Castle Connections

There is a hill near here. A big long ridge with three high points with the St Michael leyline running all along it. One high point has been topped with a memorial and another with a folly castle that is now a restaurant. F asked me to marry him on a cold, claer, bright winters morning sat on a granite stack near the monument and we celebrated our wedding years later in that castle.

Ever since I first came here that hill top has fascinated me. I found an obscure track along it's side to a vantage point on it's side my first week down here, house hunting. When I moved here, I was taken my the more normal road to it's top within days. I sat in lectures gazing out at it. It watches me as I live and work.

My Dad told me at my wedding that he thought he had been there before but not inside. I promptly forgot this!

So I was very suprised when looking at old family photos belonging to my Grandmother, to see a familiar building... In fact I found two photos.

This first photo shows my Father with my Grandmother and Grandfather sat in front of the castle on some of the granite stacks. This photo is probably around fifty years old. And so, despite the two photos not looking at all the same, I left it at that. (oh how silly - and prehaps a little ego in there? *laugh*)

This second photo is clearly older and the men on the castle walls are wearing bowler hats. It also says on the back Dad at ****, in my Grandmother's writing. It was nagging at my Dad and he came back to it and figure it out.... This photo is of my Great Grandfather, also at the castle! He died in 1914 so this photo is at least 100 years old and shows I have some sort of connection this palce going back through four generations over a hundred years, even though there is no obvious reason why my non-Cornish family should have been drawn here....

Now since my wedding people have delighted in telling me things about the place... One friend told me they had heard the owner had been given large amounts of money by people from a now defunct base so they could hold completely private parties there overnight. My conspiracy friend has delighted in telling me that the St Mary line and St Michael line spiral around each other across the land and that the St Michael line is polluted and bad and favoured by Satanists. I do not agree, the line is not bad, it may have been put to selfish uses, but that is human, not the line itself...

However....

One night as I was on my way home I was casting out thoughts that I wanted to learn things, to know. A Voice answered and said 'we can show you everything'. Of course I was interested! I told me to go to ****. So later that evening, Little Dog and i went there. It was pitch dark as it was the New Moon. I made it to the top and sat on granite admiring the view.

Nothing happened. Well, not till I closed my eyes anyway... At once there was a circle of shadowy figures around me. And having seen them, I knew who these entities were who offered me knowledge, and power too. They were of Crowley's ilk. Crowley was intimately connected with Cornwall and while he may not have been one of these spirits, they were of his line. Not the sort I wish to have anything to do with. Not my path. not anything I wish to have in my life. So I politely declined and walked away.

And since then my path and learning has done nothing but speed up, but it a gentler, kinder direction, one full of heart and soul, that seeks to work with spirit, for it. Not to understand it and control it. But it does all make me wonder at the exact nature of my families connection with this place.... Why have we all been drawn here? and how strange that four generations of my family have all loved this place, hundreds of miles from where we lived....

For my part it is all about love and a connection to the land and to my ancestors. What drew them there I shall never know.