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Summer Watson’s workshop is nearly fully booked. If you would like to attend give Chris a call.
Shaun enjoyed the long weekend so much that he is already actively looking into possibilities for next year. If you have any suggestions for a location to visit speak to him ASAP otherwise you might be too late for the 2009 trip.
For the August meeting we plan to have a selection of odds and ends contributed by some of the members, as part of the usual summer social evening. Please let Shaun know if you would like to contribute anything – I will be showing a few slides on a digital projector so it will be there for any member who wishes to make use of it. All you need to do is transfer pictures from a digital camera to a memory stick, and away we go.
What a relief! After last year’s trip having to be cancelled due to the area being flooded, it was great to be able to do the Herefordshire trip in warm, dry weather. Better a year late than never! The campsite, Poston Mill was maintained to a very high standard and was quiet, peaceful, and had lots of wildlife - birds, rabbits [and dowsers].
Shaun had done sterling work researching the restaurants, I don’t think anyone starved. We even managed to do some dowsing.
The members who stayed at a nearby B&B remarked on an odd incident of synchronicity – the rooms that they had been allocated were each decorated in the colour that their occupant was wearing! The accommodation proved to be excellent, interesting too, as the house had once been the home of the author Lewis Carroll’s brother, and Lewis Carroll had himself stayed there on several occasions.
Thursday afternoon was spent settling in, then those of us who felt energetic went for a walk along the riverbank to dowse the small church in the nearby village of Turnastone.
The following day was spent dowsing two other nearby churches, one being St. Margaret’s, in the parish of that name, has a superbly carved wooden rood-screen. This is in the Southern Marches, right on the Welsh border, and was formerly in the Hundred of Eywas. This simple church has a strange wooden bell-tower jutting out over it’s end, and Norman foundatios, with the old walls having a slight batter, similar to Norman fortified buildings.
The screen is one of the finest examples of oak carving that I have come across and the church is worth a visit for this alone. On the north wall some windows have hinges where at one time the windows had shutters to protect the glass during games of Fives, which were played against this wall, in the days when churches were at the centre of community life.
After lunch we spent the remainder of the afternoon at the enigmatic ruins of Grosmont Castle.
Plenty to dowse here and most of the group found the castle a very energetic but pleasant place although two or three found extremely strong energies up on the parapet which made them feel slightly unwell.
Saturday morning saw us at Dore Abbey, a fascinating place with a few very peculiar carvings. One, high up in the chancel had a moustache and looked like a male but with the addition of anterior extremities to rival those of Dolly Parton. None of the photos that I took of this came out.
The Abbey is in a beautiful setting and there is plenty left to dowse, although most of the monastic parts have long disappeared. It must have been a big place when still intact.
Nowadays the once great abbey is now the parish church of St. Mary and is also used as the venue for a prestigious local music festival. No music was being played during our visit but I suspect the acoustics are very good. The whole place had a lively atmosphere, several members described it as being a very “female” energy.
After lunch came the eagerly awaited trip to Kilpeck Church. We were met at the church by a church-warden, James Bailey, who is a fellow dowser and he gave us a short talk about the carvings and other features of the building, pointing out several things that he would like us to include in the dowsing, to see if our findings tallied with those of other dowsers. We have collected some material together and plan to send it off to him shortly.
Thanks are due to John Moss, director of the BSD, who put us in touch with James when he found that we were planning a visit to Kilpeck.
I, like many others, had assumed that the majority of carvings at the church had some kind of Christian symbology but James thinks that only about 4 of them have actually derived from the Christian tradition. The two splendid carvings of men with pointed hats that adorn the main door puzzle him and this was one of the things he wanted us to dowse. Suggestions have been made that they are Hittites, and this matched my own dowsed findings.
The age of the apse is often queried, as some believe it to be comparatively new, but I dowsed that it was contemporary with the rest of the current church, although Pete dowsed it to be very slightly newer, but only by about 50 years. James also asked if we would dowse to see if a wooden church had been on the same site before the current one, again several members found this to be the case.
The churchyard is interesting, being egg-shaped, and the building is not on an exact east-west axis. One explanation for this is that there is a stream of exceptionally pure water running beneath the exact line of apse, chancel and nave.
According to the guide book, also written by James Bailey, dowsing indicates the probability of a large Roman courtyard just outside the newer churchyard, to the northeast. There is a motte only about 100 yards or so away, just outside the left of the churchyard, and the humps and bumps of a deserted medieval village on the other side of the churchyard.
Another thing James asked us to dowse for was the presence of megalithic stones lying beneath the current building, which other dowsers have suggested are there.
There is so much to dowse at this site that it is impossible to fit it into one visit, but we had a most enjoyable afternoon, greatly enhanced by James Bailey’s knowledge, open-minded enthusiasm and welcome.
Sunday Morning came all too quickly and it was time to wind up the trip, with a visit to nearby Arthur’s Stone, the remains of a chambered tomb. The site is set in wonderful scenery with a great view. Lots of earth energies flow through this site and it always feels beneficial, to me at any rate!
It was a lovely weekend with good weather, good dowsing, good food and good company. A big thank-you to Shaun, who worked so hard to get everything right. Keep up the good work!
The July Trip will be to the ruined castle at Ludgershall and nearby ancient sites.
We will be meeting at the usual time of 10.45 to start at 11 o’clock, .at Ludgershall Castle, where there is a parking place. There is no charge to look at the castle, which is in ruins, although enough remains to give a very good idea of what it must have been like when it was in use.
It is a few years since my previous visit to the castle, but I remember it as having plenty of dowsing potential, and has an interesting history.
After lunch the plan is to visit the nearby Snail Down barrows, provided the weather is reasonable. In the event of truly dreadful rain we will go to some alternative local site which is less exposed to the elements
We turned up at the site hoping for an improvement to the weather, but unfortunately the torrential rain over the area meant that we had no realistic option but to postpone the outdoor event we would have otherwise have held there.
Although an interesting and beautiful site, Lodge Park is very weather dependant for visitors and it would have been foolish to risk rain damage to our book stock and possible pneumonia for probably no financial returns. In addition, the labyrinth would have been washed away before we got halfway through making it!
We will be negotiating an alternative date with Mark, the site manager, when hopefully the weather will have improved, with more people about.
Apologies to anyone who turned up and wondered where we were.
The speaker for June was Dr. Serena Roney-Dougal, one of our regular speakers, this time talking about the psychic traditions of Tibet.
Although Serena is based at Glastonbury, she spends much of her time abroad doing research into parapsychology, which is her speciality. Recent funding meant that she could study at first hand the traditions, superstitions and beliefs of monks at several Tibetan monasteries One of the things she wanted to study was the effects on the brain of meditation and she went there with a case-full of scientific equipment to enable her to do this. She had instruction in meditation from a very high-ranking monk, and even got a letter from the Dalai Lama, welcoming her research into meditation.
A trip like this is extremely difficult to arrange but Serena managed to get an invaluable contact, a monk in Dharmsala, who was able to make it all happen.
Much of the research took place in Southern India, which is now home to over 20,000 Tibetans. As in their homeland, the Tibetans use psychic traditions every day of their lives, and they send their children to monasteries to learn the traditions so that they do not die out. Divination is used a lot and astrology is in daily use.
The lunar month is 29 and a half days, so they sometimes have a missing date or they repeat one, completely different to Western Astrology. They also have shamans, who become possessed by a deity and then takes the name of that deity. Oracles are used by Tibetan governors and each village has its own oracle, as does each monastery.
They are great believers in omens and believe that the recent massive earthquake activity in China is the gods making their displeasure felt about the behaviour of the Chinese government and that it is a warning to them to change their ways.
Thanks to Serena for yet another great talk. If anyone wants her meditation tapes or books and didn’t manage to buy one, Shaun can give you a contact number.
Last August I wrote a short piece in the journal about dowsing for aids to healthy plants, with particular reference to blight in tomatoes and potatoes, which was unusually bad last year due to the very wet summer. A couple of members have asked for the information again so here we go:
………….Like so many others this year, our tomatoes have been badly affected by blight. I realised that this was likely as the wet weather this season is ideal for the proliferation of blight and other fungal plant diseases. We could have taken the chemical route as so many conventional gardeners feel forced to do, all the “experts” swearing that there is no other effective solution, but we did not wish to do this.
Most of the organic books say that it is OK to use Bordeaux Mixture as a preventative, but in fact this is soon to be phased out of the list of treatments allowed for organic gardeners. In any case, it is no use once blight has already struck. So what to do?
We already put cloves of leftover garlic under each tomato plant when it is planted out, which is reckoned to make them less prone to disease in general, and this usually seems to slow down the blight so that a reasonable crop is possible.
However, this year it was not enough. Looking ahead to next year, I decided to do some research into alternative methods.
One book swears by a brew of horsetail leaves used as a foliar spray. No exact details given other that boiling the horsetail for 30 minutes then cooling and diluting before application.
I have in the back of my mind that a dilution of natural live yoghourt can be used in similar fashion, but can’t remember where I read this, as it was a few years ago. This might work by raising the acidity of the tomato leaves’ surface, while creating a partial barrier, while the horsetail might work by adding silicon to strengthen the cell structure of the plant.
I then thought about using a homoeopathic remedy produced from blighted tomatoes, but have not yet plucked up the courage to phone my pharmacy for advice on the idea. [Since writing this last year I have spoken to the pharmacy and they are willing to prepare a remedy from a blighted tomato or potato if one is supplied to them. However, the process costs £1 per “run” to potentise it and this would work out rather expensive for something that I can’t guarantee would work – it would need quite a bit of expensive experimentation, but I haven’t abandoned this idea yet.]
Shaun and Mary also tried an experiment, using Cocculus, I’m not sure what potency or the details of how they applied it, so ask Shaun about this.
One thing the pharmacist suggested was a spraying with a solution of boiled water and Calc. Carb., which is more normally used in human medicine to treat fungal diseases such as thrush.
I also break a few rules with tomatoes. Dowsing for the best time to start, and the quantity to remove, I trim off all the mature leaves on the plants on the basis that if they are going dry they will no longer be of use to the plant, and will be causing stress. I leave on most of the side-shoots in order to provide fresh leaf to feed the plant in lieu of the old ones. Leaving on side-shoots is contrary to what all the books will tell you, so do this at your own risk!
One thing we’ve tried this year with potatoes, is as soon as you see affected plants, cut them off at ground level and leave the tubers in the ground for at least two weeks, by which time any blight spores on the soil surface should have died off and the potatoes can be safely harvested.
Once I’ve collected a few more ideas I will dowse for the ones most likely to succeed in our particular situation and will report later.
Any other suggestions would be most welcome. S.C.