Festival of Archaeology: Talk

Hidden Patterns in the South Dorset Landscape | Jonathan Harwood

29 July 2022, 7:00pm - 8:00pm

The positions of churches in the South Dorset Landscape, when connected together by straight lines (drawn from church symbol to church symbol on a map at a scale of 1:25,000) reveal deliberate and meaningful patterns.

Jonathan began to explore these patterns in 1997 and, over the years, has carefully considered whether these arrangements of churches in the landscape could be the result of chance. This would be the most obvious explanation since, apart from anything else, it seems out of the question that surveying techniques in Antiquity would have been up to the job. We have a strong tendency, however, to underestimate the capabilities of our ancestors.

In this talk, Jonathan explores his hypothesis that one particularly remarkable pattern encapsulates the, to us, very curious beliefs and practices of Gnostic Christians who were present amongst the villa-owning elite in Dorset during the Roman period.

In the 17th century, a group of puritans in Dorchester pursued a project to transform the town into the ‘New Jerusalem’. More than a thousand years before it seems that another group was motivated to imprint a scaled-up version of the floor plan of the Holy of Holies of the Temple of Solomon onto the Dorset landscape.