A potter with a penchant for making scorpion-tailed dragons was unable to explain his fascination with the mythical creature until Somerset researcher Dr Anthony Thorley enlightened him – the potter's workshop was sited on the sign of Scorpio in a landscape zodiac and the craftsman seemed to be unconsciously responding to it.

Anthony has just begun a four-year PhD study of landscape zodiacs, of which there are now known to be 60 in Britain – the most famous, of course, in the countryside near Glastonbury, 10 miles across, and revealed in the 1930s by the sculptress and mystic Katherine Maltwood, who lived in the Polden Hills.

These zodiacs emerge mysteriously for the initiated from maps and aerial photographs, the outlines of the astrological signs formed by natural and man-made features in the landscape – hills, streams, lanes, field boundaries and so on – and are often verified by local folklore and placenames. "Are people really talking about something in the landscape secreted away in the fields and hills and the turns of rivers?" asked Anthony, a retired psychiatrist from Peasedown St John, near Bath.

"There are so many coincidences, synchronicities, in the land when you are on one of these signs that it beggars belief." A dog figure "guarding" the Glastonbury "Temple of the Stars", for example, had an ear at Earlake, the tip of its tail at Wagg Drove, and its body around Curry Rivell, an association with "cur".

Interested in landscape zodiacs for more than 20 years, Anthony would like to hear from attuned people like that potter on the zodiac which Anthony helped to discover in the Scottish Borders.

"I would love to hear from anybody who feels or who has discovered that they have had an experience which links to living on or being associated with any part of a landscape zodiac," he said.

Unlike indigenous cultures all around the world, we in our Western materialistic society had no concept of the land "speaking" to us. "They have a comfortable concept that the land carries its own consciousness and expresses this, particularly in sacred sites," said Anthony. "One of the things that fascinates me is that a zodiac in England found in the 20th century could be considered as a kind of sacred site."

He sets the phenomenon of the landscape zodiacs against a background of great spiritual rediscovery over the last 60-70 years.

"I think it's a reflection of our disenchantment with life," he added. "We have lost a great deal of natural contact with a basic spiritual landscape. A lot of the New Age movement is a reaction against scientific materialism. We need technology but need to find a balance.

"There have been many adjustments going on and Mrs Maltwood and other people finding zodiacs is partly about this."

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Anthony is joining forces with Glastonbury astrologer John Wadsworth for the Alchemical Journey, a series of workshops on zodiac energies as a medium of personal exploration and change. The programme begins at the spring equinox on March 20 with the first of 12 monthly workshops progressing through each sign of the Glastonbury Zodiac. Find out more at www.thealchemicaljourney.co.uk – and to contact Anthony, visit his website, wwwearthskywalk.com