The Braided River

This journey has been created as a very different pilgrimage from the rest of the Weavers’ Trail. 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 Cloister is open only to trail travellers 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. Here is a summary of this journey:

You undertake to travel the entire route of the Granite Cloister each month for thirteen months. The journey begins with stepping through the Threshold and completes each month with a visit to the Gathering Place. There are thirteen stone mothers sitting between these two journey points. As you walk this route you will be following the tracks of wolves.

During each month of your journey, you will be working with each of the thirteen stone mothers, who sit as waymarks along the route and serve to anchor your footsteps into the land. The time spent with each stone shrine and the nature of the rituals that are created is entirely for you to decide. What matters is that you work with a rhythm each month, so that the momentum of your cloistering builds and strengthens.

Your pilgrimage footsteps will return again and again to the same stone mothers in the cloister, and to their pages in the cloister online vessel where you will write your personal shards of granite prayer. Each loop around the cloister will enable you to reach deeper and explore further into the meaning and potential of that prayer.

Over the course of your pilgrimage, you will gather a garland of stone prayers, containing thirteen prayer shards for each of the thirteen stone mothers. By the end of your cloistering journey you will be carrying (physically or symbolically) a garland of 169 ritual prayer shards.

You are walking the Cloister in solitude and silence. This silence also applies to your offerings into the online vessel, which carry the formality of a ritual council and will become an unfurling record of your granite stone prayers. However, at the end of each cloister cycle you will reach the gathering place, where you may restore your energy, and converse freely and informally with your cloister sisters. This is an important feature of the cloistering experience.

The written content that gives guidance for the stone shrines is dynamic; it will shift and grow as this journey is unfurled on Dartmoor. In addition, you will be working with the mythic stories and peat prayers of the mûkthno wailî, ancestral marsh wolves. These texts are not reproduced within the cloister, so the Book of Hag (Peat) is an essential reading resource for this journey. The art portfolio 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 shrine tending that featured in the previous trail journeys, inside the Cloister you are entirely free to evolve this aspect of the work as you choose – or to keep your cloistering focused on less tangible and more symbolic representations of your journey: prayer, spell, invocation, ritual, 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.

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 your journey within the bone dreaming house will have prepared you well. However, you continue to be a member of the Soitlâ clan, where you will be able to integrate your journey into the monthly online circles, as well as receive and offer support and encouragement to other travellers.

This journey is being walked on the land by Carolyn every month from January 2026 onwards, with the first cloister cycle being completed in February 2027. But it does not matter when the pilgrimage is started; your pilgrimage steps will fall into a resonance with other cloistering sisters as you follow your own thirteen-month cycle.

If you are already paying the additional Soitlâ Clan subscription when you step into this journey, this will be suspended while you are travelling with the pilgrimage. After completing your first 13-month cloistering, you will continue to have full access to the Cloister journey for as long as you wish to work with it if you wish to do so – and your Soitlâ Clan subscription would apply again. You will also still have full access to your other trail journeys and all Braided River ingredients.