Originally published in Vol 43 No 347, Winter 2024 edition of Dowsing Today, the journal of the British Society of Dowsers.

The Burlington Earth Clock is a modern 43-foot diameter stone circle of 14 stones on the banks of Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont. It was constructed in 2007 by Patrick MacManaway, Ivan McBeth and friends, under the auspices of the non-profit organisation Circles for Peace. The five stones nearest the lake are aligned to the horizon points where the sun sets over the distant Adirondack Mountains at the solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days throughout the year. With its beautiful location and solar alignments, what better place to view the total eclipse on April 8? Or so I thought, just a few weeks before the event when I realised that Burlington lay squarely in the path of totality. In a moment of fiscal madness, airline tickets to Boston were quickly purchased and a car hired for a week. Burlington was predictably expected to be very busy around the eclipse and the hotel prices reflected this; but after a bit of searching, I managed to secure what seemed like almost the last AirBnB in town for 2 nights, handily situated just a 20-minute walk from the stones. Perfect!

Once I managed to get hold of Patrick, who lives in Burlington most of the time, I discovered that he was leaving for one of his regular teaching gigs in Australia the day before the eclipse! Very poor timing, Patrick. However, his erstwhile house-mate and the President of Circles for Peace, David Brizendine, was delighted that we were coming over and kindly invited us round for food when we arrived in town.

Arriving in Boston, we were met with 20cm of snow on the ground – not what we were expecting! We’d planned to catch up with some friends in New Hampshire who we hadn’t seen for a few years, before driving up to Burlington for the main event. The main highways were clear, but things started looking a little hairy as we got into rural areas where there was still a fair bit of snow on the roads. We saw a few fallen trees and power lines, and home-owners with snow plough attachments on their trucks who were busy clearing driveways. Still, we made it safely to our destination, and miraculously, the snow almost completely cleared in a couple of days.

The eclipse

I’d visited the Burlington Earth Clock on a previous visit to the town, so I knew about its location and construction. As well as the 14 stones, there is a large circular inscribed ‘sundial stone’ in the centre of the circle with small surrounding stones marking the hours set into the grass. By standing in the centre of the sundial, your shadow will indicate the appropriate time.

We arrived at the stones about an hour or so before the eclipse began, which gave me time to do some dowsing. Lots of people had set up picnic chairs, tables and even barbecues along the lake edge and around the circle, but the interior was largely free, apart from a few souls leaning against the stones. A chap had set up a video camera on the edge nearest the lake where he was live-streaming the event via a portable Starlink setup and passing out NASA documentation about the eclipse and other celestial wonders. We parked ourselves on a recumbent stone at the rear of the site where it wasn’t too busy.

There are two energy leys crossing in the circle. Before the eclipse started, I dowsed that one had nine bands and the other seven. Both were around 2.5-3m wide. As expected, once the moon started to occlude the solar disc, I started detecting energy lines outside of the main leys, which continued to expand as the eclipse progressed. These dowse for me as lines of opposing polarity, rather like smaller versions of the dragon currents found along the larger long-distance leys like the Michael line. Normally these are contained within the body of the energy ley, but as the energy in the ley increases, so does the area that these lines expand to cover.

Using a percentage chart, I checked the energy level of one of the leys frequently, and it increased from around 45% to nearly 80% as the eclipse continued to deepen. I was expecting that it would increase to almost 100% at totality,

Things were suddenly interrupted by the arrival of a sinister-looking man-in-black who, without warning, rode a black electric trike with wide off-road tyres straight into the centre of the circle, before dismounting and producing a black plastic didgeridoo from his saddlebag, which he began playing. He was clad in a long black oiled canvas coat and a wide-brimmed black hat, and generally exuded the archetypal mean cowboy vibe.

I’d been dowsing outside of the circle at this point and was unaware of his arrival until I heard the didgeridoo, but I did notice that the energy level of the ley I was on had suddenly dropped to about 25%, although it was still very wide.

David Brizendine, who was sitting on the central sundial, was rather shocked to find this didgeridoo playing right behind him and rose to politely request that the chap remove his trike from the circle as it wasn’t really in the spirit of the place. This triggered a volcanic and voluble rant about ‘violating my personal rights…this is a public space… I have every right to be here… you f***ing baby boomers think you can tell everybody what to do…’ and other vituperative outbursts, which quite shocked everyone within earshot and really put a dampener on the mood of the occasion. A few people tried to calm him down, and eventually he did quieten and left the circle with his trike to sulk at the rear of the site.

By this time totality was fast approaching and I just had time to quickly check that the energy level of the ley I’d been working on had increased to over 70%, but by then I was more interested in watching the eclipse (through my eclipse glasses of course) and just experiencing the majesty of the event.

Totality was everything I remembered from my single previous total eclipse 25 years ago in Cornwall – and more actually, because this time it wasn’t cloudy and we had a fantastic view of the sun’s corona. For the three minutes and twenty-something seconds of totality, an awed hush fell over the crowd as we all stared, transfixed, at this wondrous spectacle of nature. It was even possible to pick out two or three prominences around the edge of the disc, visible to the naked eye as red dots. Even though it was dark over the site, we could still see light on the horizon beyond the Adirondacks across the lake, and all too soon the edge of the shadow swept across the water towards us, bringing the return of light and cheers, drumming and singing from the spectators. 

Regarding  the interruption by the ‘man in black’ – it seemed clear that he’d come to the circle with the intention of causing a scene to draw attention to himself. We heard later that he is quite well-known locally and his behaviour is not unusual. At the time, I felt that it had rather spoiled the event for me. Yet in retrospect, I started to think that perhaps his appearance was simply a manifestation of Shadow energy and, as a mirror of what was happening in the skies, maybe it was entirely appropriate at the time.

I did try to get some decent pictures with my phone camera, but it just didn’t rise to the task. Our NH friends gave me an eclipse filter for the phone camera but it didn’t seem to make any difference to the photos. I found out afterwards that I should have downloaded an app to my phone to use with the filter, which would have turned out some spectacular shots. Ah well, when’s the next one?