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Appendix 6.  The “COLDRUM 2” simulation

The coordinates of the 447 nudged sites in Coldrum 2 are shown in Table 11. A complete list of 7- 8- and 9-point, alinements found in Coldrum 2 is shown in Table 12. The “Length” column gives the length of each alinement in metres. The “Width” column gives the width in metres of the narrowest strip covering all the sites centres. The “Space” column gives the smallest distance between adjacent sites on the alinement. This column enables us to pick out the influences of close site pairs, and also serves as a partial guide to what we call “silly spacing” for want of a more technical term. This requires some explanation.

The ley hunter is unlikely to be attracted by an alinement which has 4 sites on one side of the map, then a huge gap, then another 3 sites, say, on the other side of the map (Fig. 8). Such an alinement has what we call “silly spacing” on account of the wide gap in the middle. Some of our simulated lines will inevitably have silly spacing, but since there is no quantifiable definition of what a ley hunter would accept or reject, we have no way of making our simulations more “realistic” on this score. Indeed, one might argue that in the Coldrum ley the gap between Coldrum barrow and Snodland church would be “silly” if it were not for the intervention of the confirmatory crosstrack, so that perhaps we could argue some of our silly-spaced simulated lines back into respectablility by plugging the gaps with secondary sites after the manner of our section on confirmatory evidence.

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However, we do not intend to pursue these obscure arguments in the present volume. We merely point out that the “Space” column-of Table 12 tells us about the minimum gap, even though it doesn’t tell us that there are no inordinately large gaps in the lines.

(a)

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(b)