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For me, the magical middle point of winter is not Christmas day, but Winter Solstice, when the sun stops going further and further south in its rising each day, and gets ready for the long climb back towards the east and the Spring Equinox. This makes the Solstice the start of something good, i.e. longer, warmer days, rather than the end of the line feeling that Christmas has. In fact, the point of celebration on Christmas day is that this is the first day on which it is actually possible for us to see that the rising point has moved back to the east! So I wanted to be somewhere special for this special time, and decided to go to Brithdir Mawr, the community in the Prescellis where I found and re-erected the stone circle. For more on that, see the Geomancy Group site, where I have written up the various stages of our work,and for more on Brithdir see their web site, www.brithdir mawr. My journey took me near to the ancient stone circle of Gors Fawr, {the Big Bog in english}, which lies on a big expanse of boggy land ringed round by the Prescellis, and the ridge, with huge outcrops of bluestone, that the stones at Stonehenge may well have come from. On the day of my travels, having decided to start my Solstice at this circle, a thick mist had manifested over the mountains, and as I left my car by the road and walked through the gorse bushes towards the stones, the modern world dropped away. Looking out towards where the mountains were, all I could see was misty flat land, with eerie forms of gorse looming out, and I really felt how this must have seemed to ancient peoples, with no road maps, or roads even! Having said that, this area is full of ancient sites, and there was almost certainly quite a good network of tracks linking them up. I had brought with me some mistletoe, one of the most sacred herbs, growing as it does on neither land or sea, but in-between the worlds. So I laid this on the stone that sits in the south -east of the circle , where the rising sun at Solstice will touch first. I then walked around the stones, touching each one and remembering the other times I have visited them all. I then sat and meditated a bit, and got a strong call to visit the two outlier stones, about 100 yards away, along a well marked path that the sheep and cows have made over the centuries. These two stones are much taller and more substantial than the stones of the circle, which are no more than two or three feet tall. These two feel like the entrance to the circle, especially if one was coming from the Dragon peaks where the bluestones are, and I felt bad that I had no offerings of mistletoe left for them, however, I then found an apple in my pocket! So I sat and ate it on the stone which seemed to have a seat shaped into one side, making it extremely phallic in shape, and bit my apple so it became a pentagon around the core pentacle, and left it there for the Wee Folk, a feminine complement to the phallic stone. I then made a wish for the year to come, and walked back to the circle, which swam back into view through the mist, and looked so old and strong, enduring all our modern madness and seeing that this too will pass......And on to Brithdir! Walking down from the car park, the peace and silence grew more tangible, and the smell of the air grew sweeter. It takes about 10 minutes to walk down to the hut of my friend, through fields and woodland, till a bit of muddy wall appears, and suddenly I am inside a cosy,straw bale hut, warmed by a fire crackling on the hearth, and by my friends greetings. This turning point of the year is a good time to consult the oracles, so I had brought along my Tarot cards, and did my two friends a reading each for the coming year, both of which seemed positive. It can feel sometimes as though the time between Samhain and Solstice is a very inward time, when plans for the future seem dreamy and unreal, and the days speed by as we attempt to deal with the last demands of the old year. I seem to spend a lot of time travelling, seeing people and places, and recharging my batteries ready for the effort of the coming longer days. It is good to share skills such as Tarot, and a great exchange of energy for the sweat lodge! My friends have 170 acres to live and play on, so they have made a lovely sweat lodge site; it is by a rushy stream of the kind that flow all over Wales, bringing the rain back to the sea, via many mossy stone and tree -filled valleys, where the small beings of the woodland still live, far away from the cold concrete of the human “world”. As I walked down through the dusk, I remembered the old stone beside the track, - or did it remember me, and nudge me to wake up and see it?! Either way, I went and put my hands on it in greeting and acknowledgement of its role as guardian of that place, where three ways meet, before going on to enter the darkening woods. When I greet the stones, I always feel as if I should put my bare hands on them to be “recognised” as I introduce myself. This must in fact leave my DNA imprint there, and this will be reinforced every time I go there. On through the trees, and along a little path to the glow of a big fire, maybe 3 feet high and wide, with the sweat lodge rocks sitting within, heating up. There were around ten of us, gazing into the fire, chanting, playing drum or rattle......... for an hour or two, until the huge pile of wood is gone, and the stones glow red hot, like phoenix eggs ready to hatch. Down the twisty candlelit path they are taken, then we humans follow, kneeling as we enter to touch our foreheads to Mother Earths body, and going in sunwise, on our knees, till we can sit and be still. With prayers and chants we honour the stones and the darkness, until ready to emerge to the waters’ bright and cleansing embrace. Back up to the fire, to stand steaming, and at one with all beings. The next morning, after a lovely ceremony in the woods, at an old cromlech, or dolmen, and a Solstice feast, I left my friends and walked up to the stone circle. The sun actually entered Capricorn at 6.36 pm, so although I had already celebrated the longest night, I wanted to be in the circle at the switch point, as it were. We completed the circle in 2002, but I am still getting to know it as a complete thing, rather than work in progress. I saw it last in the spring, so it is lovely to come round the bend of the path, just where another guardian stone sits, and see the stones, standing in an area of darker grass, where the horses and cows seem to keep the grass down to a fine green lawn, rather than the rough tussocks over the rest of the field. There are three horses and two cows in the field this time,and they watch with calm interest as I enter their circle. One stone is surrounded by a sea of muddy hoof prints, as it is the perfect height and shape for rubbing a horses tummy and armpits. It also sits on the big energy ley that runs across the circle and on up Carn Ingli, the holy mountain that sits on the western side of the circle. Once more I walk around the stones, greeting each one, as old friends who have already had a lot of my DNA! The story of each ones raising comes into my “mind movie” as I walk round, and all the other good times that have happened here since. I greet the mountain as well, as it sits benignly gazing down, like a great giant head, seen here in side profile. While we were working oin the circle, it always seemed to be keeping an eye on us, as if the stones were its children, and it wanted us to put them in their right places.
By this time it is dusk, and it is getting very cold, high up on the slopes of a mountainside, so I turn to go, but as I wandered back to the guardian stone, a figure loomed out of the dark. It was the young man who had come to visit the community as part of his journey, so we walked back to the circle, and I had the chance to tell him some of the stones story, carrying their legends through into the future. Finally it is really time to go, and I fly back through the darkness to Elfane, to light the Solstice fire in the Ring, and dream the year to come.
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