Encounters In Riffa Wood

By Andy Norfolk from Northern Earth 63

While I was studying landscape architecture at Leeds Polytechnic, now elevated to a university, I was exploring earth mysteries in Yorkshire. I had already found several alignments of old sites by dowsing at each one and using lines of sight or computer bearings to check for the next place in line.

In 1976, I was experimenting with dowsing while being driven about in a I friend's van. I was able to estimate the angle at which a dowsable straight line crossed the road as I was being driven along, and this information was plotted on a map at the time. I was unable to see where we were, so I felt that this acted as a control, albeit not very scientific, to limit wishful thinking.

A site I had found to be particularly interesting was Tunnel How Hill at Grid ref. SE 294 384 . I visited it a number of times and had the odd experience of seeing a ghost standing stone and dowsing out what seemed to be a stone circle site. This obviously doesn't seem to be historically likely, bearing in mind the name of the hill. I also saw ghostly horsemen riding from this site on one occasion. Anyway, I had dowsed an alignment that appeared to go through Five Lane Ends [see Gordon Harris ~Ubiquitous Nodes~, NE 57] at SE 279 415 and on to who knew where!

One mobile dowsing session was intended to find out which way this line went. We drove around Arthington, Pool, Huby, Stainburn and other places to the NNW. After covering many miles, we found that my original line went through Little Almscliff, a site with considerable appeal from an earth mysteries viewpoint. In addition, there appeared to be another line crossing this one at the north end of Riffa Wood.

By the time we had worked this out and got near the wood it was late and beginning to get dark. We decided it would be worth looking to see if there was anything interesting at the point where the lines met. After wandering about in the gloom we found a dead straight section of track, carefully paved with stone pitching, which we assumed was an old packhorse route. This track appeared to be on one of the alignments. When we finally got to the point where we thought the lines would cross, we found a stone. "Oh", I thought, "It's a markstone, that's nice". When we looked closer we found it had a face carved on it (see illustration). It's not one of the so-called Celtic or rather archaic heads, but it's interesting even so.

As we left the stone, we suddenly met a large black dog which loomed out of the dusk. It was quite a surprise and seemed very significant at the time. It turned out to be just a black labrador which followed us out of the wood. The stone is at SE 2545 4718 . Please remember that this all happened some time ago, and though I think this is accurate, it might need checking.

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