Olivers Castle, Devizes, UK

An afternoon with Merlin.

Oliver’s Castle stands on the edge of the escarpment above Devizes in Wiltshire, an Iron Age hillfort crowning Roundway Down at the western edge of the Marlborough Downs. Its earthwork ramparts — now little more than grassy banks — respect two far older Bronze Age burial mounds, and the site looks out across a spectacular sweep of rolling countryside. Though named after the Battle of Roundway of 1643 in the English Civil War, its story reaches back thousands of years, and the excavations found little trace of settlement — suggesting a place used as a refuge in times of danger, or for ceremony, raised close to the gods.

Its deeper significance lies in the landscape. According to Hamish Miller and Paul Broadhurst’s celebrated book The Sun and the Serpent, Oliver’s Castle is one of the sacred points where the two great energy currents of southern England — the Michael and Mary lines — cross one another. This is the famous St Michael alignment, a great ley that runs across the country from Cornwall to the Norfolk coast, linking a string of sacred high places dedicated to the dragon-slaying archangel: St Michael’s Mount, the Hurlers, Burrow Mump, Glastonbury Tor, Avebury and more. To stand here is to stand upon one of the nodes of that living current, with a dew pond and the ancient enclosure close by.

Small wonder, then, that the hill has long gathered folklore and mystery — tales of a headless figure by the barrows, and in more recent times a strong association with crop circles, which appear again and again in the fields beneath its slopes, and with the lights and legends that gather around them.