The Hedge Druid

Posts Tagged ‘corbel’

Friday 28th May – Newgrange, County Meath

On our second day on the Ireland megalithic tour we were going around the main Boyne Valley sights. It would be rude not to, seeing as we were in the vicinity. It would be interesting to contrast how the Irish valued their sites compared to the English, Welsh and Scottish. That said, I don’t think were were prepared for the…organisation levels that we were about to encounter.

To get to Newgrange from Knowth you have to…er…go past Newgrange, back to the bus terminal near the Visitor Centre and catch the bus back to Newgrange. Of course you do! On arrival we had to wait for the guide to, er…open the small two feet high unlocked gate and to tell us to walk up to the standing stones in front of Newgrange’s famous entrance. The arrangements are all a bit of a faff, but it began to dawn on us that this was necessary to control the number of people at the site and make the experience rewarding for everyone. In the end we capitulated, although Kal still went off and did his own thing whilst I endured the guided tour to get some background on the site first. Later we walked back rather than hurry for the scheduled bus. We wanted time to dowse, of course.

I’m going to recount things out of chronological order now, because I want to relate the interesting stuff together, so bear with me! We found that the constant influx of tourists into the mound was causing a build-up of negative energies. It was only slight, and took a while to accumulate, but was there.

The accretion effect I suspect may be due to the fact that tourists in no way “prepare” themselves for entering such sites. Why would they? Of course they wouldn’t, and yet in my experience this can often be a necessary part of approaching these sacred places – to cleanse oneself of the subtle energies from the places we have visited (or live in) that is like wearing a smelly coat!

We walked around it the ‘correct’ way – clockwise, sunwise. This ancient (and now partly modern) construction  was a chamber whose energies we left were in synchrony with the Sun’s movements primarily. We wondered as to why the main path invited tourists to walk around it in a contrary, widdershins, direction. This was something that we found to be the case at Stonehenge too, Tourists were ‘invited’ to walk around the structure in a way that would neutralise positive energy flows and keep the place feeling…drained. It would take quite a strength of will for a tourist to walk around in the opposite direction to the flow of everyone else. Of course, we did just that! Swim against the stream, young salmon!

One thing we did wonder about was this: if the flow of energies during Spring was clockwise, would it change direction at other times of the year? Perhaps someone who lives closer might be able to tell us that?

As we stood outside the entrance being given the known history of the site both Kal and I were separately thinking about the hidden history of the place. Kal had gone off exploring, and my mind was split between taking in the historical information and feeling for the energy coming from the nearby standing stones. As my eye wandered absently along the line of the stones I saw that there was an alignment with nearby tumuli (or mounds) closer to the Boyne River down in the valley floor. Interesting that all these sites are aligned to the path of the Sun, and that they all were built within the bounds of this wide bow bend in the river.

Now it was time for the guided tour of the inside of the Newgrange chamber. We all filed into the chamber, careful not the scratch the artwork, and emerged in the central corbelled chamber. Then Kal appeared again and I could see that he was holding his dowsing rods. He wouldn’t, would he?

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