After our visit to Pentre Ifan, my wife M and I travelled further inland from the coastal town of Newport. Our intention was to visit Gors Fawr stone circle [SN126294], described in the local tourist literature as “the most intact stone circle in Wales”. Sounded very promising, and after the wonders of Pentre Ifan we were very hopeful.
Using an OS map I worked out that we only needed to go slightly up a hill near the village of Llandre, near Llangolman. Up the hill we went, and I asked M to pull over at the entrance road to a farm. This tallied with the map. There should be a footpath passing the back of the farm leading to the stone circle.
The Death Spiral
We walked down the path in the late afternoon cloud cover hoping it wouldn’t rain too hard before we were through. Hot on our heels were an elder couple seeming to verify our map reading skills – they must be visiting the circle too, we thought. We let them catch up while we consulted the map again, and we started a conversation about visiting the site. It seems they were going there too, but hadn’t been here before either. Oh! However, they mentioned Julian Cope’s book, and soon we were chatting like familiars.
Not finding a public footpath, but definitely a wide path of sorts, we all headed over the fields. I got my rods out and asked to be taken to the Gors Fawr stones. A minute later we stood before a pile of rocks piled up against a wall adjoining the farm. Confused? Obviously, my question was open to misinterpretation, so no wonder the rods took their time pointing to a possible path.
I asked the same question again, and the rods pointed back the way we had came. We all trotted back to the main path and ventured on, led by a single rod with the instruction to lead us to “…the nearest stone circle”. Well, we must be somewhere near to it, right?
Two minutes later, after a gate and a farm path leading to a grove of old trees next to a stream and two fields of sheep. Now, this is more like it! We all spread out to find traces of the stone circle. I leaped down to the stream (as it seemed the most beautiful spot) and was looking around a flat area under some large beech, ash and oak trees. There were certainly many scattered large rocks and many were positioned in a seeming circlular shape….I called everyone over to discuss the site.
The older couple ‘um’d and ‘ah’d. It wasn’t very impressive I had to say, and quite humid and marshy roundabout the site. The older couple said their goodbyes and left. M wandered back to the main path, and sat on a wall, waiting for me. Well, the pressure was on! I grabbed my rods and dowsed for lines. Soon enough I had a large boundary energy around the flat area – it was some four feet in width. Confident with that, I dowsed to find its centre, and walked around in an ever-decreasing spiral to the centre. I had to dodge down-hanging tree branches that skimmed, almost touching the spiral’s path, and several fallen rotting branches on my way.
As I reverse dowsed to find the eventual source of the energy for that spiral I kept seeing the dead branches in between the large sandstone rocks that marked definite points on the spiral – these rocks linked to locate or form the spiral, or maybe to empower it – I wasn’t sure.
The end of the trail was a gigantic ash tree, which had a profound energy emitting from it. I paid my respects to the tree, and placed my hand on its ancient trunk, watching the light through its branches for a minute. I hadn’t attempted to connect to an ash tree before, so this was new ground. I felt a presence, and then a phrase popped into my head – this was a ‘Death Spiral’! It was a place where animals came to die, I was sure that was the image and feeling being transmitted to me.
I walked back to the small ridge which separated the site from the sheep in the next field. As I walked over the ridge I nearly stood on a pile of bones – the horned skull, spine and jawbone of a sheep! Some validation of the death spiral idea, I felt. Insitinctively I picked up the skull and walked back around the spiral to place it in the centre. I said a few kind words about having a pleasant journey, and emoted a sense of peace and love whilst standing on the centre.
Then I traced my way out, and went back to M, sitting calmly on the wall with a watchful eye on the clouds. “What did you make of that?” I asked, “Rather disappointing?”. She scowled, “I didn’t like it. It felt weird.” “I think it was a Death Spiral – a place where things go to die.” I stated, without adding any evidence. M asked me why, and I recounted the skull ritual. She wondered whether I had done the right thing. I could only say that it felt right to do it, and offer no rationale for it. But I hadn’t felt uncomfortable with the idea that it might be connected with death. In my drudic studies I have come to appreciate the power and purpose of death, rather than to fear its touch. M was instinctively wary of it.
Gors Fawr real
However, we wondered whether that really was Gors Fawr. We decided to go back to the hotel near Cardigan. Thirty seconds up the road and M screeched the car to a halt outside a large span of moorland whose fence bore the sign “Gors Fawr Stone Circle”. Ooops! Red faces all round! I threw the OS map into the back of the car.
As we walked towards the circle, obviously complete and identifiable from a distance, my embarrassment deepened – the rods had been confusing and undecided earlier. They seemed to have trouble answering me, but I pushed them for a decisive movement. I really had to learn to stop doing that – if the answers are uncertain that means something – I find it easier to interpret this response from a pendulum, even though I generally try to use just the rods. Occasionally the pendulum is more useful, and I need to remember that when the occasion arises. 🙁
I gave a set of rods to M and she wandered off in the direction of the two large standing stones some few hundred feet distant beyond the circle itself. She seemed almost drunk as she slowly walked left and right into the near distance!
I started with each stone in turn. I dowsed for the female/yin energies coming out of each one, and found that each stone had two spirals emerging into the circle. The first was a very small spiral close to the inside of the stone. The second was just large enough not to touch the first spiral, then curled in the same direction, right-to-left until it terminated.
This pattern continued with each stone except for two. Two stones situated at the North-East and South-West points of the circle had two sets of small and large spirals – spiralling either side of the inside of the stones.
I turned my attention to these stones, and dowsed for a male/yang line. I straight line of strong energy connected the two NE and SW stones going directly through the centre, which was marked by a circular bare patch of earth.
Noticing that M was returning, I only had one enigma left to dowse – the stone at the back of the circle. M was already packing our stuff up as I dowsed for a line from the stone at the eastern edge of the circle, slightly out from it. The line went round the back of the circle, to the western end, then through an outlying stone and curled around a seven-foot gorse bush – the tallest and loneliest gorse bush you’ve ever seen! There was nothing like it in the immediate area. How interesting! I wondered on the effect of the circle on the gorse bush’s growth, and vice versa.
At the car M told me how she’d traced a line which sinewed between large stones placed in the ground until she had reached the standing stone pair.
Looks like I have another partner in some of my future dowsing exploits!
Gwas
Follow your true path.