Monday, February 13, 2012

Dowsing and Cornish Eccentrics: Great Day Out!

The Angel's Runway dolmen at Ed Prynn's fantastic "rock garden" in Cornwall
If you take a forked stick in your hands, and hold it firmly but not tightly palms up, engaging the little finger and thumb particularly, you may find water. You WILL find water if:
  • You are doing it properly (no “messy hands” as Ed Prynn admonished us during our dowsing lesson)
  • You have a modicum of connection to the mysteries of the Earth, and
  • You are not a bad ‘un. 
Of course, you can find all this out in Ed Prynn’s front garden, or possibly a dozen feet below his back garden. The mysteries of Earth Magic are all represented in Prynn’s garden. 

Druidic healing stone
Ed Prynn has built a private stone henge. He has imported a rocking stone, once used to separate the good ‘uns from the bad ‘uns. (Good people could make it rock, bad ones couldn’t.), He has acquired a men-an-tol (ancient Druidic healing stone), a judgement stone, a few odd stones of various sorts and uses, and he has built the Angel’s Runway, which those who have visited Ireland’s Burren will know as a dolmen. Ed’s dolmen consists of two seven-tonne stones topped by a 13-tonne stone.

Earth Mother and good luck
And then there’s ‘middle earth.’ Ed has dug a chamber underground. Unlike Newgrange in Ireland, it is not aligned with the solstice. And besides, those were mounds, not diggings. Ed’s underground chamber is 12 feet below grade, and 12 feet in diameter. The walls are two feet thick and the roof is made of four capstones, the largest 7 tonnes. In the centre is the Dreckly stone, a sort of underground omphalos, very fitting for what Ed calls the structure, The Womb of Mother Earth.

A note about Dreckly. Dreckly is Cornish for “never gonna happen.” In shops in Mevagissey, among others, you can buy clocks with numbers on them, but where the 12 should be, the word dreckly, short for directly, is painted. Dreckly works like this: Your furnace has packed in and you’ve contacted the gas repair man to come fix it. He says he’ll come dreckly. Two weeks later, chipping the ice off your phone, you call again and ask when he’ll be along. He answers, “Dreckly after I fix my van. But don’t worry; the auto parts supplier said he’ll have the part I need dreckly.” Eventually he shows up, takes a look at your furnace, decides he needs a part, says he’ll order it dreckly and be back, dreckly it arrives, to install it. As soon as the last fruits of summer drop off the vine, he arrives with the part and proceeds to install it and you’re so damn grateful, you tell him you’ll be happy to pay his bill. Dreckly.

How to have good luck in Cornwall
Ed Prynn’s Dreckly Stone is a bit more energetic than that. Indeed, he says, if you touch the stone with your clothes on, you’ll have good luck. And if you touch it with no clothes on, you are guaranteed better luck, dreckly.

I touched the stone, with my clothes on. We shall wait and see. I’m sure something good will happen dreckly.

I rocked the stone. (Whew!)
Nicky McBride and Ed Prynn in front of Prynn's slate billboard honoring famous people and eccentrics
Dowsing for water or identifying energies
I dowsed for water, a lot less successfully than I dowsed for energy fields. But that makes sense. I have always been drawn to spaces. I have now lived in 53 different places, each one of which was chosen for its energies. I rejected one of two exactly similar garden apartments once, although it was ten dollars a month cheaper back when ten bucks meant something, because I didn’t like the vibes. It turned out that the apartment was home to a revoltingly nasty succession of tenants. One set of them mutilated the feet of Dobermans in the corridor. The next tenants were just as bad: the man grabbed me one afternoon and smashed me against the hallway wall because I had dared to tell his rotten son to stop throwing rocks at my dog when we went past their garden. They also chanted Christian prayers backward in the middle of the night, and I could hear it through the shared living room walls. I always wondered if I would have gone crazy or something had I moved into that space. And why was it cheaper? Did the owner of the buildings know? Was he or she a Druid, psychic?

Anyway, my current spacethe land beneath my housesits atop old Cornish mine shafts, and the garden had to be remediated because of the arsenic tailings left behind. That’s not unusual; most of Cornwall sits atop ancient mine shafts and the place is lousy with arsenic, all the copper and gold having been removed. We are also about 50 yards from a holy well. And we have a view across the Tamar Valley to Dartmoor. Best, however, is that I have felt NO presences in the house. None at all. I was beset by them in my husband’s house in Maryland, so much so that I called in a psychic whose work I trusted and he cleared them after we married. One was an Indian who had been cheated out of the land 300 years before. He didn’t leave, exactly, but agreed to stop being a pain in the neck. The other presence was much more recent, and was vexing me because the person she really wanted to reach didn’t have the proper antenna. My psychic told us all what she wanted to say, and the presence stopped. Thank goodness.
*
Ed Prynn counts himself an eccentric. Indeed, that’s one reason I wanted to go to one of his Sunday afternoon soirees. I love meeting British eccentrics. No one does eccentric better than the Brits. I suspect my long-haired engineer husband is an eccentric, too. And I guess I’d be remiss in my assessment if I failed to include myself. I do look ordinary…but I have lived in 53 different places (not counting college dorms)…and I get messages from beyond. Sometimes it’s people with something to say. Sometimes it’s things, for example, the unassailable notion that the tyres on my car were dangerous and would fail me on a trip. That time, I compulsively checked the tyres for a week. All seemed OK. So I set off on my trip.  Halfway there, the timing belt packed in. AHA!  T for tyre, T for timing belt. This stuff isn’t always preciseor maybe our translation equipment isn’tbut it is ALWAYS there.

Visit St. Merryn, book a session with Prynn, and become an official dowser
I had a feeling we had to go to St. Merryn yesterday…and I was right. Both Simon and I earned our dowsing certificates, met a fascinating person, saw some amazing things, and had a nice tea at the end of a fascinating tour in the gentle--if chilly--breezes of late winter on the Cornish coast

On that note, I will suggest booking a trip to see Ed Prynn’s amazing stones and meet the man himself, a fount of information and a nice guy to boot.

Ed Prynn, his wall of fame and his rocking stone to cut the sheep from the goats
PS Plus he has one heck of an ocean view from his hilltop perch.