It began, as many important things do, with something I could not fully explain.

At the time, I thought I was witnessing a story unfold on the land — a strange, vivid encounter involving three cousins searching for one another across a battlefield. One was dead. One was missing. One waited in a church, suspended between fate and survival. The vision came through Naomi, a seer, as we stood on the Somerset Levels near Battle of Sedgemoor — the site of the final confrontation of the Monmouth Rebellion and the beginning of the brutal reprisals known as the Bloody Assizes.

At first, it felt symbolic — a psychic echo, perhaps, or an imaginative reconstruction of trauma held in the landscape. But later, I discovered something that changed everything.

The three cousins were real.

Their names were John Browne, John Browne, and Thomas Browne — almost certainly related, and very likely my ancestors. They were men who had lived, fought, and lost. In 1685, following defeat at Sedgemoor, they were captured, tried, and transported to the Caribbean as punishment for rebellion. Their story was not imagined; it is recorded in history. And yet, somehow, it was also recorded in me.

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We had gone to the land deliberately.

The day after Pope Francis passed, Naomi, Jackie, and I travelled to the ancient landscape around Glastonbury. We walked the line between Glastonbury Tor and Burrow Mump, following what is known as the Michael and Mary leyline — an energetic pathway said to connect sacred sites across the land.

We visited churches, ancestral locations, and the low-lying fields where history lingers close to the surface. We stood near Westonzoyland, where captured rebels once waited in the church for their fate. We traced the edges of rhynes and droves — old routes through the wetlands where men had fled and been caught. And finally, we stopped at a place that felt different.

A field between Othery and Aller.

A vortex.

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Naomi described it before I could feel it.

“A huge spiral,” she said. “Like a toroidal vortex — a node that draws things in.”

She spoke as though she were inside it, not observing it. As though the air itself carried memory.

“This is why the battle happened here,” she continued. “Why the cycles repeat. Why they don’t clear.”

In her vision, the battlefield and the vortex were not separate. They were the same phenomenon — a convergence of forces where history, emotion, and human experience became entangled.

Standing there, I began to understand that this place was not just holding the past.

It was replaying it.

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When high emotion is experienced — shock, terror, grief — something can remain. A resonance. Under the right conditions, that resonance behaves like a recording, replaying itself when triggered. On this land, the events of 1685 had not simply passed into history. They had imprinted.

And those imprints could be activated.

The same, I realised, was true within the human body.

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Naomi turned her attention to me.

“This is about shock,” she said plainly. “It happened quickly. Your body is still in it.”

She described what I had never fully named: a dysregulated nervous system shaped by early childhood illness — patterns of hypervigilance, collapse, and withdrawal. What modern language might call dorsal vagal shutdown. States where parts of the self become inaccessible, split off, or “lost.”

Then she said something I could not ignore.

“You are reliving the story.”

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The three cousins were no longer just historical figures.

They were also aspects of fragmentation.

One lost.

One held in suspension.

One gone.

At the same time, Naomi described something larger — an energetic structure that mirrored both the land and my internal world.

“A toroidal vortex,” she repeated. “It attracts things. It pulls them in.”

Between the years 1976–1981, during my childhood illness, and again between 2014–2026, I had experienced periods where life seemed to collapse inward — where events, emotions, and external pressures converged with overwhelming intensity. Like the phenomenon associated with the Bermuda Triangle, things did not simply happen.

They disappeared.

Parts of my psyche — overwhelmed by stress — had gone missing.

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“The battle site and the vortex have the same energy,” Naomi said. “Its location, right on the leyline, messes everything up.”

What she described, in simple terms, was a failure of boundaries.

Old energetic cords. Unresolved contracts. Inherited patterns. Personal trauma.

All of it converging.

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And yet, the vision did not end in darkness.

After describing inversion — something turned inside out, distorted, even touched by what she called “dark magic” — Naomi saw something else emerge.

Magnetism.

Structure.

A crystalline network.

“You are part of the magnetism,” she told me. “Wherever you go, it follows you.”

She described a system not of collapse, but of reorganisation — a grid forming through the body, connecting points, restoring flow. A process that required movement, attention, and participation.

“You need to go to these places,” she said, “to finish business. To connect everything together.”

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This book is the result of that process.

It is a record of real events — historical, geographical, and personal — and the ways in which they intersect. It explores how landscapes hold memory, how trauma imprints itself across time, and how unresolved experiences can repeat in cycles until they are recognised and integrated.

It is also an account of return.

To the body.

To the land.

To the parts of the self that once went missing.

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At the end of that first encounter, Naomi paused and listened, as though hearing something beyond the immediate moment.

Then she turned to me and said:

“One cousin tells me, soon this will all be forgotten.”

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This book exists so that it is not.