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Autumn Equinox: The Druid Order, Primrose Hill – 2007

Autumn Equinox: The Druid Order: The Autumn Equinox was on September 23 in 2007, and as usual The Druid Order celebrated in with their ritual on Primrose Hill and I went to photograph it.

My photographs show the event from the preparations including a brief practice for a few on the hill top in normal clothing, and then their robing and preparation for the march up the hill and the various stages of the ceremony.

I had another event to attend elsewhere and had to rush off before they ended the event with a procession back down the hill, which I did photograph in other years. But I was on my way to a guided walk around ‘London Street Women’, statues on the streets of the City – you can also see pictures of them on My London Diary.

In this post I’ll stick with the Druids. I photographed The Druid Order both in the autumn at Primrose Hill and at Tower Hill for the Spring Equinox on quite a few occasions and in some I give a fairly detailed account of their history (they began early last century) and the more ancient traditions as well as of the various stages in the ceremonies.

Back in September 2007 my account was rather brief but earlier in the year I had written captions to the pictures of the similar Spring celebration which explained what I thought was happening at each stage.

Here is the piece I posted on the September 2007 page with the usual minor corrections:

The Druid Order has three public ceremonies each year, celebrating the Spring Equinox at Tower Hill, Summer Solstice at Stonehenge and Autumn Equinox (Alban Elued) at Primrose Hill.

I got there rather early, and found quite a few people enjoying the hill in their own way – including those who were running up it as well as others merely enjoying the panoramic view over london, as well as a group of half a dozen people in normal clothes practising a simple ritual of Peace To The Four Corners.

At least this told me I was in the right place, and I soon spotted a larger group gathering in under the trees a short distance away.

The ceremony followed the same pattern as in the spring, with a few minor differences.

I did have a small surprise, when i came across a rival druid, Jay The Taylor, the Druid of Wormwood Scrubs, part of the Loose Association Of Druids, who had come to celebrate the event in the Hawthorn Grove (not a feature marked on my map) and seemed surprised to see the other druids.

There are around 80 pictures from Primrose Hill on My London Diary, presented there in the order in which I took them, at Autumn Equinox – The Druid Order.

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All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
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Spring Time for Druids – 2007

Spring Time for Druids: in 2007 the Spring Equinox was on 21 March, though I think in most years it is a few hours earlier on the 20th. Yesterday, in 2025 it apparently came at 9.01am, though for me it had come around ten days earlier when a patch of my garden was deep in flowering crocuses (or crocus or croci.) And for weather forecasters Spring starts on March 1st.

Later in the day The Druid Order will have come out at 12 noon yesterday at Tower Hill Terrace, but I didn’t feel moved to go to join them. I photographed their ceremonies on several years, both there and at the Autumn Equinox on Primrose Hill, and also published some more detailed reports (having done some research in the Mount Haemus lectures and other sources) with some of my pictures of later events.

The pictures here are from March 21st 2007, the first time I had attended a Druid ceremony and I then knew very little about them, and my comments on My London Diary perhaps reflect this. But the pictures I made were rather similar to those I made in later years and as with some other events I no longer feel I have anything new to say and no longer go.

I think druids might say their ceremonies were timeless, and certainly The Druid Order still use the order of service which they invented and printed aproaching a hundred years ago and I think the banners they carry and the other items used have a similar inter-war history. But I understand they only began this anunual event at Tower Hill in 1956.

We have very little real evidence of the druids of the distant past in our country, though I think their ceremonies may well have involved rather more bloodthirsty sacrifices than the current rather anodyne public festivities.

But here are some of my thoughts from this first encounter back in 2007:

It was in some ways impressive, with their white robes, but rather to staid and measured for my taste. Celebrations need to be done with much more joy. This had more the feeling of a funeral – despite the white dress.

There was an air of dusty scholarship, of dull Victorian scribes trying to major on gravitas in the Order of Service, and a sermon of mumbled though possibly worthy boredom. Hard to imagine William Blake as chief druid of this tribe, I’m sure they must have done things differently in his days.

I’m not sure how far back these celebrations go at Tower Hill. Modern Druidry revived in the eighteenth century, partly as archaeologists re-discovered sites such as Stonehenge and Avebury and asked themselves what went on there. What relationship the rites they came up with bear to those of pre-Christian times is impossible to know (though one suspects rather little.)

My pictures on My London Diary (link at bottom of this post) are in the order they were taken and together with the captions give a fairly detailed account of the event, although I think I did it a little better in some later years.

William Blake was among a long list named in the ceremony as a former druid. According to the article A Note on William Blake and the Druids of Primrose Hill there is no evidence for the claims that William Blake was a druid or chief druid, although he may have known some who did take part the annual rituals on the hill which were begun by some Welsh Bards in 1792 claiming that their Bardic traditions “had preserved the true esoteric lore of the Druids.”

*Back inside the church hall, where I left them and went in search of a cup of tea.*

In fact Blake commented negatively on Druids in his writing and images, particularly objecting “to reported Druid practices of ritual human sacrifice, and forced submission to priestly rites and rituals.“

More pictures and captions from the 2007 The Druid Order: Spring Equinox on My London Diary

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All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
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Autumn Equinox & Druids

Autumn Equinox & Druids: In 2023 the Autumn Equinox is at 6.50am Greenwich Mean Time on 23rd September (7.50am British Summer Time.) The exact timing timing is when the sun’s path crosses the Equator and it happens at slightly different time each year between the 21st and 24th of September, though mainly on the 22nd or 23rd.

In 2009 the Equinox was at 10.19pm BST on September 22nd, and nine hours earlier I was photographing the Druid Order celebrating the event with their annual ceremony at Primrose Hill in London.

I’ve photographed the Druid Order on a number of occasions both at Primrose Hill and also for the Spring Solstice at Tower Hill in March. I think 2009 was my first visit to the autumn ceremony and probably my best attempt to cover it as a whole, though I did take one or two striking images in a later year.

The ceremony follows closely the pattern laid out possibly a hundred years ago. The Druid Order dates from around 1909 or 1912, though it claims to be a continuation of much older druidry. You can read more about its founder in a lecture by Dr Adam Stout.

All we know about the ancient druids who worshipped in these islands for thousands of years before the Romans came is from their monumental structures such as Stonehenge and the brief and probably rather biased comments of Roman historians which described them as wise but bloodthirsty and given to human sacrifice, staining the altars of Angelsey with blood.

As I commented on My London Diary, “Fortunately today the members of The Druid Order are peace loving. free-thinking and rather photogenic in their white robes, and their main aim is to develop themselves through being rather than through intellectual learning.”

My post on My London Diary describes the Alban Elued (Autumn Equinox) ceremony in some detail both through the text and my photographs, and I won’t repeat myself here. You can read various versions of the ceremony on-line (also called Alban Elfed) and also watch a 49 minute video on the Druid Order website which also has a reflection on the Autumn Equinox.

Before the ceremony I also photographed a memorial plaque to Iolo Morganwg (1747-1826) unveiled in June 2009 at the top of the hill which had been unveiled earlier in the year, marking the site of the first meeting of the Gorsedd of the Bards of the Isle of Britain on Midsummer’s day 1792.

The start of the 18th century saw a revival of interest in druidry by people including Irish freethinker and philosopher John Toland (1670-1722). Iolo Morganwg (1747-1826) invented descriptions of Druid ceremonies and added these, together with some of his poems, into the translations he made of medieval Welsh manuscripts. He also introduced the ‘Awen’ symbol with its three ‘rays’ still used by the Druid Order.

The Druid Order are not the only druids who celebrate the Autumn Equinox on Primrose Hill. A little further west down the hill in a small hawthorn grove you may see the celebration of a smaller group of the Loose Association of Druids of Primrose Hill.

More at Autumn Equinox: Druids at Primrose Hill.

Spring Equinox

I’m not sure how Druids will be celebrating this year’s Spring Equinox on today, March 20th, but for several years I went to photograph the annual celebration at noon at Tower Hill. But after I’d photographed the event several times I decided there seemed to be very little more I could say about it and it was no longer something I felt a need to cover.

Spring comes every year, and we celebrate it in different ways, and I think that other festivals around this time of year, including St Patrick’s Day and Easter all owe something to this Druidic festival of new life. Before Julius Caesar updated the Roman calendar a date around the Equinox was often chosen to celebrate the New Year, and this lives on in our names for the months of September and October, the seventh and eight months of a year starting in March. In London we can join with the Kurds in celebrating their New Year, Newroz, at the Equinox.

Druids claim to have a long history but we know very little about how the ancient inhabitants of our country actually celebrated, though clearly they did mark the solstices and equinoxes as sites such as Stonehenge attest. But there is no record of exactly what they did and what they believed, and traditional Druidic ceremonies are a relatively modern creation.

Wikipedia has a lengthy article on modern Druidry, which includes the following:

Many forms of modern Druidry are modern Pagan religions, although most of the earliest modern Druids identified as Christians. Originating in Britain during the 18th century, Druidry was originally a cultural movement, and only gained religious or spiritual connotations later in the 19th century.
Druidry (modern)

The oldest remaining of these modern druidic groups is the Ancient Order of Druids founded in 1781. The public ceremonies at Tower Hill and for the Autum equinox at Primrose Hill are by The Druid Order, founded in1909 by George Watson MacGregor Reid but claiming lineage from earlier Druids. They have apparently also been known as The Ancient Druid Order, An Druidh Uileach Braithreachas, and The British Circle of the Universal Bond. Their public rituals have now been carried on for over a century.

On My London Diary you can see the pictures I took in the various years and in each report I’ve posted the images in chronological order and I try to give my interpretation of the various aspects of the ceremony. But mine is an outsider’s view and you can also find out more from their web site.

The Druids process away to a nearby hall at the end of the ceremony. Most years they have used the church next door, but one year this was not available and they had to go a short distance through the city, crossing the road through an underpass.

You can see my pictures and text from the Spring Equinox ceremonies in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2014 on My London Diary – and if you look on some of the October pages – or use the search on the site – there are also pictures from the Autumn Equinox at Primrose Hill.