The Braided River

WALKING THE GRANITE CLOISTER

This journey has been created as a very different pilgrimage from the rest of the Weavers’ Trail. It is open only to women who have completed their Soitlâ footsteps and therefore all thirteen moons of the trail, and who have maintained an ongoing connection with the Soitlâ clan community. The Granite Cloister is offered as a vessel within which to deepen and expand your trail experience by undertaking a circling journey of contemplative footsteps over a dedicated thirteen-month period.

• The pilgrim undertakes to travel the entire route of the cloister each month for thirteen months. During every month of her journey she will be working with each of the thirteen stone shrines or stone mothers, who sit as waymarks along the route and anchor her footsteps into the land. The time spent with each stone mother and the nature of the rituals that are created are entirely for her to decide. What matters is that she works with a rhythm each month, so that the momentum of her cloistering builds and strengthens.
  
  
• The pilgrim will return again and again to the same stone shrines in the cloister, and to their pages in the cloister online vessel where she will write her personal shards of ritual granite prayer. Each loop around the cloister will enable her to reach deeper and explore further into the meaning and potential of these stone prayers. Over the course of her pilgrimage she will therefore create and gather a garland of thirteen prayer shards for each of the thirteen granite shrines. Thus, by the end of her cloistering journey, the pilgrim will be carrying (physically or symbolically), a garland of 169 ritual prayer shards.
  
  
• The pilgrim is walking the cloister in solitude and this silence also applies to her contributions within the online vessel. Cloister travellers will be requested not to write responses to each other’s stone prayers. However, at the end of each cloister cycle the pilgrim will reach the gathering place, where she may rest awhile, and converse freely and informally with her cloister sisters. Here she may gather her energy before beginning the next cycle of her cloister journey.
  
  
• The written content that gives guidance for each stone shrine is dynamic; it will shift and grow as this cloister journey unfurls on Dartmoor. In addition, the pilgrim will be working with the mythic stories and peat prayers of the mûkthno wailî, ancestral marsh women. These texts are not reproduced within the cloister vessel so the Book of Hag (Peat) will be an essential reading resource for this journey. Through the Heron’s Marsh is a beneficial addition since it offers the painting images and peat prayers in large format as a meditative tool.
  
  
• After the many ingredients of sacred craft and wild shrine tending that featured throughout the previous Weavers’ Trail journeys, the pilgrim is entirely free to evolve this aspect of the work as she chooses while travelling with the granite cloister – or to keep her cloistering focused on less tangible representations of her journey: prayer, spell, invocation, silence. The only physical tools recommended for this pilgrimage are a drum and a journal. The single crafted item that is suggested for this journey is a physical prayer cord or garland; a description of how to make this may be found at the threshold of the cloister trail.
  
  
• The pilgrim can represent her cloister journey in whatever way works best for her – symbolically, ritually, physically. This journey is being walked on the land by Carolyn every month from January 2026 onwards, with this first cloister cycle being completed in February 2027. But it does not matter when the pilgrimage is started; each pilgrim’s steps will fall into alignment with the other cloistering sisters as she follows her own thirteen-month cycle.
  
  
• In keeping with the solitary and contemplative nature of this journey there are no dedicated online sessions for cloistering pilgrims. The cloister is intended as an individual undertaking, for which her journey within the bone dreaming house will have prepared the pilgrim well. However, each sister continues to be a member of the Soitlâ clan, where she will be able to integrate her journey into the monthly online circles, as well as receive and offer support, encouragement and inspiration.
  
  

All the ingredients of the Weavers’ Trail and individual journey archives remain open to travellers entering the Granite Cloister.