The Chinese Luo Pan Feng Shui compass is the subject of a new book by an author from Glastonbury.

Gill Hale has released the book entitled The Luo Pan Revealed: the Construction and Use of the Chinese Feng Shui Compass via Quicksilver Publications.

Gill has been studying and practising Feng Shui for almost three decades. She is the author of The Feng Shui Garden, The Practical Encyclopedia of Feng Shui and its many offshoots, and Zen and the Art of Gardening.

She is a consultant and teacher, both in the UK and US, and was instrumental in the development of the Feng Shui Society in the UK into a professional body with standards for education and ethics, for which she was elected as a Life Fellow.

The Luo Pan Revealed looks at The Chinese Luo Pan compass, which is a multi-ringed astronomical and astrological tool used for determining the best locations for homes, businesses and their occupants over time, according to the laws of Feng Shui.

As the compass is written in Chinese, it can make applying it to Feng Shui difficult. However, Gill says she used her tenacity inherited from her engineer father to "get to the bottom of things", to translate the Luo Pan so that those who followed could spend less time fretting over it and more time using it.

Often teased by colleagues for colouring in tables and diagrams, Gill said she found it enabled intricate patterns to leap off the page, in the same way that an environment can be read from the prevalence of certain weeds, which indicates the health of the soil and suggests which plants will thrive there.

She deliberately chose to produce the book in colour to help readers see the patterns in each ring - which suggests consequences for locations down to .975 of a degree. The derivation of each ring is described in detail along with indications of how it is used.

Gill said: "An intuitive feel for buildings and environments helps, but knowing what the rings represent is only the tip of the iceberg.

"Analysing buildings and environments using a professional Luo Pan takes many years to understand.

"Quotes from other cultures have been included where relevant, to suggest that the knowledge contained in the Luo Pan is not confined to the East and to whet the appetites of Western researchers."

The Luo Pan Revealed: the Construction and Use of the Chinese Feng Shui Compass by Gill Hale is available via YPD Books.