The Hedge Druid

Posts Tagged ‘four knocks’

Since I have some time on my hands thought I would catchup with some really old (half a year) posts. This one is from memory i’m afraid and although vivid, might contain the odd in-accuracy.

Who can tell though, right? Since it concerns my adventures and recollections.

Gwas and I were in the midst of our trip to Ireland (May 2010) and we had just got the keys to access Four Knocks mound.

It was abit of a drizzly morning as we pulled on the road side next to the gate that was a short path away from the mound called FourKnocks.

Whilst Gwas was inside making some preparations for a meditation, I dowsed to find that my work would be done outside. So I dowsed to a location that would be suited and stood (the grass was wet) awaiting some inspiration (or at a push intuition).

There were a couple of horses in the field next to the mound and they came over to the fence to keep me company in my vigil. Nothing happened for a while and then my attention was caught by the cry of some nearby crows.

Have you ever noticed that crows seem to call in bunches of three squawks?

This crow was cawing in groups of four and had me listening to it intently as my mind wandered and was transported to another place. As, almost premonitioned the evening before I was standing with a figure who I knew to be Caileach. You just know her without knowing her, if that makes sense?

Although the exact wording of the conversation escapes me, I know that she asked me whether I would like to be her student. She promised that I would learn many things and though she was a hard teacher, there was none better.

I asked her whether I had time to think about this exotic proposal and she said I had all the time I had at four knocks to make my decision.

What a request! To be a student of Caileach offered so much and yet I had reservations. To be quite honest I was afraid, of commitment, of the dangers, of losing myself to something else.

Also I already had a wonderful teacher in the Ancient Yew.

With these reservations and fears. I rejoined (stop asking me how) Caileach’s world and politely declined. She wasn’t wrathful, phew. But she did say we wouldn’t be meeting again.

At the conclusion of this little two day encounter (see this post) I felt both good and sad. Good that I was able to refuse such a request and sad that perhaps I had lost something special and unique.

Kal Malik – not a student of Caileach

Saturday 29th May - Four Knocks, County Meath

On the morning of Saturday 29th May I roped Kal into one of my crazy ideas. We would spend the next two days on a modern pilgrimage, just like we had done at Glastonbury the year before. We would find a starting point and then let the dowsing rods direct us from site to site. For me, I would set my intention for this pilgrimage to be to work on each of the seven chakras and to see what came out of trying to do that. For Kal, he would just do what he does – see what happened at each place and go with it. So, with the help of the iMegalith iPhone application and my SatNav system we trekked off to the starting point, which I had determined would be a henge and mound close to Four Knocks.

We didn’t get very far trying to find the henge and mound. The mound was visible in a farmer’s field, but the supposed henge had been… well, let’s assume it was removed and ploughed out of existence! Not a good start. Was there anywhere else we could pick up the quest? Our dowsing showed that nearby Four Knocks would be suitable. As soon as we got the rods crossing we kind of knew that this had actually been the right place all along, but something had been preventing us from dowsing that from afar. We sort of had to be in the area to zoom in on it. Perhaps we had prevented ourselves from ‘finding’ Four Knocks prior to actually being there because we knew you had to obtain a key in order to get in? Who knows. We obtained the said key (by the way – the directions are not very clear – but we found the house eventually and got the key by leaving a small deposit with a nice lady) and went to discover this famous mound’s secrets and begin a quest.

Entrance to Four Knocks

We opened the iron door up (iron – aaargh!!) and began to settle in. I needed some stuff from the car that I had forgotten, and by the time I got back to the mound it was swarming with a minibus-load of tourists from various parts of the world – America, Japan, Australia….all over. Their guide had clearly gone off to get the key without realising that we already had it. Ten minutes later he was in the mound beginning his guided tour of the place, which I earwigged into, of course. Hey – it was free for me to listen!! And jolly interesting it was too, although I could see Kal twitch every now and again, and I was biting my tongue at some of the speculative leaps the guide was making to fill the gaps in the archaeology with fantasy and pure imagination. He was very careful to preface everything with “My guess would be...”, or “Perhaps they might have…”, and even in the dim light I occasionally caught Kal swinging his dowsing rods behind the guide, shaking his head as though to say, “Nope!” It’s funny how dowsing can sometimes make you feel quite confident about being able to find out hidden knowledge, and yet later in the day that confidence would be completely reversed, but we’ll come to that in a later tale.

I don’t know if this is the traditional position but at Four Knocks we have the female on top and the male underneath. Yes, on top of the rounded mound there was female energy all over it. All around the outside of the mound was a male energy lineThe direction energy takes when moving. It may be straight or curved, in several dimensions and be composed of one or more different types of energies, i.e. negative, positive or neutral. Energy lines can be found at standing stones and ancient sites but are a general feature in all energy fields., waving and running around in a sunwise direction. Kal was spending quite a time outside, pacing around and around, working something out, but I decided to get myself inside to take some pictures of the rock carvings and to try to work out what I might have to do to work on my Root Chakra – the first part of my modern pilgrimage. That was the intention, but instead Four Knocks had its own agenda for working my chakras!! I will explain in a moment.

Inside there was more than the usual amount of decoration. Many of the swirling circular shapes were familiar to us, but there was an abundance of zig-zag lines and lozenge shapes carved into the lintels of the recesses in the mound that seemed to be quite unique to this particular chamber, or at least rarely seen in such quantity elsewhere.

Zig-zag lintel decoration at Four Knocks

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