Nine Stones Close stone circle – Harthill, Derbyshire

Needing to wear in the new front tyre on my motorcycle I took the opportunity to get over to Derbyshire. Of course, this involved the legendary Cat & Fiddle route from Macclesfield to Buxton, which conveniently has many corners just suited to the purpose of scrubbing the coating from rubber.

The weather was lovely on this early August Friday, but I could see rain clouds hovering around the Derbyshire hills and I was ready to choose an alternative destination if necessary. However, the rain held off for the whole journey, and even improved.

Kal and I had visited the Nine Stones Close circle as one of the first we dowsed together, along with the nearby Nine Ladies circle at Stanton Moor, only a few miles away from Harthill. This time I was determined to make a more thorough search for energy lines, and I was also eager to try another ‘manifestation’. Such things can be very intriguing, and the feeling of getting a pattern back from an act of your own is such an interactive and experiential moment that I want to keep trying to fathom out what the patterns signify. More importantly perhaps, what do they mean to me and to the sites at which they appear?

I stomped up the hill past Robin Hood’s Stride, a peculiarly-formed sandstone ridge on the top of Harthill Moor, and then through the two fields to get to the circle. All around the circle, wandering in and among them, occasionally rubbing themselves on the stones, was a herd of young cows and their mothers. Hmmm…my chances of an uninterrupted dowsing session was dwindling with each curious bovine that inched closer.

I placed my helmet and backpack safely on the wall that edges the circle’s four large stones, and got the rods readied for tracing the usual patterns. I seem to remember from the previous visit in early Spring that we had found some energy rings around the four stones; a line eminating from the oak tree going across the circle; and another leading off to the Stride a few fields away.

This time I would try to get more detail, now that we knew about different types of lines (yes Kal, I remembered about ‘neutral’ this time!). As I left my stuff on the wall, I noticed a small rock lying next to it. I picked it up and put it in my pocket for later 😉

After an hour of dowsing I had established the following :-

a) The four stones were laid out on a North/South – East/West alignment, with the primary ‘alignment ley’ line going West to East from the oak tree. This meant there was a Northern Stone, a Southern Stone and two Eastern Stones.

b) The stone furthest from the Stride (i.e. the Northern stone) was the most energetic, having a concentric female ring around it which was of at least six layers before it reached the stone. Just to the west of it was a loosely-wound male spiral, which was self-terminating.

c) The Northern Stone and the two Eastern Stones all had female rings around them. The Southern Stone (nearest to RH’s Stride) had a male quality – more loosely wound than the others, and again, self-terminating just outside the circle.

d) The oak tree not only had an alignment ley coming out of it, but also it connected a male energy line to an oak tree on the other side of the field to the circle itself.

e) In the middle of the stones there was a connected pattern of four spirals aligning to the cardinal points. The ‘power centre’ (the strongest) of these was the northern spiral.

f) Each of the stones was connected to every other stone by a neutral line. The crossing point for these lines in the centre was the centre of the four-spiral pattern.

g) Across the whole site there was a radial ley of neutral qualities, which bisected the northern stone from the others.

Many of the energies that connected the stones together connected at points on the stones where there was either a long scored mark down the stone, or often a cup mark (a shallow depression).

One stone in particular was heavily marked, if not only by the cows rubbing themselves against it (as they did with all the stones during my visit).

I had identified the power centre most suitable to myself, and before sitting down on it I put some energy into that small stone I had found nearby. Again, I checked that there was nothing else to find on the site of the power centre – nope, just the spiral I had found before.

With the stone I sat down on this centre (the northern one) and tried to drift away in no-thought, but those cheeky young cows wouldn’t have that! They kept coming near, crowding around, sometimes with their mothers, who all seemed to be hanging on what I was going to do next! I stood up (the cows jumped backwards – not literally, of course, that’s impossible!). 😉

I put the ‘charged’ stone int he centre of the spiral, and then dowsed around it. A new pattern had emerged! It was a kind of Celtic-knot-cum-flower pattern that was a bit more complicated than the one from Birchen Edge. The Edge’s manifestation had been just eight straight petals – this one was four large petals with four smaller inner petals – all connected in a continuous line that interwove with itself. Beautiful!

As storm clouds were rolling overhead I packed my gear and headed off back to the bike parked at the bottom of the moor. A lot more interesting than my last visit, I thought. How far we’ve come with dowsing in only several months of practise and theorising!

Gwas.

Follow your true path.