The Templars' secret island: The knights, the priest and the treasure

Nearly 30 years ago, a television programme documentary programme about a tiny French village ended with the words: "something extraordinary is waiting to be found on the mountaintop ...and in the not too distant future, it will be". Rennes-le-Chateau, the village in the French Pyrenees, is world renowned. Bornholm is a tiny island in the Baltic Sea, a 1000 miles to the north. This book shows how these two specks upon the surface of the earth are tied indissolubly together. They have been touched by the hands of master builders who shared a common expertise and a common body of knowledge. Bornholm is barely 20 miles by 10 and possesses 15 mediaevel churches and many hundreds of standing stones which mark the island out as a sacred site in remote antiquity. These ancient markers - and especially the churches - demonstrate a skill in land surveying, geometry and mathematics. It is a knowledge which was jealously guarded and handed on. In the Middle Ages, those mysterious mediaeval warrior monks, the Knights Templar, were still using and developing the same expertise. And they were doing it knowingly. This treasure of the "secrets of the past" as a body of knowledge was only for the chosen few. "The Templars' Secret Island" shows many extraordinary links between Bornholm, France and Jerusalem. The author's collaboration began when Erling Haagensen, born on Bornholm, was beginning to find the strange truth of his island home and contacted Henry Lincoln who had already produced three books and three documentary films which had provided the first glimpse of the provable facts which were underlying the story.