Carreg Coetan Arthur : Pembrokeshire, August 2008

My final dowsing experience in Pembrokeshire came about unexpectedly. We had been driving around the area on our way back from a trip around the famous coastline, but it had been wet for most of the day. Now, as we headed back to Cardigan, a little sunlight was threatening to appear, which lifted our spirits.

We stopped off in Newport’s lovely little town to soak up its uplifting ambience, and also to take a leek 😉 Then as we headed off out of the town we decided to try to find a restaurant that had been recommended. After a quick coastal search the road brought us out to the housing estate with a brown sign pointing to a ‘Burial Chamber’. OK – let’s see what this is! We parked and walked into the estate to find a little gate, and a twenty feet or so square haven housing the little cromlech called Carreg Coetan Arthur.

In the early evening light it looked splendid, even though diminuitive in scale when compared to Pentre Ifan. Chunkier maybe, but it looked interesting. As always happens when we visit sites like this, someone else turned up – a mother with her young daughter of around 7 or 8 years old. They spent five minuites there, the girl asking questions much of the time – “Mummy – why is this here? What is it for? Who made it?“. The answers were hesitatant, as though the mother was having to pull something back from a far distant knowledge store, but in the end the easiest answers to find were : “I don’t know. Kings were buried here. We don’t know who built it.” I didn’t have time to open a debate on the subject, and the mother seemed not to want to share more on the subject either and they left shortly after.

I, on the other hand, couldn’t resist asking the rods a cheeky question. It’s good to be playful with the scope of dowsing, so I moved the rods into the chamber’s centre and asked, “Has anyone ever been buried here?”. A bit fat negative – not a twitch. I re-tested with variations on that theme until I got bored with the same answer – this was NOT a burial chamber. Bones may have been found here, but that was coincidental to the cromlech’s initial and customary purpose, of that I had no doubt. My research has suggested that the chamber was used for transformational purposes – as a means of sensory deprivation rituals to induce deep trance states by the druids or their students (cf. Paul Devereux’s ‘Stone Age Soundtracks’ book). This chamber seemed conspicuously human-sitting sized.

I feel as though these rituals were probably carried out at particularly energetic times, such as the Celtic fire festivals. I also would venture to suggest, in line with Terence McKenna‘s direction, that psychoactive herbs and concoctions were imbibed or mushrooms eaten during these trance-formation ceremonies. This chimes with something which I read by Emma Restall Orr in Living Druidry. She views drug use in modern druidry as something of individual responsibility, and undoubtedly linked to breaking the barriers which prevent the full integration between nature and human. However, she does not advocate their use because the connection is not in the control of the individual wholly, and can’t be created at will. I guess it does not require any skill or discerment either, but that’s why I suggest its use was for students, or those that required a special level of interaction that the thrust of psychoactive chemicals can provide. We can only suppose until we discover the truth.

Back to the dowsing. Like Pentre Ifan, I started with the nearest corner. A small spiral on the right hand side of the entry gate flowed outwards, through an outlying stone just in front of the cromlech, and around in a loose male/yang spiral – right-to-left – to self-terminate. Good – I had made my first discovery.

I dowsed for a power centre at the site and was led to the back of the site, where there was the remains of a pathway of stones – about five or six left. The largest stone was the power centre, so I stood on it for a moment. It felt like I was immune to the chill in the early evening air, and I revelled in that for a moment, before asking for an energy line coming out of the stone. A single rod led into the centre of the cromlech chamber, out the ‘entrance’, and into a right-to-left male spiral.

Back to the nearest stone in the ‘path’ at the back, opposite to the power centre stone. It led around the left-hand side of the cromlech, spiralled into the chamber’s entrance, curled around the left-hand uprights and into the rear left-hand upright [orientation from front view].

The front left-hand upright also had a connection with the outlying stone I had first dowsed that evening. Finally, I dowsed the curiously unneccessary stone that sat at the base of the right-hand front upright. It dowsed for a neutral line going right around the main cromlech stones.

The site seemed a healthy balance of male, female and neutral energies. Whilst I am sure the site may have been raided for stones, or otherwise tampered with over time, it had a feeling of still being very active on it’s left-hand side, with many connections between stones, and interlacing spirals of energy. When I consulted my diagram again I was pleased with the beautiful patterns that had emerged the last few days, from Pentre Ifan, Gors Fawr and now Carreg Coetan Arthur. Drawing these energies makes for some beautiful diagrams, which I am sadly unable to render satisfactorily yet in pixel format.

Gwas

Follow your true path.