About two weeks before the Spring Equinox, 1999, I was passed word that Kevin Carlyon, self-proclaimed King of the British White Witches, was to be performing a fertility ritual at Uffington White Horse on the Equinox Sunday. That word originally came from an article in the Oxford Times, which had been running a series on fertility rituals conducted by Mr Carlyon. Now, I had been intending to go druid-laffing at Avebury and meet up with my good friend Fellraven, however the thought of allowing Mr "I'll have a '99 please" free reign to trample over one of the most beautiful chalk figures in the English countryside filled me with a certain degree of dismay and distress. I couldn't bring myself to just let the day pass without comment.

Knowing that wards and blocks are all very well, but they won't necessarily stop the combined might of a media junkie and his assorted camera crews, my first step was to contact the National Trust. They were most interested to hear that Mr Carlyon had decided to help an infertile couple conceive a millenium baby after eight years of unsuccessful attempts using the erosion-prone White Horse. Mr Carlyon had in fact moved to this site, I was told by another source, after being warned off for encouraging people to trample all over the Cerne Abbas Giant. The National trust representative was also grateful for my offer to take a bunch of leaflets bearing the ASLaN charter and hand them out to those present.

So, on the day in question, I filled the flask with coffee, shoved my waterproof, a camera and a few oranges in my daypack, grabbed my stick (the blackthorn, for those that are interested - I don't tend to take the rowan on such outings any more) and my husband, and set off.

I have a soft spot for Uffington. Not the White Horse itself, which is very nice as chalk figures go, but not really my thing. No, I go for bank and ditch emplacements. I'm very much a bank and ditch kind of girl. I quite like passage and chamber tombs as well - in fact, I really like earthworks. I don't like the stones at Avebury, they give me a headache, but I love the bank and ditch. It must have been quite something when it was still the original 60 feet deep.

Sorry, I digress.

The day was gorgeous. Sunny, with signs of approaching storms, fantastically windy, and with a biting wind on top of the hill that always makes that a refreshing stroll. Frood and I tramped off to the White Horse and hung around for half an hour or so, having seen a suspicious looking brown Austin Allegro in the disabled car park (although not sporting an orange sticker) with signs of camera crew lurking around. The large pentacle on what looked like an old piece of blackboard cut into a circle leaning aginast the bumper was a bit of a giveaway as well. I took the opportunity to hand out some copies of the ASLaN charter to a couple of walkers who didn't seem to appreciate the content of the National Trust signs despite having read them a couple of times, and who felt it necessary to walk all over the chalk face itself anyway, but gradually became impatient for the appearance of my intended quarry.

Frood to the rescue. He had seen the party process up from the car park and start setting up in the ditch on the west side of the Hill Fort, and came looking for me just as I entered the Hill Fort to ask the locals where I should be looking for King Kev. I looked in the direction I was told to see the bright green hair of Frood and a hand waving to me to get a move on. Stick in hand, I raced across the hill fort and found myself looking down upon a most extraordinary scene.

The circle, if one could call it a circle, was traced out in the bottom of the ditch, where, I was assured by the locals, all the dead bodies would fall in the event of a siege. In the North was the altar, with the large pentacle leaning against the North face (not visible in picture). There was a collection of various shaped and sized candles, in red and green, none lit. There was also an incense crucible, unlit. Mr Carlyon was using a long crystal point of quartz with citrine and rose quartz impurities as a form of athame, and he also had a large lump of quartz that appeared to have a hole through the middle. The circle itself was quite obviously laid with flour of some kind. Frodd was quite taken with the idea of chucking down a couple of dead lambs that were lying in a synchronous position within the fort directly above the circle. We decided that it was probably not the best thing to do.

Calling of the quarters and other usual ritual shenanigans were over in a fairly rapid time. I wondered, perhaps unkindly, if this was due to the fact that the wind was getting up, there was rain in the air (although it wasn't coming as fast as I would have liked) and King Kev was wearing nought but a pair of black shorts and his red robe - the one that looks like it might have come from the bathroom apparel section at British Home Stores. You might have seen him wearing it in "TV Quick".

Seeing no sign of the National Trust representative I had expected to be present, I waited quietly while the couple did their meditative bit. This seemed to consist of Mr Carlyon casually leaving the circle and getting them to step inside and stand to the south of the altar with closed eyes and held hands while the camera crews pointed lenses at them from three inches below their chins and stood all over the circle boundary. I could sense no real energetic changes, could see no sign that Mr Carlyon was taking this particularly seriously except in terms of a publicity stunt. The ritual took only around twenty minutes, but they were on site for approximately three times that long again, while various film crews and journalists conducted interviews and took pictures. I did my best to get copies of the ASLaN charter to everyone, including the Australian film crew, and a woman who tried to insist that it would be of no use to her because she was from Canada. A swift reminder that prehistory happened there too ensured that she took one with her.

By the time Frood was beginning to get overtly impatient, I had deliverd copies of the charter to all present, had received business card from Mr Carlyon and a promise that he would publish the charter in his magazine, and had even managed to obtain a small chat with the couple who wanted the baby. I had given a statement to the journalist claiming to be from the Daily Mail (although there was never any sign of it), had snickered at the Australian stills photographer getting Kevin to do something with his lumps of quartz, and received an assurance from Mr Carlyon that the circle was traced out using nothing more serious than self-raising flour. One has to ask why self-raising in particular. Something to do with the cone of power, perhaps....? Or maybe it was something to do with the necessity of having a large bank of Earth in the East.

We did get to Avebury in the end, where I failed to meet up with Andy Burnham (finally making up for that at Beltane at the Rollrights) and had a good giggle all round with a few ASLaN people about the day's events.

I am not entirely convinced about the benign nature of flour. While indubitably biodegradable (if slow), flour turns into a thick paste with the addition of water, as anyone who has ever made papier mache will know. The rain began to come down as they were finishing the interviews, and that circle would have quickly become very thick and sticky and quite attached to the grass. I know that self-raising flour was used by the Dragon group for one Rollright ritual and the evidence was still there some three weeks later. I can't help wondering, if one really needs to have a circle (although I can't see why one would), wouldn't it be better to lay it out using small stones, which can be picked up afterwards and reused for other rituals? Wouldn't that be better from a ritual and tool point of view as well? Much as ritual robes contribute to some people's paradigm of ritual space, could not ritual boundary markers perform a similar reinforcement function?

The overall sense of vagueness, of lack of anything real or useful being done, was quite overwhelming, and rather disappointing. I had hoped that the stories that I had heard about Mr Carlyon would prove to be false, and that, while he might well be a publicity hound, he at least did some good. If he did do any good, it was purely by paying attention to the couple and giving them something else to hope with, perhaps no bad thing in itself, if positive thinking can help in such a situation. There was no magic that I could sense in that working. Only the Monday before I had been embroiled with an argument over someone who declared it was not within the right of the National Trust or anyone to prevent Kevin preforming the ritual on the White Horse, erosion problems or not, that it was not my place to state that his motives were important, much less make a judgement as to what they were. I wish that man had been there that day to witness exactly what Mr Carlyon got up to.

Some people do what they do because they are called. Some people do what they do because they have no choice in the matter. Some people do what they do becasue it makes them happy and centred. Some people do what they do because it is a way to be noticed and become the centre of attention. Some of those people start off doing it for very different reasons, but become sucked in by the lure of the media. Some of those say they do it because paganism needs a more public face, and why shouldn't it be them? Some of them do a very good job. Some of them don't.

I personally am distrustful of anyone who actively seeks out media attention, no matter what the motives are, but then I am a rather private person, and would rather be left alone to just get on with the things I do. Still, I don't believe that the performance I witnessed on the Spring Equinox 1999 was anything that could be beneficial to the public face of paganism and pagans in general.

The druid ritual was something else altogether, and I am not allowed to talk about druids, for fear of causing offense (more of it).