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A Place Before the Knowing

Updated: 18 hours ago


Julian’s Bower is easy to miss if you don’t know what you’re looking at.

It doesn’t announce itself. There’s no gate, no warning, no instruction. Just lines cut into the earth, grass worn down by feet that have followed the same path for longer than anyone can remember. From above, it makes sense. From the ground, it doesn’t. You only see what’s in front of you.

That, I came to understand, was the point.

A turf maze like this isn’t a puzzle. There are no choices to make, no wrong turns. You walk the path you’re given, and if you’re patient enough, it takes you where it takes you. Pilgrims once walked these instead of travelling to Jerusalem. Others walked them as penance. Some walked them because walking was the only thing that quietened the mind.

I walked it because I was already walking everywhere else.

As I moved along the curve, I became aware of how exposed the place is. The Humber stretches out below, wide and tidal, its water always moving in two directions. It’s a place of crossing, of arrival and departure. Even standing still there feels temporary.

From the centre of the maze, you can see the church.

St John the Baptist sits where churches often sit — on the edge. Above water. Between worlds. John was the saint of thresholds: baptisms, crossings, repentance, preparation. He didn’t build institutions; he announced change.

I didn’t know then that St John dedications appear again and again in places once held by the Templars and the Hospitallers. I only knew that the church felt watchful, like it had seen waves of belief come and go and learned not to cling to any of them.

Inside, the stone is worn smooth by centuries of feet. There’s a quiet order to it — not decorative, not theatrical. A place meant to hold repetition. Prayer spoken so many times it becomes muscle memory. Even the floor seems to know where people will stand.

At the threshold, the labyrinth motif appears again — not cut into earth this time, but set into stone. Outside, the path is grass. Inside, it’s rock. Earth and stone repeating the same idea: there is a way through, but it won’t be rushed.

Between the church and the maze lies the woodland.

That’s where the atmosphere changes.

The path narrows. The air thickens. Sound dampens. The trees lean closer, not menacingly, but attentively — like witnesses. It’s there that I began to feel it most strongly: the sense that I was not alone in time, even if I was alone in body.

Not spirits in the way stories describe them. No apparitions. Just a sense of stored attention. As if the land itself had been used for listening.

The Templars, I later learned, were less an order of knights than an organisation of logistics and thresholds. They guarded roads, crossings, ports, money, and movement. They understood that power lives where people pass through, not where they settle. Rivers. Wells. Paths. Doors.

They didn’t need castles everywhere. They needed nodes.

Alkborough feels like a node.

The well — Kell Well — rises quietly from the ground not far from the path. Wells are honest things. They give or they don’t. They mark where water chooses to surface. In older traditions, wells were places of oath and healing. You don’t lie easily near water that comes from the earth.

When I walked there, I didn’t drink from it for any ritual reason. I stood near it and listened. The sound of water coming from stone is different from water moving across it. It feels intimate. Internal.

It was along the route between these places — maze, church, well — that the carvings began to make sense.

They weren’t everywhere. They didn’t cover all the woods. They appeared where the path slows. Where people stop. Where waiting happens.

One tree in particular carried more than the others.

The initials there didn’t feel random. They gathered. My family names sat close together, as if held. My own name was there too. Nearby, Stephen. And threaded through them, the letters JDM.

Above them, the heart.

Beneath the heart, the ARK.

The longer I looked, the more the tree seemed less like a surface and more like a page that had been written on many times, by many hands, for many reasons — and somehow still remained legible. 2 knots organically weaved through time giving the sense of eyes watching enticing the viewer to see at the perfect height.

Higher up, the outline appeared — unmistakable once seen — like Cyprus. An island associated with last stands and quiet survivals. Where things go when they can no longer remain what they were.

Faces emerged as I stayed longer.

Jesus appeared not as a figure of triumph, but of endurance — arms open, body exposed. A reminder that accusation and suffering don’t always mean guilt. Sometimes they mean proximity to change.

Then Nefertiti — or something like her. A profile both ancient and serene. A counterweight. The sacred feminine returning where it had been buried. Power without violence. Presence without domination.

It wasn’t that the trees showed me these things.

It was that I was finally able to see them.

Later still, history arrived, as if the place had waited until I was ready to hear it.

Stephen Slaney. Staffordshire origins (1524-1608) A distant great grandfather, A man who rose not by conquest but by navigation — of people, systems, land, and water. London Lord Mayor. City of London Guild leader and grandmaster freemason. A facilitator in an age when England was mapping itself outward and inward at the same time.

Slaney’s connection to Alkborough — to Humber rights — settled into place like a final piece. He didn’t build here. He didn’t rule here. He touched the place, as one touches a hinge rather than a door.

Queen Elizabeth’s Court was a place where geometry mattered. Where maps were prayers in ink. Where John Dee(1527-1608) spoke of angels and numbers in the same breath. Where men like Slaney moved resources quietly, understanding that power rarely announces itself.

The Slaney line pulls me back toward Staffordshire, a landscape that feels older than its records and heavier than it first appears.

This was not quiet countryside in the medieval sense, but a region threaded with former monastic lands, dissolved commanderies, and roads that once served men moving with purpose rather than destination.

In recent years, Templar-era graves have been uncovered in the county, their alignment and anonymity stirring old questions about what survived after the Order’s fall and where its members retreated when visibility became dangerous.

Not far away lies Caynton Cave or “Staynton”, cut into the sandstone and hidden in plain sight—its carved crosses, passageways, and chapel-like chamber long whispered about as a place of refuge, prayer, or continuation under another name.

Whether or not the Slaneys were directly involved matters less than the terrain itself:

Staffordshire as a quiet continuity zone, where sacred functions slipped underground rather than disappeared, and where families like mine could emerge generations later not as knights or monks, but as facilitators—men who understood land, thresholds, and the art of moving influence without drawing a sword.

The name Julian’s Bower began to trouble me once I stopped taking it at face value.

Julian feels older than a person, older even than a dedication — closer to a cipher.

It echoes Julius, not as an individual ancestor, but as an idea: the turning of time, the calendar-maker, the one who reordered days so cycles could be read and repeated.

If Stephen Slaney had any hand in shaping this landscape — not by cutting turf himself, but by authorising, preserving, or re-framing what was already here — then naming the maze may have mattered more than making it.

A bower is a shelter, a hidden place, somewhere knowledge rests rather than announces itself. In that sense, Julian’s Bower becomes a maze of time as much as of earth: a walking calendar, a ritual of return.

The later appearance of Julius in my own connected family line feels less like coincidence and more like resonance, as if the name had waited centuries to surface again, carrying forward the same function — to move through cycles, crossings, and renewals without claiming authorship.

If the Templars guarded anything from the ruins of the Temple of Solomon, it may have been this: the understanding that time itself is a labyrinth, and that survival belongs not to those who rush the centre, but to those who learn how to walk the curve.

Then Lincoln Cathedral.

Stone that remembers sound.

Inside it, an old tombstone placed at the front of the morning chapel, The Slaney name again. Thomas Lany (S). Precentor. Keeper of ritual and music. A man responsible not for doctrine, but for order through repetition. For harmony instead of command. Something I would have never noticed had I not sat behind it in prayer.

By chance, luck or fate I now live close to the cathedral moving in February 2025.

I didn’t choose that because of history. I learned the history because I was already there.

That’s how this story works.

The Templars don’t appear as knights on horseback in this narrative. They appear as absences. As structures that vanished but left their logic behind. Paths without owners. Wells without names. Symbols that refuse to disappear because they’re rooted in how humans move through the world.

And so the ARC beneath the heart became clear.

Not destiny. Not bloodline. Not proof.

Just a reminder that when things collapse — families, reputations, orders, lives — what matters is what you carry through. What you protect. What you refuse to abandon.

The arc isn’t a crown.

It’s a curve you walk.

And walking, I learned, is sometimes the most faithful thing you can do.

 
 
 

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