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BITS AND BOBS<br />
SUSSEX WILDLIFE TRUST CALENDAR<br />
All together now… aaaah.<br />
These foxes, photographed<br />
by Lisa Geoghegan, are the<br />
<strong>January</strong> entry for the excellent<br />
Sussex Wildlife Trust<br />
<strong>2017</strong> calendar, and the organisation<br />
still have some copies<br />
available, at the discounted<br />
price of £5 (originally £8.99),<br />
if Santa didn’t put one in your<br />
stocking. Please call 01273<br />
497532, or go to sussexwildlifetrust.org.uk/shop.<br />
We<br />
can promise waxwings, hares<br />
and hedgehogs as well…<br />
and that’s just taking us up<br />
to April!<br />
AXIS OF HEAVEN BY PAUL BROADHURST & GABRIELE TRSO<br />
This book is subtitled The Greenwich<br />
Meridian, Britain’s Secret Axis of Power,<br />
and it posits, in great detail, the theory<br />
that, though officially founded in<br />
1884 the Meridian line is much more<br />
ancient than we think, and was actually<br />
‘laid down’ by Celtic astronomers,<br />
to align with the Celestial North Pole,<br />
as a symbolic centre around which<br />
the stars were thought to revolve.<br />
The writers’ evidence for this theory<br />
includes the inordinately high number<br />
of remarkable ancient sites the Meridian ‘accidentally<br />
passes through’. <strong>Lewes</strong> figures prominently towards<br />
the end of the book, where the authors muse at<br />
some length on the meaning of the twelve (by their<br />
account) mounds on which <strong>Lewes</strong> was built. They<br />
pay particular attention to what they call ‘The Tump’<br />
(and we <strong>Lewes</strong>ians generally call ‘The Mound’, or<br />
‘the Mount’, at the top of Mountfield Road). They<br />
figure this to be a ‘Neolithic observatory<br />
for viewing the sun’s annual<br />
journey through the skies’.<br />
This is believable enough, but the<br />
authors often stray from plausibility,<br />
particularly when they try to<br />
shoehorn historical events and<br />
characters (including Tom Paine) into<br />
their theory. They even suggest that,<br />
since Landport Bottom is just off the<br />
Meridian: ‘It is reasonable to conclude<br />
that <strong>Lewes</strong> was understood by both<br />
Henry III and de Montfort to represent the mythic<br />
‘gateway’ to the Axis Mundi symbolising the power<br />
over the land, and as such was the place to fight for<br />
rulership.’ Um… Nevertheless it’s a good read, and<br />
one which will lead us to explore the mysteriously<br />
circular ‘Golden Horn Copse’ in South Chailey in<br />
more detail in a future issue. Alex Leith<br />
Mythos, £25, axisofheaven.com<br />
25
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