by Signe Pike
The wind whipped across the broad moor. Covered in tall yellow grasses, the gently rolling landscape was scattered with ancient thorn trees with dark, gnarled trunks, each one framed against the spring blue sky like its own private Rackham painting. As we neared the crest of a small hill, I spotted my first ancient stone circle. It wasn’t hard to see why Jo felt this was a magical place. If I closed out everything else—the rushing of the chilly wind, every errant thought spinning around in my head—and took it in like a piece of art, the circle—with its jagged stones still thrusting up from the earth in irregular fits and starts—was telling a story about relationship to the land.The moor felt vast, haunted, desolate. The sky composed the rest of the world, nearly crushing itself down upon the grasses. Whatever had drawn the ancients to this site still seemed to linger, despite the tremendous passage of forgetfulness and time. The rocks tied heaven to earth, cradling the power of the universe within their thick, stony fingers, if only for a moment before it dispersed wildly, out across the massive moor.
What I imagined were once towering stones had been worn down by wind, water, and time to leave what stood before me that day—twenty-three standing granite stones and several fallen ones formed a circle about ninety feet across. It almost seemed to be built into a dip in the land that physically drew me in as I approached. I looked at Jo, who was standing at the edge of the circle, as if waiting to go through. As I approached she turned to me. “I like to ask permission before I enter.”
“Permission?”
“Yes. From the guardians of the circle. I feel like there’s a male and a female spirit, somehow still here—I don’t know . . . perhaps they were invoked during the time this circle was in use, or invoked in the building of it. They were probably made offerings when ceremonies took place here. I can still feel their presence.” I hadn’t considered this before, but regardless of whether the idea seemed far-fetched, there was something beautiful about it, something respectful, and I preferred it to tramping clumsily into an ancient wonder unannounced.
“But how will I know when it’s all right to enter?” I asked.
“You’ll just get a feeling. Something inside you will say yes. Sometimes you might almost feel there’s a hand at the small of your back, gently pushing you in.”
“What if I get a no?” I wondered.
“Trust me.You’ll know if it’s a no.” Closing her eyes a moment, she entered. I stood at the edge and gave it a try.
May I have permission to enter? I waited, trying to quiet my mind, but felt nothing aside from my own impatience. Still I waited a moment longer before stepping gingerly inside.
It’s believed that Scorhill Circle was originally made up of seventy standing stones, which would have made it the densest stone circle on Dartmoor. Now that I was standing in the midst of the circle I felt something very distinctly. It was almost like a slight drop in pressure. I also felt sad, curious and sad. I sat down in the grass, along a furrow in the ground. I wanted so badly to be able to imagine what this monument would have looked like, to see the people who’d used it, to know what they used it for. Artifacts gathered from the vicinity of the circle dated anywhere from 8500 to 700 BC. That was simply too much history for me to wrap my head around, and I felt lost in it. We sat there, each in our own space within the stone for what must have been several minutes before quietly rising and continuing along the moor.
“The interesting thing is that this stone circle seems to align with that huge granite rock.” Jo pointed to a faraway hill. “So you can imagine that you could always use those rocks as a guide to find the circle.” She pointed to another far hill where a similar huge stone was perched. “I think that rock acts as a sort of energetic battery pack for this stone circle. It sits up there in the sun, and this circle is tucked away on the moor. Of course, the stones were taller before the stone cutters got to them.”
“Stone cutters?” I was astonished. “But who would touch those? I mean, how could they?”
She gestured to a number of damaged stones that lay in the vicinity. “It was easier to harvest these rocks when people needed stones to build their houses. Also, the circles were considered to be pagan places—so there were some who wanted to destroy them. There were men who went around hauling up the rocks and inserting them back in the ground upside down. I’ve been to some of those circles, and I can’t stand to be in them. The energy feels completely wrong, like there’s just pools of chaos now.”
We made our way out over the moor where we came to a slender, rushing river, which Jo told me was the River Teign—it ran from the moor all the way down to the English Channel. Jo pointed out the remnants of ancient stone hut circles, occupied during the Bronze Age, most likely. I’d never in my life witnessed human habitation this old. Down the river, we came to a huge boulder with a perfectly concentric hole that ran through it, down into the water. “This,” she explained, “is the Tolmen Stone. It’s believed that if you drop through it, it cures arthritis, but it’s been used by people here going back centuries. In ancient times it was most likely involved in cleansing rituals of some sort, as the hole could represent coming through the mother’s womb and a rebirth of sorts could take place.”
“It’s incredible!” I breathed, climbing out onto the rock and lowering myself facedown, so my dangling hair was inches from the cold, rushing river.
Jo laughed. “Fancy a swim?”
“I wish,” I breathed. The water was so clear and cold it was all I could do to stop myself from putting my lips to it and drinking. But the freezing-cold gorge waters of upstate New York, I had a feeling, couldn’t hold a candle to how much I’d suffer from a dip in this river. I sat for a few minutes at the edge of the Tolmen Stone, listening to the soft rushing of the water. Pillow your head on a rock and wash your ears with the sound of a stream, my father used to say. A line from a famous poet, I’m sure, but when he said it, with his deep voice as we stood, arms linked, by a shady gorge back home, it became his own. We moved back out to the moor in silence, until we approached a grove of ancient-looking trees that looked out over the hills of Devon. I sat under a twisted old tree with spongy green moss mounded at its feet and aligned my spine with its trunk. Jo smiled.
“They’re curious about you,” she said.
I understood her. “Who, the faeries?”
“Yes. They’re kind of wondering why you want to know about them. Maybe you should explain why you’re here.”
I thought for a moment. “I want to know about them because they’re magical. And if magical beings exist, there’s hope for us all.”
“Well, they think that’s pretty funny.”
I didn’t see what was so funny about that. In fact, I was beginning to glower at the fact that perhaps these English faeries weren’t taking me very seriously. We walked on and out of the moor, and even as we did I could feel its immensity at my back, as though it stood there witnessing, as time moved through the rest of the world.
I liked Jo. She was kind, quiet, earnest, and honest. Back at her house Jo snipped fresh herbs to make us tea, and we arranged to meet back up at dinnertime.
My curiosity had been piqued and not satisfied by my visit to the moor. Some digging uncovered a few more interesting facts about the legends surrounding Scorhill and the vicinity. One notable thing pertained to domesticated horses. Dating back as far as local memory ran, riders on horseback could not get their horses to enter the circle or pass through it at all. And yet there was also a written account of someone in the nineteenth century who had witnessed a line of wild Dartmoor ponies approach the circle, and enter it one at a time, each waiting for the one before it to linger and then exit before entering themselves, just as Jo had told me. Perhaps the wild ponies knew more about its original purposes than we could ever hope to.
The Tolmen Stone had derived its name from the Celts, tol meaning hole and maen meaning stone. Naturally formed from thousands of years of water erosion, there was speculation from an early Dartmoor writer that, durin
g Celtic times, Druids used the stone to purify people who had been accused of some wrongdoing within the tribe. Holed stones like the Tolmen were sometimes found as entrances into burial chambers or ancient tombs, like portals into another world. In addition to the supposed cures from arthritis, the Tolmen Stone had been used to cure children of whooping cough and tuberculosis. Some believed that passing through the hole could enable you to see the future. It was believed that looking through a holed stone could give a person “second sight”—the ability to see into the land of the supernatural, making faeries and other spirits visible.
That night was my last in Chagford, and Ed joined us for dinner. As Jo, Ed, and I sat outside in the cool May evening we talked about life and the meaning of magic, until it was time for them to head home and for me to walk the deserted streets of the tiny village, alone but not unsafe, to Shelagh’s door. It opened with a creak, and I made my way swiftly down the hall, ignoring my intoxicated notion that there was someone in the living room who must be responsible for that waft of sweet-scented tobacco, and someone moving behind me up the stairs like a mother shooing her child into the nursery, hours past their bedtime.
9
Morgan le Fay and the Isle of Apples
In the olde days of the king Arthur, of which Britons speak of in great honor, all this land was filled with faery. The elf-queen, with her jolly companions, danced full often in many a green meadow; this was the olde opinion, as I read it . . . I speak of many hundred years ago.
—CHAUCER
THE next morning I said farewell to Shelagh and set out on another dreaded drive, this time to Oxshott, where I was picking up Raven for our journey to Glastonbury. Glastonbury had captivated my imagination since I’d read The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley, as a teenager. I was utterly enthralled by Bradley’s gorgeous turns of phrase, rich with the hues she lent a legend I thought I knew. She wrote of the mythic Isle of Avalon, which legend says was a holy pagan island. In her epic, Avalon was home to the great Priestesses of the Old Religion, and the book bears witness to the clashing of the Old World with that of the new, as Christianity became popularized in Britain. Avalon was an island shrouded in mist not just in legend, but in literature as well. People have translated the name to mean “Isle of Apples,” and it had been linked time and again to the Arthurian legends through an enigmatic heroine: Morgan le Fay. She was often spoken of as a priestess, but in earlier stories (namely Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini, circa 1150) she was called a faery, a healer, and a shape-shifter. Some claim, or perhaps even Monmouth himself claimed, that he was working from genuine Celtic material when he created the poetic work that first truly popularized the Arthurian legend for greater Europe. According to that legend, Arthur was brought to Avalon to be healed by Morgan le Fay of his fatal wounds from the battle at Camlan. Some believe that, to this day, Arthur and his knights yet lie sleeping in the hollow hill of Avalon until such a time that Britain needs its legendary hero once more. Each year thousands of people come to walk the steep slopes of Glastonbury Tor, where many believe that Arthur still lies in magical slumber. And still others believe the tor is the domain of Gwyn ap Nudd, a faery king and lord of the underworld in ancient Welsh mythology.
But at the heart of Glastonbury is the Chalice Well, one of the best-known holy wells in Britain. For nearly two thousand years, people have visited to drink the waters, thought to have healing properties. The water flows at the same rate and temperature regardless of draught or other climate-related conditions—miraculously it has never, at least not in recorded history, run dry. In the late 1950s, the Chalice Well Trust was established to protect the well and surrounding area. “The ancient people saw wells as gateways where the veils between human existence, the world soul and the spirit realms became thinner, and beside them they established shrines and conducted ceremonies,” according to the trust’s website. Because the well waters are rich in iron, they turn the rock they flow over a brilliant red color, which at first glance is a little alarming. Today people come from all over the world to meditate near the well, walk in the healing pool, or to simply sit and enjoy the beauty of the extensive gardens.
Glastonbury and the Chalice Well aren’t home to King Arthur and the faery folk alone, however. Legend has it that Joseph of Arimathea, who some say was great-uncle to Jesus, spent time in Glastonbury with Jesus as a very young man, and that upon Jesus’ death, Joseph traveled to Glastonbury with the cup from the Last Supper, hiding it in the depths of the well. While Jerusalem to England would have been a long journey, it was certainly possible—England was a part of the Roman Empire during Jesus’ time. And thus there are those who believe the well represents the blood of Christ: to drink its waters is an ultimate communion with the son of God.
Raven had visited Glastonbury back when we were first becoming friends, long before chasing around after faeries was even a pixie-sized thought in my mind. When she first mentioned finding faeries in my apartment, she’d also cited two unusual experiences that she’d had with faeries there. She’d been staying at the Inn at Little St. Michael, owned by the Chalice Well Trust. She was so taken with the beauty of the gardens that she would often wander through them at night. One evening she had a strange feeling that she wasn’t alone and turned just in time to see a small silhouette with a rounded hat move across a shaft of light from the garden lamp. She had also seen strange lights in the bushes and trees, on various occasions. Now, Raven is a very close friend, and I trusted her inherently, but believing or not believing in something is not a leap I take lightly—I need proof. Raven was so “in touch” that often she didn’t question things, and that I couldn’t trust. But her experiences were intriguing enough to make me want to see if there was something in Glastonbury that I could experience for myself.
I invited her to come with me, but just before we left for Charleston, she’d broken some bad news.
“Signe, there’s nothing I would love more than to come with you—believe me. Glastonbury is like heaven to me.” She looked at me intently over her wineglass. “But I’m just not sure I’m meant to be there with you. You need to be the one reaching out to them. Not me.”
My face fell. “But, Raven, I need you!” I begged. “I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ll have no idea what to do!”
Panic began to rise in my chest. I only had nine weeks in Ireland and the United Kingdom in which time I desperately needed to get in touch with something—nine weeks in which I desperately needed to rediscover a sense of enchantment. And the one woman who had opened the door for me in the first place, who I’d traveled with to Mexico, who had become like a second mother to me in New York, was trying to bump me out of the nest. She was my Gandalf and I was a lost and bewildered Frodo, now being sent off to the ends of the earth completely alone. Now I knew the fear and the braveness required to bear the terrible weight of the hero’s journey. There can be only one. No, wait. That was Highlander. But nonetheless! It wasn’t that I needed her to prove to me that faeries were real—I knew that was something only I could do for myself. But Raven was my interpreter. She was versed in the world of faeries; she spoke their language. She’d seen them, she could sense their energy, and she knew what to do to get in touch. And I wanted her with me because she has a talent for making life magical. Even though she is a grown woman, she can see the world through the eyes of a child. Raven never doubts herself. Her life experiences have given her a purity of belief. And she is open to a magic that I don’t think the rest of us understand.
I had steeled myself to journey through England alone, when a month and a half shy of my departure she called with good news—she would come after all. She told me that something interesting had happened: she’d received a message that there was something in Glastonbury waiting for her.
In case it’s not already self-evident, I should state for the record that Raven is a bit . . . magical. To be perfectly blunt, she’s a goddess-worshipping ordained priestess, Reiki Master, hypnotherapist who is trained
in shamanic journeying. I mean all that in the nicest way. She’s both enlightened and incredibly down-to-earth. The perfect copilot for my quest, if only for one leg of my travels.
What made Raven change her mind was a “message” she received while in a shamanic state, or “journey”—a dreamlike, out-of-body experience (are you still with me?) that offers a bridge to the spirit world.The “message” she received was that if she chose to accompany me, there was something she would experience that could change her life forever.
At long last I arrived at a stately home in Oxshott, in the fashionable county of Surrey. It was the home of Jill Schmidt, a friend of Raven’s. At the sound of the car Raven appeared at the door, her blond hair wild with curls against a dark green cloak, the likes of which only she could pull off. I extracted myself from the car and nearly ran into her arms. It was so good to see such a warm, familiar face that I couldn’t keep my eyes from welling up.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” I sighed.
“Not any gladder than me, darling.” She smiled.
After a quick lunch, we set off together to Somerset. Now that Raven was in the car with me, everything felt safer, calmer. I told her about Ed, Jo, the Frouds, my time in London, as we wound our way through roundabouts and finally onto Route 303, a two-lane road that twisted through the English countryside.
A wreck on 303 caused us to creep the majority of the way—not a problem when you get to pass Stonehenge at three miles per hour, but it meant we didn’t arrive until after nine o’clock. At last we pulled into the parking lot of the Inn at Little St. Michael. Raven had told me that if we wanted to double our chances of catching any faery activity, we needed to have access to the Chalice Well Garden at night. During the day, the gated gardens were open to visitors for a fee, but those staying at the inn had the benefit of twenty-four-hour access.