Day: May 1, 2016

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/stairway/

After six ‘steps’ (posts), I have reached the top of my Silent Eye ‘Leaf and Flame:TheFoliate Man’  stairway. This sixth post marks the start of a new ‘floor’…

Happy ever after, is it, Cariad? Oh, we’d all like to think so, wouldn’t we? The tales we hear at our mother’s knee have that as their ending, after all: Princesses and princes, saved by heroic quest, or love, or both, ushered into a book-ending boudoir of joy, those words ‘The End’ sparkling with the glitter of ‘No more problems…’

I could see my girl’s longings and desires, could almost feel the tremble of tears when she heard the first strains of ‘Hela’r Dryw’ and the familiar words of the Cymraeg soothed her with her childhood language: Ah, the little wren and its annual slaughter, hunted for ritual purposes and for a higher theme. Ah! The sweetness of that music!

Situated next to a main road in deepest Scotland, and more curiously in someones garden – this is the unusual triple-ringed stone circle of Croft Moraig. I have wanted to visit this place for ages, and recently I had the opportunity. I wasn’t disappointed – in fact I was overwhelmed.

Croft Moraig was excavated in 1889, and was used for religious purposes. It was constructed sometime before 3000BC, and was used continuously for over 1000 years! It was altered a number of occasions with the changing needs of the people who used it. That great man Aubrey Burl even suggested that it may have been “the dwelling-place of a priest, a witch-doctor, a shaman.” It is also thought to have mythic associations with the sun and moon.

The first structure on the site may have been a ring of upright wooden posts set in a wide shallow ditch, possibly containing screens to…