John Fish B.Sc. Publishers of Tenby in Wales (UK)

TENBY PORTAL PAGES

Elvis in Pembrokeshire

"Same reason as we're here now. While you were away I talked with them and they'd been monitoring the Second World War and trying to understand what it was all about. They couldn't understand the rational that led to the great strides in mankind's understanding of science and technology to be used for self-destructive purposes. Instead of viewing it as warfare between sovereign states they came to the conclusion that what was being fought over were Britain's sacred sites. Call it lateral thinking or what you will but until us Americans came into the war it was very much a case of Britain being on the defensive but then the build up for D-Day began and they detected a lot of military activity around Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, Southern England, which is where Stonehenge is, around Oban on the West Coast of Scotland where there are numerous Iron Age sites and here in Pembrokeshire.

"In other words, their reading of events as they happened was very different to history as we write it. Also Britain was involved in the war in North Africa which they seemed to think was about the Egyptian Pyramids. They seem to have been investigating planet Earth for generations and observed how science and technology gradually developed. So to them the places where astronomy was born such as Pembrokeshire and ancient Egypt, and by places I mean the actual sites, have an almost mystical importance whereas to our thinking those places are of mere historical interest only. To them the most important figure in human history is Neil Armstrong."

"How do they rate you?"

She laughed: "They were very surprised to meet me but seemed to take it as meaning something along the lines of a meeting of equals was taking place. It's quite a mind numbing experience to meet people to whom, well to whom someone like Elvis Presley is of minor importance compared to someone like me."

"Wasn't he named after the Preseli Mountains?"

"Was he? I certainly don't know anything about that but I found I had a lot in common with them, and they were very enthusiastic about Harvard's University of the Environment in Pembrokeshire and readily agreed to join the science faculty's department of analog computing as research associates in the first instance."

"So you think you fit in better on the Moon and in the Iron Age than you do on planet Earth at the end of the twentieth century?"

"Frankly, yes. Let's stop a minute. Now if you look towards the southern horizon then in the distance you can see Lundy Island beyond which lies the English coast, part of which you can just about make out further to the east before the line of sight leads you to Worm's Head and the Gower Peninsula. Now prior to the Iron Age, in the Bronze Age or perhaps even the late Stone Age, they transported dressed stone pillars of volcanic Dolerite, what are known as the Preseli Bluestones, from the Preseli Mountains to Stonehenge across the sea in England.

"Now we can see the Preseli Mountains to the north of us and from here we can actually see where they were quarried. The peak to the west is known as Foel Eryr and the one to the east is Foel Cwm Cerwyn which is also known as Preseli Top since it is the highest point of the Preseli Mountains. Then to the east of Foel Cwm Cerwyn we have Foel Drygarn which in the twenty-first century will be a very well preserved Iron Age hilltop fortification, then just to the west of that is where the Bluestones were quarried.

"I read a book called Open Secrets by Piet Brinton and Roger Worsley (and published by the Gomer Press of LLandysul, Wales) and in it the authors point out that when Bluestones are polished they actually look like the night sky, the Dolerite is a dark bluish colour with white spots in it. Now if we think about it we operate to a frame of reference where the Earth is a planet which has its place in a solar system, in a galaxy, in a universe; in brief we believe the World is round. But what is the frame of reference to which the Iron Age intelligentsia of the Druids, and presumably their predecessors, think?"

 

Extract from Preseli Bluestones by Sion Pysgod

Published at Tenby in the Pembrokeshire Coastal National Park (Wales, UK)

As a Star of Pembrokeshire Series Paperback