Posts Tagged ‘megalithic sites’

The Athgreany Piper’s Stones : Fixing a hole

The Piper’s Stones, near Athgreany, County Wicklow - Thursday 27th May [map]
 
What follows over the course of the rest of this month is a series of posts that recount my experiences visiting the sacred sites around the Boyne Valley area of Eire (Republic of Ireland). Kal and I spent five days there visiting all the well-known (and some barely known) megalithic sites in the area just north of Dublin. The Boyne Valley is well known in Irish history for two important reasons: firstly because it is the site of three of the country’s most important and most-visited megalithic structures (Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth), and secondly because of the Battle of the Boyne, a battle whose outcome could be said to have influenced the nation’s character ever since.
.
The five days we spent there covered some fifteen separate episodes, and both of us have tales to tell of those events, so you can expect a busy month of posts this June. Should you wish to read our posts in their entire sequence we have decided to tag the posts uniquely. To view the entire story from either of our perspectives simply select the tag “kal ireland” or “gwas ireland“.
.
We took two reference books with us for the journey: Julian Cope’s “Megalithic European” and “Temples of Stone” by Carleton Jones. Copey’s book was the more useful to us (because it included stone circles instead of just chambers) but on several occasions we were caught out by the changes that had happened in land ownership and house-building that had taken place in only the last fifteen years since the book had first been published. Ireland has clearly prospered those days, but at what cost? Some sites are now inaccessible, uncared for or lost in gorse and bramble. Still, at least they have a placard by them stating that they are ‘protected’.
.
We quickly decided that the cluster of sites on the N81 south of Dublin would make an ideal starting point for our explorations. We identified two sites that looked like good starters: Athgreany Pipers Stones and Castleruddery stone circles. This is the story of our first Irish megalithic encounter at the Piper’s Stones.
.
.
We drove for over an hour south of the ferry terminal in search of the sites. We had two satellite navigation aids to help us: the iMegalith application on my iPhone (the phone also has in-built mapping capabilities) and my Active10 GPS unit for which I had purchased maps of Ireland at 1:50k scale. Impossible to get lost, right? Not if you haven’t realised how to switch the OS mapping on! Instead we were working to a base map at a ridiculously high scale, and which was wildly inaccurate. We spent the first few hours driving up impossibly narrow and bumpy roads, walking up a steep hill, thrashing through a forest and muddy tracks, and finally realising we might be in the wrong place. When we asked the dowsing rods to point to the site they indicated that the stones were down in the valley that were were overlooking.
 
We abandoned the search for the Piper’s Stones and decided to try to find something else nearby. Off we drove, a few miles down the valley to the next site indicated on the GPS map. This time we ended up in a field that had been dug up, filled with JCBs and lorries and piles of earth! What….the…?  THEN we spotted the switch on the Active10 unit that switched on the 1:50k mapping….aha…..suddenly the Piper’s Stones were visible, right where the dowsing rods had been pointing, and were only a few hundred yards down the road from us. At last! Our first few hours had been spent chasing our tails in the midday sun like a pair of mad dogs. Now we were finally going to visit our first site.
 
Dark Work at The Piper’s Stones
 
The stone circle is signposted from the N81 road with a brown sign. One might easily drive past it though, but it’s now opposite the entrance to a farmstead. Access is through a rusted gate and leads to an information sign with the usual blurb about ‘who’ built it and ‘why’. All good information, of course. But we ignored it and walked up the field to the right, heading for the circle itself (it’s not actually visible from the sign – you have to guess where the circle might be).
 
As you rise over the rounded small hill the first thing that strikes you is the May Tree (hawthorn) which was in bloom when we visited. Then you see the wooden pylons overhead, which kind of spoils the idyllic setting of the circle, nestled as it is in the crook of several hills around. We bathed in the splendour of the setting, alternately lit by patches of light then dark as clouds moved steadily past overhead.
 
Immediately we knew that this was not somewhere that we would be recording the emergy flows, or mapping the leys, or anything like that. Straight away we were energetically entangled with the site and there was the feeling that something interesting was about to happen. We both went about attuning to the site’s energies, with me sitting on a long female stone and finding my power centre nearby.
 
 Kal found a skull on the May Tree that formed the focus of the circle (see picture below, next to blue ribbon), and he declared shortly afterwards that ‘black magic’ rituals had been done here and that the circle was tainted because of it. We dowsed as to whether there was anything we could do about that, and it turned out that I had to clear it. Without hesitation I began my own dowsing to work out what I might need to do whilst Kal began working with the Genius Loci of the site.
 
 
Kal will tell you the story of his work with the spirit of the circle himself, and I don’t want to spoil that, so instead I will tell you what I did in the circle.
I lit some incense sticks and placed them around my power centre in a square. Then I began to meditate and using my new-found skill of working with neutral energy I coated the sheep’s skull in neutral energy and sealed it. I had to protect myself well using this square of incense and a circle of protection drawn by my staff. You see, I had learned my lesson about protection (or so I thought), and working against this darker energy made me especially cautious.
After sealing the skull energetically I had the notion that I needed to fling it away without touching it if possible. I used my ash staff to pick it up and luckily it fitted into the skull’s socket neatly. I flung the skull out of the circle using my staff and then followed it and smashed it with a single blow. I then ‘cleaned’ my staff by knocking it three times on a transformer stone next to the circle. This seemed to conclude the matter and dowsing showed me that I had successfully removed the negative influence. For how long, I don’t know. No doubt these dark energy workers will be back to take the energies of the earth for themselves again – that seems to be their way. I will continue to counteract those forces whenever I come across them. That is my way – to restore the balance.
 
We cleaned up our stuff and prepared to leave, satisfied with that work. I tied a small ribbon to the tree to signify that I had been there and left my mark, as it were. Kal had had an interesting encounter totally separate from the work I had been doing, and we swapped tales as we bounded down the slope joyous at making some progress at last after several hours of frustration and idle wanderings in the backwaters of the area around the site. Now that we were more comfortable with the navigation process we set our sights on Castleruddery stone circle not far away.

Gwas.

Anglesey Winter Solstice – Part 1: Bryn Celli Ddu

At the Mid-Winter Solstice Kal and I ventured forth to Anglesey again. In the following set of three posts I will share with you all the encounters we had, the energies we mapped and worked with, and the discoveries on our tour of Anglesey on 21st December 2009.

1. Bryn Celli Ddu (South Anglesey) 

We started at our favourite Anglesey starting point – the neolithic mound of Bryn Cell Ddu. It has all the right ingredients – it’s away from traffic but easy to get to; it’s close to the Menai Bridge; it’s beautiful; it’s aligned to the Winter Solstice. Perhaps that last point was the most important!

We missed the sunrise moment, but arrived at about 11am, in time for the midday sun. The previous day’s weather had been appalling making us wonder whether we’d be out here at all, but today the sun was out and the sky was blue, despite being very cold. Not impossible weather to dowse in if kitted out with gloves, hats and sturdy boots (well, I was anyway).

Almost the first moment we began to dowse we noticed something rather unusual – our usual alignments (myself = female, Kal = male) had been inverted! When I asked to be taken to a compatible power centre I arrived at a male power centre atop a recumbent stone at the edge of the mound. Later, when I caught up with Kal this was the very first thing he said to me: he’d been drawn to female centres and lines. We had confirmed each other’s findings, even if we didn’t understand why this was so. 

Winter Solstice sun path

We set about dowsing. I had vague memories of when we had last mapped the site’s energies and was keen to see whether that had changed at all, given that this was the Winter Solstice. Oh my word, had it changed! The energy flows were significantly different from when I had dowsed here last. Either that, or we are finding more and more layers to the existing energy structures. However, when I had finished dowsing I asked if there were any more energy formations and the rods indicated that there were not, so I suspect the flows have modified, rather than us finding more and more new formations. This, of course, makes the idea of mapping the energies a moving target, as they would have to be mapped over the course of a year the get a full picture of how they change. 

Energy flows

The mound was enclosed in the loving ‘hands’ of female energy, which stayed clearly outside of the ‘moat’ feature that surrounds the mound. A ‘tunnel’ of female energy was diverted into the mound’s interior along the ‘Entrance’ path and flows into the gap in the rear of the chamber. As I had found previously the female energy then hugs the walls of the passageway, and flows up and over the mouth of the passage as it emerges at the Northern end. It seems as though this ‘entrance’ is the entrance for energy, whilst the passageway is the human entrance to the structure. 

Midwinter Solstice energy fields

Inside the chamber I found that the male energy was the same as the last time – it emerged from the petrified tree trunk (as proposed by Rupert Soskin, see this YouTube link for details, from the videoStanding With Stones‘), and from the recumbent stone outlying the mound, but within the moat area. 

Sun in the passage at Bryn Celli Ddu

The male energy was confined to the stones within inner circle of the mound area. The male recumbent transformer stone gathered the sun’s energy and fed it to the standing stone at the back of the mound in a circular link. The standing tree stone inside the mound chamber gathered energy from somewhere inside the mound (possibly male earth energy beneath the stone) and fed it out of the back of the chamber, around the mound, and pulled it back inside to the tree stone again. No other male energy formations could be found this day. 

The carved energy patterns

These energy formations were nothing like our previous experience of the mound in the summer months when energy had been evenly distributed between male and female. This shows us that our energy maps are going to change depending upon the time of year that we map them, making the maps even more dynamic than we anticipated! 

Thinking and stinking

To conclude we both did a little meditation and lighting of incense. This also involved us walking around the tree stone inside the chamber. It was an attempt to connect to the specific energies of the Winter Solstice and to try to gather them up, and indeed that was what happened. Both Kal and I felt as though we had managed to infuse ourselves with the Solstice energy and that it was being stored within us, ready for our next site visit, where we hoped to understand what might happen next. We were still at the stage of “letting things occur”, but adding in a little direction ourselves by stating our purpose for using the energies.

In the next post I tell of how we ventured further along the southern edge of Anglesey to the Bryngwyn Stones, and then up to the Soar Stone in the North West, and how the energies of those places interacted with the energy we had gathered from Bryn Celli Ddu. In the final post of this series we do some valuable energy work at Lligwy Chamber, and I map the energies again.

 Gwas Myrddyn 
 
 
 

=================================

External resources: http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/Walesbryncelliddu.htm 

 

The Book Store
Recent changes

** COMING SOON ** - Our Imbolc 2012 day out posts.
-------------------------------------------
* Moon Page updated with 2012 Full Moon table (Jan)
-------------------------------------------

Brighid Song
Kellianna's song 'Brighid' from her album 'Lady Moon'. Seemed appropriate.
Subscriptions
Subscribe to monthly Kindle update

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Photo of the day
Glastonbury Tor - Summer Solstice
Categories
Archives
Who's Online
  • 0 Members.
  • 14 Guests.

Switch to our mobile site