The Hippy and the Physicist.
I was sitting in a 6500-year-old burial chamber, listening to a hippy chant. It was the first day of a new moon. Fifty-million-year-old sarsen stones stacked to form the Long Barrow around me.
Heavy.
It was a spontaneous day trip to visit megalithic architecture. There is something deeply satisfying about the simplicity of placing stone to define space: a stone circle, a burial chamber or a medieval abbey.
Avebury Stone Circle had drawn me to Salisbury Plain. A strange part of the world where ancient earth energy vibrates while C-17 cargo planes and black Apache gunships fly overhead.
Somehow, I ended up deep in a Long Barrow.
She pushed her hands into the ground, adjusting pressure in rhythm with the song. The frequency made the stones hum.
“What language was that?” I asked.
“It’s how I’ve always spoken to the fairies”, she said.
“Oh”, I said.
“It’s a new moon today. A time to clear out past baggage”, she said.
“Brilliant”, I said.
As I got up and stooped out of the chamber, left brain said “weird”, right brain said “wow”.
From time to time, I go to Avebury to walk the circle and touch the standing stones. Over eight feet tall, there are a few I’m drawn to. Putting both hands on their face, I feel energy. A vibration. Electrical perhaps. Whatever – it’s real, man.
Heavy.
The bedrock beneath is Holywell Nodular Chalk. We don’t think enough about what’s under our feet. We’ve become detached from the earth. To reach Avebury from the south, you climb over Pewsey Down – clay deposits over chalk. A massive ridge formed, not by addition, but by the surrounding clay being worn away.
The day trip continued to Malmesbury Abbey in the Cotswolds. Until 1520, it had a spire taller than Salisbury Cathedral and, in the 11th Century, the second-largest library in Europe. Today, an impressive Norman entrance carved from local limestone still stands. More stone forming space, making a place. It was buzzing inside. Like the Long Barrow, but no chanting hippies. Just old’ens chatting while drinking tea.
Not so heavy.
A few days later, I saw an old red phone box standing tall on the back of a truck. Like a megalithic standing stone. Phonebox Henge.
Strange, I thought. On closer inspection, two men were removing a 1980s BT call box, ready to join its red counterpart on the truck. The hole it left revealed the layers added by civilisation.
It got me thinking. History is the process of adding and removing stuff. Stories get lost, but the layers remain for future interpretation and speculation.
Woodhenge, near Stonehenge, is a hundred or so stumpy concrete posts where 12-foot-tall wooden posts once stood. An unimaginative replica. In 4000 years, will they be adding square concrete bollards where strange red communication devices once stood? Will they speculate about what they were for, what they meant? Maybe they’ll only know about how Bill & Ted and Doctor Who used them—and jump to the wrong conclusions.
I ended the week listening to a former NASA physicist, Thomas Campbell, talking about consciousness. His research suggests that the world around us is not physical at all — that reality is a kind of information system, and we are players inside it. He believes we interpret a web of data to build our experience of being alive.
Heavy.
The hippy and the physicist.
Both trying to make sense of what it’s all about.
Just like me.
And now you.
Have a good weekend.
All the best
This Week’s Links:
After a little while, I’ve made another house design video for my YouTube channel.
A once-neglected house in the Irish countryside was rescued by its former owner.
Avebury henge and stone circles.
Mysterious Silbury Hill and the twisted tale of West Kennet Long Barrow’s human bones
Thomas Campbell is a physicist, consciousness researcher, and author of the “My Big TOE” trilogy.
I’ve updated my build cost data for 2025. You can download a copy here.
Main Image credit: Earth’s energy amongst the stones. (MidJourney)
