Dear Witches:
It’s Safe to Walk on Earth Again

Straight away, we felt that this was a sort of ‘death womb’, unlike the magical ‘birth womb’ at Avebury. In many sites the circular magic is to create a birth womb, or a portal to shift into new dimensions. This one felt as if it had become a ‘death doula’ of energy, that was full of many hidden sorrows and missuses, and souls who had not made it all the way through the gate.

We silently circled the site, walking high on the slippery earth bank, followed this time by mournful sheep with accusing eyes and some with shiny black spiral horns. It felt ancient.

According to metaphysicists, Arbor Low is considered a major center of ley lines in Britain, amplified by geomantic alignments with other important megalithic sites across the land.

Back in the 19^th century, people claimed it was haunted and warned to never go there after dark. Paranormal researchers called the “Dragon Project” say that at certain times of the year the stones emit electromagnetic signals. Many people are intrigued by its strange atmosphere, including reports of UFO sightings, boggarts, and green orbs that surround the henge at night.

Circling the site, we felt increasingly ill at ease, the sky was broiling gray and spitting at us with rain. The feeling was that the site needed to wake up to its true self again, after all these years of retirement and possible misuse (bodies excavated are missing hands and feet). Cautiously we both walked towards the central cove, the seed space or portal ‘egg’, and the energy amplified.

Interestingly, old myths say it was once a healing circle of the Druids, and before that a sacred site of the Brigantes, who worshipped the Goddess Bride, and was also known for fertility blessings. Birth and death were held in common for our ancestors, rooted together. Stone circles are symbolic wombs, and portals and thresholds, where energy can enter into this world, or energy can leave this world. They are liminal places of transition and becoming and rebirth.

Without deciding it consciously, we opened the gate. Feeling a little shaky as the magic formed.

Afterwards, we walked through strong rain to Gib Hill cairn, once a place where murderers were hung. Before hurrying back through the rain to our car. As we passed through the farm yard a fleeting bit of signal returned to our new phone, which started ringing. Almost no one had the number so we hurriedly answered: it was a frantic neighbor calling – an ambulance had arrived at my childhood home, and my mum had fallen and broken her hip, and was being taken to hospital. She must have fallen at the exact same time we were circling Arbor Low.

Later that night, I was holding a very frail hand just before midnight, as mum prepared for surgery. She was so weak we didn’t know if she would make it, and in my heart I knew, one way or another, she would not make it. The magic we had woven had put in motion events to take her back home. It didn’t feel sinister, it felt full of gravitas and intention. My mum was a wily witch. She had chosen her own portal.

Within two months, my mum was gone. Midwifed back into the sacred ceremonial landscape of Mam Tor, itself contained in the vast web of ceremonial geomantic magic of the Peak District, an ancient land.

After this terrestrial magic at Nine Ladies and Arbor Low, a new presence arrived with me. Not only the Old ‘Uns of the land, the most ancient of Ancestors now turned to rock and stone who had come to me after my father’s death to remind me of the Goddess lineage of Mam Tor, but now also the Ancestral Witches, our close relatives, who were rising again to set the record straight on their legacy and wake up the hearts and wombs of their great-great granddaughters. Emerging from their slumber and their invisibility spells, they were here to share their secrets again, their feminine magic that had once spun the world together.

As I shared in Magdalene Mysteries, the Ancestral Witches arrived in my life by the way of a talismanic doll called The Witch of Pendle, who sat on the “witch shrine” I had created for my mum, during the last month of her life. These Ancestral Witches were humble, wily, cunning, and knew how to rise to the occasion and be grand, bold and glamorous when life demanded it, or they could slip away, like a mist, unseen.

After the temples had fallen, and the bells and ornaments of the priestesses were lost and scattered, and the swan cloaks of the goddess shamans and druids were ruined and tattered, and after the masked balls ended, and when the red velvet cloaks of the royal magicians and their ladies were folded away in secret; only a few hundred years ago, the women of the brideways across the lands, from simple hearths, in their plain clothes, with their foraged wild flowers and herbs, on silver moonlit nights, made their way to these grand henges, with sure feet and secrets on their lips, and wild offerings at hand, to keep the old remembering alive.

They grew skilled in secrecy and hiding, and making their power small enough to remain unseen by prying eyes, and with longing and fear, they spoke to the wells and wedded the old gods. To keep the lineage alive, they knew they must keep it cloaked in hum drum words and penniless homes, and even then, with all their skill, they hung and burned across the lands. But they never forgot and they birthed their babes with codes of remembrance for a long, away future.

As my mum was dying, and with the candles lit on the Witch Shrine, I would watch the sun set across the moors and pray to the Ancient One of the land, whilst gently rubbing the feet of the porcelain witch doll, fashioned in the image of a real life witch of old times, and I would say: