Orkney, Scotland
16–19 September 2026
THE WISDOM KEEPERS GATHERING
A pilgrimage to the land, the ancestors, and the self
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RESERVE YOUR PLACEÂ
There is a stretch of land in Orkney where the sky comes right down to meet you. Wide, pale, scoured by a wind that has already crossed an ocean by the time it reaches your face. The stones have been standing there for five thousand years. They were already ancient when Stonehenge was built.
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Nobody alive remembers why they were placed exactly so. The people who quarried them, dragged them, set them upright against wind and centuries, they left no name we can read, no language we can translate. Only stone. And yet something in the body recognises them anyway.
This September, two very old lineages will meet on that ground, and you are invited to bring yours.
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RESERVE YOUR SPOTÂ
Call it memory older than words: carried not in the mind but in the blood, in the bone, in the way the feet slow down and the breath deepens the moment you step inside that circle.
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THE PROGRAM
Wednesday 16 September
Public Evening Talk
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Peruvian Elder Eda Zavala Lopez will share stories from her Wari and Ashaninka lineage, her work with the Shawi People and what called her north to Scotland and to the Orkney Islands.
Dr Clare will introduce Eda and special guest Claudia Goncalves, a third generation indigenous Brazilian from Minas Gerais, and co founder of The Edinburgh Shamanic and the Planetary Healing Centre. Clare will say a few words about her work with women’s health and her own call to this land.
Thursday 17 – Saturday 19 September
The Wisdom Keepers GatheringÂ
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Honouring Land, Ancestors and Future Generations.
Three days of pilgrimage, ceremony, water ritual, fire, storytelling and the kind of gathering that asks something real of you and gives something real back.
Guided by Peruvian Elder Eda Zavala Lopez, founder of The Shawi Project, together with Dr Clare Willocks and Claudia Goncalves, third generation indigenous Brazilian invite you to join a gentle pilgrimage through story, ceremony and the natural world.
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BRING YOUR OFFERING
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Participants are invited to bring:
A small stone from their homeland or a place that holds personal meaning.
A small bottle of water from their homeland or a place that has nourished their life.
These simple gifts will become part of our shared ceremonies of gratitude and remembrance, symbolising the meeting of many lands, many peoples and many ancestral lineages.
This is not about adopting another tradition.
It’s an invitation to remember our own relationship with the land beneath our feet, the waters that sustain us and the ancestors whose lives continue to flow through our own.
DAY BY DAY
Day One
Thursday 17 September
10 am - 4 pm:Â Guided archeological tour of the sacred sitesÂ
6 pm:Â The welcoming circle
- Opening circle at West GreenigoeÂ
- The ceremonial Apacheta altar begins to take shape — bring a stone of significance and a small bottle of water from your homeland.
Day Two
Friday 18 SeptemberÂ
Pilgrimage and stone ceremony
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Sunrise gathering — tea in flasks, the sky doing what the Orkney sky does
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Pilgrimage through the Neolithic landscape: the Stones of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar, the Ness of Brodgar with a view towards Maeshowe
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Ceremony to the ancestors, the Great Mother and the generations not yet born with building of the Apacheta sacred Peruvian stone altar, an act of reciprocity with Mother Nature, gratitude , protection, respect and guidance.
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Shared evening meal — bring something to put on the table
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Evening fire, weather permitting — storytelling, song and drumming
Day Three
Saturday 19 September
Water ceremony- Bay of Skaill
- Elder Eda Zavala will pour fresh water in prayer, offering seeds to feed the Sea Spirits, expressing her deep gratitude to them.
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The waters from everyone’s homelands will be combined, blessed and returned to the great waters — many lineages, briefly, becoming one
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Each person takes a little water from Orkney home — so the remembering doesn’t end when the pilgrimage does
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 Closing circle
THOSE HOLDING GROUND
Elder Eda Zavala Lopez
Wari, Ashaninka and Huarochiri lineages from Peru. Founder of The Shawi Project. She did not choose to carry all of this — it chose her, and called her north.
Dr Clare Willocks
Eden Energy Medicine Advanced Practitioner, and current resident of Orkney. She is hosting this gathering and holding all logistics — she knows this land the way you know something you have chosen to live inside.
Claudia Goncalves - Standing Stone
Brazilian shaman, co-founder of the Edinburgh Shamanic Centre and Planetary Healing Centre. Thirty years living and working alongside communities in Scotland. More than twenty-three years holding ceremony at the Celtic festival times.
GETTING THERE
Orkney is a place you have to mean to get to. Fly into Kirkwall from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness or Aberdeen — or take the ferry from Aberdeen , Scrabster or Gills Bay. The journey is part of it.
Accommodation · Limited places available (17–20 September) at £550 per person inclusive of the full gathering. First come, first served.
RESERVE YOUR PLACEThis is not a journey to a place. It is a journey back into the body. Back into the blood. Back to the long, unbroken line of grandmothers and grandfathers who are still, somehow, remembering through everyone willing to stand still long enough to let it flow through them.
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