The Hedge Druid

Posts Tagged ‘robin hood’s stride’

The Wizards Wood

Can you believe it? Gwas is off adventuring in the land of the Sun on this fine Beltane festival. As he is the one that usually sets an agenda (I improvise). It was up to me to create a celebration on my lonesome. Finally the side-kick gets to play on his own (queue maniacal laughter).

When?

Beltane falls on the 1st of May however what I have often found is that there is a personal note to festival days. Thus I like to go with feeling as well. The 1st of May was a day of rain here in the UK. Maybe it was the weather or not, but I definitely didn’t feel the energies of Beltane in the air. Nope.

Work kept me awake to the early hours of Wednesday the 2nd and I was still typing when the light came in through my window. Ah yes! Definitely today. So I grabbed a list of places that I had written down before hand and dowsed as to where to go.

I started with Sacred Sites in Derbyshire…No no and no! Then Northern Wales. Nope!. I tried being more open with my criteria…Would I go north, south, east or west. This proved more fruitful and I ended up with a location of Alderley Edge. The sun hadn’t hit the horizon and I was off for that mystical wizards wood.

An hour later I was walking through the mystical wood and getting muddy. But the sun was out and the day was going to be special. You can just feel it sometimes.

Cleansing

Oak at Nine Stones Close

Incense has been our standard format when it comes to Beltane or indeed fire element requirements but this time I really wanted to light a fire. A proper one! There are a few caves in Alderley Edge and my intention was to use one of those. I dowsed the paths for a suitable place and unfortunately the rods took me to a place that I recognised. It was the place where I had connected to the Earth a couple of years ago. But not a cave.

So it was to be incense? I asked the rods No. What then a fire? No, not here anyway. So I went through my mental list of activities and reached the conclusion that this place was to clear out old energies and ground myself. Obvious really since it was the place that I had connected with the Earth. Doh!

I leaned against the side of the cliff face and let my thoughts focus on the depths of the earth. I reached down into the roots and let the energies clear within me. Mere moments later I felt detached. Curious that really because it wasn’t the feeling I was aiming for. Nevertheless my work at this spot was done. Time for the fire, I thought.

So I asked the question, was I ready to light a fire? No. Gosh! More work to do. I asked was there more work to do? No. What? Was I done with Alderley Edge? Yes. Did I have to go some other place? Yes. Oh Ok.

Again, I went through the list of sacred sites and arrived at Nine Stones Close. Oh no! Another hours drive. Oh well so be it. The good thing about the drive was that the sun was bright as I headed towards it.

Wings

Robin Hoods Stride

If you don’t know, it had been raining for about 3 days here in the UK. The amount of mud in the fields going to the Nine Stones Close site was phenomenal. As per the usual when I got there I began by greeting the Oak tree. Me and that Oak have a wonderful relationship. It has taught me so much about over coming fears.

I spent some time with the Genius Loci until I and it got comfortable. I then wondered about a fire. So I asked the rods, where should I light the fire? Again no fire! What’s with the Beltane festival these days? What then, another meditation? Yes it seems. But not at the stone circle but across the rock wall and under the Oak tree.

I leaned against the tree and felt the sun on my back, nice and warm. My mind was on fire. I had brought along some wood kindling and fire lighters but was being thwarted in their use. As I tried to clear my mind I heard a squawking from above and three crows flew out of the Oak tree and headed towards a land mark called Robin Hoods stride.

Crows are, as you know, my totem so I felt this to be significant. So I forgot my meditation and dowsed for a change of venue. Would it be Robin Hoods stride? Yes. So off I toodled off towards the heights of the Stride.

Fire

It didn’t help that the fields and climb was mud splattered but whats a guy to do? Up I went and this time I went all the way up to the top (usually I get a bit wobbly knees). I had a feeling that this would be the place for the fire. I dowsed and YES finally it was time.

I dowsed and found a good energetic place to light a fire. A few minutes later I had a small fire going and I was sat so that I was facing the fire and beyond that the Nine Stones sacred site (though I couldn’t see it from my sitting position).

In magical terms fire is often used as a gateway to travel to the underworld. That is where my thoughts where whilst I was watching the dancing flames.

An aside: 2007 was the first time I have ever encountered an entity personally. I had observed what you might call entity behaviour before that time. But I had never been the subject of an entities attention. That is until 2006.

Many years before then I had gone through a process of creating an internal sacred space. This space that was totally within my mind was a controlled environment in that nothing from the outside could get in. It was perfectly protected. Visually speaking it looked like a clearing in a forest. Often there would be other beings in the clearing but it was understood that these were aspects of my personality or subconscious if you will. The overriding feature of this space, was as I said, security and protection.

Then one April 2007 it was invaded. At that time I assumed that it was a fire elemental. It not only prophesied great change in my life but also presumed itself to be the instigator of that change. It literally said that it would push me onto the path of fire.

That is a long tale in the telling, enough to say that it’s prophesy came true and I was indeed pushed along a path of fire. Since that time and this I have grown immensely and have come to the conclusion that that entity wasn’t a fire elemental, I now believe it was a phoenix.

I stared into the flames on top of Robin Hood stride and my thoughts wandered to the time of the phoenix. Recalling that thought brought visions of the phoenix back into my thoughts. Scary they were too since that time and that image is associated deeply with great pain. I shook the thoughts from my mind and stared into the living flames. There was no wind to disturb us and the only sound was of the occasional bird and the crackling of the fire.

As I practiced a new technique of breathing I had learned from my Native American friends I felt that something was drawing near. My thoughts flew to my Energy Double. But no it didn’t have that feel. I knew that it couldn’t be the phoenix that I had encountered years ago. It (she) had said that we would never cross paths again. So what was this feeling of coming together?

No amount of pondering drew the answer. All that it was and is (for the moment) is a feeling of me and something heading towards each other. The flavour of that meeting was to be fire.

I dowsed for the meaning of this feeling but got no connections. All I have is a sense of “soon”. I left the tor in puzzlement. What is the future holding now?

Kal Malik

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.

Dull weather at Nine Stones Close

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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?

Aproach view of Nine Stones Close

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.

Cup-marked stone at Nine Stones

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!

View to Robin Hood's Stride

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.