One of our mounds…

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The plan was to base our inaugural public ‘solstice’ event at Avebury and thus it seemed natural to book a room at the Public House situated in the centre of the Stone Circle… Only, The Red Lion no longer provides B&B so we ended up instead at a hotel some ten miles away in Ogbourne St. George.
Now, Ogbourne St George is a curious name and one redolent of both mystery and intrigue and given our literary proclivities we thought it might be possible to find something of interest in the village to occupy our Companions for at least one of our allotted slots over the weekend.
We had stayed in Ogbourne St. George before and had a visual memory of a strange mound like structure in one of the fields lying adjacent to the hotel and had pinned to it an accompanying mental note which ran, ‘…must have a closer look at some point.’
A little research in the form of a flick through the ley-line dowsers’ classic, The Sun and the Serpent by Hamish Miller and Paul Broadhurst, confirmed both the visual memory and our hunch that the structure would hold some interest for us.
It was not a prehistoric construction at all but a ‘folly’ built sometime during the Second World War by a local farmer but somewhat amazingly it had, according to our venerable authors, been constructed over a node which marked the crossing of the Michael and Mary currents.
This it seemed to us was very curious…
Of course the mound now looked like nothing so much as an overgrown hillock with its spiral causeway, rising twenty-feet in height, all but obliterated by trees, bushes and shrubs and there was a picture of it in the aforementioned tome which approximated with the mental image which had been stored in my mind for future reference all those years ago.
It was in this respect reminiscent of another of the mounds we planned to visit over the weekend.
The now slightly more famous, but equally tree infested Merlin’s Mound stands in the middle of the private grounds of Marlborough College beset by houses of learning and no doubt deliberately dwarfed by both the sheer bulk and the lofty spires of the College Chapel.
This mound is a prehistoric structure and has recently been given a date of construction commensurate with Silbury.
As we had been unsuccessful in our request to the authorities concerned to climb the mound and as the third of our mounds the aforementioned and world famous Silbury Hill is now fenced off and no longer accessible to the public we were hoping that our unobtrusive poor relation in Ogbourne St. George would afford our Companions the chance to scale its relatively modest sides and experience the dual currents of the Michael and Mary ley.
In this though we were destined to be disappointed…