Seven Sites for Beltane 2010 – Part 1

Introduction

I had been looking forward to Beltane for a while. The promise of warmer, longer days to work in plus the chance to get back to some of the best ancient sites in Derbyshire had been whetting my appetite for a few weeks, making all else seem like filling in time until the Big Day. For us, we had worked out that Beltane was happening at the full moon on the 27th and 28th April. This is, of course, different from the ‘new traditional’ concept that Beltane is the 3rd May. Some say the 1sy May – May Day. Others maintain that due to the calendar shift caused by Pope Gregory XIII that the actual date is 23rd April.  You see how confusing this all is?

Our reasoning was simple – we timed the change from the third eighth of the year to the fourth as being when the full moon’s energies signalled a phase change, not on an arbitrary and disputed calendar date. After all, for us the interesting change was a change in subtle energies, so why not connect it to a major factor in the strength of those energies, namely The Moon?

Off we ventured with the intention of visiting as many sites as we could within one day. On our list were Arbor Low, Nine Stones Close, Doll Tor, and possibly Nine Ladies if we had time. Oh, we had time! Arbor Low, Nine Stones, The Andle Stone and Doll Tor will all be covered in this first post.

In part two of this set of posts I will describe our experiences at Nine Ladies, but also The Bullstones and The Bridestones which were also added to the list. We worked efficiently and effectively on this auspicious day and here’s the beginning of my account of our work and our findings.

1. Arbor Low and Ringham Low

The purpose we had set out with for this first site was to check our recent information about the movement of the ‘spirit of place’, the Genius Loci (henceforth – ‘GL’). Kal had found at Penmaenmawr and subsequent places that the GL enters an energised sacred site like a stone circle through an arc of neutral energy – like a fashioned gap or portal into the dome of energy covering the site. The same was true of the exit too – there was an arcing neutral energy that formed a kind of doorway.

Our intention was to verify whether the neutral arc I had found on my recent visit to Arbor Low was in fact an entrance or exit point for the GL. Here is what we found:-

• The Genius Loci travels along a neutral North-South ley line that connects to other distant sacred sites
• It enters the site at the place I identified last visit
• The exit is directly opposite, at the northern-most point of the stone circle
• The path of the GL oscillated more strongly as it approached the embankment of the site
• The path circles around the position where a standing stone would once had been placed on the earthwork (now all missing)

Satisfied with these findings we headed off to a site I had spotted marked on an OS map as being near to Arbor Low. This site as called Ringham Low, but when we got to the place where it was marked on the map, there was no sign of it. We walked the field for a while then got dowsing rods out. We found a circle thirty feet wide on the slightly sloping ground, and wondered what might once have been here. Then we moved on. More interesting work was due next at Nine Stones Close.

2. Nine Stones Close

Our second site was up on Harthill Moor, and was a site we were both very familiar with – our old friend Nine Stones Close. My intended purpose for visiting this site was to try to establish my wider purpose for the fourth eight-part of the year – the time between Beltane and Summer Solstice. We always have a little chuckle about what people might think when they encounter “Nine Stones”, with its four standing stones. Do they think it might once have had nine? It didn’t. Possibly five, but never nine.

Despite the passing human traffic, ramblers and school outings everywhere, I was able to meditate quite deeply at Nine Stones, and to get a lot of dowsing done too. As a precaution, remembering the warning that I had been given by the Llangernyw Yew tree, I put up some energetic protection around myself. According to Kal that did its job, because a passing inquisitive person thought twice about approaching and came nowhere near whilst I has meditating. Just lucky, I guess.

Here’s what I found out:-

• I identified the purpose of the time between Beltane and the Summer Solstice
• The purpose of this time of the year is to learn how to diffract, dissociate and extract the different frequencies that my energy field can generate. Then to learn how to bring those frequencies together again to form a pure white energy form.
• I found that my meditation visualisations have changed from streams of fire to those of water – streams, fountains and geysers.

That purpose seemed like a natural extension of the research I had done for the previous eighth part of the year, which had been to learn how to work with neutral energy. I have yet to discover whether there is something about the energies of this time of the year that promotes or encourages that kind of work – this I will try to discover in the next few weeks.

From Nine Stones we headed towards the imposing gritstone structure that is named Robin Hood’s Stride.

3. Robin Hood’s Stride

There was not much to do at Robin Hood’s Stride. The huge outcrop of gritstone is impressive against the surrounding skyline of rolling hills and tree-studded fields, and something made us both want to go and pay it a visit. The one time we had felt like that previously we had found respective power centres, but that had been such a long time ago (in our minds) that we had forgotten where those were. We decided to re-dowse them to see if we could verify the original findings and to see whether that would jog our memories.

Minutes later Kal had found his centre in a small sheltered cave-like formation on the side of the Stride, whereas I was being directed into a crevice. I looked up the crevice to see that there was some kind of hit-like formation of rock slabs above me. Seems like I would have to climb up. I remembered from the last time that I had had to do that to find my power centre, so I hoped I could find it again, now that the rods had led me to this spot directly underneath this unusual slab formation fifteen feet above my head.

Once on top I followed the rods until they crossed and circled around inside a square box of a rock shelter. Inside I felt cushioned from the cold winds of early Spring and my voice resonated within the stone chamber as I called forlornly to my now absent friend below. As usual Kal had gone a-wandering. There was a beaten and chewed stick that some dog must have deposited within the chamber which kept attracting my attention. I picked it up and started to bounce it off the walls and floor of the chamber like a drumstick. For several minutes I beat out strange rhythms that seemed inspired by the sound of the wind on the walls of the chamber, but which were immensely pleasing. This was the place I had found the last time too.

Here’s a link to a YouTube video showing you Robin Hood’s Stride.

4. The Andle Stone and Doll Tor

We headed up to the Stanton Moor area again. We liked this area – several sites all close together, and an air of mystery about a place that is frequently wreathed in mist. This had been the weather pattern last time we had been this way searching for a new circle to us – Doll Tor. Thanks to GPS we had found it, but now in the warm light of a clean Spring afternoon we were shocked to practically walk into the Andle Stone rising out of a mass of rhododendron’s and lined by a dishevelled wall. How on earth had we missed that last time we had walked this way?

The stone provided a fun diversion as we dared each other to climb its iron-handled ladder, but there was nothing energetically interesting about the place other than a fantastic view to gladden the heart. On to Doll Tor!

Many of the visits we had planned for this day out were returning to sites we knew well, Doll Tor was an exceptional exception. We had only been to this stone circle once before, and as part of that experience we already knew that we had practically a written invitation to return “when the daffodils had died“. Now was just that time – there were very few daffodils left in bloom and most were not just dry husks of previously resplendent white and yellow flowers. Time to return to Doll Tor to carve my staff with a symbol of my learning about sigils so far. I was nervous about doing this. But it had to be done.

I did some preliminary dowsing: was the Genius Loci still here? Yes. Was it sympathetic to my idea of carving, and would it help me? Yes. Was this the right day to do this – well, this day, the next, and then the energies would begin to wane. Aha – as would the power of the full moon, that was with us today and tomorrow, but which would then wane.

I carved the formation I had discovered at Dinas Bran some months earlier. The sun shone above the crowded tree canopy, and the stone circle was quiet apart from the sounds of Springtime – birds twittered and distant cattle lowed. Within minutes I had my shape in the ash staff, and I wondered if this was enough. I dowsed for the answer, and found that two other things remained to complete the carving: an energetic sealing of the shape, and the need to add “more definition”. Quite how, I haven’t yet discovered, but some form of tinting might be in order to do that.

The energy seal work I could do, so I called upon the spirit of place to add its energies to the process as I drew out neutral energy from my power centre at Doll Tor and coated the staff in its protective form. A shaft of sunlight broke through the tree canopy above me to bake the seal at exactly the right moment. I couldn’t help but simply smile at the serendipity of that particular moment.

One thing that I enjoy about the Doll Tor site is the obvious amount of devotion and the level of emotional presence there. People leave tokens of their spiritual time, work and hopes all around the site, and some are the most creative and natural that I have seen anywhere. There was activity at the site that ranged from from ribbons, stones, crystals to hexagrams and wood and leaf mobiles.

I have learned not only what the purpose of the time between now and Summer Solstice is, but also a technique for how to actually practically dissociate and recombine the energies that I am working with. This, I feel, is a very important step in my quest to understand the reasons for why stone circles and other ancient sites were constructed. At Arbor Low I had found that stones were positioned in order to form male+female energy fields – to trap and combine the energies.

All this was shaping up nicely! There is much more to come in part two, however, as we move on to the lovely Nine Ladies site, meet some fellow circle seekers, and then visit a new site for us, to finish the day as the sun set at the deep and dark Bridestones site near Congleton.