Discoveries in the Templar Church at Shipley

Some time in the early 12th Century, probably between the years 1125 and 1130, Philip de Harcourt, Dean of Lincoln, gave the Knights Templar "the land of Heschapelis and the church of the said vill". The Templars immediately began to rebuild, erecting the solid, rather sombre building that now stands beside the bank of the Adur, one of the oldest and architecturally most important churches in Sussex. I first saw St. Mary's, Shipley, on a June day in 1975. It was an idyllic scene, a 'Country Life' cover picture of rural England if ever there was one. Swans glided majestically between the water-lilies on the clear, meandering river and small boys fished. A little distance away the white mass of the windmill that had been Hilaire Belloc's home reared itself above the vivid green of early summer trees. Beyond, the little village drowsed in the afternoon sun. It was a charming scene of which I was only partially aware at the time, for almost immediately I found what I was looking for and hastened to follow it up.

The triple line, which off and on I had been following through Sussex for weeks, arrived at one of the corners of the altar end of the church at an angle of 45 degrees. At the north-east corner, a six-line emerged. I had found a changeover point. The new sextuple went towards Dragon's Green where stands the 'George and Dragon' pub. Along the side of Dragon's Lane and partially on it the sextuple line ran in a northerly direction. The road turns to the left, but the sextuple continues, marked by a line of well-established oak trees that successive farmers have allowed to remain standing across the field, until it joins a low earthwork in a hedgerow. Here there is a strange trackway about 8 feet wide between an impenetrable wood and the hedgerow. The low earthwork dowses like those at Coldharbour Wood. Some twenty yards along the earthwork the sextuple line, running parallel to and on its right hand (south-north) side along the earthwork, split in two, one branch running across the field to the north-east, the other easterly through the impenetrable wood.

I drove along some of the other nearby lanes, in particular one which ran past a house marked on the map as Knight's Farm. Most Templar churches had farms of their own. There are many Mr. Knights, but it was worth a try, for a sextuple line crossed the road at 90 degrees and went towards the house. This was strange because its other direction was on Shipley Church and I had only found one sextuple there which I had traced in another direction. The following day I visited the church again with the same results, but this time I went outside the graveyard in the meadow to the south. The churchyard was clearly elevated some four feet above the meadow and, at a point where it extended some 10 feet a right angle in a southerly direction before carrying on, I found the westerly sextuple line that equated to the one at Knight's Farm. It did not enter the churchyard. I went into the churchyard, found the vicar and engaged him in conversation. He had only taken over the parish at the beginning of the year and was still in the process of informing himself as to its antecedents. He had been questioning the verger who had informed him that grave-digging had revealed signs of building in the corner where I had encountered the second sextuple. He believed this to be the Templars' Preceptory, referred to earlier. He also told me that the 15 feet wide River Adur which passed the Church used to be navigable and the knights had embarked there for the Crusades. Indeed, it was alleged that the ironstone bollard in the entrance to the church had been found at the water's edge and bore what might be marks of mooring chains. It dowsed! But then it was ironstone - at least, that was what  I supposed at the time to be the reason.

I enquired about Knight's Farm and he said it was believed to have Templar associations. The lady who lived there would be pleased to talk to me, and so she was. Mrs. Gretel Little, the owner, welcomed me in, gave me a life saving beer on a hot summer's day and showed me round the house. She explained that it was alleged to be a Templars' hospice and it was clear that much of the house, albeit restored, showed signs of antiquity. The sextuple line ran partly through her drawing room, once a kitchen, and partly outside the house. It stopped some 10 feet the other side. Two days later I came back and met Mrs. Little's partner in her horticultural business, Bob Phillips. He was a parish councillor with a deep love for and intimate knowledge of that beautiful stretch of countryside and I was fortunate indeed to have so knowledgeable a guide. Accepting what I had to tell him, he took me to see Abraham's Well, for which recently he had obtained modest funds from the parish to renovate with his own hands. It was a mysterious and slightly disturbing, if singularly beautiful, spot. the well - or rather spring - was about the size and shape of a large cauldron, perhaps two feet across and only two feet deep. But no matter how hot the outside temperature was, the water was always bitterly, numbingly cold. Bob Phillips told me that the well changed its water every two and a half minutes and that Hilaire Belloc used to insist on churns of water from Abraham's Well being sent to him by train whenever he was staying in London. The six-bar line went through it.

On my next visit a few days later, Gretel Little welcomed me in her accustomed style. "Do you do ghosts with your thingummyjig?" "Well, I don't know," I said. "Possibly. Why?" "Well, I have visitors who say that one of the bedrooms is haunted." I asked her permission to dowse the bedrooms, but she said that she should not tell me which it was. I dowsed them but the only reaction was the straight six which passed through her living room and the bedroom above. She told me that was the room where a particular visitor said a nice young man was always there. I proceeded to follow the six-line back and I went to the field opposite, where next to the sextuple line I found two circles. My first reaction was an idle speculation that the six-line circle was the same diameter as those I had found in the interim at Chartres Cathedral which I had visited a few days before. It was 33 and a half of my paces and so were the Shipley circles.

Gretel took me later to a little bridge of obvious antiquity over the River Adur on her property. It was a splendid little bridge built without mortar, and its stresses were distributed and its fabric supported by its massive stones which formed a Roman arch. The river authority had been at work, dredging and 'preserving'. They had pulled out of the river some very large stones which had fallen from the coping; they were about 100 kilos each. She told me how they had also found heavy stones laid under the bridge below the water. The stones dowsed. The bridge itself which could support a modern tank was on a line junction, an exact cross, but the bridge was within a circle into which the lines did not penetrate. The centre of the circle also dowsed. I took a fragment home. It dowsed. Later, on another visit with Bob Phillips, now as good a dowser as anybody, we explored the lines on the bridge. They were different from other lines I had encountered - single lines about 10 feet wide. Normally they are about 3 feet or less. The northern line ran to a grove within a hollow, with configurations like the classic clover-leaf pattern of the 'earth temples'. Within the complex a star-shaped line system met the main line where it disappeared. We did not know what to make of it.

We returned to Abraham's Well to examine it at greater length. Bob had brought his three children and I put my spare rods in their hands. As I crossed the sextuple line, they began to say, "Daddy, it moves!" The well was beside the road. On the other side, some few yards into the wood, I could see a low earthwork. We went in. It curved in a gentle arc some twenty-five yards either side of the six as it crossed the road. It dowsed just like Coldharbour Wood! Its curve took it back across the road to a hollow, like the chalk-pits, on the side of the well and, leaving the earthwork on the other side, the single six split into three sixes in a north-west quadrant. the sun was low, the place mysterious. Bob said, "I can feel them too," as well as the children. We paused to consider, Bob this time concentrating very hard. The sympathy he had initially shown me had hardened into certainty that at least I wasn't a wandering madman and whatever it was he and his children knew it was there too. He then said he knew a place where there were one or two strange depressions which he had always felt to be 'eerie'. They turned out to be near the line that went through Knight's Farm where I had found the two circles earlier. On the way, his children kept saying "Here's a six" and "Here's another". "They're only children, they don't know," I thought, but sure enough there they were - many circles of 33 and a half paces running, as it appeared, in a group perpendicular to Knight's Farm, Shipley Church straight-six, and the depressions on the other side of the line, which contained spirals - the start of a very large group.

I returned to Shipley a few days later. And again a week or so after that. And again and yet again, working my way first through the water-meadows immediately surrounding the church and then through the fields beyond. It was slow work, for I was no longer dowsing on open downland but on farmland, and where there are arable crops it is possible to work only during the relatively short period between reaping and sowing. But fortunately Shipley lay more or less on the route between my office and home, and so it was possible to stop over at odd moments and add a little more to the map that I was building. For it was becoming more and more apparent that I was not simply dowsing ley-lines, or even Underwood's aquastats, but something much more complex and deliberate. Eventually with assistance, I was to uncover more than six hundred symbols centred around Shipley Church; symbols - not patterns which might have been produced by chance movements of underground water; symbols which, though possibly employing that blind natural force, had communication as their object. This was what my rod was revealing, and in due course I found different classes of symbol. One of the most elaborate of these was something which resembled a line of music - a representation of ram's horn spirals, based on factors of seven. And the circles were in groups of 49, as were the squares with the linear symbols inside.

Another phenomenon I tried to chart (but eventually gave up as impractical, although not impossible) was a link-up of the group of 126 (or 7 x 18) spirals I referred to earlier. I had noted that they were linked, but when I started to sort out the linkage I found myself involved in a most intricate pattern. The spiral at one corner might be linked to another 100 yards away, and also linked to the next one fifteen yards away and so on. I recognised a symmetrical interweaving pattern, such as one might find in a Persian carpet or in the interweaving forms of Celtic Art, but I didn't have time to pursue this. It would take a team of three or four dowsers, and a day or so. If it is shown to be important, it will be done. What I particularly noted was that this huge display of symbols, at least a mile long and wide, always followed the natural features of the landscape. They scrupulously observed the serpentine banks of the river. All of which was a not unpleasant way to spend a summer or two, particularly when one knew one could always repair to Gretel Little's for refreshment or chat with Bob Phillips (who by now had become a first class dowser) at the end of the evening. If nothing else, one had made good friends on this strange quest.

By July 1975, I had found enough to convince me beyond argument that I was not looking at merely another function of the ley-system. But what had I found? Before one could even begin to answer that question, it was necessary to have some corroborative investigation. Bob Phillips had worked side by side with me and confirmed my findings. But had I been unconsciously influencing him? What was needed was a dowser of experience who could confirm or deny the findings by basing them on his own experience. Bob Cowley of R.I.L.K.O. had also become a firm friend within this period. My meeting with him was only one of many such meetings that illuminate this story. I made enquiries of Guy Underwood's publishers as to whether there were any unpublished papers, and they directed me to his Estate's solicitors where I was courteously received. Upon my announcing the nature of my enquiry, they said that all his papers were on loan to a Mr. Robert Cowley. They gave me his telephone number and permitted me to use their telephone. He was in. We talked for half an hour before I realised I was abusing the hospitality of the solicitors. I think we both realised we had a life-time in which we were going to talk. "Come down next weekend to Wolstenbury," I said. He agreed. Harold and Jill came too. We all struck up the firmest of friendships from then on. Bob was a senior member of R.I.L.K.O., the Research Into Lost Knowledge Organisation. This admirable and unpretentious society, which publishes works of the most fundamental importance, was founded under the auspices of Mrs. Janette Jackson to rehabilitate the reputation of Frederick Bligh Bond, the man who excavated Glastonbury Abbey under the direction, it later transpired, of automatic writing from a medieval monk. His great discoveries were then hurriedly suppressed by the ecclesiastical establishment. How extraordinary that such evidence for the survival of the human spirit after death should cause embarrassment to the very institution which has preached it for two millenia.

Bob had already visited Shipley and found the symbols and, one day later, he phoned me and said, "Look, Bill Lewis is in London for the weekend. He will come down and look at what you have found." I was delighted for I knew Bill Lewis by reputation as one of the best dowsers in Britain. As it happened, the previous week, I was in Watkin's bookshop in the Charing Cross Road and fell into conversation with a complete stranger, a young man by the name of Stephen. We got talking and I said, "Why not come to Shipley and see what's going on?" He did, and he came with another young man - an advanced yogi - who was also a dowser. Thus, quite by chance, a remarkable gathering of people quite suddenly took place. It was with a great sense of anticipation that I drove over to Shipley from Brighton. This was for two reasons: firstly, my findings might be rejected by a better dowser than I, and all the work I had put in be rendered nugatory; secondly that it might receive confirmation, in which case I would receive another form of emotional shock. For, notwithstanding my intellectual appreciation of the dowsing results, there was still one part of my mind which kept telling me it was all an idle fancy - an attempt by the subconscious to provide relief from the wholly materialistic culture of which I was the product.

We met at 11.00 a.m. that Sunday morning. I don't know what the vicar thought when he saw the party foregather outside the church. Bill Lewis was introduced. He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye. "So you think you can dowse, do you? We shall see." He was a man in his sixties from Welsh Wales, and as I got to know him during the day, a gentle and knowledgeable man, if ever there was one. Dylan, the yogi, and I went off in one direction, whilst Bob and Bill went off in another. Dylan cut himself the hazel fork of the traditional dowser and I held my rod. We marched together across the sextuple line from the church. As the hazel worked and jumped in his hands, so my rod moved back and forth through its quadrants. We were both marking the same phenomenon. I explained to him about the symbols and we moved into an area where they were. He dowsed them. And then something quite extraordinary happened. "I can see them," he said. As in all these events, at the moment strange things happen, you take them in your stride. It is only later that the full impact hits you. "Oh yes?" I said. What's over here then?" And he proceeded to explain to me that he could actually see the square symbols I had painstakingly dowsed and drawn. Then he demonstrated to me that he could identify, by his own particular vision, what was present on the map I had made, which he had never seen. I asked him to describe them. "They are like huge cubic polythene bags."

"Let us make an experiment," I said. I had brought with me the charged stones we had collected from various sites where lines started or bifurcated. We set them up in the car-park of the church in the form of a rood cross, which we knew produced a projection of lines, thus: (diagram - not in typescript). "What's happening now?" I said. "It's like a great wind." He replied, "It's bending the symbols away in both directions." Then he said, "It's something to do with that ironstone in the church porch." I asked him to move into a position in which he could feel the strongest impressions, but from which he could not see us, and we would disassemble the stones, to see if he would know when it was done. We did so, and when we put them back in their bucket, he came round the side of the church almost immediately. "It was like a punch up the kidneys," he said, "when you removed the cross." And so we adjourned for lunch in the appropriately named 'George and Dragon' Inn. In the meantime, Bill Lewis and Bob Cowley had gone off inside the church itself. Bob took notes of Bill's findings. Lewis felt that the church was based on a series of converging underground springs, forming the 'square of Pegasus'. The ironstone in the porch was part of a larger and much earlier stone temple on the site and was important in today's system. Much later, I found out that the constellation of Pegasus was a key symbol of the Templars, whose church that was.

We got to know each other a bit better over a beer and a sandwich and later moved off to the area of the spirals. Bill Lewis certainly found them, although he kept associating them with underground water. As a test, I got out the charged stones and set them up in a way that would interfere with the patterns. Bill Lewis was not watching. I walked away for a while. When I came back, the stones which I had placed in grass so they were more or less invisible were back in the bucket. He waved an admonishing finger at me and grinned. What was interesting was that he agreed with what I had found, but his interpretation was more on Underwood's lines. By this time he had come to realise that Dylan could see what was going on. "You're one of those who can see these things then? I've met one or two before. I suppose you can see auras." "Today I can," said Dylan, "but it's the first time it's happened." "I'll steal Colin's aura,"said Bill, and taking me by the right hand with his left, swung a pendulum around in his right. I felt a distinct tingling. "Can you see it's gone?" "Yes," said Dylan, "and yours is twice as big." "Do you mind?" I said. "I'd rather like my aura back." Obligingly he swung the pendulum the other way. The tingling sensation was repeated. "It's back now," said Dylan. Now up until that time, although the rods always obliged, I could not get the pendulum to do anything. From that day onwards the pendulum came alive in my hand, and I was generally a better dowser than before. I often wonder if I didn't get something from Bill Lewis as a result of this operation - and the pendulum became very important subsequently.

We moved up on to Abraham's Well, really a spring. Dylan found the six-bar lines there. Bill Lewis said it was the convergence of two radio-active stress lines whose origins were thousands of miles away. He said that the present name, Abraham's Well, was only of 80 years standing. Previously it had been dedicated a a shrine in the name of a saint some 750 years ago. Circa 1900 B.C., it had been the centre of a temple, at which time the spring, previously a blind spring, had been opened up so that the waters emerged. He then proceeded, using a wire spring which he thrashed in the air with one hand, to give an analysis of the water. He asked Bob Crowley to call out the periodic table, and spelled out the sort of analysis one is accustomed to read on the label of continental mineral water bottles. Calcium was the predominant trace element, with potassium and magnesium second and third. He expressed percentages of others to six places of decimals. It also contained traces of Strontium 90. "It's a wonder all Welsh sheep aren't psychic," he said at this point, a reference, I later realised, to a belief in occult circles that the release of Strontium 90 into our environment is raising man's perception. We went to see Gretel Little and had a farewell beer together. During this debriefing session, I asked Bill to look at my photograph of Wolstenbury with the hemispherical bubble. He dowsed it with his spring apparatus. "You are right," he said. "This is a manifestation of zeta radio-activity. Many people take photographs like this but throw them away, as they think that the light has somehow ruined the photograph." Interesting, but it merely removed the problem one stage further.

And what had we found here today at Shipley? What was the explanation of this huge complex of interrelated symbols? The conversation went back and forth, the speculation circling round the subject until I said, with some diffidence, "Are we looking at the equivalent of a school-child's blackboard? Could it be, say, a permanent display setting out geometric truths for the benefit of Templar neophytes and, in the Preceptory, those who come after them. People like us, for instance? It is perhaps a code, or a form of simple test. Only when the neophyte has perceived them and explained them is he fit to move on." I was diffident because the theory was startling to say the least. But I had good grounds for advancing it. Over the eighteen months or so that I had been visiting Shipley, I had naturally been building up some background information on the Templars. It was sketchy, hesitant material. There is no history of the Templars or, rather, to be exact, the history of the Templars has only been written by their enemies. They were wiped out totally in 1305 and their traditions subjected to vicious, hostile propaganda which sought to show them as degenerate perverts who also dabbled in the black arts. But 'truth is the daughter of time' and over the succeeding centuries independent researchers have been throwing light on aspects of Templar tradition and motivations. All this I tried to explain that evening in a local tavern to my fellow explorers. Sceptical at first, they became more and more interested.

I began to think of a link between this quiet Sussex churchyard and that violent story wrapped in the mists of time of the Albigensian Heresy. In a month's time I was going to Andorra to spend the summer in the family chalet high up in the Pyrenees. I had brought a map of Andorra and gave it to Bill Lewis to be dowsed by him. He agreed and shortly after we parted company. He promised to write to me with the results for I had told him I had discovered a legend that the Grail of the Cathars was buried in a cave in Andorra. The reason why thoughts form in one's mind and why one does certain things is not always easy to explain in a logical way. I had read certain books about the Cathars or Albigensians by French authors over the last year, as they were appearing in a series about 'occult' matters in Spain. I acquired them as they were published, for I was also interested in the surrounding history of Andorra. My interest quickened when I noted, in Gerard de Sedes' 'El Tesoro Cataro', his references to the work of Fernand Niel who had indicated that the castles and chateaux of the Cathars had apparently been built on geomantic lines, that is to say, in keeping with the ancient canon of measurement and orientation I had read about in John Michell's 'View over Atlantis'. Maybe the Cathars had been in the secret as well, whatever the secret was. The connection between geomantic buildings and ley-lines was also a point made by Michell, and by Paul Screeton in his 'Quicksilver Heritage'. Furthermore, the Cathars were clearly associated with a strange group of men called the Cagots, a guild kept in a rigid apartheid in that area, who built the churches and who unequivocally traced their origins back to the Master Hiram, builder of King Solomon's Temple. Here one was right back in again to that Masonic stream with which the Templars are inevitably associated. I shared Underwood's view that all this was a 'Masonic' phenomenon.

I had also read during this period Trevor Ravenscroft's 'The Spear of Destiny'. This also dealt with the feminine grail symbol, the chalice or stone, and I was now therefore familiar with Wolfram von Eschenbach's 'Parzifal' and the alternative Grail cycle in which the Grail Knights, or Templars, had received the Grail and guarded it in the castle of Montsalvat, quite specifically in the Pyrenees. Wolfram had said it was a stone fallen from Lucifer's Crown. Montsalvat, said some, was the same as Montsegur, last redoubt of the Cathars who were synonymous with the Templars in knowledge and objective. Both were exterminated for heresy. In a little book called 'The Templars' by Pierre Morizot (a Steiner Publication) which Bob Cowley had given me, the whole connection had been spelled out between the Templars and the Cathars, both as Grail adepts and guardians. Could it be, I wondered, that the Grail symbol cloaks the esoteric truths of ley-lines and geomancy? And the thought began to form in my mind that the quest was perhaps a sort of search for the Holy Grail. Even when I found the reference to its being buried in a cave in Andorra, it was still with a light-hearted gesture that I gave the map to Bill Lewis.