Two people stand just ahead of the main group at the edge of a Llyn Carrig Bach, the sacred Druid lake which now lies just off the end of the runway at RAF Valley, on Anglesey. Being the weekend, RAF Gnats – the UK’s primary jet training aircraft, made famous by the Red Arrows aerobatic team – are silent.

The two gaze into the setting sun, drinking in the vivid colours of twilight, and give unspoken thanks to the modern forces of happenstance that this most special day could have ended with such a magical event in the early night’s sky.

The last stage of their path, here, with their companions of the weekend, was from the RSPB car park situated at the end of the main road through the small town of Valley. As they walked the sun set, and the final stages of the short climb to the plateau were carried out in the day’s fading light.

This juxtaposition, here, of ancient and modern has its military overtones, too, – which are not lost on the group. The Silent Eye teaches that in the moment, the now, there is continuous magic. This magic conspires to bring to us the ‘bigger’ picture – the work of the spiritual – in what is usually viewed as the ordinary or the accidental. We see what expect to see. When we widen that expectation – in the final analysis, letting go of any ‘us-generated’ expectation – we begin to see a very different world.

In this place, right over the marshy lakes which marked the end of our first day, some of the world’s most advanced small jets hurl themselves into the air with unbelievable speed.

Unbelievable…. a word that might also describe how those we were gathered to honour – our Druid ancestors – felt, in A.D. 60, knowing that the greatest military machine in the world was a few miles away, waiting for the right time to cross the Menai Straits from the mainland and end the Druid’s magical existence…

 

Disbelief, perhaps, would be a better word. One theory is that disbelief was so strong that the Druid chiefs assembled here (already a longstanding sacred site) to cast into the waters a large sacrifice of their most precious objects – damaged by themselves so that they were beyond their own use. We have forgotten this form of sacrifice, yet we embed such principles into various logical instruments such as financial trusts.

Swords, shields, slave chains and even a cauldron, all were thrown into the waters of Llyn Carrig Bach only a short distance from where we had gathered in the fading light. What became known as the ‘Anglesey Hoard’ was rediscovered when the airfield was under construction in the 1940s and is now housed in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff.

Now, on the hilltop overlooking the ancient lake – now largely silted up and with a shoreline protected by sharp gorse bushes – the two light candle flames and gathered their spiritual kin to begin the simple rite…

A day such this can be focussed on either its beginning or its ending. At the summer weekends, we focus on the dawn, symbolising the rising power of life – a universal, magical event, that we all take for granted.

For the winter solstice, we view the sunset as the event around which gather; and the whole of the Saturday on Anglesey was constructed to support that…

We had begun with the vast history of life and pre-life on Earth, beautifully illustrated in the twin climbs (down and up) of the cliffs at South Stack.

Back at the top, after the struggle of the ascent – representing the long climb of evolution – we visited a wonderful ancient village that has such a special feel that it could still be inhabited by the happy ancestors who lived and thrived there…

From there, we travelled in our car convoy to a strange dolmen located in the middle of a large and very muddy field.

Both Barbara (in the stone) and I had been moved by the folk-tale of a family who, in relatively recent times, had made a home beneath this ancient structure in their times of dire need. The contrast with the ‘happy’feel of the Holyhead Mountain group could not have been stronger and emphasised how mankind’s structures have played a pivotal role in the ascent of the species.

Our brief (soup) lunch had been at Rhosneigr, where, after our simple meal, the beach provided a contemplative place to each select a pebble to be used as a sacrificial token during the sunset ceremony at Llyn Carrig Bach. Each person was asked to imbue the stone with something that had served them well, but which they had outgrown.

Our penultimate destination, with the sun setting fast into the ocean, is one of the most beautifully situated burial chambers in Britain – Barclodiad y Gawres. Located on a clifftop near Aberffraw, this site has been reconstructed with a roof of concrete, newly covered in soil and grass, and is most strongly associated with the Druids, as this picture site guide shows. The facial decorations were mirrored in the headland stones.

Here, we had a place of ritual splendour which, sadly, is now locked behind steel shutters to prevent vandalism – a sad contrast to the reverence of our ancestors.

On one of the previous visits, the early fencing had been bent back and we were able to spend a few moments inside.

Then, with the light fading, and fearing that we were too late to bring the Saturday to the conclusion we had planned, we had set off for Llyn Carrig Bach, arriving just as the sun set on the western horizon. The sacrificial site is a few hundred metres across a field, and the final ascent to the raised plateau overlooking the lake is a bit of a scramble…

But, we need not have worried. Everything was waiting for us, as perfectly arranged and timed as we could have asked for…

The small ring of pilgrims collect their lights and their blessings from the priest. In complete silence they take light and token to the high edge over the water, where the priestess is waiting. She greets them with a sign and her own blessing, standing back so that they can cast away into the sacrifical water what they no longer have need of, and which is holding back the embrace of their spiritual future.

The simple rite ends. There is a feeling of great peace. It has been a day well spent. The moon and venus have borne witness to this gathering. We are blessed.

Previous Parts of this series of blogs:

Part One, Part Two,

The Silent Eye School of Consciousness offers a low-cost, three-year home study programme which delivers a deep and experiential understanding of the human spiritual journey using the Magical Enneagram.

www.thesilenteye.co.uk

For more information, email us at rivingtide@gmail.com.

©Copyright Stephen Tanham, 2016.

There are at least three dimensions to one of the Silent Eye’s discovery weekends. There’s the place itself, with its features – ancient and modern; there’s the social side, most present in the evening when we mellow into the chosen restaurant and share good food and a glass or two of wine; and then, there’s the way the whole event unfolds, which is the most important of all.

Good unfolding is the essence of a good weekend, and it does not come about by accident. For “Of Ash and Seed’ The organisers made two separate trips to Anglesey during the year leading up to December’s pre-solstice weekend. Each time we were ‘sensing’ how the plans would flow into a near-solstice day which is very short. We work on the basis that, social time, aside, December allows us only the daytime hours of ten till four and then the darkness wraps around us.

If the weather is foul, as last year’s was, then we also need places of retreat along the way. Last year, for example, the long-term forecast was dreadful so we booked a Christmas lunch at a nearby pub (The Jolly Crofters, Bolton) – one on the same height level as the top of Leverhulme’s gardens, leaving us only to stagger through the gale force storm to get to it…

But even those grumbling by then were the first to admit that it made the day very special.

When you start planning such an event, you look a the meagre list of places you want to include and your first thought is: there’s not enough! That won’t fill a day and we’ll have a ring of people looking expectantly at the sodden itinerary that has just been raced through…

Cafés…. I confess to finding great happiness in cafés, liberally scattered through the day so that a pleasant half hour can be spent out of the wind, rain or sandstorm… Can’t beat it. They also come in handy when you’ve lost the leader of your party and you need to wait somewhere predictable so you can be found. I’m very predictable… you’ll always find me in a café – ideally one that (rapidly) serves big pots of tea, with anytime cream teas… I’m a simple soul.

The climb back up South Stack, with its four hundred-plus steps, is demanding, but there were many stopping places where we could rest the legs and take in the splendour of the views. Being December, bird life – in abundance on the RSPB cliffs during the warmer months – was scarce, though several beautiful choughs, with their orange-red beaks, were gaily in abundance.

It is important to go at the pace of the slowest, and we take that seriously. This is why such days need to have lots of ‘elastic’ in them – think tea rooms…

The RSPB café, part of the visitor centre, is just down the road from the top of the South Stack steps and well-placed. Gratefully, we trundled in and the sound of relatively happy people sipping good tea and coffee was soon to be heard. The day was going well… allowing for the aches and groans the four-hundred steps were always going to induce.

For those deeply into the mysteries of the ancient landscape, there was a treat in store, just across the road from the cafe.

The Holyhead Mountain Hut Circles Group, to give it its full name, is the remains of about twenty dry-stone-built huts and associated field systems, belonging to a series of prehistoric and later farmsteads. I could go on to describe it, but Sue has done such a good job with her post of the 13th December, that I can simply put in the link, here… and add a few photos of my own:

The last photo – of the gorse and the site of the ancient fortification – marked a particularly poignant moment. Having discovered that there had been a hill fort on the top of Holyhead mountain, I could imagine how warrior guards would have been stationed up there, in the freezing and exposed conditions of winter, to guard over the settlement below. The mountain offers views right across to Ireland, on a clear day, and history records that it was a point of security of both Druid and, subsequently, Roman guards.

The lasting impression of this place was one of peace. Despite the settlement being very old, there remains a feeling of great tranquility, as though it is still lived in, in some form. You get the other-worldly feeling that its inhabitants were happy here, under whichever guardian paced the mountain fort, above…

Our own offerings to this lovely settlement took the form of poetry and the first of three scrolls between a Roman Centurion, Amathus, and a Druid High Priestess, Camma. Amathus, the centurion, had spent time in his wandering youth and fallen in love with the Druid tribe who adopted and trained him in their lore and wisdom.

Later, his travels took him away, but his skills saw him co-opted as centurion into the Roman Legion of Seutonius Paulinus, the much-feared leader of Rome’s campaigns in Africa, now sent to exterminate the last of the Duids, shored up on the Ynys Môn–present-day Anglesey.

These scrolls, which were to foreshadow the playing out of a tragic sacrificial death at Bryn Celli Ddu on our Sunday morning, were published in the run-up to the weekend and can be read here.

Another tearoom beckoned, one next to the beach in the lovely coastal town of Rhosneigr, but before that, we needed to visit a mysterious dolmen in the middle of an easy-access, but muddy, field.

To be continued in Part Three

Previous Parts of this series of blogs:

Part One,

The Silent Eye School of Consciousness offers a low-cost, three-year home study programme which delivers a deep and experiential understanding of the human spiritual journey using the Magical Enneagram.

www.thesilenteye.co.uk

For more information, email us at rivingtide@gmail.com.

©Copyright Stephen Tanham, 2016.

Four hundred steps… six hundred million years… It’s a lot, especially when they descend one of the steepest cliffs in Britain.

But it’s worth it. To travel through the known geological history of the Earth in the few minutes it takes to hum ‘Morning has broken’ is a soul-warming experience; and nor is the song out of place when you’re experiencing one of the brightest and most beautiful December mornings ever…

With the exception of Friday night’s walk around the moonlit crescent of Trearddur Bay, on the farthest western peninsula of the ancient island of Anglesey, this, the Saturday morning, was the start of the Silent Eye’s ‘notorious’ winter weekend – notorious for its dubious seasonal placing within the pre-solstice, December weather.

Last year’s December workshop had ended, prematurely, amidst the worst UK floods in living memory, as we battled the elements to climb the rain-soaked west-Pennines in the search for the meaning  of the lost landscape of Viscount Leverhulme.

Thankfully, we had all enjoyed the Saturday, including a splendid Christmas lunch at a local pub, enough to abandon the Sunday…

No such woes, now. At the bottom of South-Stack’s vertical cliffs – an RSPB nature reserve in its own right – we were treated to light, dappled clouds and frequent winter sun. Bright and just cold enough to feel distinctly festive as we all looked up at the light sky, and wondered if it would hold…

We needn’t have worried. For the entire weekend, we were increasingly bathed in gold, blue and, as the days ended, a very rare and crystal-clear obsidian black, which was to play a great part in a spiritually- uplifting two days.

Looking up the cliffs at the rock-written history of our beautiful planet, we asked the Companions of the weekend to visualise how many times the Earth had curved on its seemingly never-ending orbit of the Sun, spiralling through the backdrop of galactic space of which we have little conception. Back through our Western history to its roots; and prior to that, to the pre-history of Britain, in which the Celtic and Druid tribes had their origin and their zenith.

In the case of the Druids, that zenith came to a brutal end on the Isle of Anglesey, their last refuge from the ruthless Roman army, in two massacres – A.D. 60 and later in A.D. 77.

What does it feel like to know that your civilisation and everything you love and treasure is coming to an end? There are obvious parallels with the uncertainties of the present chaos in the world’s politics, but our focus was not on doom, but on how to face dark uncertainty with hope and a heart filled with the seeds of the possible–the real future.

Hardship, and its extreme characteristic, destruction, is a necessary, though little-considered part of evolution. The ancient Hindus understood this well. Their primary ‘Trinity’, though a single threesome, contains the Gods of existence, preservation and, at the end of useful life of structure, destruction.

We have no idea whether the Druid priests and priestesses communed with their own gods and goddesses of destruction as they stood on the beaches of the Menai Straits, gazing across the deadly waters, as they considered the end of their world. Perhaps they invoked The Morrigan, that three-fold goddess: shape-shifter, crone and warrior in one entity…perhaps a more native Welsh god was invoked. We may never know, and nor is it of great importance for this exercise.

For the Druids, forest groves and bodies of water were of special significance. Lakes, in particular, held the power of the ‘liminal’ – a nether world between two others: neither one thing nor the other, such as life and beyond life; a place where offerings could be made, and communication with higher perspectives could be achieved.

Such places, often embedded, now, in modern urban landscapes, may still have a very special energy, as we were to discover at the end of this most special day, at Llyn Carrig.

In the day and a half before us, we meant to use the spirit of the approaching winter solstice to explore the liminal edge of the end of the Druids…

To be continued in Part Two

The Silent Eye School of Consciousness offers a low-cost, three-year home study programme which delivers a deep and experiential understanding of the spiritual journey using the Magical Enneagram.

www.thesilenteye.co.uk

For more information, email us at rivingtide@gmail.com.

©Copyright Stephen Tanham, 2016.