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Gaian Rants | ||||||||
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Stone Circles - An Interview with Rob Roy | ||||||||
I’ve always been drawn to rocks, and felt their aliveness. I remember as a child wondering about the pain inflicted on granite cliffs in the process of being blasted apart to widen roads. I can still see the confused looks that came my way after I expressed concern about “hurting the rocks”. Today my home and garden are graced by rocks and crystals that spoke to me — or to a loved one. I’ll never forget looking out one day from the third floor balcony of my Montpelier, VT apartment to see Colin, then about 9, carrying a large pure white rock down the slope from the woods out back. “I knew you’d love it, Mom, so I had to bring it home,” he explained breathlessly. That rock is now in my garden, along with a very special, large smoky quartz crystal, a foot long and perfectly faceted, that my father found on one of his hikes into the Moats. The interview with Rob Roy was inspired by this love of rocks and my fascination with stone circles, which only increased following my first visit to Stonehenge in 1998. Rob, his wife Jaki, and son Darin live in a beautiful circular home constructed of cordwood in West Chazy, NY. He and Jaki founded the Earthwood Building School to teach cordwood masonry, underground construction, and megalithic stone construction. Workshops are held at Earthwood in West Chazy and elsewhere. Rob’’s books include Mortgage-Free! Radical Strategies for Home Ownership(Chelsea Green, 1998), The Sauna (Chelsea Green 1996), The Complete Book of Underground Houses (Sterling, 1994), The Complete Book of Cordwood Masonry Housebuilding (Sterling, 1992), and Stone Circles, A Modern Builder’s Guide to the Megalithic Revival (Chelsea Green, 1999). Rob also publishes a very limited edition newsletter, Club Meg News, that even has color photos hand-pasted in place. The issue I have, Winter Solstice 2002, documents the raising of Juliesteyna (J.), a 20 ton block of granite from the Rock of Ages quarry near Barre, Vermont. J. was raised without modern technogy, using tools and methods that would have been available to ancient stone circle builders. The process began in July 2002 at a Megalithic Workshop and was completed in October. The next project is to construct a trilithon like at Stonehenge — two standing stones with a cap stone across — by hand. And then Rob has visions of raising even larger stones, 40 tons or more. “Raising megaliths can become a compulsion, if not an obsession,” Rob explains. Patty Manning and I visited Earthwood in June. We took the ferry across Lake Champlain and drove the short distance to Murtagh Hill. It was a gray day and rained for much of the time we were there. But it didn’t dampen our enthusiasm and the stones were just as magnificent. G.V: Why did you start building stone circles? RR: It all started in 1966 when, at the age of 19, I traveled on the old SS United States to Southampton, England. It was night when I arrived so I took a taxi to Salisbury and got a room at an old inn. The next morning I hired a bicycle and cycled to Stonehenge. In those days you could wander right among the stones. It was really something! I wondered how stone age people could have raised those huge stones with no back hoes or cranes and such. I was hooked. Two years later, I moved to the Highlands of Scotland where I lived for most of seven years. During this time I visited many stone circles in England and Scotland. The question then moved from the how of it to “why”? G.V.: Stone circles are everywhere, too, not just in the British Isles. RR: Right. In the British Isles, about 1,500 circles were built between between 3000 B.C. and 1500 B.C., about one a year. Then the megalithic mantle passed to other parts of the world — India, Japan, Korea, Africa, the South Seas, and even North America. G.V.: What about old stone circles, as opposed to ancient ones? RR: The Druids in England were building stone circles throughout the 1800s. And in Wales stone circles were built for the Eisteddfod, which is a bardic sharing of stories and poems. In those days stone circles were built as follies. One amazing stone circle was built during a time of depression. People were paid something like a penny a stone to cart them up and some weighed five or six tons. If this circle had been a 5,000 years old instead of 180 years old it would be one of the great historical sites in the world, but because it’s so young people say, “Oh, that’s not a real stone circle, it’s a folly.” But it’s a fascinating, beautiful, spiritual place. And so few people know about it. You can go there and have a great time. G.V.: And today? RR: We are in the midst of a megalithic revival that began in the 70s and 80s. Today stone circles are being built at an amazing rate. G.V.: It seems to me that people are looking into building stone circles or raising some kind of monolith to deepen their relationship with the Earth. RR: Yes. In fact, I think people build stone circles today for much the same reasons the ancients did. As we know, ancient peoples were very interested in the sky. They were curious about the sun, the equinoxes and solstices, and in how the moon rises and sets. That’s a rather complicated 18.6 year cycle, and they knew that stuff. It was a very Earth-based religion. Ancient circles likely functioned as our churches and temples as well as meeting places, places of celebration and ceremony, where rites of passage took place. Archeological evidence also indicates that commerce took place at Stonehenge and other similar sites. G.V.: How does one go about finding the best site for a stone circle? RR: There are lots of different points of view on that. Some think it’s important to dowse the site first to find out if there are any intersecting ley lines, or positive or negative energy that you want to take advantage of or avoid. Others just put them where they think they ought to be, where they seem to fit. Ours was an architectural decision. We have these round buildings that are sort of in a circle, so the stone circle continues that. Plus we had space constraints. These two different approaches often turn out to be the same. Aesthetics are very important. It’s no coincidence that what looks best is best energetically. G.V.: Sacred sites are famous for their energy levels. Do you think the energy was there to begin with or did it come because of intention? RR: I’ve discussed this question a lot with various people. Ed Prynn, who builds wonderful stone circles in Cornwall, says that his stone circle has this energy because people come. He didn’t dowse because he had a small garden and the circle had to be where it is. But thousands of people have visited his circle and put their energy into it. One day he taught Jaki and I how to dowse. I was rather skeptical but Ed said, just ask where the edge of the stone circle is. So I approached these giant stones, eyes closed, blindfolded, and every time I got to the edge the sticks went down. Ed’s seen this hundreds of times. He told me to take the stick home to find the energy of my stone circle. And sure enough I did. Geomancer, Patrick McMannaway says, “You can dowse, you can do all kinds of things but ultimately you just ask the Spirit of Place where it should be and that will take care of it”. G.V.: How did you chose the stones for your circle? RR: All of the stones in our circle came from Murtagh Hill. Here’’s my approach. I take a pad and go out and catalog all the stones that are available to me. I travel around the hill, go to neighbors’ yards. If I see a likely stone, I ask mon to use it. Some people ask permission of the stones, too. I catalog all the pertinent information: height, weight and color, how deep the stone will have to go into the hole, and any special features about the shape. Some people design a stone circle and then try to find the stones to fit. That could be very expensive. So I find the stones first and then I ask how I can best make use of them. I get to know the stones very intimately, very personally. And then I design around what is available .G.V.: How deep are they buried? RR: That varies from stone to stone. Three of the stones in the circle out there (points to circle clearly visible through the windows) are standing on the surface. Nine of them are set in socket holes at varying depths depending upon weight of the stone. Safety is definitely a concern. The twenty ton stone there is about four and a half feet into the ground and the heavy part of her is in the ground. The stone splays out (shows model of how stone is set in ground). Probably seven of the twenty tons are underground. G.V.: How big is that compared to the stones at Stonehenge? RR: That’s on the scale of Stonehenge. G.V.: All the stones seem to have a personality. RR: They do and I mark that when I’m doing my catalog. G.V.: I noticed you refer to the stones as “she” or “he”. RR: Yeah. It kind of comes after a while. The workshop people determined by a variety of intuitions that the big one is a female stone and I go along with that. The new stone (that replaced the frost-cracked stone) in the stone circle is another female stone, Meg. Here’s an interesting thing that happened the day we put Meg in place. There were about 16 people doing the work. When we were done we made a circle outside the stones and did a spiral dance through the stones, and we laid our hands on Meg. There were some very spiritual people here and they organized a wonderful ceremony to welcome Meg into the circle. After the ceremony was complete we were all standing outside the stones looking into the center and suddenly it appeared to me that the stone circle swelled in size by twenty percent or more. I said out loud, the stone circle has just gotten a lot bigger. Does anyone else see this? And they all did! We were able to discuss it for a period of time and for the whole time the circle was bigger. And then it receded back to its normal size. We thought perhaps it was the other stones welcoming Meg into their number. G.V.: Like hugging the new person. RR: Right. This kind of thing doesn’t happen to me a lot. I’m a very right-brained person, but I’m glad it did. G.V.: Looking down at your stones from here, they have a dancing energy about them, like they are alive. RR: Well, did you see our stone family over there? (Points to a small grouping of three stones). They’ve been visiting with the ancestor, that’s the basalt stone, the black stone. And now they’re walking back to the activity in the Stone Circle. The children are following. G.V.: And you have 12 large standing stones. RR: Yes, 12 standing stones, 12 sitting stones, and 12 little fire pit stones. .G.V.: Why twelve stones? RR: I had heard that the North American Indian medicine wheels had twelve spokes in them. So I thought, I’m building in North America I ought to use that number. Wrong. Some medicine wheels have eleven or thirteen spokes. It had to do with star rises and sun rises and sets. Twelve is a nice number because you can get your four station stones and can subdivide it every 30 degrees for a stone. But coincidentally about 20 percent of the stone circles in Britain have twelve stones in them. It is the most common number there. In Cornwall 19 is a common number. G.V.: That’s a lot. RR: Some have even more. In Orkney, the Ring of Brodgar has 60 stones. And Avebury, who knows how many. There were 600 stones standing . . . G.V.: Avebury must have been huge. RR: If you walk around the top of the mound, you’ve walked a mile. There were two stone circles inside the major stone circle, then there were two avenues that had a lot of stones in them. One still does. I understand that in Avebury most of the stones were re-erected in the 1930s. The only ones that still remain from ancient times are the really big ones, the Swindon Stone and the Devil’s Chair. But most of the ones that you see when you walk around Avebury have been re-erected. There were two periods of stone destruction. In the late 1700s, Stone Killer John Robinson used Avebury as his personal quarry. He broke the stones with fire and water. A pub, Catherine’s Wheel was a pub (no longer there), was built largely from one 90 ton stone that Stone Killer John Robinson broke up. G.V.: What advice do you have for folks thinking about building their own stone circle? RR: You don’t need to build a huge megalithic circle. You can have a wonderful little garden circle or a fairy circle. I’ve seen window box circles made out of little tiny stones that are just magical. G.V.: I have a stone circle in the middle of my garden. When I had the fence put in and the space rototilled we discovered a ledge right in the middle of the garden. So I uncovered part of it and put a little statue there. Now I have a circular flower garden surrounded by special stones in the middle of the garden. RR: What you’ve just told me is that you’ve built a stone circle. It’s not a matter of kind, it’s a matter of degree. You do things for atmosphere and pleasure and beauty and fun. You can’t take yourself too seriously when you do this type of thing. | ||||||||
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