This is the continued story of my weekend away with The Silent Eye. Please click here for instalment one and two.
After the visit to Carl Wark and an excellent dinner, I returned to my hotel unable to do anything other than watch TV for a while before falling asleep, thoughts of finishing my short story gone in the face of my experiences on the hill. Besides, I thought, I can look at it tomorrow.
Despite all the travelling the previous day, I woke early, and was one of the first people down for breakfast in the old oak-beamed dining room. Once finished, I realised I had an hour or so to spare before being picked up, so decided to take a look around Hathersage. Sue had mentioned that I should visit the church, so I upon leaving the hotel I headed left, taking a cobbled path between stone cottages towards where Google Maps told me the church should be. I came to a long muddy road and turned left again, following a glimpse of spire above the trees. After being splashed by an enthusiastically muddy spaniel, I found a gravelled path leading past mossy stone walls. The sign on the tree helped, too. ;-D
The path led towards a walled enclosure, a grove of trees crowning the hill where the church hid. I wandered up, dodging cowpats and taking care to close the gates behind me, enjoying the views across the village, thinking what a lovely place it would be to live in.
When I reached the church, I wandered around the graveyard for a little while. It was peaceful, the gravestones grey with age and lichen, family names appearing again and again speaking of an uninterrupted line of existence linked to the village. I love to read old gravestones – the stories they tell of lives lived, of loved ones and families – and there were plenty of fine examples. I didn’t find the Eyre family, which was a shame, but I did find one rather famous fellow.
This is the grave (reputedly) of Little John, he of Robin Hood fame. As you can see, it’s a very long grave, in keeping with his fabled height, and the gravestone tells the story of how he once lived nearby. Well, why not? I thought, as I took the pathway back towards the gate, smiling at the ladies decorating the ancient stone doorway with flowers, no doubt in preparation for a wedding later that day. But I had somewhere else to be and time was ticking, so I walked back to the hotel, collected my pack, then joined the companions for another day of exploration.
This time we were heading to Gardoms Edge. I didn’t really know anything about it, but, as we walked through the fields towards to the gate, Sue filled us in. Gardoms Edge was once a Neolithic village – stone hut circles, walls and other evidence had all been excavated and mapped by archaeologists, then left in place for the lichen and heather to cover once more. This sounded fascinating, and I couldn’t wait to take a look.
We entered via a farm gate, then walked among trees and tumbled stones, hut circles and walls ancient remnants of the people who once made their homes here, thousands of years ago. This would have been a nice place to live, I thought, looking out to the view across hills and valleys, the high ridge protected by virtue of its location.
…until the painted people came…
But as the land started to rise, and we moved towards the edge of the cliff, anxiety began to curl in my stomach, my breath hard to catch. I swallowed, frowning, wondering what the hell was wrong with me. After the release of last night, I had thought to find something similar today. But this was different.
Sue turned to me. ‘You don’t like it here either, do you?’ I shook my head, realising I was almost treading on her heels in my haste to get through this place. The stones here were larger, some piled precariously on the cliff edge itself, other placed in groupings, some alone. Apparently, Sue explained, this was thought to be the place where the bones of the dead were placed, a sacred spot. The valley below was peaceful, green-clad.
…yet she could see people falling, spread-eagled like starfish against the dark green below, pushed from the cliff edge to break upon the desecrated bones of their ancestors, their deaths taken from them, their sacred space destroyed…
Later, when we spoke about the place, I likened it to how a concentration camp felt, invoked 9/11. At the time, when we reached the gate in the modern fence, waiting for the rest of the group to join us, all I could say was that it felt defiled.
‘Do you not feel well? Stu asked, looking concerned.
I shook my head. ‘I feel sick,’ I said, bile rising in my throat as I looked back to the cliff edge, our companions still walking among the stones, taking photos. I had taken no photos, just wanting to get through the place.
‘It took me the same way, when I first came here,’ he said.
…she took a moment to regroup, wondering at the morning she’d had, visiting two places of the dead, one still sanctified, the other not. The dead are revered among all cultures, ceremony and ritual used to send them on their way, the origins of such practices lost in time. And to destroy such a place of ritual is to commit the deepest sacrilege. The reverberations of such an act still resonated in the land, millennia later, affecting her to her core…
As we went through another gate, a fence separating the cliff edge off from the wooded area beyond, I felt the sickness and fear start to ease, my breath coming easier. I didn’t want to go back through there again, though. I followed Sue and Stu through the woods until we stopped at a large standing stone in a clearing. It was set at an angle, notches carved into the head. A bit like a sundial, really…
Helen Glynn Jones 
Reblogged this on O LADO ESCURO DA LUA.
Thanks so much for sharing! 🙂
hugs
warm hugs from Brazil…
And the same to you from the UK 🙂
tks
The archaeologists have made no mention of any evidence of what we felt there, but it affected us in exactly the same way, bringing to mind the same images…and just in that one spot. Your comparisons were spot-on, that’s exactly how it feels there.
Thanks, Sue – the experience was so vivid, yet so strange, it’s nice to know that I wasn’t completely off the mark with it. 🙂 And it was strange, that I’d visited the other graveyard that morning…
I thought the same thing when your face showed you were feeling it… nice to know Stu and I were not alone! Yes, it does show a huge constrast when you go between a place of reverence and a place of defilement, doesn’t it? Especially when both should have been sacred.
Well, it was interesting to me that at both places I’d been struck by how nice the villages attached to them were. Yet the feelings were completely different.
And I don’t have a poker face, do I! haha. I cannot tell a lie to save myself. I thought I was going a bit nuts though, especially when I couldn’t catch my breath – it was a relief when you and Stuart commented on it. And, looking back through my photos, I have none of that place. Loads of everything else, rocks from 73 different angles, but I didn’t take a single photo there.
I gritted my teeth on a previous visit and took plenty of photos… while Stuart was sitting down, like it or not. These feelings are so easy to dismiss as imagination, but although you might get away with that on your own, when several people feel it, that throws a differentlight on the matter.
Yes, absolutely. And I’ve had that happen to me now quite a few times, so I think it best I start listening to them! And it is a teeth-gritting place – if I’d managed to stop long enough to take a shot, I think I would have been that way too x
So do I… it is surpprising what you learn and research often confirms the oddest things.
It is curious that you are telling the subjective account in the same way we had to in the books too …x
Oh really? I didn’t mean to, it just seemed the best way to express what I experienced. I confess I’ve not had any time yet to start The Initiate, or the Mystical Hexagram (on my Kindle), though I plan to shortly. Perhaps it’s a way of expressing something that seems to come from elsewhere…
The Mystical Hexagram is a different thing, but with The Initiate and the other books with Stuart, the stuff that comes through like this seems to tell a whole story on a different level…I agree, it seems the best way to express it.
Yes, that’s just how it feels, like a story separate to the reality of what is happening on the surface. I have a tattoo I got years ago, a Celtic design, and the intertwining lines are supposed to represent the way the real world and the spirit world intertwine, which is why the design appealed to me. This feels like the same thing 🙂
Yes, that is pretty much how it works 🙂
P.S. That 3D stone we mentioned is the ‘wood-stone’ in the pictures on the Silent Eye’s latest 😉
Oh, I loved all the photos on that post! There is so much treasure out there. That 3-D stone is pretty cool, and so is the ‘swastika’ stone – so lovely!
There has been a lot of research done on the alignments with the design of the swastika stone and the surrounding landscape… it makes fascinating reading., especially when you know the area too 🙂
I have a small book on ley lines which mentions Arbor Low, but there is SOOOO much more reading I need to do. In general, really 😀 I need another day in the week, just for reading! Do you recommend any titles to get started?
Stuart is your man for that, but he’s point you towards John Michell and Alexander Thom for sure 😉
Excellent, thank you – I shall look them up 🙂
🙂 Right… Nick awaits…
😀
So interesting. “There are more things in heaven and earth…”
Thanks, Angelika. I mean, I wondered how to share it all, because, like I say, it could all be a product of my imagination. But then when other people corroborated what I was feeling, it became much more real. I suppose it’s the old instincts we’ve largely suppressed – perhaps out there, with the trappings of the modern world gone, they return…
Nice contrast with the two sites, Helen. It’s awful, sometimes, what we have to put sensitive people through but hopefully it was worth it to get to the ‘Crone Stone’… And you have to tell it how it is. The ‘land’ doesn’t ‘lie’…
Yes, you’re just terrible, you two ;-D It was definitely worth it – part of the experience, really. Like you say, the land doesn’t lie…
That’s good and it is good you have that attitude, many wouldn’t…
Really? I didn’t see it as anything anyone could help, it was just how it happened. It’s been interesting writing this journal, as it’s made me examine the various impressions I had over the weekend, and see more synchronicities (like visiting two very different places of the dead on the same day). It actually felt quite good having my feeling validated, so to speak, made me trust them more…
You’d be surprised… Yes, the journal method is a good way to ‘earth’ our experiences for ourselves (we use it in the lessons too). Validation is important and can only really come about through communicating with people at events like this…
Reblogged this on The Silent Eye.
Thanks for the reblog, Stuart 🙂
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I recognise that last stone…
It’s an interesting one, isn’t it?
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Thanks for the link to these posts, particularly lovely for me, having grown up in the Peak District, in Buxton, and having spent my honeymoon in Hathersage. I still have my own photograph of Little John’s grave and one of my husband as a very young man cooling his feet in a brook. Some very happy memories indeed
Oh that’s so lovely, Lynn – I hadn’t realised you came from there. Whenever I visit I always think how lucky people are who live there, it’s such a gorgeous place 🙂
It is lovely, though possibly not when you reach your teens … And sadly, I only visit now – far too cold up there for me now! 🙂
Ah yes, I understand about the teenage bit 🙂 And it certainly was cooler up there – I was sweltering by the time I got back to London, at least eight degrees warmer and I was still wearing all my layers haha!
I notice it on visits, how much cooler it is, the flowers still to come out when they’re over here in Bristol. Spring crawls up the country, then Autumn crawls back down again towards the end of the year 🙂
That’s a lovely way of putting it, Lynn 🙂
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