The Oldest Calendar

The 1st of May is Beltane.

The word comes from the Gaelic Bealtaine — often translated as the bright fire, the shining fire. For thousands of years, communities across Ireland, Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man marked this day as the formal turning point of the year. The midpoint between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice. The moment winter was declared over, and summer was invited in. Not as a feeling. As a fact.

Communities took this seriously in ways we’ve largely lost the language for. On Beltane Eve, every hearth fire in the village was extinguished. Every one. The community sat together in the dark. Then, on a hilltop or in a forest clearing, a single sacred fire was kindled — the neid fire — and from that one flame, every household came forward to relight their own.

For one night, an entire community held together by a single source of light.

I find that genuinely moving. We’re so close to major conurbations here — London is little more than an hour away — but when you come out into Wychwood, it’s like you’re taken to another world. I think that’s what those ancient communities understood. That the woodland, and the fire, and the dark between them, could take you somewhere your ordinary life couldn’t reach.

The Leap

Then they jumped.

People leapt over the Beltane fire. Not as spectacle, as intention. To leap the fire was to take the flame inside yourself. The quality of it. The energy of summer, of growth, of beginning. The ancient understanding of fertility was broader than the biological. It was creative fertility. New projects. New thinking. The things you want to bring into being.

Couples leapt together as a pledge — hands held, a commitment made in front of the community and the fire, one of the oldest forms of marriage vows we know of. But individuals leapt alone, too. Carrying their intentions to the fire — the work they wanted to begin, the things they wanted the summer to carry forward.

Wishes brought to the bright fire, believed to take hold in the world.

When I first experienced this, something clicked. Because this is exactly what the post-dream brain state does — the one we’re trying to guide people towards here. When you’ve transitioned out of that high-focus, high-alert place, when the senses have been gently brought down to something slower — that’s when the real thinking happens. That’s when you know what you actually want. That’s when you can say it.

The Beltane leap is that moment made into ritual. You come to the fire carrying what you want to bring into being. You say it out loud. You step across.

I think it might be one of the earliest recorded creative rituals in human history.

What This Forest Has Seen

Wychwood is one of the oldest ancient woodlands in England. The oaks here were old when the Beltane tradition was young.

I didn’t know this when I chose to build here. I came to Wychwood because of what it does — what I felt it doing to me the first time I walked it. There’s something really calming about being in these woods. You hear the birdsong in the background. You watch the sun rise and set coming through the trees. The ancient canopy creates something I haven’t found anywhere else, and I’ve spent a long time trying to understand why.

I think now it’s the accumulated weight of it. The depth of it. Every May Day, every autumn, every winter, and spring, these trees have stood through, numbered in the thousands.

Whatever was lit in clearings like these, whatever was leapt over, whatever was carried to the fire — this forest received it. All of it, down the centuries. And it’s still here.

When you arrive, the fire in your treehouse is laid and ready — wood stacked, kindling set. The lighting is yours. That first moment when the stove takes, the smell of it filling the room, the light changing — it belongs to you. And if you want something larger, something older-feeling, the fire pit in The Glade is there for the evening. Open sky, ancient woodland all around, a fire as big as the occasion needs.

I’ve stopped thinking of any of this as purely practical. There’s a fire waiting to be lit in ancient woodland that has been marking this moment for longer than we can count.

What you do with it is yours.