Listen to Rachel's story >>>

"Penance. I thought.
I am cursed."

Rachel is 23. She was born Glasgow but moved "down South" when she was 12. Her grandparents used to live in Cornwall so she imbibed a lot of local folklore and culture. Now she works at the Pegasus theatre in Oxford, which she loves.

"My story is a new and humorous take on a place which has many of its own ancient tales"

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"Crawl through the stone, 9 times against the solar direction, then lay yer head down on a sixpence".

So there I was, squeezing, grazing through Men-an-Tol, the 4,000 year old holed stone in Maddern, Cornwall, following this ancient ritual

Three times - kneeling in mud,
This was the fifth day of my solo cycle trip along the Cornish ley lines...

Four times...

The Men-an-Tol site was starting to give me the creeps...so quiet and deserted. Folklore spoke of the ghost of Giant Old Denbras slayed on this moor, and of meddling piscies, and of hidden bottomless wells where many travellers had fallen to their death, and of trees...with faces...

Five times… and I was starting to feel off key...
Was it the sense of years of pagan fertility ceremonies, druid poetry and unexplained energy fields coiling outwards from the site?

Men-an-tol

Six times...
Then something on my seventh time through made me....pull down my pants and push my naked bottom through the hole and moonie those Ley lines from East to West!

Then chuckling, I had a cigarette on the stone and wandered back to my bike.

I hadn't been riding for more than a few minutes along that smooth road to Morvah when a strange wobble, a swerve an out of control oscillation took my bike and threw me clear over the handlebars and crashing onto the tarmac. In shock, I surveyed my mangled front wheel and my tent some 50 metres back up the road.

Penance. I thought.
I am cursed.

As I sat there, 2 cars passed without stopping and a van driver leant out of his window and laughed.

Do not meddle with powers ancient and unknown. Respect the few treasured places that we have left knowing that thousands before you have done the same...

An hour or so later, a police car pulled up and stopped. Out of the car stepped a very attractive officer. It turned out he'd got all the right tools to patch up my bike, put it in the boot, and drive me the whole way to St Ives in comfort. Over a pint that night he told me it was really lucky he had passed by - he didn't normally drive that way.

Or was it another twist of fate?

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