The Hedge Druid

Posts Tagged ‘well’

Our holiday to Hungary was supposed to be a whole week off, and particularly for me a whole week of spiritual interests. In large part it was, but somehow the forces of the wild managed to break through into my full-on Tourist Mode in the middle of the week. It happened to be a full moon – Milk Moon – so I guess that was a contributory factor too. Budapest is a splendid laid-back city and after a couple of days touring around on a bus we knew where the interesting places were.

View over Budapest from Gellert Hill

On a typically sunny April day we were finding our way around the base of Gellert Hill. This hill was renowned for being the haunt of witches, which is always bound to interest someone like me. I like a bit of witchiness in life. We had just come out of the underground quaintness of the restored Gellert Hill Cave – a site still peddling its special aura on the basis of a later Christianisation.

Entrance to Gellert Hill Cave Church

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Water Adventure

I could feel the energies of Imbolc on Friday 1st of Feb but still believed that the best day to be out was on the 2nd. Gwas and I had agreed to a 7:30am start. Phew! Fortunately, I had been getting up early throughout the week anyway so this was not an inconvenience.

We had met earlier in the week and over a delicious meal considered what our purpose would be on this first outing of the year. As it happens I had that question in hand, what with going to see the Oracle of Delphi in a couple of weeks. MY question (questing?) then was simply to find out what question I would need to ask the Oracle on my visit.

The weather on either side of Imbolc was rain and snow. On the day itself however we were extremely fortunate. The sun blazed throughout the day and although it was cold to the quick we at least had the auspices of the Sun to guide and accompany us.

It took more than two hours to reach our first goal, a sacred well dedicated to St. Anna. Gwas laughs but it seems that every outing has some adventurous escapade waiting for me and today was no exception. On the to the well we had to navigate some watery ways and for a moment it was touch and go as to whether I would be taking an early dive. As I clambered along the side of the path a voice silently told me to align my energy to the roots of the trees as opposed to grasping the nettled twigs. It seems that luck was with me today and I arrived high and dry at the Well of St Anne.

As is often the case Gwas and I went our separate ways in greeting and communing with the spirit of this sacred place. For me this was going to be a place of cleansing, energetically speaking of course. I dowsed for the best place for me to commune and was taken to a place by the side of the building so that I was facing the sun with the Well behind me.

I opened my thoughts and let impressions of the sacred drift in. For a while there was nothing but the sun streaming on my face and the cold biting at my fingers. Then I felt a flutter behind me and was caught of guard as a spirit flipped over my head, using my shoulder as a stepping stone. With light-foot the spirit of the place (who I assume was known as Anna) landed some few feet in-front of me.

St Anna

Bowing with respect (see? I am learning) I inquired as to her well-being. She responded with a light, laughter filled voice. “I have awoken” An interesting synchronicity would be to read Gwas’s account as his experience was that of awakening the spirit. He also found (via dowsing) that the Genius Loci was located at exactly the spot where I had seen her land.

I mentioned that I was here to celebrate Imbolc and to ask for any guidance that might be in the offing. She responded that this wasn’t the place for such answers but that I should not worry, “today is a day of awakening and answers will be forthcoming.” I was just grateful to her for not saying those dreaded winter words, “have patience”.

With expectation coursing through my spirit I was feeling ecstatic. Gwas and I finished our commune at roughly the same time and we each lit some incense with an intention of thanks and gratitude.

Finally, movement!

Kal Malik – Journeys Beginning

Considering that we’d only landed on the island a matter of an hour prior to this point a lot had gone on already. This was fixing up to be a worthwhile visit already. Whatever next? As though in a form of light relief I switched my attention away from the ancient mound of the giant towards the 12th Century buildings that were the focal point for the rest of the day’s tourists. They almost seemed like light relief at this point.

With the whiff of lit incense still fleetingly scented in the environs I went into the abbey grounds to trace the other end of the ‘corpse road’ that led up to St Ronan’s Chapel. I went in search of any energetic hotspots in the abbey. Dowsing rods at the ready, and now completely uninhibited about doing dowsing in public, I made my way to the ticket booth – paid my way (five pounds sterling or so) – and entered the well-coiffured lawns of the abbey.

Hotspots in the Abbey Grounds

I find it fascinating that most of the major energetic sacred sites that have had churches built upon them (i.e. Christianized pagan sites) have a story that tells how the church had to be rebuilt several times either because it fell down or was de-constructed by spirits. The Abbey of Iona has the same tale. Unaware of this at the time the focus of my investigations was wherever the rods decided was the most energetic point. They dutifully swayed in a sinewing path towards the round stone-walled well that stood before the main entrance to the larger part of the abbey building. A well, I mused? No – the rods were playing a little game as they sometimes do. They swung towards the well’s wall, skirting it closely, and then deviated away from there to point towards a small opening alongside the main building. I peered into the opening – a small archway of stone without a door. Inside the room seemed very small – big enough perhaps to hold my tall frame and not much more.

Outside the entrance was a small stone block about a foot square. On it someone had placed a few stones. In my pocket I had a couple of stones that I had picked up from Ronan’s Church. One was red and the other indigo coloured. Seemed kind of fitting at the time, so I deposited them on the stone here, almost like I was “paying” to enter the shrine, or that they were something that I couldn’t take in. One of the two. No-one else was inside so I ventured inside with my staff. This was St Columba’s Shrine.

Inside St Columba’s Shrine, Iona Abbey

The small room was light enough to make out the scant decorations - Christian crosses with rather Celtic looking ‘holy’ symbols on them. A book of prayer. A wooden kneeling stool. An altar with a candle flanked by simple ornaments. The wooden kneeling stool invited me to prostrate myself in devotion. Pah! Not likely! I asked the rods to define exactly which point inside the shrine was the most energetic. Right in front of the altar they crossed. Above the kneeling stool. I turned around and sat on the stool instead, preferring to face the light and greenery of the outside space than to lose myself to the dead space of the wall and to mimic the many people who had been in that shrine before me. I would do this my way.

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In this second part of the story of my visit to Knypersley Pool (or Knypersley Reservoir) I will be telling you about the female equivalent of the Gawton Stone that was discovered in the first part. If we consider the stone to be the male aspect then the following feature could be said to be the female equivalent.

As Mike and I walked back along the path on which we had arrived at the stone my gaze was drawn to the rocky hillside above. There, through the trees, I saw a diamond-shaped hole that was almost the same size as the diamond-shaped stone that we had just been standing next to. I joked that perhaps the stone had been born from the hillside and this hole was the evidence of that. Whatever the real circumstances, the hole was an incredible sight nonetheless. Straight away we both wanted to go through it – it was such a strong impulse.

We approached the base of the climb and then reason began to suggest a number of difficulties that might prevent us going through:-

1. It was steep
2. It was obviously slippery in the damp conditions
3. We were running out of time to find the well
4. Mike had the wrong kind of shoes for climbing
5. I would have to climb up there with my staff in hand too
6. It was steep and slippery

The Alignment Portal

As we climbed we took our minds off the tricky ascent. Was this some kind of portal? Would anything interesting happen if we went through it? What was on the other side? Was there actually a path up here? We both felt that something would happen. We used the word portal repeatedly.

Gawton alignment portal – gate between energies

As we climbed the sense of anticipation grew stronger. I could feel the mounting energy levels as we approached the passageway into some other place. It was like the energy was being concentrated to fit into the hole, and that male energy on one side was battling to balance itself with an opposing force on the other side. The word ‘alignment’ came into my head. This was an alignment portal – a portal between two energy fields – one male and the other female. I hadn’t even properly formed the concept when I found myself at the very centre of the hole after pulling Mike up with my staff as he slipped and slid his way up the last few feet to join me.

We halted at the top to get our breath back and go through together.

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In England one has to get used to working in the rain – especially in Summer, it would seem. June 2012 has been one of the wettest months I can remember. However, despite this, I have somehow managed to be out and about quite a lot.  I think it’s down to sheer bloody-mindedness, which could be seen as both a positive or negative trait.

One June evening I was chatting with my friend Mike and he mentioned that a friend of a mutual friend had mentioned that a recent visit to a sacred well had been unexpectedly unpleasant. The report that came back was that the well felt disturbed and oppressive.  We discussed whether there might be something that we could do about it. The name of the place was “Gawton’s Well“. The name rang a bell with me – then I remembered that I had seen it on the Megalithic Portal, but its location looked difficult to identify, and I remember thinking, “I will mention this to Mike ad see if he knows where it is”. A year later, here was Mike mentioning it to me. Maybe I was being a bit too eager, but I asked if we might go and try to find it. Apparently Mike didn’t know the location of the well either, but he knew the area. Good enough. Surely we should be able to locate it? Despite the dark clouds and drizzle I managed to persuade Mike to leave the house and we set off for the reservoirs beyond Biddulph.

Locating with Dowsing Rods

When I heard that the well was situated near to a place called “Knypers-ley” the name drew some raised eyebrows and knowing looks. Could there indeed be a ley line running through the area? If I had had more time and the weather had been nicer I might have added it to the list of things to look for, but this evening I only had time for one objective – to find the location of this mysterious well, mentioned as one of the most spiritual places in Staffordshire, and now possibly energetically damaged.

We had only three points of reference to find the well. We knew that it was “north” of the reservoir, and that it was on a path that wasn’t the main path. From a photo we had seen there was a wall with a gap in it too. That was it. How difficult could it be? Well, we drastically underestimated the size of the reservoir for one thing! After twenty minutes of walking approximately northwards on the path round the reservoir we hadn’t seen a wall, and we hadn’t seen any sign pointing to a well (not that we were expecting one).

We stopped to ask the dowsing rods for some help. Could they direct us to where we could find the well, I asked?

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Kal and I are still just outside the village of Ballyfarnon on the shores of Lough Melagh. It is our first day in Ireland on my ancestor energies quest. We have just looked around Kilronan Abbey and found some interesting and significant graves. Now we’ve crossed the road to St Lassair’s Well.

Saint Lassair is an interesting lady. There is very little historical information online about this woman, except that the well dedicated to her is associated with Brigit. Now, isn’t that significant considering that there is a small megalithic site right next to the well too? Seems like this may have been a site originally dedicated to Brigit and later appropriated in the name of Lassair? One account says that Lassair was Ronan‘s daughter – Ronan being the founder of the ‘modern’ abbey. Maybe. Here’s another consideration of her origins:

It is with Sanas Cormaic that we find the first explicit link made between this goddess and the element of fire, in the word ‘bri’. McCone has convincingly shown that the three arts it claims Brigit supervised— healing, smithcraft, and poetry—were in early Ireland all associated with fire. The authors of the saints’ Lives of Brigit seem to have been aware of the same-named goddess, though they never say so explicitly: all of her Lives give Brigit a druid father figure, so she is made into a member of the druid class, the same class as poets and judges….

…McCone has pointed out that another saint, the virgin Lassair, also has a fire name, from lassar, flame. In his view Brigit, like Lassair, was a goddess who became a saint in Christian times; both succeeded in the new religions because their attributes could be harmonized with those of the Christian God, for the Bible is filled with light and fire imagery.”

(source: p.64 – ‘Women in a Celtic Church‘ by Christina Harrington)

Hot Spots in a Cool Place

Of course, our first task is always to find out whether a place has any energy worth investigating. It almost went without saying, yet still we both dowsed for it in our own separate ways. We both asked the same initial questions and ended up standing next to each other underneath a tall but closely-cropped yew tree growing nearby to the well. We laughed and confirmed that we had both asked for the most energetic and beneficial places for ourselves and we had ended up at the same location.

From our evergreen vantage point we scanned the site. It is a curious mixture of modern Christian tacky monumental-ism, of rehashed re-interpretations of vestal virgin figures and sad-looking never-be brides combined with a plaque commemorating the visitation of the Polish octogenarian Pope John Paul II. Lurking politely to one side like a faithful pet is a small table of stone – an ancient monument of diminutive proportions whose first sight evokes a small smile and even so far as a smirk. What the heck is THAT? And what is it doing here?

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Path to the Well

 The final destination for our visit around Llangollen was the well of St Sarah. Having had a lot of success with St Helen’s well at Imbolc I wanted to visit another one to see if we could replicate that success.

Interlude in a Church

Before I go into that I just wanted to mention that on the way to St Sarah we stopped of at a church dedicated to St Mary in Derwen and found (after a push) that the door was indeed open. God had a open house in this instance. Lovely. Gwas and I dowsed the rather un-inspiring energies in the church and found the same thing that I have in several places. A power centre to the left of the altar (as you look down the pews) with a energy line that takes a wavy path down the left of the church pews.

St Sarah

The well was very easy to get to which I am liking a lot about wells. As you can see from the above picture the path down to the well was splendid even at this time of the year. As you turn the corner however you reach the well. Unlike a traditional well that one might imagine as a circular affair raised from the ground a few feet. This was a flat square dip in the ground some 6 foot in width and length and maybe a few feet in depth. It had a lip that let water flow in to the stream (see pic below).

As soon as both Gwas and I saw this we knew that this didn’t have any energy, if anything it was pushing us away. To where though? I followed the feeling until it led me some twenty foot away from the well along the edge of the stream until I came to a bend (again see pic below).

I dowsed to ask whether there was any of St Sarah’s energy in the well? No. Incidentally Gwas had already found this too. As in previous occasions I have found that energy of water related places has often been in the movement of water rather than its containment. So I asked here, is the energy of Sarah in the stream? Yes. Clearly and distinctly.