One of my favorite rambles in the world is the nine-mile Ozette loop on the west end of the Olympic Peninsula.

The wild Olympic coast is noteworthy for:
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_ My kind of place!

One of my favorite spots on the hike is a mid-sized sea stack perched in the intertidal zone. Somehow, the wave action (or maybe a stray trident strike from Neptune) has bored a perfect eyelet in the rock.

_ I’ve been intrigued by natural windows in stone for years. Somewhere- perhaps filtered through the bottom of a Guinness glass, I was once told that natural apertures like this serve as a portal into another realm- the haunts of the ‘good-folk’, the Sidhe, Faerie.

I believe that a sevenfold passage under a newly risen moon may have been part of the equation.

_ Incidentally- any online research into the concept of ‘Faerie’ pitches one into a bottomless potpourri-pit of new-age claptrap. Somehow, the adult market always gets it wrong. One needs to dive into George MacDonald or Mollie Hunter for the good stuff. (Heck- just read ‘The Haunted Mountain’- it’s a classic).

_ Needless to say, there’s a pretty active stew of mysticism bubbling under the Darwinian façade I wear while working my day job.  I pay full honor to quarks and Higgs bosons… but the idea of crawling through that Ozette eyelet under a rising moon still...  intrigues me

Opportunity has yet to present itself, mind you. There are probably only a couple days out of the year where that beach isn’t socked in.  The trifecta of a moonrise, clear skies, my presence seems like an elusive target.

_ So… I thought I’d do a little research to see what I was setting myself up for.

There’s an enormous body of information about ‘Holey’ stones on the net.

Many ancient examples are carved, and tend to be extremely enigmatic.  For instance, the Great Pyramids at Ghiza, contain a series of odd ‘star shafts’, tunnels with twin sealed ends and no apparent destination, with unfinished, graven windows in the stone that seals one end.

_ As another example, the Mnajdra temples on the island of Malta display a series of ‘oracle holes’… possibly used as portals for sacred communications (although one wonders if they might also have been rims for some archaic version of basketball).

Still- when it comes to natural apertures in stone, I’ve found nothing that directly mirrors my notion about passage into some alternate realm.

_ Certainly, there are multiple legends about ‘holey’ stones serving as some sort of scrying device, allowing one to ‘see into faerie’. I haven’t made it all the way through the ‘Spiderwick Chronicles’ (bad C.G.I. makes my teeth twinge)… but the ‘holey stone as a lens’ idea was certainly central to that flick. These are mostly depicted as small eyepieces, however, and it’s not clear whether a massive rock tunnel would function the same way (or if the viewer would need an eye that was proportioned to scale).

The Mên-an-Tol in Cornwall is perhaps the closest match I’ve found on the web. This ring-shaped artifact is said to be a natural feature (although it certainly looks carved).  At one time, people would pass their children through its eyelet- either three times or nine times. This was supposed to be a sovereign cure for rickets, scrofula, and other maladies with ghastly medieval names.

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More ominously, local legend suggests that a woman can impregnate herself by passing through the eyelet seven times backwards under a full moon. It’s not clear what the agent of this quickening might be. The Sidhe? Leda's swan cavorting amidst the silver gleam?

_ The whole question is complicated by the fact that numerous Celtic artifacts in the area include perforations as a suitable height for the ‘ritual insertion’ of certain appendages. See 'Ireland and the phallic conundrum' for more information than you probably wanted. ‘Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the scene’, as Mark Twain would say.

Overall- research suggests that a certain restraint might be in order.

_ Nonetheless, I’m considering the idea of incorporating passageways and eyelets into some of my fountains or lanterns.

 

And… if any of you have images or descriptions of natural passageways and windows from your own rambles, I’d love to hear about it.