In this first part of a three-part interview, Cheryl talks about her forty-year long involvement with the megalithic sites in Cornwall. This interview with Elyn Aviva was recorded in Cheryl’s home in West Penwith on August 7, 2014.
http://youtu.be/0xd0JbQ_v4U
(by Elyn Aviva, not Gary White)
More stories.
Alsia Well. Near Lower Alsia Farm. Maintained by the 82+-years-old Keeper of the Well, Trevor Rogers, who lives in a 17th-century house where a wise woman/herbalist lived 400 years ago. He found it a wreck and has been rebuilding it, cutting the granite himself, doing the beautiful wooden cabinet work himself. And tending to the well. Attending to the well. The only well that wasn’t discovered by the Church and Christianized, according to the story. Trevor says the name, “Alsia,” pronounced AAyleeuh, comes from the Phoenicians who traded for tin in the area. And it refers to Eleusis and the Greek goddess Demeter.
The group walked from Carn les Boels to the well on Sunday, but I arrived with Ralph in his taxi. Trevor pointed out the way, and we found the well down a grassy path hidden in the trees, a gate before it, a tree festooned with clooties, large flat stones formed a surface to sit upon beside the well. The well itself: dark and low, overhanging with greenery. A pale frog kicked its way out from beneath a sheltering rock and across the water.
We went up the path to await for the group. They soon arrived, thrilled and exhausted after a rather challenging tromp through fields and brambles, appearing on the other side of a high fence gate where Ralph and I were waiting. Ralph helped them one by one climb over the fence. How perfect, our being there. A story could be told of synchronicity and faith, and I heard stories about “follow your path” and trust.
The group crowded into the tiny space before the well and settled in, attuning to the place, and then began to tone and sing. I stretched out on the path, in the sun, listening to the sounds emerging from behind the trees, wondering about the ancient goddess and the well, and how Trevor was called to be her caretaker. Many stories there, told and untold.
Back at Rosemerryn, one of our group went into the fogou by herself. While she was standing barefoot in the mud, in the near-dark passageway, a wreath twined from green leaves and stems fell at her feet. She picked it up and put it on her head. There’s quite a story there, but it’s not mine to tell.
The next day, Monday, June 23, everyone felt the need to rest, recuperate, and integrate. Plans changed as fast as a sailboat tacking in the wind, but then settled into a gentle flow.
I led Gary into the fogou and we communed in silence in the narrow creep passage. Later I walked into the woods around Rosemerryn, following a dancing, melodic stream, enjoying the solitude—if such it was, since I was surrounded by trees and flowers and birds and insects. I sat on a narrow stone bridge and watched a butterfly and two dragonflies dance, flitting off, returning to me, as if showing off their fine way of flying through the air. The year before, we had been taken to this bridge by a local guide, who fished for a nugget of tin in the water and gave it to us, and told us stories of the 1940s and 1970s and the wild goings-on in houses in the woods.
A late afternoon sounding session with Wendalyn. We sat on the ground in pairs, back to back, experiencing the other person’s energy; sensing into the breathing of the other; making sounds that welled up (that word again: well) from within, “sounding” an experience we’d had from yesterday; moving back and forth from our own sound to the other’s sound to the sound of others in the group; and then, into silence.
Then in early evening, a short walk together up the hill to the Merry Maidens stone circle, its 19 stones supposedly maidens petrified for dancing on the Sabbath. Now there’s a story. I felt a kind of static electricity as we approached the northern stones, as if the place were charged with energy—as well (that word again) it was, since people had celebrated the solstice here a few days before, leaving flower offerings on every stone.
I asked permission before entering. I circled around the outside 3x, and then the inside. I felt called to the center and I stood there honoring the directions and the center within. Each of us moved in our own way, creating our own relationship with the stones. Each of us told a story, lived a story, with a stone, our stone, the circle of stones, circling from now to then and back again. What would it be like, I wondered, to grow up with this stone circle as a neighbor? Or with the isolated standing stone we saw in a neighboring field, thrusting up against the sky?
The sun set. Gary and I walked back to Rosemerryn in silence.
This afternoon we made our way to Glastonbury, leaving the pleasant town of Wells behind and entering into the buzz and craziness of Glasto. We’ve blogged and even posted a podcast or two about this town, but we have never seen it as we’ve seen it tonight.
Leaving the peace and comfort of Magdalene Guest House, our refuge in this town, we plunged into one of the deepest fogs we’ve experienced. Suddenly, Glasto disappeared. We were transported into a Kafkaesque landscape where strange shapes appeared and disappeared out of the mist. The human-like beings we met on the street seemed to have emerged out of an old Boris Karloff movie, hunched over, draped in strange dark clothes, coming together and drifting apart.
We hurried to one of our usual dining venues, the “Who’d a Thought It,” finding our way through wispy tendrils of fog. Would it still be there in this strange night, or would we have somehow been transported to another planet? We entered the restaurant, the familiar waitresses greeted us, and we were once again safe.
As Elyn and I ate our pork belly and winter roulade we wondered what it would be like to climb the Tor this evening. What would await us there? Elyn thought we might be taken into the “hollow” Tor described in legend and never return. I wasn’t feeling too grounded either. When we left the restaurant, we decided not to risk climbing the Tor, but we still wanted to experience more of this mysteriously altered world we found ourselves in.
As we walked up the High Street to the sound of the change ringers in the parish church of St. John the Baptist, the sound echoed eerily in the night, coming from one direction, then another. We made our way to the church yard. The gate was locked. Elyn took the photo above on her iPhone 5s, marveling at how the camera seemed to bring out details that we couldn’t see in the fog.
Returning to Magdalene House we realized that we had experienced the fabled “mists of Avalon.” Perhaps if we had walked up to the top of the Tor, we would indeed have entered into another realm…
On our second day out with our friend Kate Gannon we visited a number of interesting and a few powerful sites in Dorset, England. Of all the sites, my favorite was the holy well known as St. Augustine’s Well in the official literature. The well was originally called the Silver Well, but the monks at nearby Cerne Abbey must of thought that wasn’t sexy enough to draw pilgrims, so they made up a story about how St. Augustine struck the ground with his staff and the well issued forth. That story, or one very much like it, is told of many holy wells in Europe.
Kate, Elyn, and I reached the well after passing through the local cemetery, which has an interesting “preaching stone.” The ruins of Cerne Abbey are next to the cemetery. The well is located in a hollow that is approached through a path lined with huge lime (linden) trees. As soon as we entered this avenue the atmosphere changed and a great sense of peace came over us. The well itself was overflowing with crystalline, pure, rapidly flowing water that gave me an immediate sense of how abundant the earth can be for us. My companions fell silent and we simply sat, stood, or meandered about the well in blissful contentment. I felt that we could stay there for the rest of the day and, in fact, we did spend considerable time there. I came away feeling healed and put back together again, and I sensed that the others felt similarly, although we were too peaceful to talk about it.
Perhaps the peaceful energy of the place accounts for numerous legends about the well. As with many holy wells, there are legends of the healing properties of the waters. Another legend states that if you stare into the waters on Easter morning you will know who will die in the village in the next year. On a more positive note, a different legend states that girls who perform a simple ritual at the well and pray to St. Catherine (whose chapel was once on a hill near the site) will be granted husbands in the near future. I wonder if that has anything to do with the famous Cerne Abbas Giant (a huge, naked, priapic figure brandishing a club, carved into the chalk hillside nearby). A more general version of that story states that any wish you make will be granted if you drink the water from a cup made from a leaf of one of the nearby trees.
St. Augustine and St. Catherine aside, our wishes for healing and rest from travel were granted and we went away feeling refreshed and renewed.
By Elyn Aviva
Our friend Kate Gannon offered to show us some unusual sites in southern England (see the previous post), and she suggested we spend a day or two in Sherborne, Dorset (there is another Sherborne somewhere else). She said there was an interesting abbey, begun around 1180. We said, “Why not!” and booked a hotel.
We thought Sherborne Abbey would be in poor repair, perhaps a ruined shell, but then we learned it was still in use as an Anglican parish church. As we walked toward it from our hotel, we saw its golden spires and square tower rising above the Elizabethan houses that line the street. When we were about a block from the abbey, Gary and I began to feel slightly “spacey” and disoriented as the energy of the place became palpable. Apparently, when Kate said the abbey was “interesting,” she was engaging in calculated understatement. Water-pipe-spouting grotesque gargoyles snarled at us from the roofline, and jagged zig-zag stonework edged its way around the Norman (12th century) entrance.
We pushed through the temporary plywood doors and gasped. Exquisite fan vaulting created a delicate stone forest of soaring columns and interlaced arches that covered the distant ceiling, the intersections marked with sculptures of knot work, fantastic animals, grotesque faces, and geometrical designs. The abbey staff provided a large flat mirror on a trolley to make it easier to see the carved bosses suspended high above. Rolling it down the aisle, we spotted St Michael dressed in a feathered “onesy” tromping on a playful dragon; a mermaid with a comb and mirror, symbolizing vanity; a “Jack of the green” Greenman with leafy tendrils issuing from his mouth–to name a few. Many of the bosses had been gilded and repainted in garish colors during the extensive 19th-century Victorian renovation (and reinvention) of the abbey.
We quickly became visually overwhelmed by the fanning vault work and multi-colored designs painted on the abbey’s walls and ceilings. Staring in the mirror at the criss-crossing stone arches was mesmerizing, like looking at a kaleidoscope momentary petrified in time. We realized that the geometry of the abbey, including the complex fan vaulting, and the earth energies below the abbey interacted to intensify the buzzy energy we felt.
Seeking shelter from too much intensity, we made our way to the Lady Chapel at the northeastern end of the abbey. Here we found unexpected beauty of a quieter kind: a three-part glass reredo engraved by Laurence Whistler in 1960. In the center is an etched heart with delicate, thread-like veins; angelic wings mirror its shape on either side. Beneath the heart and wings is a crescent moon, pierced through by the pure transparent winged heart of the Virgin Mary. Two slim lines expand on either side and turn into cornucopias overflowing with grain and grapes. Above the heart is a delicate crown adorned with a looping string of pearls and, above that, the five-petaled roses and lilies that are symbols of the Virgin.
Scattered stars sparkle in the glass, and tongues of flame circle the frame, recalling the sun-rays of fire and the stars seen in images of Our Lady of Guadalupe–who perches delicately on a crescent moon. Unlike the exuberant colors and carvings in the rest of the abbey, which clamored for our outward attention, the simplicity of this etched glass drew us inwards into contemplation.
The abbey holds more, much more. To mention a few: medieval misericords (wooden seats that supported the monks who had to stand in the quire [choir] for lengthy services); regimental banners; a reconstructed timber roof; medieval stained glass; the stunning Great West Window installed in 1997, with references to Hale-Bopp comet and with the central image of the Virgin Mary and child sitting among tree branches that rise up and expand into an exuberant canopy of leaves.
We had expected to find a modest church but found instead a visual concert of painted walls and fan-vaulted ceilings, a “fanfare” of almost overwhelming intensity. But we also found stillness in the midst of it, the silence that is always present between sounds and images if you take time enough to notice.
There is considerable evidence of our ancestors’ working the stones in the field next to The Lacket Cottage. These lines of depressions appear to have been made in the process of splitting the stones. Notice how similar they appear and that they are all in a line, which appears to follow the beginnings of a crack in the stone.
One wonders what use they were intending for the stones they liberated from these boulders.
The nearby outcropping of chert nodules (a stone similar to flint) would have made a ready source of stone tools and weapons. Perhaps these depressions were carved with such tools.
Here is the entrance to The Lacket Cottage. It is certainly an atmospheric location to attend a workshop led by R. J. Stewart.
We have come to England for 12 days to attend two events with R. J. Stewart and see some sacred sites we have not yet visited. This weekend we are in the Lacket cottage near Marlborough, Wiltshire. Here is a photo of Woden’s Deen (or Wodin, Wodan, or some other spelling) filled with Saracen stones and an outcropping of chert on the hillside.
