Stone, Sound, and Altered States

Why do stone circles, castles, temples and ancient churches amplify sound healing experiences?

From Stanton Drew to Bristol's Goddess Temple, Arnos Vale Chapel, and The Mount Without, I've been exploring how stone amplifies consciousness.

How archaeoacoustics confirms what Celtic shamanic wisdom has always known.

Why I love facilitating sound journeys in sacred stone spaces.

This is a journey through time. From a wee girl making sounds at a neolithic burial site to singing in Newgrange's chamber.

From studying medieval architecture across Europe to bringing crystal bowls into some of Bristol's oldest buildings.

From body knowing to scientific confirmation.

It's a long read because the story spans millennia.

But if you've ever walked into an ancient space and felt something shift, if you've ever been pulled toward stone without knowing why, this is for you.

Altered States at Stanton Drew Stone Circle

Stanton Drew Stone Circle

I'm standing in a 5000 year old stone circle playing my shamanic drum, and I'm already gone.

Not "twenty minutes of meditation takes me deep" gone. Instant. The moment I play the first few beats, something shifts. The sound doesn't just travel outward, it bounces back, amplified, changed. The stones catch it, shape it, throw it back at me in ways that make my sternum vibrate. My breath drops into my belly without me trying. I'm in an altered state before my brain has time to catch up.

Gamma and theta consciousness. Simultaneously. Grounded and lifted at the same time.

This is Stanton Drew on my birthday. I'm drumming in a stone circle older than the pyramids, and I'm connecting to something so much bigger than me. The ley lines, the land, the thousands of years of feet that walked this same ground.

The space itself does half the work. The stones aren't just witnessing, they're participating. They amplify, focus, hold. They change how sound moves through the air and through my body.

I didn't understand what was happening. I still don't fully understand. But I recognise it now when it comes.

The Giant's Ring and a Child's instinct for Stone

Neolithic burial chamber at Giant's Ring, Belfast, Northern Ireland

When I was small, my Dad used to take me to the Giant's Ring. It's a prehistoric earthwork with a dolmen at its centre, just up the road from where we lived. I didn't know anything about Neolithic monuments or sacred sites. I just did what my body wanted to do. I crawled all over those stones, underneath them, inside every gap and hollow. And I made sounds. Loud howls, strange calls, every noise my body needed to make.

I'm so grateful my Dad brought me to that place. He showed me something without either of us naming it. He let me be curious, let me explore, let me make all that noise. That gift, that permission to connect with stone in whatever way felt natural, it shaped something in me that I'm only now understanding.

Even then, small and unselfconscious, just playing, I was responding to something. The stones did something to me. Or maybe I did something with them. Either way, a conversation happened that I had no words for.

Singing in the Chamber at Newgrange

Newgrange is a prehistoric passage tomb in Ireland, built around 3200 B.C., which features a large circular mound with a central cruciform chamber reached by a long, stone-lined passage. It is renowned for its megalithic art, a stunning facade of white quartz, and its alignment with the winter solstice sunrise. Today, it is a major archaeological site and a part of the Brú na Bóinne UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

In my 20’s, I stood inside Newgrange and couldn't stop touching the stones.

By then I'd learned about passage tombs and winter solstice alignments. I knew Newgrange was 5200 years old, precisely engineered, one of the most significant prehistoric structures in Europe. But knowing didn't prepare me for feeling.

I kept reaching out. Running my hands over the surfaces. Pressing my palms flat against the cold stone. And then I sang. Inside that ancient chamber, I let sound come out of me, and the stone caught it. Held it. Gave it back to me changed.

The resonance was immediate, physical, undeniable.

Years later, I learned that chamber resonates at 110 Hz, a frequency that shifts brain states into trance. But I didn't need to know that to feel it. My body knew something was happening in there.

Medieval Churches, Castles, and body knowing

Raglan Castle is a late medieval fortress in Wales. The castle later became a stately home, complete with a long gallery and fine Renaissance gardens, before being deliberately destroyed after a long siege during the English Civil War

I started working with sound in stone spaces because my body had already learned what they could do. I'd spent years walking into churches and castles and other stone buildings feeling the shift. When I began facilitating sound journeys, I went straight to those spaces. People dropped into altered states faster there. The sound traveled differently. Old stone churches with thick walls and vaulted ceilings created something I couldn't create anywhere else.

Participants at our drum journeys at the Mount Without often think we amplify our ancient instruments with technology. We do! Just the ancient technology of sacred geometry architecture!

I'd been drawn to these spaces long before I ever brought a drum into one. I studied medieval history at university, spent hours learning about Gothic architecture, Romanesque design, the engineering of vaulted ceilings and flying buttresses. I understood acoustics from an academic angle, could talk about how sound moved through naves and transepts, how stone and space were designed together.

And then I'd walk into these buildings and all that intellectual understanding dissolved into something else entirely.

I spent much of my twenties traveling across Europe. Notre Dame before the fire. The Duomo in Florence with that incredible dome you can see for miles. St Peters in Rome where the scale makes you feel tiny. The tiny chapel in the crypt at Canterbury. Parish churches in villages whose names I've forgotten.

And castles. So many castles! Studying medieval history meant I was always visiting these otherworldly places across Britain and Ireland. The thick stone walls, the great halls, the chapels within the fortifications. Now when I drum in castles, the sound bounces off walls that have heard battle cries, prayers, celebrations, grief. Past, present, and future collapse into each other. The stone holding all of it.

I wasn't religious. I didn't go to pray to a monotheistic god. I went because I felt different the moment I walked in. The air changed. My breathing changed. My body knew something my academic training couldn't explain.

People would come up after a sound journey in the Anglican Chapel at Arnos Vale or The Mount Without and say "I thought you were right next to me with the drum."

I'd been 30 feet away on the other side of the room. Or they'd describe hearing the singing bowl circling around them when I'd been standing still the entire time.

The stones were doing something to the sound, bending it, amplifying it, moving it through space in ways I couldn't see but we could all feel.

Stone, Frequency, and Celtic Practice

Frequencies between 90 and 120 Hz, the range many stone chambers naturally resonate at, demonstrably affect brain activity. They induce altered states, influence mood, shift perception. When I drum in a stone space, I work with frequencies that change consciousness. Technology that's been functional for thousands of years.

We're made of the same stuff as stones. Calcium, minerals, crystalline structures in our bones. When I stand in a stone circle and feel my whole body respond to the sound my drum makes, resonance happens. Material to material, frequency to frequency.

Stone isn't inert matter. It participates in how sound moves, how space feels, how consciousness shifts.

The Women’s Drum Circle in an old stone building at the Bristol Goddess Temple, Warmley

At the Bristol Goddess Temple, housed in an old stone building, women often tell me how much more powerful the drums feel there compared to other spaces. They're not imagining it. The stone is doing something to the sound, to their bodies, to the experience itself.

In Celtic shamanic practice, stones are so much more than objects. They're connectors and healers. They bridge earth and sky, the physical and spiritual, the past with the present. There's an understanding in the tradition that stones absorb and hold what happens around them. Not just physically sitting there, but actively participating. Witnessing.

From painted pebbles used in Pictish ritual to white quartz placed in water for healing, the Celts understood stones as active participants in transformation. Not symbols of power. Actual power.

This is why I work the way I do. This is why the spaces matter so much.

How I choose Spaces for Journeying with Sound

Now when I choose a space for a sound journey, I'm listening for what I learned to recognise. Stone that holds sound. Geometry that focuses vibration. Places where the building itself is an instrument.

When I bring my quartz crystal bowls into a stone church like the Anglican Chapel at Arnos Vale, I'm working with two forms of ancient technology together. The quartz generates frequencies through piezoelectricity. The stone walls amplify and shape those frequencies. Both materials hold and transmit energy. They're in conversation with each other, and that conversation creates such an immersive experience.

Quartz and stone in conversation. Crystal singing bowls at Arnos Vale Chapel, where Victorian walls hold and transform sound.

Remembering what our Bodies know

The stones remember. And somewhere in our bones and our breath, we remember too.

When we bring sound to stone, whether it's a drum, a voice, a crystal bowl, or just the sound of our own presence, we activate relationship. We co-create with materials that have been doing this work since before we had words for ritual or ceremony or altered states.

Stone shapes sound. Sound shifts consciousness. Consciousness connects us to something larger than ourselves.

When we work with stone, when we let the acoustics of ancient places teach us what they know, we're remembering how to speak with mother earth.