There he was – the familiar tall, lean young chap with flowing brown hair, elegantly if perilously poised on an overgrown Cornish wall, next to the megalith he had just uncovered. We, the capacity audience, all gazed appreciatively at the grey 1970s photograph on the screen. Just as nimbly the same young chap – now grey himself – sprang up on to the stage of the Glastonbury Assembly Rooms and told us what had become of that stone in the intervening years…

John Michell’s study of megaliths, their history and meaning, their scholars and desecrators, provided the central pivot for the conference’s eclectic subject matter, and his book – Megalithomania – its name. He described his discovery of the St Michael line – the alignment of prehistoric monuments which extends from East Anglia to Cornwall – research which gave that generation its first inkling that the ancient world was not as institutional archæology, and its associated sciences, described it.

Some of this research was conducted in a Morris Minor convertible with a hole in the hood and an umbrella provided for the passenger sitting under the hole. The umbrella sported another, but fortunately unaligned, hole. John’s writings had been the first inspiration for most of the conference’s other speakers.

Whatever version of megalithomania they subsequently espoused, they had all been gripped by his revelation of a deep secret enshrined in the landscape; deep, but freely available to anyone willing to search, think, observe, imagine and trudge the fi elds armed with gardening tools to strip the brambles from the standing stones which, it transpired, map an archaic cosmology.

From the 5th to the 8th of May, just such intrepid types fi lled the Assembly Rooms in Glastonbury to bursting point – Glastonbury which is, according to one speaker, “England’s heart chakra, which is nice”.

The range of megalithomanias the conference offered extended up into the Heavens and down into the Earth. At one extreme was the talk given by John Martineau (one of the conference organisers, along with Hugh Newman and Gareth Mills, and the publisher of the beautiful Wooden Books line). 1 He had demonstrated the geometrical harmony of our Solar System’s planetary proportions and cycles in his Little Book of Coincidences, but the same proportions realised in stone circles, he thought, have an extra dimension: “They do something to us. They have a feeling.” While the circlebuilders’ knowledge was clear, their intentions are still obscure. “Why,” for instance, “did they align and size and site megaliths where they are?” As John summed up his subject matter: “It’s about what we don’t know – their massive culture, unified and busy.”

This massive culture can be glimpsed though its units of measure. The first person to conceive of a ‘megalithic yard’ was Professor Alexander Thom and, by measuring hundreds of stone circles, he also determined its length: 2.72ft (0.83m). A brilliant academic who held the chair of Engineering Science in the University of Oxford from 1945 until his retirement in 1961, he carved chains out of wood during the train journeys between Oxford and Ayrshire, built a windmill and fathered archæoastronomy. Robin Heath 2 vividly evoked the life of this fascinating and ruthlessly energetic Scot with the aid of the Thom family photograph album, and lamented his present fall from academic fashion.

Thom’s work on the megalithic yard was refi ned by John Neale, 3 who has spent decades codifying the units of measurement in the ancient and classical worlds. In his mesmerising talk he described how Bronze Age builders embodied these measurements and preserved the integers in their stone constructions – “the nit-picking accuracy of these people!” He also showed, illustrated by suitable lengths of wood, the coherence between theirs and our own Imperial measures. In the face of the onward march of metrication he pleaded: “Leave us our God-given measurements.”

Martineau’s, Heath’s and Neale’s conclusions all reiterated the theme of the conference – that, as Professor Thom put it: “In terms of thinking ability, the megalithic builders were superior to myself.” This reversal of modern evolutionary thought – that we are intellectually inferior to our ancestors – was an idea explored by Andrew Collins, the inventor of ‘psychic questing’ and a man incapable of uttering a dull word.

Over 20 years, Andy’s quest to discover, as he puts it, “what the hell is going on” has reached as far back as the oldest structure known to man, the temple at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, as his fascinating slides testified. He gave us a tempting foretaste of his latest revelations: “Even my closest friends haven’t heard The Cygnus Mystery stuff yet!” 4 He wondered whether Palæolithic peoples could have been influenced by particles from the Cygnus constellation, which could have kick-started their great civilisation.

Graham Hancock, on the other hand, suggested it could be hallucinogenic plants which were responsible for the vision and art of our ancestors. 5 Descending from the constellation of Cygnus to girdle the Earth like Puck, Hugh Newman 6 gave us an overview of the distribution of ancient megalithic sites around the world and the various grids that have been proposed that join them all up. He asked big questions, such as: Do the Michael and Mary lines go around the world? Do other cultures recognise them? In the last few decades, something resembling a grid has indeed girdled the Earth – the World-Wide Web. Andy Burnham described how he turned this to the advantage of megalithomania, creating a massive but user-friendly website 7 whereby the dedicated stone-hunting community (‘megaraks’, as Andy terms them) can share information about obscure stones worldwide and add their photos to the archive. Some of the site’s most prolific anonymous contributors were spotted lurking self-effacingly at the conference (JJ Evendon, for instance, who posts under the name of JJ and the legendary JackME, who is Jack Morris Eyton, though I failed to spot ‘The Captain’).

At its social level, megalithomania was beautifully placed in its historical context by the conference’s first speaker, Andy Worthington. He described historical attitudes to Stonehenge and Avebury and the development of neo-paganism in the 20th century, seeing the different Druid orders which focused on those temples as expressing a yearning for English spirituality. His hair-raising slides of the 1985 summer solstice Battle of the Beanfield – the final rout of the New Age from Stonehenge by the police – showed the extent to which suppression of that yearning defi ned 1980s society. 8 Perhaps it is the influence of the megaliths, our oldest inheritance, which makes English spirituality so closely identified with landscape in its associated forms, from the National Trust to the Romantic Movement in art and literature.

The romantics were present at the conference, of course. Michael Glickman proposed “if not a love story, at least a flirtation” between stone circles and crop circles. His homage to the landscape was a display of some of the ravishing photographs of the crop circles that have appeared near Avebury, Stonehenge and other stone circles. Jurgen Kroenig likewise produced a stream of wonderful images – megaliths, simulacra and natural stone formations – set to music. Then there was Sig Lonegren, the illustrious dowser, wore red braces and has recently become a British citizen. He saw stone circles as places to enhance the possibility of personal spiritual connection. In this august group must be numbered George Wingfield, equally a romantic, but, like a spurned lover, determined to demystify the object of his fascination. The slideshow he had assembled of ancient rock carvings and sheela-nagigs inevitably traduced his avowed scepticism by its beauty.

But megalithomania is also a history of personal revelation, and parochial enchantment. Above all things, it teaches us that the New Jerusalem is just outside our back door. This point was made by Nicholas Mann, who had discovered that what had previously been dismissed as a modern spoil heap in a 1960s Glastonbury housing estate, St Edmund’s Hill, was in fact an ancient mound aligned to the winter solstice sunrise. Fascinated, we watched his photos of the sun crawling up the landscape’s silhouette from its vantage point. Turning to the other side of England, Edmund Marriage’s lecture described the Wandlebury-Hatfield Loxodrome, an extraordinary 26-mile (42km) alignment of megalithic stones and earth mounds stretching through Paul Weston drew on the ‘geo-mythic reality’ of the St Michael line as his inspiration for a personal pilgrimage along some of its length to Dorchester on Thames, a physical journey but one into which magical coincidences and meanings began to insinuate themselves, showing how the impulse to follow a sacred path has unexpected rewards and ramifi cations: “If you play games with that, stuff happens.”

The altered perspective on modern assumptions that megalithomania brings was touched on by many speakers, most vitriolically by Michael Glickman: “We live under a vicious fundamentalism – scientism”. Chris Trwoga condemned our “scientific age” too, comparing the emotion depicted in Mantegna’s Dead Christ to Rembrandt’s record of detached enquiry in The Anatomy Lesson, and suggesting that science was deadening our innate sense of wonder, awe and dread. Robin Heath, too, had favourably compared the truly scientific method of Professor Thom (“I go on recording what I find”) to the disinclination of modern academic archæologists to look seriously at his work.

But it was left to John Michell, the most practical of megalithomaniacs, to suggest a use for university archæology students: they are young; they could be out mapping the stones which still lie invisible in the hedges – for unless these markers are surveyed and recorded on the county maps, they are vulnerable to demolition along with the boundary walls that often incorporate them. We were invited to look at the St Michael line projected on the screen, and John pointed out, among the many stones he’d discovered, all those which had already disappeared. There is now no trace of that stone he jumped up beside and measured with his own height, except that grey 1970s photograph.