Another trip to Itchen woods but this time we wanted to walk the old drove route that runs to Alresford, an ancient trackway and which allowed farmers to bring their stock to market. The images below show a walking route around these old droves. Some drove roads were Romano-British and some medieval. I know that the Dongas, the holloways coming into Winchester behind St. Catherine’s hill were ancient droves, but I don’t know how old this Alresford drove is.

It was a sunny-ish day, with a chill wind when the sun went in, but we began the walk not intending to do any energy work at all. We were simply going for a walk.

Or so we thought.

It wasn’t long before we passed, on our left, an old oak tree. Chris told me that on his previous walk here, he had noticed this tree too. That’s often how they call you. You notice them. They stand out from the crowd. You see the wood for the trees.

Naturally, we went to check it out.

Almost immediately, I had the impulse to walk around it anti-clockwise. A tree, or a site, will invite you to walk around it. It’s like a pull you can’t ignore. It does not come from your head but from your feeling. So, I walked around it three times. There was a dark sense here, a deeper energy, like we had stepped into some other space which was not as bright as the one we had just left. This was not familiar.

We then received the invitation to connect with the Heartwood symbol, a symbol both Malia and I received from a pine tree in Micheldever woods last October (2024). This symbol connects you to the heartwood of a tree, a heart to heart connection. I felt the impulse to raise my arms, as if I was a tree with branches. Chris followed suit. This brought our energy into the upper branches of the tree, as though we too were trees with our branches raised to the sky. The consciousness of a tree is in its branches and leaves, the crown of the tree. Raising our arms felt like we were greeting the tree on its level.

I often find this with trees. The energy shoots upwards to connect with it. The trunk of a tree is like our body but we think with our heads. The tree does too. It communicates through its branches and leaves. The wind moving in them is their way of telling us what they want us to know. But equally, we can sense their energy, once we become sensitive to them. They can feed us through through their trunks, as energetic sap, sharing their vitality with us.

This tree was like an sleepy man. (I’m surrounded by them). Chris received his customary tree-hug from the tree. I was given the instruction that now was time to make an essence. This was our first oak essence! I placed it on the ground between the roots.

The energy came down from the leaves and branches, through the trunk and flowed like a mini-waterfall into the bottle. It was sap but was the energy of the oak funneling down into the water in the bottle through the heartwood. It felt like an Enid Blyton story, and the Magic Faraway Tree story. The branches reach into other dimensions, or spheres, of reality and wisdom, and bring information from those dimensions down to our physical reality. Pulling it into this dimension, yet, still solidly rooted, solidly anchored in those dimensions.

Then, to our surprise, we were instructed to leave the essence bottle where it was, and to prepare for an attunement. So much energy came in, then I was given a symbol. This was to do with the oak tree and its interdimensionality and the ability to connect with the spheres. We held our arms up again, becoming the tree, our arms becoming branches, our bodies becoming tree trunks, heads and shoulders linking with the leaves and upper branches. Our fingers were the tiny twigs on the end of the smaller branches. When the wind blew, our arms waved like the branches, flowing with the flows of the wind. Then, when the wind stopped, the branches and leaves, our arms were still.

The energy flowed down from the branches until we were aware of our body as a tree-trunk and we brought our attention to the body/trunk where all the information from the crown of the tree flowed through the heart of the tree, to our hearts. Giving our hearts strength, being solidly anchored an rooted in tree-ness. I became aware that the entire tree was one energy, yet each part of the tree, its roots, its trunk, its branches and leaves play a different part. This energy of interconnectedness was the energy being anchored into our consciousness.

The strength of the tree was now our strength. We now had the ability to connect to the consciousness of the tree at its branches, its trunk and its roots, each part having a different function yet being part of the whole. Upper, middle and lower worlds. There is wisdom in each layer. (This became evident a few weeks later when we connected to the lower world). This is not the same as the three worlds of shamanic wisdom but about the energetic dimensions of trees. Although I think it is another aspect of it, too. This attunement gives you access to these three levels energetically.

The body played the same roles. The feet stand firmly on the earth; the body holds you strong, and holds, and supports the upper levels of the branches and the leaves. The upper branches filter knowledge and awareness from the collective unconscious, the thinking mind of the earth, bringing it down to earth where it then is anchored as memory. Like seaweed in the sea, it filters out what is not needed. Only bringing what is necessary down into physical life, so the darker aspects of the collective are not brought into being. All the rage and anger and denser emotions are filtered out. Only the useful information will be brought to earth and manifested.

All of this information and energy flowed into the essence, just as it flowed into us.

The energy spoke of taking time, allowing things to flow through, like the tree does. It doesn’t rush out to meet anything, but allows things to come to it, just as we did when we found it. The energy of flow was like harnessing the wind and rooting it in the earth, and no matter how much wind there was, it was always manageable. The oak has the strength to hold itself. Holding the balance. Allowing itself, and by extension us, to let that energy flow through.

Next, after all this, a gold crown was placed around Chris’s head, one around mine and one around the neck of the essence bottle. All three of us received these energy activations. It connected us to hold the power and communication from the crown of the tree and to being a channel for this power, but not holding onto it in the way humans hold onto it, but allowing it to move through us so we can do what is needed in the moment. With the wisdom of the Oak.

I then had to gift something to the tree, so I had some hazelnuts in my camera bag, (because that’s where you keep them, right?) and when I took the essence bottle up, I planted the hazelnut in its place. Just as Chris had been told, but we’d forgotten, by the Hawthorn on Magdalene Down. The entities of the trees know way more than we do. He had also been shown the crown in the royal oak. But we had no idea that we were about to meet one.

We walked on and came to another oak that felt like a very old lady. And she was old, but so wise. Once again, we were invited to make the heartwood connection with her, so we did as we were bid. Once we had made this connection, she told us to change position and face her, just as the Pines at Fleming Park had taught us to do, so the symbol came out the back of the heart chakra. And, just as the other oak had taught us only moments before, we were instructed to replicate what we had experienced with it. We raised our arms and became the energy of the trees, feeling the energy as wind in our branches and leaves. This moving air energy then flowed down through our fingers, our arms and into our body and into our roots.

Again, I had to put the essence bottle at her roots, and the feminine oak wisdom flowed down through this beautiful, old feminine oak tree and into the essence, filling the bottle with her wise solidity. There was something about Spring in this energy, specifically April and May, which is when we did this (26th May 2025). Her wisdom was the wisdom of age, old, still, knowing, trusting, having the experience of age. And she then placed her feminine crown of hawthorn and blackthorn around the neck of the bottle.

I felt an impulse to place my forehead against her bark, making a third eye connection. The third act in the sequence of this tree-connection. Chris was receiving info about the tree and how it never really dies because the acorns she sheds are part of her. They continue her life in another form. Then I had to wrap my arms around the tree, which is not my thing at all! I did check to make sure there was no-one else about it first. But this was a third eye attunement, a surrender somehow to not worrying about what she looks like. Her branches are bare, she is a haggard old lady, but she is still strong, majestic alive.

A beam of light came from the heartwood and entered our third eye where she then planted an acorn. Was this part of what Chris meant? All our chakras were attuned to her, through the third eye, and then out through the base into the earth. She did the same with the essence. Each tree gave its own activation, but there was a definite sequence to them. I gifted a hazelnut to this tree, burying it beneath where I had removed the essence bottle.

This activation was to the male wisdom of the oak and to the female wisdom. Each was distinct and yet they were paired. Part of each other. It was a very lovely activation and one I am looking forward to sharing.