Finding my Way Back to Balance at Nine Ladies, Birchover.

After a busy, chaotic, humid and very people-packed trip to New York and Disneyland over the Summer, I found myself craving something completely different.

I wanted to get back in touch with nature. To slow down. To breathe. To regain some of that inner balance and calm connection with myself that can so easily get lost when life becomes a whirlwind.

So, no sooner had I waved my little darling off to Year 9 “Prison”, than I bundled the dog, our lunch and my dowsing rods into the car and headed for the Peak District.

My destination was Nine Ladies Stone Circle, near the pretty village of Birchover on Stanton Moor.

And, as it turned out, it was exactly what I needed.

Approach to the Nine Ladies Stone Circle

 A walk through the heather to Nine Ladies

Nine Ladies is perhaps overshadowed by the more imposing Arbor Low Neolithic henge and stone circle near Monyash, but there is something particularly beautiful about its setting.

The walk from Birchover takes you through woodland and open moorland, with paths winding between ferns beginning to turn russet brown and swathes of beautiful lilac heather. It didn't take long before the well-worn path led me to the stones.

Nine Ladies is not imposing in the way that Stonehenge or Avebury can be. Nor does it have the sheer scale of the Calanais complexes I visited recently. Instead, the circle feels almost intimate. There is something rather lovely about that.

The nine surviving stones are relatively modest in size, standing quietly within the landscape. Dating from the Bronze Age, the circle forms part of a wider prehistoric landscape containing other standing stones, circles and burial monuments.

Rather than feeling like a huge monument that demands your attention, Nine Ladies feels like somewhere you can simply sit with the landscape.

And that was exactly what I had come for!

Exploring the energy of the circle

Once I had the opportunity, I got out my dowsing rods and began by walking around the outside of the circle, exploring what I experienced as the energy around and within the stones.  I found what felt to me like an omnidirectional energy line just outside the circle, followed by a clockwise flow within the inner area close to the stones.

Walking around the perimeter, I also found a series of what I interpreted as male energy lines emanating from the centre focus point, appearing at fairly regular intervals of roughly 30 degrees, with strong directional points corresponding to the compass directions.

I have to admit that this part of my exploration was rather more perfunctory than I would have liked.

Other people had arrived, and before long I had a small audience of curious onlookers asking questions and wanting to have a go with the rods themselves! I didn't mind at all. Of course they could!  There's something rather wonderful about watching someone else's face when they first experience the rods responding in a way they weren't expecting.

Following the layers

Standing at what felt like the centre point of the circle, I began slowly walking outwards. As I moved away from the centre, I watched the dowsing rods respond as I passed through alternating bands of what I interpreted as yin and yang energy.

The further I moved from the centre, the broader and more diffuse these bands appeared to become.

I counted approximately twelve layers in total, reaching around 30 paces from the centre. The first six were within the area of the circle itself.

For me, the perceived strength also changed with distance. I experienced it as around 5/10 at the centre, gradually reducing to approximately 2–3/10 towards the outer edge.

It was fascinating.

And then my stomach rumbled.

My dog agreed wholeheartedly that enough energetic exploration had been done and that it was clearly time for lunch. She’s apparently, very good at bringing me back into the present moment!

Finding a place to recharge

Before sitting down, I decided to dowse for the place that felt most appropriate for me to stop and recharge. The strongest point I found was due South, just inside the circle.

Interestingly, it seemed to correspond almost exactly with where a missing tenth stone might originally have stood. Whether that coincidence means anything, of course, I don't know , but it certainly caught my attention.

So that's where I sat. Lunch beside me. A thermos of tea. Dog happily investigating every woodland smell she could find. And gradually, the world became very quiet.

The wind moved through the leaves, the ferns rustled and for a while there was absolutely nothing I needed to do.

No airport. No crowds. No queues. No noise. Just trees, stones, dog, tea and the landscape.

Exactly what I had been looking for!

There is more to explore, I didn't have time to explore the wider landscape properly on this visit.

I would have loved to find the nearby guardian stones, explore whether the energy I experienced within the circle flows in a spiral from the centre, and investigate whether there are water features or aquastats in the landscape similar to those described in the work of Maria Wheatley.

I'd also like to spend more time exploring the relationships between the individual stones and the lines of energy I experienced between them.

But that's OK. Perhaps part of the point of a place like this is that you don't have to explore everything in one visit.

I found a campsite nearby that looks like it could make a perfect base for a longer stay, so I suspect Nine Ladies hasn't seen the last of me and my dog.

And perhaps that's the real gift of places like this.

Sometimes we don't need to go on a once in a lifetime trip or somewhere extraordinary to find ourselves again.

Sometimes we just need to step away from the noise, walk through the trees, sit beside some very old stones....and listen.

Nine Ladies Stone Circle