayor remains a person appointed by the banks.

We then stood in front of Chicago University's European Campus located in Woolgate Exchange but were cleared off this spot by another zealous security guard who had a contented 'job well done' look on his face when he managed to get us to the other side of the street. I can only think that these men have a very poor understanding of public relations as these actions only heightened the sense that these institutions had something to feel ashamed of and were embarrassed by this attention. Security guards and those who manage them tend to see things differently.

Chalk was again used to good effect to produce this table showing the income of the top 1% and level of public debt in an effort to debunk the free-market theories of the Chicago School of economic thought. The apparent failure of these economic theories and policies to behave as predicted has not yet made any apparent dent on the prestigious university campus located in the heart of the financial city. I would have liked one of their economics professors to have come out of the building and defended the theories, but that was not to be. It was a Saturday after all.

We then went over to Deutsche Bank where the topic was the consolidation of debt and the financial products and instruments that were behind the collapse of sub-prime mortgages. This was made a little more entertaining by including a rap composed by a former employee of the bank on the subject of the Collateralized Debt Obligation Market.

"CDO Oh Baby" to the tune of Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice

Yo vip let's kick it!
C D O oh baby, C D O oh baby
All right, stop, collaborate and listen
Spreads are wide with a technical invasion
Home Eq Subs were trading so tightly
Until Hedge Funds Bot Protection daily and nightly
Will they stop? Yo I don't know

Turn up the Arb and let's go
To the extreme Macro Funds do damage like a vandal
Now, BBBs are trading with a new handle
Print, even if the housing bubble looms
There are never ends to real estate booms
If there is a problem, yo, we'll solve it

Check out the spreads while my structurer revolves it
C D O oh baby, C D O oh baby"

The guards looked on unimpressed as usual but did not intervene. In the background there is some of the bank's substantial art collection on show and I noted that they offer tours of their art collection, I might just have to take one to see things from that point of view. 

The last stop on the tour was the Moorgate branch of Nat West, a bank that is owned by RBS. There was a whole lot more talk about the government bailout of this bank and its unethical investments and as I was listening to this I looked around and saw the sentry box that marks the 'ring of steel' the security checkpoints installed in the 90s to tighten police control of the city's entrances and exits following IRA bombings. It was striking how it seems to more or less follow the old Roman Wall of London which, incidentally, is a tour route as well. This city within a city, or even state within a state, as some consider it, is essential to any understanding of what is going on elsewhere in the city and well beyond. The tour concluded with many thank yous, a steadfast refusal to accept money for the tour, encouragement to get involved with the issues raised and current campaigns such as that to remove the post of The City Remembracer and a final near ubiquitous gesture that I was not expecting. They said, "if you have enjoyed the tour then rate us on Trip Advisor!" It seems like this company and its website is the glue that connects people with tours in London today. 

The tour finished in the Red Lion where the bar staff kept trying to pour short pints, ie not fill up the glass completely, even though it was an over-priced generic city pub. On second thought that might precisely be why they were pouring short but that, in any case, didn't deter a significant tranche of anti-capitalists mixing and talking about the tour, about Occupy and much else besides. I've come to notice that the tours that generally finish in the pub are the ones where there is already a greater degree of connectedness between those taking it: tours around a very specific topic or political tours, like this one. The more general tourist oriented tours rarely have this social dimension. While most of the tours I've reviewed so far that have ended this way have been lefty tours, I would be shocked if this were not also the case with other groups and different political persuasions. I don't quite have it in me to test a BNP or EDL tour, if such a thing exists, but I can well imagine it finishing in a pub too.