by AL D

In January 2006, a British practitioner known as AL D posted to alt.religion.shamanism a first-hand account of visiting a wood on an unnamed hill in the county of Dorset, in the South of England. He had gone there with a lady friend and an elderly walker who knew the county's hidden places — a man with a lifetime of walking and an interest in esoteric things. The hill, with its flat top and steep sides, bore the hallmarks of an ancient Celtic hill-fort, and AL D believed it had been the site of a massacre, the memory of which had soaked into the roots of the enormous, gnarled beech trees covering its slopes. He saw cruciform shapes in the trunks and branches. He heard a single gust of wind that seemed to speak. He offered seeds to the ground and said a prayer before leaving.

AL D was a regular contributor to alt.religion.shamanism in the mid-2000s, writing with practical sensitivity about land spirits and place-perception — a tradition with deep roots in British and Northern European shamanism. This account is notable for its specificity (the county of Dorset, the town of Dorchester and its bloody history under Judge Jeffreys, the 17th-century Bloody Assizes) and for its careful attention to the phenomenology of what he was experiencing: not asserting what the spirits "are," but describing precisely what he perceived and how it felt. The writing is vivid, literary, and honest.

Here is a true story that might be of interest to shamans, spiritists and mystics.

Today, Sunday 8th January, I visited one of the most remarkable natural places I have ever experienced. It is a certain wood on a certain hill in the county of Dorset in the South of England.

I was at the house of a lady friend this morning. While I was there, she invited another friend of hers to join us: an elderly gentleman. He does a lot of walking throughout the county, and has done for most of his life. There are very few footpaths and hidden places of historical interest in this part of England that he doesn't know about. He is also interested in esoteric things, and that's one thing all three of us have in common.

After he arrived, we got into a conversation about the messages one can glean from the activities of animals. We talked about the telepathic abilities of cats. We talked about lizards, frogs, crows and other birds. We talked about the amazing instincts demonstrated by various pets who have found their way home after having been lost thousands of miles away.

During the discussion, the elder gent mentioned a wood he knew about, not far from my friend's house, where there are rumours of strange energies and powerful spirits and ominous foreboding.

My friend suggested we go for a drive to the vicinity of those woods and explore on foot. And that is what we did. As we approached the great hill on which the wood is located, it started to snow. This was a surprise; it was the first snow I had seen that year.

We parked the car at a gate to a field where one can gain entry to the natural footpaths that lead up the strange hill and its even stranger woods. As we walked up the hill and entered the woods, I immediately recognised that this was no ordinary place. The atmosphere was unique and remarkable. For a start, there was no birdsong — whatsoever. Just an eerie silence.

I am different from most people in that I am aware of what many people call land spirits. I can sense the spirit of a place: the intangible aura or character that a place emanates. I have never come to any definite conclusion about what exactly I am picking up. Whether it is the spirits of people who have lived at the place in the past and are still lingering for one reason or another, or whether it is psychometric vibrations: the thought forms that a place has become charged with — I just don't know. But as an example, there is a town in this county called Dorchester. Even as a small child, I was always aware of a sinister atmosphere in that town. It was later in life that I learned of the town's history of terrible injustices of centuries past. People were burned at the stake, hundreds of townspeople were hanged for crimes as trivial as stealing a loaf of bread. It was also the home of the infamous Judge Jeffreys, the bloodiest Lord Chief Justice in British History, who orchestrated the "Bloody Assizes", sending hundreds of prisoners to be hung, drawn and quartered after the Monmouth Rebellion in the 17th Century.

But let's return to the hill.

As we entered the wood at the foot of the hill, I did something I often do when visiting natural places: I attempted to make peace with the place, speaking to the spirits of the place and making an offering to the ground of a few seeds or a piece of bread. However, in view of the total lack of birdsong, I started to wonder what sort of peace, if any, would be found in this unusual place. As we walked up the wooded hill, the strange character of the trees became immediately apparent. We seemed to be entering a scene from fantasy fiction: a place of forest magic unlike any I have ever imagined. I could see colossal and misshapen trees up ahead: great beech trees of the most unusual forms: multiple powerful trunks branching upwards from great tortuous, gnarled root systems visible above ground level. These were not everyday trees; many were unusually large. Many were very unusual in form, as if throughout their lives, they had been somehow tormented. As we made our way up the muddy path in the snow, the trees became increasingly freakish to behold. I couldn't help but stop and marvel at each one as we passed it — and I became aware that such bizarre root and trunk formations could be nature trying to say something. The statement seemed to be one of powerful unrest.

It seemed like we were entering another world; I saw one tree trunk with the strangest horizontal ripples, reminding me of a great sea serpent. It seemed utterly out of place. Everywhere I looked, I started to see human arms and legs in the crooked stumps of branches and roots. This was clearly not a place for anyone with a weak disposition and a vivid imagination.

Then I saw it. About 25 feet from where I stood, there was a stump of a tree sticking up out of a bank. Its upper part was in the exact shape of a human head. It was so detailed and accurate in formation that I could have been looking at a real human head that had been covered with a fine layer of lichen and moss, and it was exactly life size. It was so perfect that I could only speculate that I was looking at a human spirit finding expression through the tree. I could even see what kind of headgear the man was wearing: a cloth kerchief, tied at the back, as seen on many sea-faring men of the 18th century. I could even estimate his age: early to mid 30s. Below the head, I could see shoulders, and from the shoulders, arms protruded out horizontally: branches that had been broken off years ago. I was looking at nothing other than a man being crucified.

It dawned on me that we were entering a place where a terrible event had occurred — probably hundreds of years ago. On exploring further, I realised that the hill is quite high, and has an unusual flat top and very steep sides, and from the summit you can see for miles in every direction: it would almost certainly have been used as a hill fort in Celtic times and earlier. I believe it must have been the site of a massacre. The trees were now giving expression to that massacre and the terrible cruelties that took place on that hill — perhaps because their roots intermingle with the remains of that cruel event. We walked up further and I saw another tree whose strange trunk formation reminded me instantly of a girl being crucified, naked, in an "X" form, with arms and legs splayed out.

I saw some strange things in that wood: trees with the most grotesque branches I have ever seen — short branches with elbow-like joints, sprouting hundreds of tiny twigs from each elbow-joint. I saw the top half of a large tree standing upside-down, as if a giant had broken it off at the trunk and hurled it against the ground, branches first. We saw the gaping mouths of monsters in great broken-off, hollow branches. The whole scene was made all the more strange by the thin carpet of snow which seemed to accentuate the darkness and mighty power within these trees. On one occasion, as we were leaving the flat top of the hill, I heard a single, isolated gust of wind blow through the many branches overhead. Somehow it seemed like the voice of a great spirit. A chill went up my spine, because it seemed to say something to the three of us as we started to head back towards the way out. I asked my companions if they had noticed it. Neither of them had, but the elderly gent remarked that this was certainly a "power place."

I do not think there would be many people who would remain sane if they were forced to spend a night there alone, tied to a tree so they couldn't leave. The presences there would be just too alive, too strange and too terrifying to handle. There is also an awful feeling of loneliness there — as if the place has been forsaken by the living, loving world. I'd say we had walked through a forest of tormented souls, still bound to that place, and only able to express themselves to humanity, through the trees they now inhabit.

This is surely one of England's most enchanted and spiritually alive woods. I said a prayer to bring down some peace to that place and we left that hill with some sense of relief and returned to civilisation.

But none of us will ever forget.

Colophon

Written by AL D, a British practitioner, and posted to alt.religion.shamanism on 8 January 2006. Message-ID: [email protected]. AL D was a regular contributor to the group, writing from a British Isles perspective on land spirits, place-perception, and the shamanic reading of natural environments. The location of the hill and wood is not named in the original post.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

🌲