The Boleigh Working

This had been a trip in the planning for many months. The only real plan though was to record in a Fogou. Boleigh Fogou to be precise.

Everywhere else we got to visit was a real bonus. What an amazing couple of days we had.

The trip began for me with a drive from Blandford Forum to Southampton Airport to pick up Brian Lavelle. We have become a pair of Fogou obsessive's over the last few months after choosing Fougou as the name of our band. We decided to spell the name Fougou after T.C Lethbridge and his spelling of the word. You're much more likely to see the word spelled Fogou these days though.
It would be fair to say that Lethbridge and the promise of seeing and experiencing a real life Fogou were the inspirations for the beginnings of our musical project.

Brian and I made the journey down to Boleigh Fogou. We met Rob at Rosemerryn, our home for the next few days. Rob and Laura are really lovely people and possibly the only people lucky enough to have a Fogou in their back garden. I would highly recommend staying here if you are thinking of visiting Cornwall.
Here is a link to their website http://www.rosemerrynwood.co.uk/

We stopped only to drop our bags in our rooms before heading straight out with Rob to see the Fogou.
Brian and I spent the rest of the afternoon recording in there and generally just taking it all in. The acoustics in there are quite unlike any place i have heard before. The dripping water adding to the sounds we made. Other ambient sounds such as the wind or birdsong are really reduced once you step into the fogou.

Boleigh Fogou is alive. There is no doubt about that. It is a living breathing entity. I have never in my life experienced anything else quite like it and the way I felt there.

We spent hours looking around the Fogou, sitting in the creep passage, experiencing dark, so dark that we couldn't see our hands an inch in front of our faces, and enjoying being there.
The first live performance Brian and I did as Fougou was in front of an audience of spiders, some of which were big enough to look us in the eye. With red spots on their backs, they were the only audience we could see but who knows who or what else was in there during the hours we spent in the Fogou.

On the Saturday we walked from Rosemerryn to The Pipers. Two enormous standing stones just a few yards down the road from our base. These stones are enormous and quite spectacular to see and be in the presence of.

Later we visited Tregiffian Burial Chamber. This lies on the side of the road and apparently used to extend through the road that so rudely cut it in half at some stage. It is impressive to see even now and has large Cup marks in one stone. I believe this is a replica, the original cup marked stone being in a museum somewhere. This stone also faces the wrong way now, originally having faced the dead inside the grave itself. There is also a cup mark on the capstone. Easy to find and well worth seeing if you are in the area.

The Merry Maidens. One of the best preserved and most complete circles I have ever visited was our next prt of call. Brian and I had the place to ourselves for over an hour or so and only saw a dog walker, a couple of girls living in the back of a van and an elderly couple during our visit. We recorded here using just singing bowls with the microphone in the very middle of the circle. I also used a pendulum in a dowsing experiment around the circle with interesting results. I had never tried this before but influenced by Lethbridge and with an open mind I gave it a go. I'm not sure what any of my results mean but it was a start.
The Merry Maidens on an early March morning in Spring were a real joy to behold.

On Saturday afternoon we drove over to Carn Euny and again we were lucky enough to have the place to ourselves for a couple of hours. So we visited another Fogou, and took in the whole place, which is simply incredible to see. How on earth this place has survived so long is amazing to think about. The Fogou here is quite different to Boleigh. Bigger and more extensive but more sanitised and museum like in its reconstruction and preservation. Even so this is still a fascinating and compelling place to be.

The creep passage here is open to the grounds surface and the temptation to pass through it was too hard to resist. However, I chose not to go down the creep as presumably was originally intended. To do this would have had me spill out into a heap at the bottom covered in mud. Instead I decided to crawl upwards out of the main chamber. It was quite a squeeze, and I had to scrape my way though, catching my back on the stones above me before entering the light at the end of the tunnel and being free again.
Carn Euny is high up on a hillside but surprisingly secluded and sheltered from the wind, at least it was on this visit.

On the way back we had a good view of St Eunys Well . This was a nice spot but spoiled somewhat by a large metal grid.

Next was a visit to Boscawen-Un. We approached the circle and saw people in the circle. As we got closer it was clear that they were dowsing with rods. We entered the circle and I asked the man in front of me if he was having any luck with the dowsing. He told me "Yes, It's always good here, would you like to try?". To which I said "yes", and so it began. I walked towards the center of the circle from the large Quartz stone, I was told to slow down and hold my hands further apart, making sure that the rods pointed downward away from me slightly. Almost alongside the large leaning stone the rods both turned in my hands. How very odd, and very exciting this was. When I walked across the circle towards the leaning stone (now leaning towards the left) I experienced the rods turning to the left alongside this center stone., completely in line with it. I had other results too with the rods turning in towards certain stones at different points. The Quartz stone was quite different though with the rods just moving freely in my hands when I stood by it. Why? Was this some kind of mental suggestion? Or perhaps it's something to do with magnetism, my body the conductor and the rods the indicator? I'm not sure what it all means yet but something happened and despite common sense and a certain amount of skepticism I experienced results. Have I been reading too much Lethbridge or is this the beginning of something I should explore further?
I must say that I loved being in this circle, a fantastic place in so many ways.

Saturday ended with another visit in complete pitch darkness to Boleigh Fogou.

On Sunday morning the rain and mist had set in and enveloped the whole of the Land's End Peninsula.
Undeterred we decided to go and find Men-An-Tol.

Even though a nice lady walking her dog had pointed us in the right direction, we still missed Men-An-Tol completely at first.
So our next stop was at Lanyon Quoit. An amazing structure and shelter from the rain for a little while, then onwards…

Mud rain and mist, my friends, we feared them not.

Reaching Men-An-Tol was a joyous experience.
I first set eyes on Men-An-Tol on a postcard I received from Julian Cope / Head Heritage. It was printed with a black and white photo of Men-An-Tol taken by Julian Cope on one side, with printed news of a new band called Queen Elizabeth on the other. Years later I was there, looking at Men-An-Tol in real life.
Before too long I was crawling through the hole, the wind, mud and rain all cheering me on. And so ended The Boleigh Working.