Carrot and Coals: Vision-Quest…

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…The key to Arbor Low is to regard the stones as always having been laid flat.

That way they immediately begin to speak and the first thing they say has to do with time.

Wen ‘got’ a clock-face and I ‘got’ a Zodiac.

There are a number of alleged terrestrial Zodiacs in Albion the most famous being in Glastonbury and it would be very tempting to try and link that in with the twelve hides granted to St Joseph of Arimathea by Arviragus and his cohorts, whoever they may be.

Cohorts, here, may not be a strictly accurate term.

Three pagan kings donated the hides according to one legend and the names and identities of the other two pagan kings’ starts to assume intriguing possibilities when once we learn that Arviragus held Cadbury Castle, hill fort and reputed site of Camelot and visible from Glastonbury Tor at about a distance that we have come to regard as a seven league stride.

Strides and legendary figures in the landscape appear to have an affinity…

There is a Robin Hood’s Stride and a King Arthur’s Stride to name but two and when these characters strode in that way it could easily have been a seven-league-step that they took…

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…Hides were originally coverings.

Skin coverings.

Animal skins.

They only later became partitions of land.

As such it is not too much of a stretch of the imagination to consider some of the stones at Arbor Low in the light of the shapes mapped out in the Landscape by this and other Zodiacs.

Nor is it too much of a stretch to regard some of the stones at Arbor Low as microcosmic land masses.

There is a tradition in these Isles that describes the other-worldly journey as a series of islands or land-locked cities and an island or a land-locked city is a good metaphor for a state of mind, or a state of consciousness.

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“But what would they do here?”

“You mean, how would they work it?”

“Yes!”

“They wrapped themselves in animal hides and ‘slept’ or ‘vision-quested’ on the stones.”…

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