Scottish History : GNAS Home Page © 2001 H. Bell

'Begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error'
Sermons of Huang-Po (d. 850)

Bell's priority was to find out where the Prehistoric Site Alignments originated and where they terminated. As a guideline to further research he devised a working hypothesis, a supposition to be proved or disproved at a later date. His hypothesis was that Glasgow is built over a framework of prehistoric communication lines.

The first sightline centre he discovered was at Camphill in the Queen's Park. The ringwork at Camphill is a roughly oval-shaped enclosure, bounded by a single rampart measuring 90m across at its larger axis. It slopes towards the western side of Camphill, so a wide range of landmarks - from Dunwan Hill in the south to Dumgoyne in the north - are visible from within its confines. About 100m E of the ringwork, another vantage point presents itself in the form of the flagpole mound, a flat-topped artificial structure surmounted by a concrete and gravel platform. This platform affords views of Dechmont, Cathkin Braes and the hills above Eaglesham. Glasgow lies spread out to the north and west, with the Cathedral and Necropolis both visible despite the surrounding buildings.
Because some alignments could only be seen from the ringwork and others from the flagpole mound 100m to the east, Bell surmised that the area of the original sightline centre must have been larger than the ringwork and the flagpole mound combined.

Camphill

PSAs (Prehistoric Site Alignments) radiating from Camphill ringwork in the Queen's Park.

'I drew maps of the network and showed them to several archaeologists at the evening classes I attended. If the alignments had been found in Peru or along the banks of the Nile they would have perhaps shown more interest, but the idea of a network of prehistoric alignments running through Glasgow seemed completely unreal to them - why had nobody noticed it before?'

A year after Bell's findings appeared in the first edition of Glasgow's Secret Geometry, an American psychic did a 'reading' at Camphill ringwork with interesting results. She came to the conclusion that there were three enclosures at Camphill, not just one.
'I feel three circles overlapping - there's a bit in the center that's common to all three.' 'The people who used these circles must have lived centuries apart.' she said.
On the photograph below is a copy of the thought form diagram she drew on her visit to the ringwork.

In 1984, one of the strongest arguments against Bell's prehistoric alignments was that Camphill ringwork had been surveyed and partially excavated by Horace Fairhurst and Jack Scott (1950-51) who concluded that it was a 'clay castle' of medieval date. In 1980, Eric Talbot suggested it had been an earth and timber Norman 'ringwork' and the site became firmly classed as Medieval.

Gradually this idea has fallen out of favour. The latest archaeological survey, by the Association of Certificated Field Archaeologists (Glasgow University) in 1996, now describes Camphill as 'an earthwork of uncertain date and purpose, perhaps from the late prehistoric period, with some evidence of re-use in the medieval period ....' One professional archaeologist who visited the site suggested the earliest construction date could be somewhere in the region of the 2nd millennium BCE.