This winter has been a season of wind and rain, and I've been lucky enough to spend some well needed time really seizing this opportunity to look within, to seek vision in the deep silence of the fireside at night, and take some time out to go on retreat on the wild Cornish coast, a place of pixies, ancient tin mines that stretch for miles filled with the ghosts of times past, and tales of pirates and shipwrecks.

Cornwall is an ancient land, where Celtic villages like Carn Euny and Chysauster can still be found. Their stones walls breaking through the hummocks of turf, it's possible to stand by their hearths and look out to sea, as they did long ago. Traders with the Romans, Greeks  and those who came before, these were a proud and clever people. They mined their land for tin,  copper and even gold and lead, and were skilled metal workers with trading links all across Europe. Sitting sheltered from the harsh February winds against their strong walls there is a still and steady presence, as if the passage of time can be cast away and it is possible to sense their lives all around.

When visiting sacred or ancient sites- as surely everywhere on the earth is sacred- I always take the time to be quiet and ask that the guardians of an area to come to me if they will. In these places, I find the guardians are of wind and sea, of rock, but also the wise-ones, the wizards, the druids and earlier back the shamans who served the land and its people, held its knowledge, preserved its memory in their songs and rites. In the Celtic era, and before, the people of these Cornish settlements delved into the underworld,  and drew treasure from the womb of the earth. They lived their lives entwined with the elements, the ground beneath them, the wide sea, the fire and forge. Neolithic and Bronze Age barrows, ( burial mounds) quoits and stone circles, together with the standing stones, strange tall sentinels, stand testimony to their lives and their relations with the wild spirits of theses places, in a thread of culture and blood stretching millennia- as much markers of ancestral presence to the Celtic miners and traders as their villages are to me today.

It's good to feel these roots, these strong places. Learning their history is fascinating and always has something new to reveal, but for me the real treasure is found in the quiet, in the feeling in the gut that goes beyond words, goes beyond knowledge, that just is when we take the time to explore these places with our hearts and spirits as well as our bodies and minds. I cannot tell you what the stone says, what the wind cries with the voices of the gulls as they arc over these ancient walls. No one knows the names of the traders and warriors, the farmers, the smiths, the wisemen and women who served this land as they tilled and delved, and cast their lives far and wide across the sea. But their memories remain in each stone stacked upon another, in the char marks of their hearths, in the earth that took their bones. Sitting here as they did, in the quiet places, the soul can hear them, and finds something precious, a treasure of the deep just like their wondrous ores, that nourishes, holds magic, and can be carried onwards through the march of years.  

©DanuForest 2015

www.danuforest.co.uk

Useful links : http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/carn-euny-ancient-village/

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/chysauster-ancient-village/

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/ballowall-barrow/