All language subtitles for 2003.05.20 - OLC - Rob Roy Stone Circles

I blame the camera movement for swatting flies today.

You've heard of the Ding Dong School. Well, we're not at the Ding Dong School. We're at the Earthwood School with our good friend Rob Roy for Chapter 2 of the Rob Roy Story. How are you, my friend?

We're fine. We get our share of Ding Dongs come through here. I was telling somebody this morning, I'm going to see Rob Roy. She says, Rob Roy, why does that have a familiar ring to it?

I said, well, this isn't the original Rob Roy, and I'm not sure if he's related. But then I had to go through the whole litany and explain why we were here and that fact that we were coming back. It's good to be back with you.

Yeah, it's been some time since you were here. You and the black flies. Calvin said, blame the motion of the camera on swatting black flies. You really got them today.

We haven't had them since you showed up. Until I showed up, huh? You know, I got to tell a little story before we begin. A few weeks ago, we came back from Long Island, went to pick my dog up in Peru in the Lapham Mills Road.

My son was taking care of him. And he introduced me to a charming woman who had very calloused hands and very tired eyes. And I soon found out why. She came here from somewhere in South Carolina, I'm guessing.

She came here from the Alabama. She came here from the Brooklyn Island, and decided that the urban world was just a little bit too much to bear and decided she was going to live off the grid.

So she moved, bought some property somewhere. I'm not sure where. Let's say Saranac. And without doing an awful lot of research, they started digging holes and building things and just began. And she looked exhausted.

And she looked at me and I looked at Greg and I said, Rob Roy. And he said, yes, Rob Roy. I said, we got to bring this woman up to meet Rob Roy and find out what solar energy is all about.

Find out what wind power is all about and find out how you can really live off the grid and do some studying. But I, for the life of me, I cannot understand why somebody would make a move like that without at least reading a few books first.

Well, yeah, but it's a fairly forgiving thing. With solar panels, for example, you can start small. You can experiment with one or two panels and a couple of batteries and it's modular.

You make your, you make your mistakes in the little system and as you can afford it, you just add extra panels and extra batteries. Wind plants are not so forgiving.

You've got to have a tower and you can't kind of upgrade easily. But with solar cells, you just keep adding them in parallel.

And as you can afford, instead of paying an electric bill, you put an extra one or two panels on. And after a while,

Have you ever started more since we were here last night? I don't think so. We've been steady at 10 for quite a long time now. So I doubt if we have it. And we don't need any more. We don't.

And if the power did come by us now, we wouldn't hook in. It would be pointless.

Well, you've resisted that for years, haven't you? Well, yeah, but I mean, it comes as far as my next door neighbor now.

I noticed lines all of a sudden from the last time. If it went further up, then we could hook in for quote unquote free.

Yeah. But you know, a free man makes a poor slave. Oh, okay. I couldn't believe when I saw power lines that close on this road, because I remember that there was an effort afoot.

How long ago were we here? Two years? Oh, more than two, I think. Oh, really? Yeah, I think so. Three or four. I don't look any older.

But let's say three or four years ago. I know there was a strong effort to resist having power. Well, yeah, it's about half the people on the hill now are plugged in and half remain unplugged. And that's okay.

And there's other people in the county, of course. There's a group up around Vermontville that are off the grid and others, other scattered individuals here and there.

I'm sure there are viewers who have no idea what we say when we refer to being off the grid. That simply means you're not on a commercial power supply.

That's right. But you have to realize that the power you're making on a per kilowatt hour basis is actually more expensive.

So that if the power lines, if somebody wants to build and the power lines come right by, actually the cheapest thing to do is to plug into the power company.

Alternative energy is most useful for somebody who's on a remote site where it would be quite an expense to bring the power.

Yeah. We're, this location is off the Murtaugh Hill Road, off the Military Turnpike, Route 190, in the town of what is this town?

Well, this is actually town of Altona. Our postal address is West Shays E, but we're actually standing in Altona.

And that's Beekman Town on the other side of the driveway there.

That-a-way, huh?

Yeah.

Well, we, as I said, we haven't been here for a while. And many people, I'm sure, who view this program maybe for the first time will not have any clue as to where we might be located.

It's a wonderful spot. And as we stand here, looking around us, you would not know that there was civilization within your closest neighbors, not that far away.

Well, civilization would be an exaggeration, but,

Oh, it would be?

Okay. But you can't, I can't see any television towers and I can't see any power lines from here.

Yeah. We're interested in ancient civilization here.

Well, you've done a great job at that, too. We talked about a lot of things last time, and since we were here, many new things have happened in your life.

I ask you if you're doing seminars, because we talked a lot about Mother Earth news and the seminars, as people can see.

Once again, if you're viewing for the first time, you see these structures are made of cordwood. We're going to talk about that.

But you really, really are getting into the stone business. And I'm completely fascinated.

When I stopped my truck, I had to take a deep breath because it took my breath away when I saw this beautiful piece that you erected here.

And as soon as you began to describe to me how you got it there, by hand, I was amazed.

So why don't we start there? First of all, let's talk about Stone and how you became fascinated by that.

Well, about, oh gee, it must be 36, 37 years ago, when I went traveling around the world, one of the first places I stopped at was Stonehenge.

I'd heard of Stonehenge in England, and I wanted to see it. And actually, my second day in England, I arrived at Southampton, 11 o'clock at night,

and the next morning I was bicycling from Salisbury out to Stonehenge. And in those days, you paid the man a shilling, and you walked in, you could wander in amongst the stones.

Nowadays, you pay 2 pounds 50, and they don't let you within 90 feet of it. There's a rope around it, you know.

Unless you get a special access permit, which we do, so we can still get inside of Stonehenge, and anyone can get such a permit if they apply for it.

So I was, you know, amazed. I was more impressed in those days with the size of things and wondering how did they do this.

And as the years have gone by, I've taken an equal interest as to why people do things like this.

So there's the how, and there's the why. And they're in some ways unrelated, but in some ways they're related too.

And there's a lot to it. So much so that I took 2 years of my life and did a, not very long ago, did megalithic journeys around the world,

talked to people who were building modern stone circles, and produced a 400 page book called Stone Circles, A Modern Builder's Guide to the Megalithic Revival.

And that's all about modern stone circles, but it gets into the ancient ones too.

And part of the research of that was working with people who knew how to move the stones.

And then we all help each other out. We all, it's not a big secretive thing. We share the information that we discover.

And I actually publish a twice yearly magazine called Club Meg News for the stone circle builders.

And we share our findings. And I just got a letter a couple days ago from a guy who built a stone circle in Ohio.

And some of his stones are 3,000 pounds. This is a retired gentleman, and he did everything by himself.

Oh my. And some of the stones were up to,

A ton and a half.

Yeah. And I remember when we did the south stone of that, of that stone circle, and that's a 2-ton stone, in 1987, we had 8 people. And we couldn't get it up.

So the score at that point was, ancients 1, earthwood building school 0.

Well, I don't, I can't remember how many stones you had when we were here the last time, but it was a much smaller number than you have now.

There's been a few new ones since then, but the stone circle has been in place since 1987.

We replaced one of them during a Megalithic workshop a couple years ago.

There's been this little stone group added, the solstice, the equinox stone over there.

That one, I think, is new. That's the welcome stone that we did in the year 2000. I think that was after you were here.

And we had a big Megalithic workshop. We had some high-powered stone movers from all over the world actually came to that one.

And we learned a lot in that one. We developed the techniques that enabled us to do this from behind us here.

Well, we've got to get started on what happened here in the whole genesis of this thing.

You've explained it to me in simple terms because I'm a simple person. Now we'll use simple terms to explain it to our audience.

First of all, was this an idea you conceived of before you got the stone here? How did it generate?

Well, my good friend, the Druid, Ivan Macbeth in England, he's known as Britain's foremost stone circle builder.

He's done a number of them. And I worked with him on the stone circle in England. And he came here for this other workshop.

We did the four and a half ton stone. Ivan had taken up to 12 ton stones. And they'd put in 12 ton stones in a new stone circle in England.

We both felt that the next,

The first stage was that you had to do the 20-ton stone. Before you could move on to the 40 and 50-ton stone, if you couldn't do the 20-ton stone, you weren't going to do the 40 and 50-ton stone. So we both agreed that that was the size we needed. And we tried everywhere in the North Country. There's several quarries in the North Country from Potsdam right to Pottsburg. And they could only supply a lumpy stone, like a Volkswagen bug sort of thing. That wasn't much use to us. We had to go to Rock of Ages in Barry, Vermont.

And this is just one of the culls. It's not good enough to make gravestones or facing for skyscrapers or something. So, you know, you get it at a bargain basement price sort of thing. But it's a charming stone.

And it cost you $100,000 to get it here, right?

Yeah, well, it's true that the haulage was more expensive than the stone.

It's a piece of granite.

It's 20 feet long, and it's just short of 20 tons. I round it out. I say 20 tons. They weighed it at 19 and a half on the derrick when they were putting it on.

So, 20 tons in round numbers.

You were there when they loaded it.

Yes.

You saw that, how much it weighed. And then you came over here. And we should explain, first of all, that quite a bit of it is under the ground.

Yeah. Remember, the stone's 19 and a half feet long. Right now, it's 14 and a half feet high. Well, this suggests that five feet of it is out of sight.

Yeah. And that's the big bit. It splays out. I'll show you in the model later.

Yeah. So, roughly, there's seven tons in the ground and 13 above ground. Just in, you know, I could be off the air.

Like I said, I got out of my truck and I looked and I said, that is amazing and I'm not going to walk within 10 feet of it because what if it keels over?

Well, and after you explained to me how it got in there, I don't think it's going to be keeling over for a while.

No, it's well jammed in there. I mean, I can't see it coming over. It would have to be deliberately taken down.

I'm sure our viewers are saying to themselves, how could they do that? It's like when you see the pyramids, you say, how could they do that?

Yeah. I was in Easter Island about two years ago and I got to talk to people about it. And whenever you ask an Easter Islander, how did they move the stones?

They always give you the same answer. And the answer is mana. They used mana to move it. This is levitation sort of stuff, you know, spiritual energy.

Every one of them to a man will tell you the same thing. Isn't that amazing? It took a little more than spiritual energy to move this baby.

Yeah. We tried the spiritual energy. We tried lightening the stone by concentration and this sort of thing. Well, no luck.

When Thor Heyerdahl landed at Easter Island, I think he was there in 54 or 56, all the stones, there were hundreds of them had been standing,

but in the 17th, 18th, 19th century, every one of them had been knocked down.

There were stones standing when the first Europeans went to Easter Island, but by the end of the 19th century, they'd all been knocked over.

But they were lying there, mostly face down, because they pushed them over in that direction.

And Thor Heyerdahl said to the mayor, he said, how did they raise these stones?

And the mayor says, oh, I can do that. Thor says, I'll give you $100 if you can raise one of those stones.

And back in 1956, we'll say. Yeah, sure. That was a hundred bucks for the fair amount of money.

So, the mayor, who was a descendant of the last long-ear who survived, you know, the long-ears and short-ears, the two tribes on the Easter Island,

he and eight of his long-eared buddies, in nine days, raised about a, gee, I think it was about a 16-ton, they're called mawai.

These heads are called mawai. And they raised them, one back on its ahu, which is the platform, the stone platform.

And now, you go to Easter Island, there's 35 or so of them standing.

The Japanese brought 200-ton cranes in, and they put 15 of these mawai, some of them, sorry, some of them up to 30 tons on a long ahu, and you can go and visit that.

But another archaeologist, after Heyerdahl, set up six or seven of them by hand, comparable in size to this one here.

But, the fact is, you decided to do it here.

Yeah.

A little different technique.

Nobody has ever, nobody has raised one here in Clinton County, probably in the, since the beginning of time.

I am not aware of a stone of this size being raised by hand, except by these archaeologists in Easter Island, since,

Anywhere?

,B.C.

,B.C.

So, the fact is, when this stone was erected, there should have been national and international media here.

I couldn't get them.

The fact was, the local media didn't even show up.

That's true.

I couldn't get them, and I tried.

This blows me away.

I must be out of the loop, but I'm so enamored by this whole process that I would have been here, Calvin and I would have been here, but I don't know where we were at that day.

You said our good friend Jack LaDuke was out of town and,

Well, he was.

Fortunately, we got two good camera angles with digital,

Oh, you did?

,with DVD.

Oh, that's great.

And they're very, excellent.

Very good footage from that direction and from where Calvin's standing now.

We got right from, right, actually, Jackie was filming right from there.

We should point out that Jackie is Rob's wife.

She works at,

She's not here today.

Her one day of working down at the pediatric office.

But she supported you in all these efforts and taking all these junkets and trips and safaris.

She's fascinated by,

Safaris and,

Yeah.

Oh, she loves the megalithic stuff.

I tell you, the physical part of it is great.

The spiritual part is great.

But the real special thing is the people that you meet.

I mean,

Oh, boy.

Gotta be.

Cordwood people are interesting.

Cordwood people, that's Cordwood Masonry building.

They, if they're thinking of building a Cordwood house, they've already shown the ability to think out of the box sort of thing.

Yep.

But when you get to stone circle builders, that's another degree.

Oh, even a different dimension.

Stone circle people are marginal people.

Yes, they are.

They're on the edge.

That's why I love them.

Me too.

That's great.

Well, let's talk a little bit about how you did this.

Okay.

You got the thing loaded on a crane and brought it over here from the Rock of Ages in Barry, Vermont.

In what's called a tipper dumper.

It's a trailer that tips, you know.

Yeah.

So,

I'd want one of those if I had a 20 ton stone.

I had a load of gravel placed here.

Looks right behind here.

You can still see where the gravel was.

The remnants of the gravel.

And we, Garros tipped it onto the load of gravel.

But I'd buried two rollers in the gravel.

Yeah.

So you could remove the gravel and set it down on the rollers.

That sounds great.

It sounds like cheating.

But it really didn't gain as much because the bottom of the stone is irregular.

Notice this was the bottom of the stone.

Yeah, sure.

And you can't roll it on that.

You see, give me a flat,

I'd take a 30 or 40 ton stone with a flat bottom.

It would be easier than this.

Oh, sure.

Oh, of course.

And so we actually had to build a stone boat out of 4x8s in order to make the bottom level.

So that had to be built in place under the stone.

So these rollers were of dubious value.

They weren't even the rollers that we were eventually going to roll it on.

All they were doing was getting it a little bit off the ground, which helps.

Once you get a little bit off the ground and can get levers in, these are our 23 foot long hardeck levers behind you there.

Once you get any part of the lever under a portion of the stone, if you can move it just a little bit your way.

Now you can elevate it.

You can roll it, transport it, do anything you want with it.

All you got to do is get it off the ground.

And then every move that you make after that is using the stone's own weight to offset, to lighten the load.

I think of in karate, you're using your opponent's weight, aren't you?

Sure.

See, you're using his weight to throw people.

Like I'm going to throw you here before one.

With stone moving, it's the same thing.

If you can work close to the balance point, you can get it to where it's a seesaw.

It's a teetaw.

A child can move it.

Well, at that point, it's not a 20 ton stone anymore.

But that's too close to work that close.

If you work within 10% of the center, now you've perhaps got eight tons offsetting eight tons.

Now you're only working with four tons.

And you say, what good does that do?

Well, now you can begin to move it up.

You can elevate it, putting little chocks in each way.

Elevate it, get it on its rollers, roll it.

And there's ways to gain mechanical advantage in the rollers, too.

We actually lever the rollers, too, which I can explain.

I love that, yes.

I know.

All right.

Well, take us through the whole process.

Okay.

Well, all right.

Once we get it…

The stone boat, I can't illustrate because I don't have a stone boat made.

I do actually have one over behind the garage for a different stone.

But once you get it down on the rollers, notice that our rollers have some holes in them.

And this is so that I don't have a lever here.

But we could use this hoe to illustrate.

If I have a six-foot bar in here, I'm getting a mechanical advantage of perhaps ten to one on this.

So, you know, a PV that you roll a log with?

Sure.

It's the same principle.

It makes it easy to move that log.

And we can keep moving the rollers from place to place.

There was an archaeologist called Jean-Pierre Moen, a famous French archaeologist.

He studied the ancient stone building.

And with 200 people, he moved a 32-ton stone across the French countryside.

He didn't erect it, but he rolled it across the French countryside with 200 people.

18 or 19 years later, Bertrand Poissonnier came along and with Moen present,

he moved the same, the very same stone with 20 people.

Now, that's a factor of ten improvement.

Yeah.

How did he do it?

He levered the rollers.

So now, you're getting a ten to one mechanical advantage, you only need one-tenth as many people.

So, using Poissonnier's method, we were able to, with about eight or ten people,

have some difficulty in asided eye video code and set this beam window .

We could actually roll a 20-ton stone along.

So that's what you did.

Well, now it had to go off. We had a hole dug over here.

This is the socket hole in this area.

And it's very important to get the right alignment on this stone, because this marks the mid-winter sunset.

December 21st, the shortest day. That's called your winter solstice.

When the sun sets on the shortest day, as seen from the observation stone on the other side of the stone circle,

we can get that alignment. We can walk down there and show you that alignment.

When the sun sets, it sets right over the middle of the stone.

And can you see that we've cleared the forest behind there?

Of course, on December 21st, there's no leaves in the trees.

And the top of the stone matches with the horizon on Gerald's property across the way here.

You see? So that when the sun sets, it goes out.

And that's,

And then after that, the days begin to get longer. It's a time of hope.

So we wanted to incorporate this alignment. So it was important to get it,

To get it right.

Not only to stand it up, but to put it in exactly the right place.

And you have footage on December 21st showing a candle.

Yeah, I could give you a four by six print of that. Maybe you could show it on the,

Oh, you absolutely could. Right on the top of it.

It's beautiful.

And then it sets.

That's got to be excitement being almost beyond words.

It is. It is.

It's beautiful.

It is.

So,

All right, so we got a hold done.

Yes.

Now we've taken the stone.

Can I use my model to show,

Well, yeah, let's go over this way.

This is a,

I think it's an inch to the foot scale model of that stone.

I carved it with a chainsaw.

Did you?

Yeah.

So the stone was,

Let's see, how was it?

It was like this.

Yes.

It was like this.

This is the part we had to put the stone bow under.

Yeah.

We rolled it along in this direction.

Off like that.

We had to rotate it because it's coming this way.

Oh, yes.

We had to rotate it.

And we rotated it on a block of wood.

I can,

It's that octagon there.

Oh, yes.

I see it.

We built it up,

We built it up,

Yeah, obviously.

Well, the ancients didn't have plywood.

No, they didn't have plywood, but they had much better pieces of oak than we have nowadays.

So we rotated it on that pivot point.

We had a fulcrum on top of it and rotated it.

Sure.

And then it had to be backed up to the hole.

Now I'm better off on this model here.

Okay.

So this is the socket hole.

These two are scale models of 16 foot 12 by 12s.

They're hardwood 12 by 12s.

They're the ones on the bottom underneath the levers.

They're 16 foot 12 by 12s.

And they straddle the hole.

Now you've got to elevate this stone about four and a half, five feet off the ground.

And you do this with all this various chalking material that you see here.

You're building up what we call stolage.

It's cribbing.

Yes.

Okay.

And then once you've got it elevated, let's see if I can put the pivot roll.

This is the pivot roller.

That's the longest of the rollers.

This shows like a balance point on the stone.

Oh, I see.

And sometimes during the operation of moving the stone, you would occasionally,

the stone of its own would get to its balance point.

And everybody was amazed that you could just move it by hand.

One person could move the stone.

Oh, sure.

So that enabled us to once in a while check our balance point.

We could mark the side of the stone.

Okay.

So then you've got it with a little more than half.

Let's get this guy back a little bit.

You get a little more than half the weight on the hole side supported by a linchpin.

Something like this.

And it'd actually be higher than what I'm showing here.

Okay.

So with more than half the weight forward of the,

And this is well lashed.

I mean, this,

My son is really good with ropes.

And he lashed that thing down so there was no play.

So that when this rolled forward, the roller went with it without any slippage.

You see?

Oh, boy.

So now, yours truly with a sledgehammer, everybody's in position.

I get people on ropes that way and that way so that the stone doesn't go over this way.

We knew that it wouldn't go over that way because of the shape at the bottom.

It couldn't go over that way.

But it might come back this way.

So we had all kinds of lashings down.

And with one stroke of the hammer, and my nephew pulled the 4x4 out,

otherwise it would get crushed in there.

And I whacked it out, and he pulled it out.

And in less than two seconds, the stone went up almost vertical and then settled into its natural position.

See the shape of the bottom of that stone?

Sure.

That's the position it wants to be in.

It's also a very attractive position.

We like it.

Wonderful.

We feel it's where the stone wants to be.

You can tell that when you look at it.

Yeah.

And you said there was a mammoth cheer.

There was.

One point something seconds.

There was.

The stone is almost exactly where you wanted it.

One point eight seconds.

As a matter of fact, you say almost exactly.

The stone always wanted to come in this direction.

There's an overhanging weight here in the stone.

I can see it.

And every action we were taking, the stone was constantly trying to go that way.

It was going to pivot.

And we thought there was more danger of hitting this one.

But when it rotated, and remember it's up here now.

Yes.

When it rotated, the video from that direction reveals that we missed this 12 by 12 by about an inch and a half.

You've got to be kidding.

And had we hit that 12 by 12, I don't know what would have happened, but it wouldn't have been good.

You'd still be there scratching your head saying,

It would not have been good.

Well, it was meant to be.

How long did the whole process, let's give the people an idea how long this would take from the time it was delivered to the time you got it set up.

Well, we had a six day workshop, and our workshops are not all stone moving.

We also have a lot of classroom stuff in our workshops too.

But out of those six days, there were probably three and a half or four days of actual stone moving.

And almost all of it was on this one.

We've done other projects, but we knew, Ivan knew, my Druid friend, that this was going to command all of our time.

And we got it to the point where we were rotating it.

And that's as far as the six days ran out.

Everybody went home.

They, on their own coin, they came back from places like Washington State, Indiana, Maine.

Regathered?

They regathered at their own expense to come and have another go at it.

And we still didn't get it in.

And we got it within, as it turned out, we got it within two days of getting it in.

We didn't think we were that close, but we were.

And it was very discouraging.

And we all sat in the stone circle.

And they were very supportive of Jackie and I.

And they said, whatever you decide to do, that's okay with us.

You know, my sons were adamant about, no, don't use any, no heavy equipment, nothing like that.

Well, everybody cleared out.

We cleaned up the site.

We repositioned things.

And then we carefully thought about it.

And we realized we weren't that far away.

Within three days, we ought to be able to have a go at it, you know.

And actually, on the second day, on the second day, it was on the Columbus Day weekend.

It was Sunday the 13th of October at 3.20 in the afternoon that she went in.

Isn't that amazing?

Like I said, it was meant to be.

It was spectacular.

I can't even imagine what a tremendous relief.

It's like winning the Super Bowl.

The cheers must have been classic.

Oh, it was amazing.

But it took three sessions.

It took a six-day workshop, another six or seven days of volunteer work, and then finally the

second day of the third session.

So you're looking at, what, 14 days of work, of actual work.

I would love to have just about two minutes.

15 feet?

Yeah, but think about it.

I would love to have about two minutes of that video to show.

We came this way about 50, 50 or 60 feet, then rotated it, then got it over there, then

elevated it, and then flipped it in.

And sometimes the stone would get stuck.

I mean, it just didn't want to move.

And you had to figure out what's going on here.

Why isn't the stone moving?

And you'd pow-wow about it.

You'd try new things, new techniques, and finally you'd get it moving again.

Well, you have a plan, and the plan happens, and people would say, why?

Well, if we were to look thousands of years into the future, if this hunk of mud is still

around here, I bet you that stone would be sticking right there.

Well, I hope so.

I bet it won't have varied a hair between now and then.

But I do it because, you know, I cannot tell you this is how the ancient people did it.

What I can say is they could have done it this way.

They would have had the equipment necessary to do it this way.

They may have had better techniques.

They must have had better techniques, because they were-

The biggest one they ever did was, are you ready?

350 tons they raised one.

Well, that makes- this is a toy compared to that.

I mean, I've stood-

They had lots of time.

Lots of time.

I've stood next to stones in Brittany, in France, that are 33 feet out of the ground,

probably 10 feet in the ground.

They weigh 100 tons.

Yeah.

And they stood those up.

Whatever exists is possible.

Yeah.

Whatever exists is possible.

How far did they have to bring them?

Well, that one, the 350 tonner, we know came about two miles.

Now, they didn't bring that over in one of Garrow's trucks.

It just would have crushed any 10 of Garrow's trucks, 350 tons.

So, they had to transport this at least one and a half to two miles.

Stonehenge, the stones came, the big stones at Stonehenge came from 22 miles away.

And they had to go over rivers and stuff.

And we think we're smart, don't we, huh?

We think we're smart.

And then, of course, when you mentioned the pyramids and the obelisks, well,

that was another degree of engineering up.

But they began to use cranes and stuff like that.

They had wooden cranes and stuff.

But this, what I call, well, everybody calls it Neolithic, the Megalithic period, the Neolithic people, means New Stone Age.

We think of them as Stone Age people, and yet how delighted we were just to get a 20-ton stone up, and here they're putting up 100-ton stones.

They had a certain engineering genius. Whether or not they could balance a checkbook didn't really matter back in those days.

Well, they didn't start with the 100-ton stone. You know, you start with small stone circles, or standing stones, and you build up.

We didn't start with the 20-ton stone, either. We failed with the 2-ton stone.

It's still amazing, and it pleases us to be here to see this. I wish, I don't know, maybe it's possible for,

Do you have any of the footage here that we could maybe splice into this interview to show the last minute and 8-point?

Well, we'll have to,There's certain technical things. We'll need to discuss that off-camera later on.

That would be wonderful art. At the very least, I'd like to see that photograph of what it looks like on December, on the winter solstice.

Now, you've got three more beautiful pieces of stone that I commented on, because I parked my truck a few feet away from those.

It came from the same quarry, the Barry Gray Granite from Rock of Ages.

And that used to be one stone. That was 34 foot 6 inches long, but it's rather narrow.

It's only like, its narrowest point is like just under 2 feet.

And although it's a great idea, it tickles me pink to raise a 34 foot long stone.

In the reality, if you use a technique like we did here, it would snap.

In the shock, the rotation, a stone is less than 2 feet wide, 34 foot long.

There's something called slenderness ratio, which is working against you.

It just wasn't practical.

Well, it's dangerous.

Dangerous to the camp.

Even if you might have got away with it, but you might have killed somebody, too.

So, I couldn't do that.

So, what we had them do was to cut it into three identical pieces at 11 foot 6 inches.

And that's the way they are now.

And they were a full truckload coming over, too.

I bet you they were.

So, I can show you here what we're planning to do with them.

Okay, let's do it.

This, am I on the right side here for you here?

Let's make some terrain here.

This is a true representation of one of those stones in scale.

Okay.

These two have had three feet taken off of them because they're going to go into the ground three feet like this.

Okay, gotcha.

Okay, and the wind's going to blow them over.

That's all right.

Now, my line of thought is to get this one in between them.

And then using similar kinds of methods of elevation where you're working in close to the balance point,

you use various pieces of stolage from the pile to gradually work this stone back and forth like this

until you get it just clear of the tops of these.

Then you rotate it, and then you set it back down.

So, you build what's called a trilithon.

Stonehenge has a number of these trilithons.

That sure does.

It means tri and lithos from the Greek for stone.

So, it's three stones.

And you'll be able to drive your pickup truck under there.

Right straight through it.

What a great gateway.

Yeah.

Well, this is eight feet.

Let's see, eight foot.

Yeah, from here to here.

Or eight and a half feet, actually.

That'd be perfect, and there would be some space on each side.

A little bit.

You could just get it through.

Don't scrape my paint.

No.

You wouldn't be able to get a tractor trailer in here, though.

You'd have to bring them in the back.

Well, this is it.

I'm trying to work that out.

That's wonderful.

Well, I mean, that project alone is enough to satisfy me for making the trip up here today

because I think it's absolutely magnificent.

People spend an awful lot of time trying to design things and wonderful new cars and equipment.

And here we are trying to do something that was done a long, long time ago.

5,000 years ago.

5,000 years ago.

And before we do anything else, I just want to point out, and believe me, I'm not making

any disparaging remarks about anyone and how they put programs together on public television

or commercial television or in movie theaters or anywhere else.

But some of the programs we've seen, based on theories of how these stones were moved,

turn out to be a little bit bogus if you know what goes on behind the scenes.

That's correct.

I have read exposés showing massive cranes moving up to the site, moving the rock stone

into place.

And then when you look on television, you see,

You don't see that stuff.

You see 50 slaves with ropes trying to drag a stone somewhere.

And they didn't do it by hand.

But you were true.

Well, I can tell you we did this by hand.

We used no mechanized equipment.

Now, we did use some iron bars to lever the rollers.

However, we also used hard-act ones, too.

But you know what we had trouble with?

It was actually we didn't have time to put the holes in big enough for the hard-act rollers,

but we tested it.

And we were able to use a hard-act lever.

But with a rush of everybody coming, we had to fall back on the iron bars simply because

we couldn't find,we tried everything to drill three-inch holes through the,you know,

you're on pressure of time.

And this is what happens with these NOVA programs, too.

They're on pressure of time.

Oh, of course.

So they have to take some shortcuts.

So we used iron bars.

And it's true that 5,000 years ago, they didn't have iron bars.

But we also showed that it would work with the hard-act leverage, too.

But we only managed to get one of those holes through.

So we were able to use the hard-act levers, but we didn't have time to make all the holes

for the hard-act levers.

I think it's, first of all, maybe we ought to stop and make sure our tape is running

here, and we'll continue with Rob Roy in just a moment.

Yeah, we'll spend a few more minutes here talking about how you got the stone into place.

What's this right here?

This is one of your,

It's called a fulcrum.

It's a,who was it?

Archimedes said, give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I'll move the world.

Well, he needed a fulcrum, too.

Your lever,notice the stresses on that fulcrum.

Oh, I can see it.

See that?

That's because some of these hard-act,and hard-act is another name for, like, hop-horn-beam

or shag-bark hickory.

They're all,

Shag-bark hickory.

They're not all exactly the same, but they're all very dense, hardwoods with shaggy bark on

them, extremely strong.

So one,the big end of the lever would be on here.

It might be sticking out a foot or a foot and a half.

So if you're 20 feet long and you've got a foot sticking out, you're gaining a 20 to

one mechanical advantage.

Now, it's true that you have to move 20 inches this way to go one inch this way, but that's

all right.

You just,you just keep repeating it.

But you have to have a fulcrum.

And these,these half logs make excellent fulcrums.

That's extremely interesting.

Calvin suggested, as we were talking before and talking about manpower, how about beasts

of burden, and you said, well, there are people who theorize that maybe oxen were used.

That's right.

No,I doubt there were any horses in England at the time of the Stone Circle building, but

they certainly,they could have husbanded oxen.

And Ed Prynne in Cornwall reckons that they probably did use oxen to help bring the stones

along, especially like you get the 40-ton sarsen stones at Stonehenge had to come 20 miles,

you know.

And there's no doubt in my mind that they used rollers.

Some people say, no, they didn't use rollers.

They slid them on grease and stuff.

I don't believe it.

It wouldn't make sense if you had,I mean, first of all, they were building wood hinges

before the Stonehenges, so they already had the rollers.

I mean, it's no great leap of genius to realize that things move better on rollers.

So I have no doubt.

There are a million different things that jump into your mind, like ice.

Yeah, ice.

Yeah, ice.

Movement on ice.

And sometimes in the ancient times, there were conditions for doing that sort of thing.

England had quite a variety of climates over the 5,000 years.

Another thing is, they had ropes.

We know they had ropes because the actual ropes have survived in like the peat bogs.

Sure they have.

There's one, one and a quarter inch,

Along with,

Along with people.

Along with people.

With mummified people.

Yeah, well, they'd toss them in there.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Some of them had ropes around their necks.

We know they had ropes.

They did.

They had ropes around their necks.

Well, anyway, they did have ropes.

So to me, it's not cheating to use ropes because they had them.

It's an amazing process and it thrills me.

And I've read books on the subject.

I haven't read your book.

What's the matter with you?

I don't read much.

And I don't get onto the websites enough, but you have a couple of websites and I want

to mention them frequently through the program so that people can get a closer inside look

at what you do.

What are your websites?

We have two.

And if you're interested in the Cordwood Masonry, this method of building with short logs like

these fulcrums, that's cordwoodmasonry.com.

That's easy enough.

And masonry with one A, by the way.

People say masonry.

It's not right.

There's only,

Masonry.

It's masonry.

And it's cordwoodmasonry.com.

And the other one's called bigstones.com.

That's another easy one to remember.

And that takes care of the megalithic stuff.

And my cluttered mind at bigstones.com.

By the way, something I think we mentioned off camera that I think is important is we

make no claims that this is how the ancient people did this.

We can say they might have done it this way.

They could have done it this way.

They probably had better techniques, but they could have done it this way.

They did do it this way.

You know, the one thing that I think it's important to point out is smart people have been around

for a long, long time.

And 5,000 years ago, there were a lot of smart people on the face of the earth.

And as smart as we think we are today, you know, sometimes we pale by comparison.

As you know, when you discover something that's been buried in the ground for 5,000 years and

you say, how did they know how to do that?

Well, from what I've read,

The general line of thought is that we really couldn't tell the difference between people 5,000 years ago and today's people.

If you could magically, by some time warp, bring them into the future, these people 5,000 years ago would be indistinguishable from people today.

In terms of intelligence, people were shorter, we know that, from suits of armor and what's left in the graves and stuff like that.

But there were also times when they were taller, too.

But as far as cranial capacity and intelligence, I doubt there was very much difference.

They figured out how to do things because they had to.

Yeah, and we're always building on so much of what came before,

whereas a discovery in ancient times took longer because you didn't have as much of a foundation to build upon.

A discovery was a real discovery.

Here what we're doing is we're always building on what other people are doing.

But there you get inspiration suddenly takes you quite a ways forward.

I'm extremely interested in many other aspects of stone building and this study of megalithics, and I'm sure you are, too.

And there's a whole other spiritual aspect.

It's something we haven't talked about a great deal.

But it's a powerful influence even today, isn't it?

Well, nowadays, when you,a lot of people are building stone circles today.

So you can ask them, how did you do it?

And we all share that.

Excuse me.

But now you can ask them, why did you do it?

And the answers that I get from people, I reckon, are probably not very much different

from the reasons that the original stone circles were built.

The original stone circles were meeting places.

They served the same kind of purpose as a medieval church.

And the medieval church served a different kind of purpose from what our modern go-to-church-on-Sunday-morning kind of church does.

Medieval churches were places of commerce.

Perhaps Jesus would have kicked them out of the temple sort of thing.

Yeah, and we remember that passage.

Yeah.

But, yeah, the medieval church had all sorts of social reasons.

I mean, you'd have rites of passage, birthing, death ritual, marriage.

All these things would take place.

And they did at the stone circles, too.

We know this from the archaeological evidence.

We know that there was trade.

There were goods brought from all over the ancient world were brought to these stone circles

because parts of them remain.

And they were an earth-based religion.

They weren't a monotheistic religion.

They were very concerned.

This is perhaps why they were so concerned about what the heavenly bodies do,

the stars and the planets and the moon,

particularly the moon and the sun.

And there's hardly a stone circle.

There's certainly not a major stone circle in Britain

that doesn't have these astronomical alignments built into it.

And we do the same thing.

And modern people building stone circles generally incorporate the same types of alignments.

We have the solstice equinox in here.

We haven't put the moon in.

The moon is a very complicated one.

But the ancients did that.

Calamish in Scotland,

they knew the 18.6-year cycle of the moon.

At Stonehenge,

on the northeast avenue of Stonehenge,

are six sets of post holes.

Archaeologically, you can see where these posts were put in.

And remember, it's 18.6 years before the moon comes back to its most extreme northerly moonset.

So you've got to wait 18.6 years.

Well, finally the moon gets back to that point on the horizon.

What does that tell you?

It tells you nothing.

You don't know that there's a pattern there.

Maybe it's just, you know,

maybe it's a wanderer like the planets.

So you wait another 18.6 years,

except by now you're dead,

because lifespan in those days we know to be about 35 years.

So you were lucky to see this event twice in your lifetime.

But they kept checking it for six consecutive cycles, 93 years.

And of course, 18.6 years goes by.

The moon sets in the same place.

Now this could be coincidence.

We better check it again.

So your grandchildren are checking it.

And after six times, they reckon,

aha, we've got it.

This is the cycle of the moon.

Isn't that amazing?

And can you imagine the society,

the tenacity that would pursue a thing like that?

They realize the importance of astronomy

has played a part of any history.

We have a calendar.

Our calendar tells us December 21st,

shortest day, winter solstice.

They didn't have that.

But they had a stone circle that told them the same thing.

They were so, and people back then,

and even our grandfathers and great-grandfathers

were far more in tune with what happens around them

than most of us are.

You're trying to get into tune.

Yeah, nobody knows what the sky's doing.

Everybody was interested in the eclipse the other night,

the lunar eclipse, and it was wonderful.

We watched it.

But how many people really knew what was happening there?

That the moon's plane is at a five-degree offset

to the sun-earth plane,

and only when these two planes intersect

can you have an eclipse.

Yeah.

How many people knew that that was the Earth's shadow

going across there?

How many people said,

oh, I'll watch it on television tomorrow morning?

That's right.

I'm always bleary-eyed when I go to bed

because I have to see the whole thing, you know?

Yeah.

But it is wonderful,

and most of us would do well

to try to get more in tune with what's around us.

And those, you know, without belaboring the point,

it's lessons that we can learn after things like 9-11

when we all better pay attention to what's happening.

Well, I look at what they're planning to put back there.

You know, two towers fell down,

and I've seen the architectural drawings

for what they're planning to put back up there,

and I just cringe.

I can't believe they're thinking that way.

Yeah.

I mean, why go do the same thing again?

Just to make it,

Build a stone circle.

Yeah, build a stone circle.

That's wonderful.

What do you say we take a walk

and check what else we can with Rob Roy

right here at the Earthwood School?

All right, you got a model.

What's this all about?

Well, this model here is as Stonehenge

would have been approximately 6,000 years ago,

before the great sarsen stones were put up,

even before the blue stones.

Some of these, like that stone right there

is today known as the heel stone,

and people think the sun rises over the heel stone at Stonehenge,

and approximately it does.

But if you want to observe something,

you don't put a 30-ton stone in front of the thing

that you want to observe because you can't see it.

But we know, archaeologically,

the post hole remains for a companion to the heel stone.

There was another stone next to the heel stone

so that when the sun rose,

as seen from the center of the circle,

the sun's diameter filled the space between two stones,

like a gun sight.

Sure.

See?

If it actually does rise behind the heel stone,

you wouldn't see it rise.

Okay, so this is actually the sun's path

at the summer solstice.

Solstice means sun stands still,

and it's the longest day of the year,

and at Stonehenge is approximately 17, 18 hours long.

Okay, maybe more, maybe 19 hours.

I could be wrong on that.

So that's at noontime,

and then it sets in the northwest like that.

They don't have an observation for that.

But the winter sunset, this is your winter.

Now, notice here,

the sun is up in England,

59 degrees latitude,

or 51 degrees latitude.

It rises in the southeast.

There's your north marker.

It rises in the southeast.

It sets in the southwest.

Now, that is actually opposite the summer sunrise.

So the summer sunrise and the winter sunset

are diametrically opposite to each other.

And that would be the case anywhere

where you have a true horizon,

a flat horizon such as Salisbury Plain,

where Stonehenge is built,

Kansas wheat fields,

a low-lying island in the South Pacific.

But here, we have a wonky horizon.

We have highs and lows.

So our winter sunset alignment

is not the same as the summer sunrise.

That big stone there,

the nine-ton piece of an orthocyte there,

the sun does rise on the point of that stone.

But it's not the same alignment

as the winter sunset.

If we were flat here, it would be.

But because of differential of horizon,

we actually, we wanted to show

the actual horizon, not the theoretical horizon.

I mean, the actual rise,

not the theoretical rise.

So originally, we know that there was a woodhenge

by the post-hole evidence.

And then it was quite a while later.

This site was in use for about 8,000 years in all,

making these kinds of observations.

But about 3,500 years ago,

that's when Stonehenge was completed in this form,

with the 40-ton standing stones,

the 10-ton lentils here,

the 30 stones around the outside,

and the 30 lentils.

And they're all keystoned into each other.

So that's what Stonehenge was like when it was completed.

This is what Stonehenge is like today.

This is in its ruined state.

See, it's the same thing,

but it's just in a ruined state here.

And that's what you visit today,

something that looks approximately like that.

That's most fascinating.

Well, we've incorporated the same sorts of things

in our stone circle.

This is your east-west alignment.

So the equinox means equal night,

12 hours a day, 12 hours a night.

So in the autumnal and the vernal equinox,

the spring equinox,

about March 21st, September 21st,

the sun rises in the east and sets in the west,

anywhere in the world, you see.

And it moves rather quickly at that time.

The next day, it moves a full diameter.

And we tested this in Polynesia on the beach.

We were there at the equinox.

And every day, we would check it with two sticks.

And sure enough, it was moving one diameter

along the horizon each day.

So this is your equinox alignment.

The outlier stone's like that one.

Notice that that outlier stone

is not quite in alignment with the east-west stone.

Again, it's the horizon is at fault.

So we put it where the sun really rises

and not where it should rise.

You see?

Now, another interesting,

Interesting alignment. This is your true north alignment. This is the south stone, the north stone, and any clear night of the year, at 45 degrees declination, the north star is there.

Because we're at 45 degrees north latitude. If you're at the north pole, the north star is straight overhead, isn't it? 90 degrees.

Well, you can spot it quite early in the evening because if you know just where to look, you see it before you see the other stars because you're staring right at the spot.

And it kind of burns into your retina. So that's your, every clear night you get this north alignment.

And of course we've laid out the 12 standing stones, the 12 sitting stones, according to the ancient measure that was used.

The megalithic yard is incorporated into that. I figure if you're going to build a round house, you use the, the unit of measure in, in currency, which is feet and inches.

If you build in France, you use meters. But if you're building a stone circle, you should use megalithic yards.

I didn't even know there were any, so you're, you're one up on me there. Yeah. That's wonderful.

So we have a fire pit in the middle and there's a, a pipe, there's a receiving socket.

You can screw a pipe in exactly at the center of the circle. It's got a white dot. That's the pipe right there.

You can take all your alignments with great precision if you care to.

There's a stone under here. Here, right there.

Yep. If I take that stone out, I can screw this in and the white dot, everything, all the alignments go through that white dot.

So, in fact, I'd like to take you to that observation stone so that we can get a sense of the sun setting on the, the big stone that we're talking about.

Yeah, that's okay. Great.

The leaves are off the trees. Just a second.

Okay, go on.

Okay. The leaves are off the trees.

The leaves are off the trees behind the 20 ton stone, which we call Juli Stena.

Juli Stena is, um, or Juli Stena. Juli Stena is, uh, Yule, the Yule log, huh, for Christmas time.

Uh, and Christmas, of course, was based upon the, the winter solstice.

Sure.

And Stena is the Norse for stone. So, Juli Stena is, we, we discovered early that she's a female stone.

And so, we named her for Juli Stena. And this alignment from this stone through the center of the circle is your winter sunset alignment.

And when the sun sets, of course, the leaves are off the trees. So, there's kind of a tunnel through there. The, the, the sun re-gleams.

It goes out of sight behind the trees, but then it re-gleams in the, in the passageway through the forest.

And then it sets right on the middle of the new stone. It's perfect. It's spectacular.

People come from all over just to see it.

I can imagine. I want to see that photograph before we leave here today. I think that's absolutely incredible.

Hope I can lay my hands on it easily.

Ha ha ha. Like my house, you mean? Yeah.

Oh, golly. Just too much, too much going on.

That nine ton stone marks the summer sunrise. We did not do that one by hand. It's a very lumpy stone.

The town was, uh, widening Murtaugh Hill Road and they had to get rid of the stone. I said, well, look, uh, you got to put it somewhere. Why not just bring it up here?

And then I had, uh, one of Garrow's men just, uh, I made a little socket for it and he tipped it into place for us. So, we cheated on that one.

Yeah. That's still great. That's still great. So, the stone still has energy for you, doesn't it, huh?

Well, this is, we were talking earlier about why people do this and a lot of the stone circles being built today are being built by neo-pagans, druids, people interested in earth-based religion.

And they, they're finding, uh, there's an energy in these stone circles. Yeah. So, uh, I'm interested in that.

I've had one magical experience in, in this stone circle, uh, when we replaced one of the stones, that whitish stone over there.

Right. It was a stone that had been breaking up. And during a workshop, Ivan Macbeth, the druid, was here.

He's a very, I call it, trans-rational. He has, he has the ability to move freely between the rational and the trans-rational.

He's great with moving the big stones, but he, he can also talk to stones and get answers back from them.

I'm, I, I'm having one-way conversations with these stones, but Ivan's getting a two-way conversation.

Yeah. And, um, so we set the stone in, and then some of the ladies at the workshop, they did a little, uh, ceremony to welcome the new stone, who was also a female stone, Meg, her name was.

And, uh, after the ceremony, everybody just leaned outside, we were all surrounding, outside the, uh, standing stones, uh, just leaning in.

And, um, my friends from Toronto were filming this. And suddenly, the stone circle appeared to swell and get about 20% bigger in size.

And we, and I said, uh, it blew me away. And I said, is any, does anyone else see that this circle is bigger than normal?

They all saw it, except for one of my sons, who was standing on top of the south stone and filming.

And he didn't, he didn't, uh, observe that. But we could discuss it. And we could discuss it for a minute or a minute and a half.

And then the stone circle receded to its normal size. And, uh, some of the line of thought was that this was the other stones accepting Meg.

You know, welcoming Meg and saying, yes, you can be one of us.

Wonderful idea. Yeah.

Oh, that's pretty neat. That's special.

All right. I wanted to mention something else as we walked over.

Kelvin, uh, saw some stones, one sitting on top of an upright stone, and he called it a mushroom.

And, uh, there's a story behind it. And I know there's a story behind everything around here, but let's talk about it as we walk over toward that direction.

Well, the stone was a test stone. It's not a very big stone. It weighs only 440 pounds. But I had this, over in England, when Ivan was trying to put in these standing stones, they were all crashing into the back of the socket.

You'd start to tilt them up, then they would slide forward and crash into the back of the socket.

And I watched this NOVA program where they set up this elaborate, uh, method of putting the stone in the hole, which I don't think the ancients would have used or could have used.

But what I did notice, that when the stone went in the hole, it accelerated into the hole. It was not a static lift. It was an accelerated lift.

That means to say gravity was at play here. Okay? Because gravity is an accelerating phenomenon. So, then I thought, well, that stone didn't slip. The stones at Ivan were put, they were always slipping.

They were always slipping forward. And I think they don't slip because there's a rotational moment on the pivot roller and it doesn't have time to slip.

Now, I still lash them down and it's really important to do that. But I was onto something. And, um, so this little 440 pound stone, it's about 15 inches into the ground.

Um, we, we built up a scale. I figured it was big enough to test the theory. 440 pounds. I could scale everything down and try it.

And my friend, George Barber in Plattsburgh, who had just recovered from heart surgery, uh, was, could easily flip that stone in the hole because the stone was doing, uh, all he had to do was get it going.

And gravity took over and accelerated into the hole. So I right away get on the phone to Ivan and they tried this on the next stone at the Dragonstones in Surrey in England.

But they didn't get it quite balanced right. And they were struggling with it. And the six guys couldn't, couldn't accelerate the lift.

And there was all kinds of cursing of Rob Roy and all the rest of it. What's this guy?

But some of them realized that there was something here that, and they just didn't have it set up right.

The next one, they flipped in perfectly. Perfect.

And every stone after that has gone in perfectly. And we've now worked up to the 20 ton stone.

I love it. Yeah.

So that's what the story is behind that. Yeah, that's just a little testing stone.

And then you have the little stone family I don't think you had here since we,

No, they're, they're new. They are called the stone family and they're sandstone.

And they've been to visit the ancestor, which is the tall piece of basalt.

Basalt is a dike intrusion in the anorthosite. Anorthosite is the underlying strata here on Myrta Hill.

And the base that the ancestor is on is an orthosite. And that's a one ton stone, by the way.

Anorthosite is extreme, I mean, basalt is very heavy. Can you, can you just feel the density?

The density of that? Absolutely.

It's 191 pounds per cubic foot compared to 165 for the anorthosite.

So if you look at the ancestor from this side, maybe he or she is a pregnant woman.

As you move around the stone, it takes on all kinds of wonderful sculptural characteristics.

So the stone family has been visiting with the ancestor.

There's a father stone. Mother stone is with stone again.

They had big families back in those days.

She's carrying their latest bairn on her shoulders there.

The little daughter is trailing alongside. And this is Bart.

Now Bart is staying back and he's still, he's still speaking with the ancestor.

Now the strange thing here is that the latest child is basalt.

And the rest of them are all sandstone. So I'm not sure Father Stone has twinked to the ramifications of all of this.

I'm not sure he understands all of that.

So they're, they're all returning to whatever the activity is in the stone circle.

That's great.

And you know, there's this legend in the, many of the ancient stone circles in Cornwall in England in particular, but all over England, that the stones, the stones were maidens who were turned to stone because they danced into the Sabbath.

I've heard that.

And in fact, at the Mary maidens in Cornwall, there are two tall stones called the pipers and they've also turned to stone.

And they were piping past midnight. And of course, the maidens turned to stone.

So maybe this family, they stayed past midnight or something and they've turned to stone.

That's amazing. Maybe Cinderella's here somewhere, huh?

Yeah.

That's cool.

There's a neat, there's a hole through that stone.

Yeah.

And I don't know if Calvin can get it with his camera, but if he, if he sights from the other side through, he'll get, he'll get a nice little surprise.

The alignment on this, I don't know if you can do that or not, but line up through there.

And it's, um, it should be perfectly focused on the largest stone in the stone.

The South Stone fills the circle.

Isn't that amazing? Is that a natural hole?

It's a natural hole.

I love it.

And the alignment is total luck. It wasn't even planned.

There are no coincidences. I say it in my daily life a hundred times a day.

That's what a mathematician will tell you. The greatest coincidence of all would be if there were no coincidences.

Exactly. A bit of a riot.

Alright, where do we go next?

Well, let's go up the front way because I want to show you Rapa Nui Louie from Easter Island Moai.

Okay.

And show you the new room that we've put on since then.

Wait a minute, Calvin's got,

I want to see the guy that swings that hammer.

Oh.

Okay, this is interesting.

I'll bet this is a common tool in North Country farmers. You know what this is for?

It's for pulling out pretty decent sized stumps or trees.

What you do is you tie a chain or a rope around here into the stump or the tree you want to take out.

And if you get it right up, snug it up close to the stump, you roll it on there.

And I want to tell you, you get some mechanical advantage on that thing.

Oh.

You can pull,you're getting maybe a what a 10, 12 to 1 mechanical advantage on this.

You can pull a fair size of a stump out with this tool.

Okay, you got that? You don't need that bucket loader after all, do you?

This is a burial cairn in progress. We have a chamber. This is like the Irish burial cairns.

And there's got to be another row of curb stones and we'll build it up with just stones.

And then there'll be a standing stone on top of it like a Celtic cross.

There are several in Scotland as well. And I visited one last year and got a number of photographs of it.

Which one did you visit?

I can't remember.

Was it in Orkney?

I don't think so. I can't remember.

No.

Near Inverness?

Probably not far from there.

Okay, there's the clava cairns, which is very interesting. And each of the burial chambers is surrounded by a stone circle?

Yes.

Yeah, the clava cairns. It's near Culloden.

I'll bring the photographs to you and show you.

Yeah, I've been there. I used to live in Scotland.

Oh, did you really?

For seven years, yeah.

Oh, my goodness. We were there for 10 days and that was almost as much as I could stand. It was so wonderful.

Yeah.

Now, we've determined that the site I visited was the Caramone site.

That's up near Drumna Draca on the side of Loch Ness.

That's exactly what it is. And it's on a minor road.

And we just happened upon it and I leaped out of the van and ran in and it was just, I could, the feeling that I got there was immense.

It's called a clava cairn and it's named for the clava cairns east of Inverness.

It's a certain grouping, it's a certain style of cairn and they all have stone circles around them, little stone circles around them.

And nearby to there, along Loch Ness side, a friend of mine who lives near Coramone, he was wandering at night and it was kind of a misty night and he came across a standing stone he didn't know.

And he went up to it, it was a large standing stone, it was the size of this statue behind me here.

And he went up and he touched it and he got like a jolt off of it. And then if he touched it again there was no jolt.

It wasn't there. It's like once he touched it he was grounded or something.

It was like, hello.

Yeah.

Isn't that great? Well that part of Scotland I loved. There were no parts of Scotland that I didn't love, including the big cities and the castles and the well-known castles and the smaller ones.

And we did a whole TV show on that. But that particular spot was, was magic.

You mentioned magic and it was magic for me.

Yeah. And there's,

Every time I look at the photographs I can almost revive the magic.

There's hundreds of sites like that all over Britain and I have a book here by Aubrey Burrell. It's called A Guide to the Stone Circles of the British Isles. It lists 343 different ones you can go to.

No kidding.

Yeah. There's only about 50 of them that are really worth going to. But they're all interesting. If just to find some of these out in the back and beyond, what's going on here?

Who would expect this would be there? And fortunately somebody took the time to build a nice fence around it. The sheep have a way of getting in the fences and under the fences and around them.

Well, that,Coramone is a National Trust property. It's protected.

It's protected. There was a nice legend there that explained the whole thing.

Yeah. That's right.

And that was pretty decent.

Yeah.

All right. Now here we are. Back on Murtaugh Hill. What's,

We're going to go to Easter Island now.

I love it.

Yeah. About two years ago, Jackie and my younger son Darren and I, we did a three and a half month Pacific Rim tour.

And one of the highlights of that was a week we spent on Easter Island, which the name to the local people is not Easter Island. It's Rapa Nui.

There was even a movie came out a few years ago called Rapa Nui, which actually showed these giant statues being erected.

And they did quite a nice job in that movie. It's a pretty,not a very good movie except for that part. It was really, really good.

These are called Moai. The statues are Moai. And they're,how's that spelled? M-O-A-I. And they're ancestors.

And so you,there were 11 different, like, tribes on Easter Island. And each one had their ancestral sacred place.

The sacred place was an Aju. That was a stone platform. And some of them had this interlocking stone feature, like you get at Machu Picchu or Cusco in Peru,

where, where the stones are, are deliberately shaped and fitting one against the other.

There's one beautiful Aju near the airport at Easter Island that has these interlocking stones, perfectly shaped.

Anyway, there were some 580 or so of these Moai identified. About half of them were finally made it to their Ahus and were erected.

And sometimes there'd be as many as 12 or 15 Moai on one long Aju. And these are sacred sites.

You're not supposed to go climbing on the Ahu and stuff like that. So, um, they were all knocked down.

By the time Thor Heyerdahl,well, before, long before Thor Heyerdahl, by the end of the 19th century, they'd been deliberately knocked down.

One tribe would go knock down the other tribes, uh, you know, Moai and stuff like that.

So here, all these stones, mostly face down, because they'd push them over so they'd land in their face.

Um, so Thor Heyerdahl said to the mayor, who was a descendant of one of the last long ears,see the long ears on this fellow?

Well, he descended from the last of the long ears. There's a whole history associated with that, how that last long ear survived.

He was a paramour of the short-haired girl, and so he survived this great battle.

And the short ears were like the slaves. They were made to do all this megalithic work.

And finally they said, we've had it with this. We're not doing this anymore.

And they wiped out the long ears, except for this guy.

So the mayor descended in, and so Thor Heyerdahl says, how did your ancestors put these up?

He says, I'll tell you. He says, no, I won't. I'll set one up for you.

And Thor says, I'll give you a hundred dollars if you set up one of those stones.

And in nine days, the mayor and his buddies, using stones and levers, nothing but stones and levers, they raised it.

That's incredible. So you, you, did this person who made these, uh, you said he was from Philadelphia?

Philadelphia, New York, up near Watertown.

Up near Watertown. His name is, um, Gary Smith. He actually signed Gary K. Smith.

Oh yeah.

And I think he's got the date on it, 2002. That's a piece of white pine.

He normally makes Adirondack brown bears.

Of course. They all have.

He delivers, he delivers quite good sized black bears and brown bears up to Lake Placid and places like that.

And he always wanted to do them a Y. He had a strong interest in the Easter Island culture.

And so we stopped one day and we were on our way to a festival somewhere in the west of New York.

And, and I, I, uh, introduced myself and I said, do you ever think of doing an Easter Island statue?

He says, yes, I have.

So then about three weeks later, we get an email with a picture in it.

He's carved one.

Well, as soon as we saw the picture, the next time Jackie, in fact, we made a special trip out there, which is a three hour journey.

But we, we made a special trip out there. And the moment we saw it, we, we, we worked out a deal for it.

And anyway, I got two more of his pieces. You may have noticed two, two heads on the, at the stone circle.

Sure thing.

Those are Gary's as well. They're.

Now, did he do this from a photograph?

He did it from a photograph, from photographs of another, uh, statue I'm going to show you in the house.

It was made by, uh, the head of one of the, the, the tribes in Easter Island.

A guy that I got to know pretty well while I was there.

And he's kind of the, the chief of this tribe, the Rapu clan.

And, uh, this is a replica of one that the British stole in the 19th century.

And they took it back and it's, today you can visit it in one of the museums in London, the Natural History Museum or one of the, the, the, the, the, the Museum of Man, I think it's called in London, is where you'll find the original of this.

And of course, Easter Islanders are not happy. They want their stone back.

Yeah.

Uh, but the good part of this story is that because it was stolen, like the Elgin marbles off the Parthenon building, it's in great shape.

Whereas most of the stones on Easter Island have now worn and deteriorated.

But the one in London is, you can still see the carvings. In fact, Calvin should see the other side of this one, because the best carving is on the back.

I don't know how it will come across in the statue, in the, uh, shadow like this, but this is all from the Birdman cult.

You can see the birds.

Oh, sure.

And the Birdman cult was, there's a little island, I'll show you on our map, um, just off the southwest coast of Easter Island.

And once a year, all the young bucks would, uh, compete to descend this 900 foot cliff, swim out to this island, climb the pillar of rock, fetch an egg from a certain bird, a certain nest, swim back with the egg, climb the 900 foot cliff.

And the first one to turn in an intact egg was king for the year.

Talk about Ironman.

Well, that's right. And he had his, he had his selection of all the maidens on the, on the island too.

So that was not without its rewards.

So all this stuff has to do with the, uh, bird, the Birdman cult.

That's really great.

Yep.

That's a wonderful job. And you've had it there for about a year, huh?

Uh, seven or eight months now, yeah.

I think we did this in October.

A чddy central gig has its place to insert in the roof out in August 30 and now for kim소 and it's his primeCome disperse.

Yeah, that's cool.

The ahu is interesting. It's two pieces of granite. Can you see that there's two pieces?

Oh yes, I didn't notice that before.

The one underground is about as big as the one above ground.

And I found them in George Barber's quarry here on Murtaugh Hill.

Did you really?

And they were about 15, 20 feet apart. And I kept looking at these two stones.

I said, something about these two stones. I started to measure them,

and I realized they were one stone that had been separated 90 years ago for some reason, and left there.

Well, when we put them in place,

Only Rob Roy would see two stones and say they fit together.

Well, when we put the top one on the bottom one, and it went in,

there was a decisive, audible, satisfying click.

Of course there would be.

Quite a loud click, and then they were locked together.

And they'd been disunited for 90 years, and we joined them together again.

I love it. Part of the plan.

I made the,that's called the top knot.

That wasn't part of the original carving, but I very carefully scaled it off of a number of photographs

and a number of old drawings that the French had done, and I scaled the top knot just the right size.

I picked it up at one of the local sawmills. It's a piece of white pine.

Yeah.

And I carved it and stained it because the top knots were red.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It had to have a top knot.

Yep.

All right. What's next?

Well, along the same lines, we've put a new addition since you were here, and we call it the Sun Room,

but I think of it as Easter Island Room. So let's go in.

Let's go see it.

This is the Easter Island Room. When did you finish this?

We actually finished this about November. We began to make use of it. In fact, Jackie and I had our 30th wedding anniversary party in this room,

so that would have been,we actually celebrated it on the 16th of November. The anniversary was the 18th, but I know that on the 16th of November we had our first event in here,

which had a bunch of tables in here and about a dozen people.

Oh, this is really cool. And now what did you say then?

Well, we always,you know, this is cordwood masonry, and some of your viewers may not have seen cordwood masonry before,

but it's where you build a wall of short logs laid transversely in the wall. You've seen it before on your program.

But we always,Jackie and I always wanted to see what we could do artistically with it. You know, how far could we take it artistically?

And bottle ends, which is two bottles that plug into an aluminum cylinder, like a printing plate from the Press Republican,

if you turn a cylinder and plug two bottles into it, it transfers the light all the way through from one side to the other.

And so we collected,that has 126 bottles in it. 63 bottle ends. There's 126 bottles to make 63 bottle ends.

We brought the Moai. See the green statues there? Those are wine bottles from Chile, and Easter Island is a province of Chile.

And you could get them on the plane, duty-free stuff. They weren't very expensive. And of course, they have Pisco wine in them. It's a distilled wine.

And they have this lovely olive color to them. So we bought a couple of those.

Now, each of those guys has six coffee jars behind them. We can see that on the other side of the wall.

So the six coffee jars make up the 16-inch thickness of the wall to channel the light through into the wine bottles.

I gotcha.

Then we tried to select tropical colors. We used a lot of blues and greens and yellows from wine bottles.

We even put some geodes in, some slices of geode, and they're mounted to clear bottles or jars.

We even have an Easter Island map in the wall. And I want to find you the actual map here.

Gee, that's so cool. It's actually quite beautiful. And I imagine when the sun is coming through there, it's even more spectacular, huh?

This is Heyerdahl's book, Aku Aku, about Easter Island.

Oh, yes. And this is kind of,

It's well worn, as is my copy.

Yeah, it is. It's kind of neat. That's Easter Island right there. Now, let me take this over to here.

In this chair.

And there it is.

There's Easter Island.

Is that cool?

I haven't done the,

I want to do some markings on it, and I haven't had time to do that yet.

But that was pretty much the way I found the log end.

And just,

Oh, come on!

It really is. I did do some tweaking.

You'll notice that there's the annual growth rings here.

I had to carve in a little bit of my circular sander. This is where Hangaroa, the town is.

This is one of the craters. The crater where all these statues came from.

This is the actual Easter Island stone here.

The big moai are made from this type of stone, and the top knots are from a different quarry,

and they're a red stone. They're volcanic. They're quite light in weight in terms of density.

Yeah.

Of course, it can still be 35 tons.

Sure.

But isn't that something?

How that just topped me up?

Absolutely.

So, Jackie put some waves in around it.

Oh, I noticed that. I hadn't seen that before.

And the Birdman Island, I'll put a little piece of wood right here, because that's where it's located, right there.

They had to swim across that strait, retrieve the egg, climb up this cliff,

and so I'm going to put a little Birdman Island in wood right there on top of that one.

Look at this one. It's like a Polynesian atoll, a coral atoll.

It is, isn't it?

Yeah.

That's beautiful.

Yep.

It's all quite nice.

This one, we stayed with a lady at our guest house, just a private family in Easter Island,

and she gave me, I made the top knot again, but her son carved this, and she gave it to us.

She just said, oh, she took it.

Isn't that wonderful?

Oh, I used log ends to make the top knot for that one.

That's really quite nice.

What a nice room.

So, yeah.

This was our, trying to see what we could, what we could do artistically with Corbin History.

It's really quite beautiful.

Yeah.

You ought to see it at eight o'clock in the morning when the sun is hitting the wall.

Well, every one of these is like, it's got a 50 watt light bulb inside of it.

It's so bright.

And at night, I have a light on it.

So when it's dark, there's like a flood light that goes on it.

And you're sitting here having a meal and you're lit up by the flood light.

And that's really something.

This is a really nice room.

Did you design this yourself?

Yeah.

I actually, we didn't really need more space in this house.

I did it because I needed a project to document for a book I was writing on timber framing.

And I needed photographs, different ways of joining timbers, like with the heavy black,

these metal plates, that sort of thing.

Metal plates to Calvin's right.

You just keep turning to the right and you'll see the metal plates.

Yeah.

And that was because we had to extend the five by 10 rafters outward.

And then, of course, the heavy post and girder system there.

And we had to rebuild the floor because it was deteriorating.

There was an old deck here and we had to rebuild that.

And so I was able to document all this with about over 100 photographs.

And that's all in my new book.

It's called Timber Framing for the Rest of Us.

It's not the fancy mortise and tenon stuff, which I have the highest respect for.

But it's what the North Country Farmer more traditionally does,

which is use log cabin spikes and metal fasteners and gravity.

And, you know, people haven't got time anymore for making mortise and tenon.

It's a nice room. It's got a good feel.

It's a real, real nice room.

I bet you're very pleased with the results.

Well, we didn't need this room, but now we spend most of our time here.

We eat out here, you know, in the wintertime.

It helps heat the house.

This room gets warm.

The air wafts into the open space.

Really great.

This wall here has lots of features, too.

This is from Marcos Rapu.

He actually carved it.

He's the head of the Rapu tribe in Easter Island.

You get to know him pretty well.

And look at the carving in that one.

This is indigenous Easter Island wood.

They do have,

People think it's a treeless island.

That's not true.

There's a fair amount of hardwood forest,

and that's where they get the stuff for the carving like this.

That's nice.

That's very nice.

And here's a little dragon's den here, dragon's cave.

I love it.

More geodes and that with a lot of geodes around there.

Then this is,

We're at Lake Titicaca on the same trip in Peru.

It's 11,000-foot altitude at Lake Titicaca,

and we actually went out on reed boats.

People would take us out.

Oh, yeah.

And they're floating islands.

People live on these floating islands.

And when the canoe or when the boat finally gives up the ghost,

they'd stuff it under the island and make the island bigger.

I'm telling you, that's the truth.

You're not being kidding me.

No, it's true.

The island is made of thousands of these boats

that have been stuffed under the thing,

and people are living on there.

And the boy that took us out, he actually made this one.

Now, this is interesting.

That is not authentic of the ancient Indian people in Peru.

This was Thor Heyerdahl's influence.

Of course.

Yeah, because he had a Viking boat, you see.

And so now they all put this, what do you call it, figurehead.

Yeah.

And that's, if you look, the ancient ones didn't have that.

Didn't have that.

But it's cultural exchange, isn't it?

Oh, of course.

Yeah, this is a really, really nice room.

I love this room.

Absolutely fine.

You got another dragon over here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Were those made locally?

And I think that's the first one I visited was back in 66,

Tical in Guatemala.

And I was one of the first tourists.

That was when they just had opened up.

And what it was looking for now.

And uh,

And when you get on the plane in Guatemala City, they handed you a folding chair, a card table chair.

Forget the seatbelt. Seatbelt wasn't going to do any good. The seat wasn't even fastened down.

And when I told an archaeologist's wife this, she runs the Jaguar Inn at Tikal, an English lady,

and I described how, and this was when Jackie and I went back just three or four years ago,

and I described this to her, and she says,

Oh! She says, you got the chair, did you? Like, that was something special.

Yeah, she knew, because her husband was one of the archaeologists working on it at that time.

And so it was just opened up. In fact, they hadn't, at that point,

they still hadn't cracked the translation of the Mayan hieroglyphs.

Now they can read virtually everything that they did.

Every new hieroglyph they discover, they can read 95% of it now.

The jungles gobbled up so many things that,

But almost every year they discover a new Mayan city. More, more.

In Belize, in the outback of Guatemala.

It was so huge. What a civilization.

It was.

I know they blow your mind. It boggles your mind to think of what they accomplished.

Yeah.

Some of the things they built and the great precision with the way they built things is fascinating.

Right.

To people today. Yeah, great stuff.

Well, we said earlier that whatever exists is possible.

And yet, when you go to a place like Sokse Woman in Cusco, and you see a 35-ton stone in the second course,

fitting perfectly, like my ahu over here on this wall.

See, anybody can draw lines on a block of wood and make them fit perfectly.

But I'm talking about 35-ton stones that fit so closely to its neighbor that you cannot,

You can't slip a piece of paper between them.

And then you start to wonder if that really is possible. Am I seeing something which is not possible?

Yeah. What kind of a miracle is going on here?

How do they do that?

So what's on the horizon for you? How many books have you written?

The one that's just gone to the publisher would be my 12th.

Really?

Yeah.

And several videos?

Four videos, yeah. 12 books. And we do workshops all over the world. New Zealand, Chile, British Columbia, Washington, Texas, everywhere.

The first workshops you did were cordwood?

Yes, cordwood. And then we also do underground workshops, earth-sheltered housing.

Oh, you do?

Oh, yeah.

Berm?

Yeah, yeah.

This is an earth-sheltered house.

Yes.

And in fact, we're still putting the,we have only the drainage layer on this building right now, so if you want to go on the roof, we can go up on the roof.

We'd love.

You get some nice views from there, and you can see how the layers are built up.

Let's do it.

Okay.

All right.

Well, we'd like to show you a couple of those books to see what two of the main focuses of Rob Roy's life have been.

Stone circles and cornwood building. How recent are these?

This is my most recent book. It came out about two months ago.

It's called Cordwood Building the State of the Art.

And I'm not the sole author, even though my name appears on the cover.

I was author-editor, and I wrote about a third of this book.

And I edited the other two-thirds.

And they're all friends of mine who are cordwood builders around the world.

In fact, we get articles from Chile and from Wales and from Sweden in here.

So cordwood's really made its way all around the world.

There's an old historical article about the early days of cordwood.

But that's my latest book on cordwood masonry.

It's got lots of how-to in it, lots of the latest developments using different special mortars.

How long did this take you to put together?

Not to mention the years that it took you to gather the information and the writing itself?

Oh, it's hard to say because, you know, other people, about 20 of the 30 chapters are written by other people.

But then I had to send them out, you know, make comments and corrections and send them out.

There's quite a bit of work in it, I don't know, six months or so.

This one took me two years.

This is almost 400 pages.

The first chapter is about the ancient stones.

There's a 100-ton stone. Can you catch that?

That's a 100-ton stone right there.

Let's lift it up here a little bit.

Wow.

That's my son standing next to it.

Oh, it is?

It's like 30 feet high, you see?

There's Stonehenge.

So the first chapter is about the ancient ones, but there's 16 chapters.

And the other 15 are about what people are doing today and all over the world.

And like this chapter is Cliff Osenton.

There are a number of chapters about,

Different people.

That's Cliff Osenton.

He's a fellow that we happened to hear on the Canadian Broadcasting one evening.

And he said he knew how Stonehenge was built.

So I happened to have a friend that used to work for Canadian Broadcasting,

and she got his phone number for me.

So I called up Cliff Osenton in England, the Midlands of England.

He's a medical technician.

And I said, we're going to England.

I'm doing a megalithic journey, researching, talking to people who know something about this.

Could we visit with you?

He says, I'll take a day off from work.

We'll go to the quarry and we'll move stones.

I love it.

I love it.

And so we did.

And he and my son Darren, who was about 10 at the time,

Some of the color pictures here.

Beautiful.

Photographs all the way through.

Yeah, there's Cliff in his megalithic kit.

But here he is demonstrating some of the techniques of moving these big stones.

So Cliff was able to move very large stones with very few people.

Two people could move very large stones.

And he developed a method of compound leverage.

You know, you can get 10 to 1 mechanical advantage.

But if you work close to this balance point, the stone becomes another element in this leverage.

And now, and they multiply.

So you can get 100 to 1.

So it means that one person can move 100 pounds by compound leverage.

You see?

And we learned all that from Cliff that day.

But it's just the kind of people you run into in this life.

Did you actually go and move stones?

Oh yeah.

That's what that's all about.

Some of my family are in these pictures.

There's Jackie right there.

Yeah.

Here's my son.

Darren lifts a six-ton stone.

Now he weighed all of about 75 pounds.

And here he's lifting a six-ton stone off the quarry floor.

And he's probably weighing 75 pounds himself when that picture was taken.

Isn't that amazing?

And we reconfigured that dolman.

We lifted his five-ton dolman.

We got it off of its points, rebuilt all the points under it, and put it back down again.

In about two or three hours.

Just by using this compound leverage and stacking.

That's where I really learned a lot about the use of cribbing, stacking.

You not only make friends, but you pick their brains clean, don't you Rob?

Oh yeah.

So that's just one guy.

But there's a lot of,

Then I introduced these people to each other.

Eddie Heath up in Quebec.

Derek Murden did a wonderful program on people near here about Eddie Heath and his megalithic stuff that he does.

He's quite a,

He's quite a megalithic artist.

This is Dragon Circle.

This is Ivan Macbeth.

I wanted to show you a picture of Ivan Macbeth.

If I can find him.

How did you happen to meet him in the first place?

Here's Ivan.

He's the fellow on the right there.

I think we saw his picture.

Yeah, for a long time.

I think we saw his picture before.

Yeah, he comes over here quite frequently.

Anyway, Ivan is about 6'3", probably 350 pounds.

But he doesn't use his bulk to move sounds.

He uses his brain.

And he's the one I tell you, has a foot in the other realm.

And he dances, he moves freely between the real world and the world with the veils.

Is this his heritage or is this something he learned?

Something he learned.

He's a druid.

He teaches shamanic studies.

He does.

Yeah.

And it's something we certainly don't have time to get very deeply into this time.

But it's fascinating to me to try to come to grips with the way other people see this world

and any other worlds there might have been or might be in the future.

Wow.

And I'm always very tolerant of people's views.

Well, that's wonderful because I think a problem in the world right now is that so many of us around the world,

including Americans, are intolerant of those who are different from each other.

And I think this is the heart of the kind of problems that we're having.

It's not just the Arabs.

It's not just the Muslims.

We're intolerant of them too.

Well, certainly we are.

Yeah.

And we've seen that.

I've seen it certainly a great deal throughout my own lifetime, you know.

I was brought up Protestant and Methodist.

And if my parents knew that I turned Catholic when I married Kay, they'd come back and get me,

even though they thought they were very tolerant people.

But, you know, I'm sure Kay's Catholic parents preached against the Protestants

and mine preached against the Catholics.

And that's a perfect example of Gulliver's travels, you know.

Yeah.

The long years and the short years and all the other differences.

You know, the Christian idea, Christ said, love thy neighbor.

He also said, love thy enemy.

And, gee, how do you love somebody if you can't even tolerate them?

It seems to me that to get to love you have to at least pass through tolerance.

If you can't tolerate somebody, you're not going to love them.

Yeah.

That's one of the reasons I might as well mention it here before we go up on the roof.

My father was one of those tolerant people who, because he spent most of his early ministry in a very, one of the so-called fundamental religions.

He was a Nazarene traveling evangelist, a la Billy Sunday of the early days in the 20th century.

And so he had a pretty restricted view of what Christianity was all about and who was going to heaven and who was going to hell.

But I was one of the black sheep and I was always listening to people like you and your friends in this book and everybody else and try to put things together in my own mind.

And my father would sit down and instead of my father banging his fist on the table and he was a big man and saying, there's no room for that in my life or your life.

He would say, tell me about it.

And we would sit down for hours and hours.

My mother, on the other hand, was completely closed-minded and did not tolerate any beliefs other than her own.

So she walked on a very narrow path.

My father would sit down here and he would love your cordwood production here,

and he would try to get the essence of why you decided to do that and what it meant to you.

So that's one of the reasons I admire him, and I don't mind mentioning his name,

and the fact that he had a tremendous influence on my life because he was so tolerant of people.

So, what do you say we go on the roof? Let's do it.

I feel like the drifters back in the 60s, huh? On the rooftop, under the boardwalk.

Alright, we're up here on the roof. This is a beautiful view up here.

Yeah. Absolutely, you can see the whole property and the circle,

and we were on the roof here once before and I really admired this.

We always end up on the roof. We've been on the rooftops of hospitals and God knows where.

So, you wanted to show me the process here.

Well, the thing is, with this new room, we haven't put the earth on yet,

but we've put all the layers that go up to putting the earth on.

So it's kind of a good time to see and describe those layers.

People are always interested, how come the roof doesn't leak?

Why doesn't the wood rot out? Well, I'm going to show you now.

Okay.

Let's say that this is the planking, and of course you have your heavy beams that are supporting the planking,

and you saw that in the new sunroom. You saw the planking over the heavy beams.

Well, that's called a substrate. It could be a concrete substrate, but ours happens to be wooden planking.

On top of that goes the waterproofing membrane. The one that I use is made by W.R. Grayson Company.

It's called Bituthene 4000. And it's a very sticky. Feel how sticky that is.

Oh, sure.

Very sticky bitumastic membrane. It's actually rubberized asphalt, and it's about a sixteenth of an inch thick.

So when you pull this Teflon backing paper away from it, it reveals this extremely sticky,

You better be ready to use it.

Yes. Now, it comes in a three-foot-wide roll. I think it's 65 feet long. So,

And I don't have the factory edge on this piece, but there's a,

On the factory edge, there's a black caulking that stops the membrane from raising.

It's,stops it from what's called fish-mouthing.

There's a black caulking, a black caulking that's in here.

So, uh, you simply roll it out with the backing paper on to find out where it lies, then you roll it back again, and the second time you roll it out, someone pulls the backing paper out from underneath it.

There's a go, yeah.

So as you roll it, you're just pressing it down to the substrate, which is the planking.

So now you've got your bituthene on the planking, and that does not leak.

You're never gonna get a leak through the,where you apply the membrane in that way.

Leaks are more prevalent in places like where you put a chimney through, and you violate the membrane.

You're cutting through it, and that's where drainage comes into it.

Now, the roof actually has a pitch. It looks flat to you, but we're actually on a 1 in 12 pitch roof here.

So, um, what goes on top of the bituthene is your rigid foam insulation, like extruded polystyrene.

I have this four inches on this.

Four inches of this, yeah.

The earth is not a great insulator.

So we have four inches of extruded polystyrene, or R20, on the roof.

Then, the base of the drainage layer is this black plastic, this 6mm black polythene, right here.

It's cheap. You can do the whole roof for $60.

With 6mm black poly.

And that is the base of your crushed stone drainage layer.

Now, what we see here, this crushed stone is 2 inches of it on top of the black plastic layer,

which is on top of the styrofoam, which is on top of the bituthene, which is on top of the planking.

So now, your plastic, your crushed stone, and the crushed stone stops the styrofoam from blowing into Vermont.

Then, you want to protect that stone from getting dirty, because to operate properly, it must drain.

So, just as you do with a septic system, you put hay or straw on top of the crushed stone.

So, I would, next thing I do here now, is to scatter loose hay or straw on top of the crushed stone, and now the earth goes on top of that.

And we put 8 inches of earth on top of the straw.

This stuff will mat down and form a natural fibrous filtration mat that keeps the crushed stone clean.

You see?

And that's the whole secret to the earth roof, because drainage is the better part of waterproofing.

So, the bituthene, the waterproofing membrane, is like the commercial about the Maytag repairman,

who's always sitting around twiddling his thumbs because he hasn't got any work to do.

Because you've taken 98% of the water to the edge of the building in your drainage layer.

See?

Of course.

So, that's how it works.

So, that's how it works.

And where does, and the water drains to the edge.

Yeah, and we just today, before you arrive this morning, Mr. Hemingway, up in your part of the world there,

you must know, Hemingway's gutters, they installed a nice gutter for us.

They replaced a 20-year-old one, and they just finished that this morning.

So, on the part over the deck, we actually do use a gutter and carry it away.

On the part in the back, we don't bother with the gutter, we just let it drip off onto the ground.

It works.

You can't knock it, it works.

Yeah, I can see it right from here.

Yeah, there's the new gutter.

That's a good system.

Has been tested yet.

He guarantees it though.

He guarantees it.

Well, I'm glad you brought us up here and show us the actual process.

That knife's seen better days.

Oh, that fell out of somebody's pocket, huh?

I don't know if I'm going to recover anything from this knife.

So, here again, where you have a projection through the roof, it's important to have good

drainage around that.

That crushed stone drainage there meets with the 2-inch crushed stone drainage layer which

is under the earth.

So, any water running down the chimney gets carried into that and then finally drips off

the metal drip edge off the edge of the building.

Yep.

Makes perfect sense to me.

Now we're going to talk about French fries and we're right into my favorite topic.

Yeah, I'd like to introduce you to my son, Rowan, who drives his car on what's left over

when French fries are made.

So, this is Rowan and this is his car.

Oh, what a neat idea and how, what a stroke of providence it is that you should drive up just

as we're at the end of our interview here today.

What the heck have you got here?

Well, Saqqara is a diesel Volkswagen that I've modified to run off of used vegetable oil.

And it's not my idea, I wish it was, but the credit goes to some folks who actually invented

the diesel engine.

The original diesel engine was designed to run on peanut oil.

So, that was Rudolph Diesel.

And since then, people found that I worked on the leftover stuff from making gasoline,

but kind of taking it back to the original product here, running off of vegetable oil instead.

So, you get a ready supply from where? Burger King or?

Oh, let's see, this tank full came from Dairy Queen.

Dairy Queen, alright.

I love it.

And I've got some extra in a bucket over there that came from the college fries.

We already sniffed it to make sure that that's what it was.

You can really tell when it comes from Dunkin Donuts, it has a different smell.

Isn't that amazing?

The only car in the world where you can drive down the street and smell French fries.

Yep.

I love that idea.

I'd like to see a little bit of the internal parts here.

I'll give some credit to GreaseCar.com.

This is the company that I got the conversion kit from.

And this is the heart of it.

It's just the second fuel tank.

This is where I keep the vegetable oil.

And what happens is the vegetable oil is heated with heat from the engine as it's in the tank

and as it flows to the engine.

And as long as you get it hot enough, it'll flow through the injectors and injector pump

and the filter and everything just like diesel would.

And that tank is what, 15 gallons?

15 gallons, yep.

So that'll get me a good 400 miles down the road.

Really?

Yeah.

Now, are you going to drive this car across country?

Yep.

We're leaving tomorrow morning for Colorado.

And we'll be stopping at every fast food joint that we cross.

Have you already checked to find out where they are so you know?

No, it's great.

It's actually that there seems to be McDonald's or Burger King or Wendy's just about everywhere.

So what makes you think they're all going to give up that beautiful fat?

Well, they usually just have to find somebody to cart it away for them.

And they usually have to pay someone to take it away.

So I take it for free.

So I figure I'm doing them a favor.

Shouldn't we have a huge storage facility here somewhere in the future where you could put 500,000 gallons out in the back?

Well, I think that makes sense.

And so I think I feel like I'm doing my little part here to save some fuel, save some gasoline coming from overseas.

And I think it's just an example that, you know, we could have all our 18 wheelers running off of used vegetable oil.

I just love it.

What does it look like under the hood?

Any modifications?

Yeah, there's a few.

You know, it occurs to me that all the police cars could run out.

They're at Dunkin' Donuts anyway.

Don't be saying that.

Don't be saying that.

You make me drive the speed limit all the way home.

All right, let's just take it.

I have more trouble getting pulled over when I'm running on the Dunkin' Donuts oil anyway.

Oh, you do.

Of course.

Donuts in front of them.

I love it.

Yeah.

We want to make sure we got that line in there somewhere.

There you go.

So, you know, it's not too spectacular here.

What I've done is tap into the waste coolant line, or the coolant that comes out of the engine.

It gets piped through a new hose that I installed.

It gets piped around a new fuel filter, and it heats up the fuel in the fuel filter.

And then it runs in a hose within a hose system so that it heats up the vegetable oil all

the way.

It's all the way from the tank to the engine, because if it doesn't get heated, it'll turn back to grease and it won't run.

I always have to start it up on diesel and shut it down on diesel, so I still have the diesel tank,

because the vegetable oil will gel up inside the injectors if it's left there at night.

I understand that, especially in the wintertime.

Right. Diesels are bad enough that way anyway.

But it works pretty good. And you know, as I was telling your dad,

I've seen a few public television and commercial news features on this being done in other parts of the country,

but I don't know anybody, at least within a 50 or 100 mile radius, who does this.

There's a couple other people that I know of, and they're kind of just few and far between,

but some people put a sticker on the back of their windshield and some people don't,

so maybe people driving by you don't even know.

You know, it's not totally unlike the people who run garages,

who collect the used oil and run it through their furnace to keep warm in the wintertime,

and it makes perfect sense to me, you know.

Yeah, that's right.

Recycle whatever you can, right?

And you could run your house off of, you could run your oil heater off of used vegetable oil too,

with some modifications. So, it's a resource, and it's not going to totally replace the Middle Eastern oil,

but it's a start. It's a part of the puzzle.

I love it. I love all kinds of new technology like this. It works well.

It's time for us to wrap up the regular portion of our program.

Rob, I thank you so much for inviting us up here again.

We're laughing because the best stuff is always between takes.

But we're talking about how it was stopping, and some of the fast food restaurants have a small supply.

Some have a lot in the barrel out back, and how you scoop it out and put it in the tank.

It's all a little bit too far-fetched for my view.

I want somebody to be able to stick the handle in there.

And once you get a, if you've got a supply here, you know, and a way to do it,

you could probably go into business recycling that if you had a filter system right here.

For sure. And some of it does get recycled around here, and it goes into animal feed or cosmetics and stuff.

That's true, too.

I'm sure it's always a tremendous education for me, and I'm sure it is for Calvin.

We've learned a lot.

There's a lot more to do, so I have a feeling there'll be a Chapter 3 one of these days.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sometime.

And it's always a pleasure to have you and Calvin here as well.

Any time you're going to raise a big stone or raise a big fuss?

No, we're going to build that Trilathon over the next six years,

so maybe you can come over while we're actually doing that.

I can't wait to do it just to see if my pickup truck fits through there as you promised.

Thank you all for watching this program.

You never know what direction we're going to go in,

and you never know where we're going to be next time for our little corner.

We're so fortunate to be able to have a tape that's a finished product to show on our program today.

Tell us what our viewers are going to see in this tape.

Well, first of all, you have an exclusive on this.

It's never been broadcast before, so this is really special.

I feel special. I did just driving on your property.

And we made it with a view of it being broadcast quality.

I hope that you find that it is.

A lot of nice computer graphics that show the physics of how the stones move,

a lot of nice Celtic music.

And what you're going to see is a four-day workshop that we did here,

a megalithic workshop with Ivan Macbeth and myself,

all compressed into about 57 minutes,

and it gives you a lot of the rational and the transrational stuff,

a lot of the physics, a lot of the history,

a lot of the people that are involved in the movement.

And we keep watching it and enjoying it every time.

When was it made?

Well, that workshop was in the year 2000,

in I think July or August of 2000,

and it's been out for a year, a year and a half now.

I can't wait to see it. Let's do that.

And thanks again so much for being with us.

You're welcome.

That was absolutely very special video that we've seen today,

and we thank you so much for allowing us to use it.

You obviously have that for sale as you do your books.

How do people, how would people get a hold of it?

Yeah, well, the video you can actually access from either one of our websites,

access the order form for it.

And you can either go to www.bigstones.com,

or you can get it through www.cordwoodmasonry.com,

which is the Earthwood Building School site.

So Big Stones or Cordwood Masonry.

And if you want to stop up here,

I know this is a North Country production,

and we're on the Murtaugh Hill Road,

and if you gave us a call at 493-7744,

you can come up and get the video or any of our books.

And I imagine there might be a few people out there

that are interested in one of your workshops.

Are they listed on your website?

They are. They're all listed,

and we do them here in May, July, and September,

and then we do them in other locations around the world other times.

But it's always May, July, and September for Cordwood and Underground Housing.

Next year we'll be back to doing a Megalithic workshop again.

Terrific. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for allowing us to come into the woods

at the Earthwood School up here on the Murtaugh Hill Road

in the town of Altona.

It's our little corner.

Who knows where we're going to go next time?

Our luzes will appear up,

it's kind of the river.

Tell us more.

By the way, we're starting to see a well.

So, a cloud of moona.

Do we need a practice run or is that a time?

Does anybody know what's happening here?

One, two, the three, I'm going to try to time it.

I'm going to go one, two, three, and that's going to be when the action starts.

And this action is going to take anywhere from one and a half to three seconds, is my estimate.

And it's going to be something.

That white frame there, you guys choreographed?

Yeah, when you're all ready, we'll take out our,

Do you know how to drop it and where it's going to be?

Is this how you weigh it and stuff like that?

Straight down.

Straight down, okay.

Tom, you know that you've got to go with the stone.

Is this going to be in your way, Tom?

No, I think we're going to be able to move about, stay about where we are.

Okay.

Steven's ready.

How about the other guys?

They're a pile of 30.

Ready?

Tom, ready?

Ready?

Jackie and Darren, ready?

Yep.

Okay.

One.

Two.

Three.

Three.

Two.

Three.

Two.

Here, who are you?

It's a great angle.

Just flip that stone right there.

Lucy Trish

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.