The Beacon Retreat Centre: A Magical Manifestation Story

The Magickal Story of Manifesting a Home

As we approach the season of Lammas, what our ancestors called First Harvest, I am inviting gratitude for the harvest in my own life, the plans and work that have been coming to fruition as we approach having been in our new (old) house here in Wales for a year (in September). It was a tough journey, between making the decision during the 2020 lockdown to accelerate our move out of London, selling both our houses in March 2021, and eventually picking up the keys for the Old Rectory, for that is the name of the house, in September 2021. ‘There's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip’ as they say, and we had many slips! So I’m so grateful to be reaping the harvest of the tenacity it took us to get here, and the hard work we have been putting in since then, in creating The Beacon Retreat Centre here.

But what I wanted to write about a little here is the magical story of us finding this house (or maybe, of it finding us)! For me, it really illustrates the power of getting really clear on what you want, and how it will feel to have it, and then surrendering to the Universe, or Source, or Goddess…. whatever you want to call it… to allow that feeling come to you.

And so, beginning at the beginning. We decided that we wanted to move out of London, but we weren’t sure where. We knew that we wanted someone with land, where I could set up a retreat centre and my partner would have space to indulge his passion of tinkering with old cars, and we both love renovating properties…. but where? My partner’s recent ancestry are Welsh, I have traced my maternal line to Pendle in Lancashire, and it’s really beautiful there, Scotland is also beautiful and we both have ancestral links there too, and I have a real soul link with Glastonbury….so we had a decision to make.

Now I am a huge fan of oracle cards - I have so many decks, I have lost count! So I drew a card from a deck I have that is based on the Goddess Brighde-Brigantia: as she is patron goddess of these islands, I thought it might be good to ask Her. I asked:

Where?

And the card I drew was:

I know now that this is the Malvinha goddess water fountain in Malvern, but when I saw it, what it said to me was:

A place where water comes out of the rock

Other messages that I received from divination were:

West

(not that helpful as we were living in south-east London, and most of the UK is west of there!) and

Dragons

So, it looked like we were looking for somewhere in the west, with some dragon connections, and where there was maybe a spring. Not that much to go on, so while my partner set about hunting on estate agent websites, I went a little more esoteric and asked the spirits of the house and the land to come and find us. The image that came to me when I visualised where we would live was somewhere with a house with mountains behind it, with land running down to water, maybe a river or a stream, and I was standing barefoot in a circle of women on the land. And there was the smell of mist over water. And I was really home, and doing the work that I was here in this life to do.

In October 2020, I saw an online estate agent advert for a big granite-built Victorian house in Wales that I thought looked amazing, but I dismissed it as too big and too expensive. Literally the next day, my partner showed me exactly the same house and told me we were going to see it! As my Mum says, the spirits of the house and the land realised I wasn’t listening, so they had to go to him instead!

I was going to Glastonbury for the weekend for some training, and to walk the labyrinth path on the Tor, so we arranged to see it after my trip to Glastonbury. While I was there, in fact just as I was stepping into the labyrinth path on the Tor, my phone randomly opened this very old photo of a page from Jo Jayson’s Sacred Feminine Book, from the chapter about Morgan Le Fey:

Morgan’s prayer and message

“This is where the magic lies…”

So we travelled on from Glastonbury and saw the house, and it really is amazing. But the even more amazing thing was that as I walked around to the back of the house, I saw this view, and the land off to the right of the photo runs off down to a stream. Beyond the house you can see the Brecon Beacons mountains.

I said to my partner, ‘Holy sh*t, this is it!’ It was exactly what I had envisioned.

A house with mountains behind it, with land running down to water

I completely forgot about the ‘water coming out of the rock’… but we put in a very cheeky offer, negotiated a little, and agreed on a price. We were buying the Old Rectory! But the magic does not stop there!

There is a tiny village close to the house called Sarnau, and my partner knew he had some historical family connections with the village, but no relatives living there now. Some family conversations later, and we discovered that, not only did he have family connections with the area, but that his great-great-uncle had built the Old Rectory! And that great-great-uncle’s name was

Richard Morgan

And the rector, Gilbert Harries, who commissioned the building in the 1850s, liked Morgan’s work so much that he invited him to move south with him. Morgan relocated his family and other relatives followed, to the town where my partner’s parents met, and worked on the renovation of the church where my partner’s parents were married.

So if it had not been for this house, my partner’s parents would not have met, and my partner would not have been born!

A little while later, as the transaction was progressing, we requested another visit, to look at the details you don’t necessarily take in when you first see a property. We were looking round, and the vendors said that there was something they had forgotten to tell us the first time we visited…

“We have a spring!”

But I kind of knew that ;)