Spiritual Stone-Bothering School

The School unfolds in three phases:

Phase 1 – Preparation online
Three live Zoom sessions before the residential week, each on a Monday evening from 7.00–9.00 pm (UK time):

• Monday 18 January 2027

• Monday 1 February 2027

• Monday 15 February 2027

Phase 2 – Residential intensive on Lindisfarne
Friday 26 March – Friday 2 April 2027

Phase 3 – Integration online
One full online integration day after the residential week:

• Saturday 24 April 2027

For the residential week we will be based at Fenham Farm, in beautifully renovated retreat accommodation near Holy Island. All participant rooms are ensuite, and the house offers generous communal space, a large downstairs activity area for workshops and group work, and an upstairs lounge with views towards Holy Island.

The accommodation is light-filled, spacious, and purpose-designed for residential groups, offering a comfortable and peaceful base for both study and rest. There is also a large and well-equipped self-catering kitchen, and the venue is very well situated for access to Lindisfarne and the surrounding sacred landscape.

At present, the week is offered on a self-catering basis. Further practical details will follow.

Participants will normally make their own way to the venue. Travel guidance and coordination help will be offered nearer the time.

Spiritual Stone-Bothering is a practice of meeting stones, sacred sites, and landscapes with attentiveness, care, and trained perception — not as dead objects, but as presences that can speak back into our inner life.

It is rooted in Goethean and phenomenological perception, informed by the Western Mysteries and years of work at sacred sites, and shaped as an experiential, grounded, and non-dogmatic path. It is less about consuming places and more about entering into relationship with them.

This School is for people who want not just inspiration, but formation: a real path of training through landscape, observation, contemplation, conversation, and shared practice.

The online preparation sessions help participants arrive inwardly, sharpen their questions, and awaken a more conscious capacity for perception before setting foot on Lindisfarne.

During the residential week, we gather in the landscape of St Cuthbert, St Aidan, and the northern Celtic Christian stream for walking, contemplation, shared observation, mindful activity, and evening seminar work.

Lindisfarne has often been called the “Iona of the East”: a threshold place of sea, wind, prayer, memory, and stone. Through quiet walks, contemplative practice, perception-based exercises, and historical-spiritual orientation, we seek to enter the island and its wider landscape with greater attentiveness and depth.

The wider programme includes visits to St Cuthbert’s Cave, remarkable Neolithic cup-and-ring rock art, the stone circle of the Duddo Five Stones, a boat trip to the bird islands of the Farne Islands, and other sacred places in the surrounding region.

The integration day is for digestion, further individual work, and carrying the experience back into everyday life in a fruitful and grounded way.

The full price for the Spiritual Stone-Bothering School, including the online preparation sessions, the Lindisfarne residential intensive, and the full online integration day afterwards, is:

• £1,300 per person in a twin/double room

• £1,700 in a single room

Places are limited to a small cohort of 8–9 participants, depending on rooming and final arrangements.

This School may be for you if:

• you feel drawn to sacred landscapes, holy islands, standing stones, old chapels, and places of pilgrimage, but are tired of shallow spiritual tourism

• you want a more exact, intelligent, and disciplined way of approaching place and mystery

• you work in education, ecology, healing, land-based practice, community, or the arts, and sense that outer work needs a deeper inner ground

• you come from Goethean, anthroposophical, contemplative, or related backgrounds and want to bring that work into real places

• you long for a carefully held and transformative encounter with landscape, mystery, and your own path in the company of a small group