Around a large oval stone structure in the landscape of Monte Pocilgais, we intend to explore the genius loci of the place, its psychogeography, and the first steps toward a conscious landscape practice.

This is more than tree showering, and more than landscape architecture. It is an attempt to enter a psycho-emotional landscape ecology: a way of listening to stone, slope, tree, water, memory, and perception as interwoven dimensions of place.

On Monte Pocilgais, in the hills above the eastern Algarve, we found something that refuses to behave like an ordinary piece of landscape.Nearly all my friends who have joined me stiiting here experienced a deep relaxation and a magical atmosphere. This is reason to look deeper into the relation between a landscape, our emotions and the spiritual dimension.

It is an oval formation, approximately fifty metres long and twenty metres wide, lying on a mild south-facing slope about fifty metres north of the valley river. The difference in height between the formation and the riverbed is only about three metres. The whole complex lies broadly on an east-west axis. From north to south the oval inclines about ten degrees, with the northern side being higher. From east to west it inclines about five degrees, with the eastern side being higher.

The structure consists of around twenty large grey stones. These stones are striking because they differ strongly from the surrounding geology of Monte Pocilgais. The hill itself is made of softer reddish sedimentary stone, visibly layered and friable. The stones of the oval are grey, much harder, and appear materially foreign to the immediate hill. The largest stones are approximately three metres high and two metres broad. They are adjacent, in some places layered vertically and horizontally, and some seem to rest upon or against others. Between and among them grow old carob trees and stone oaks, whose roots now bind the vegetal and lithic structure into one living complex. Until recently, creeper plants had tangled through everything, obscuring the formation. After removing the creepers, a possible west-east passage became visible between the stones.

At this stage, no archaeological claim should be made. The structure may be natural, agricultural, pastoral, geological, or deliberately constructed. It may be ancient, recent, or a mixture of several histories. The grey stones may have been transported, exposed by erosion, reused from another context, or brought for rural purposes now forgotten. The first task is therefore not interpretation but documentation.

Yet even before interpretation, the place exerts a presence.

It has form. It has orientation. It has a boundary. It has an interior. It has a passage. It has old trees rooted into stone. It stands close to water but above the riverbed. It contrasts with the local bedrock. It invites walking. It invites return.

This is why the site can be approached not only as a possible archaeological feature, but also as a genius loci, a spirit or character of place.

Genius loci and the double nature of place

Marilena Vecco’s article “Genius loci as a meta-concept” gives us a useful scholarly vocabulary for what is otherwise difficult to describe. Genius loci, in this approach, is not simply a romantic idea that a place has a “spirit.” It is the intangible quality of a material place, perceived physically, emotionally, culturally, and sometimes spiritually. A place is never only stone, soil, trees, slope, and water. It is also atmosphere, memory, orientation, use, perception, and interpretation.

Vecco distinguishes between tangible and intangible values, or what she calls hard and soft values. The hard values are the visible, physical elements: stones, trees, paths, river, slope, geological layers, walls, ruins, and measurable form. The soft values are less visible but no less important: atmosphere, memory, symbolic charge, affect, felt boundary, orientation, local meaning, and the way a place speaks to those who enter it. The genius loci arises through the interaction of both.

This is useful for Pocilgais because the oval is precisely such an interaction. Its hard values are clear enough to document: dimensions, orientation, slope, stone type, tree species, relation to water, and possible passage. Its soft values are only beginning to emerge: the felt difference between inside and outside, the sense of directionality from west to east, the way the old carob trees hold the stones, the contrast between grey hard stones and red sedimentary hill, the proximity of water, and the curious impression that the place is more organised than its surroundings.

Vecco also argues that genius loci should be understood as layered. A place contains a visible material layer, an invisible experiential layer created in human perception, and underlying processes of human and natural activity. This threefold structure gives us an excellent working model for Monte Pocilgais.

The visible layer is the oval itself: stone, tree, slope, passage, river, and geology.

The invisible layer is what is perceived there: presence, boundary, enclosure, passage, silence, attention, possible omen, dream, or imaginal form.

The underlying process includes everything that made and remade the place: geology, erosion, tree growth, agricultural history, possible human arrangement, animal movement, water flow, forgotten use, and the slow entanglement of roots and stone.

This means that the Pocilgais oval should not be approached as a dead object. It should be approached as a living place, a field of relationships, a site where material and immaterial values meet.

Andrew Chumbley and landscape as threshold

A second key text for understanding the Pocilgais oval is Steve Patterson and Jeff Howard’s article “To Reveal the Hidden Kingdom of Eld: Andrew Chumbley, the Cultus Sabbati, and Imaginal Space in Cornwall.” This article is especially relevant because it examines the late landscape-based practice of Andrew Chumbley, founder of the Cultus Sabbati.

Chumbley is usually associated with Essex and with the highly complex magical systems of Sabbatic Craft. But Patterson and Howard show that in the late period of his work, especially in Cornwall, Chumbley’s practice became increasingly landscape-centred. Rather than relying only on elaborate ceremonial forms, he moved toward direct contact with the spirits of place through walking, simple charms, trance, omens, holy wells, quarries, crossroads, groves, and charged stones.

The article describes this late work as a practice in which the spirit world is not imagined as far away, above, or below, but as just behind the physical world, slightly askew, accessible through a particular angle of vision. The landscape is not merely background. It is the field in which the imaginal world becomes perceptible.

This is the crucial point for Pocilgais.

The oval is not being interpreted here as a “Chumbleyan” site. It is not in Cornwall, not part of the Cultus Sabbati, and not connected historically to Chumbley. But Chumbley’s late landscape method offers a way of approaching such a place without reducing it either to archaeology or fantasy. It allows us to ask: how does a place become a threshold? How does one enter it? What does walking reveal? What kind of attention does it ask for? How do stone, tree, slope, water, and path form a field of perception?

Patterson and Howard describe a hybrid method for studying Chumbley’s late landscape practice. This method combines history, textual analysis, practitioner memory, phenomenology, and direct engagement with sites in the present. That combination is important. It means one does not simply believe whatever one feels in a place. Nor does one dismiss the feeling as meaningless. One documents, compares, returns, observes, and reflects.

This is exactly the method needed for Pocilgais. The oval as landscape node

In the Chumbley article, several kinds of place become important: churchyards, barns near consecrated ground, holy wells, quarries, crossroads, groves, altar stones, and old tracks. These are not important only because of their official religious status. They are important because they act as nodes, places where geography, memory, ritual, and perception converge.

The Pocilgais oval has many qualities of such a node.

It is bounded, but not closed.

It has an oval form, large enough to walk within.

It lies between hill and river.

It is oriented broadly east-west.

It contains a possible passage from west to east.

It is materially anomalous because the stones differ from the surrounding geology.

It is held by old trees.

It has vertical and horizontal layering.

It sits on a slope, not on flat ground, so the body experiences movement, ascent, descent, and orientation.

This does not prove ritual origin. But it does justify treating the site as a landscape node for phenomenological observation. In other words, the oval deserves to be walked, mapped, photographed, and listened to.

The most important question is not yet, “What is it?”

The better first question is, “What does it do to attention?”

Does the body slow down on entering it?

Does the west-east passage feel like a route, a crossing, or an exit?

Is there a felt centre?

Are there threshold stones?

Does one side feel more open or more closed?

Does the sound change inside the oval?

Is the river audible?

Where does the eye go first?

Which stone seems to dominate?

Which tree appears oldest?

Is there a place where one naturally wants to stand, sit, or turn?

Does the site feel different at dawn, noon, dusk, moonlight, or after rain?

Does it produce dreams, images, or recurring impressions after visiting?

These are not archaeological questions. They are phenomenological questions. They belong to the soft-value layer of genius loci.

One of the most useful structures from Chumbley’s ritual language is the sequence of ingress, congress, and egress.

Ingress is entry.

Congress is encounter.

Egress is departure and transformation.

Applied to Pocilgais, this does not require elaborate ritual. It can be used as a simple walking structure.

Ingress: approach the oval from the west, slowly and consciously. Before entering, pause and observe the boundary. Notice what changes when crossing into the stone formation.

Congress: walk or sit within the oval. Attend to stone, tree, slope, sound, and breath. Do not ask for belief. Ask for perception. What is present? What draws attention? What repeats?

Egress: leave toward the east. After leaving, do not immediately speak or analyse. Walk away and later write down what remains.

This gives the site a practical grammar. The oval is not only an object of observation. It becomes a passage through which attention moves.

In Chumbley’s late landscape practice, spirit contact could involve walking, omen, trance, and the reception of a sigil representing the virtue of a place. For Pocilgais, this should be treated carefully. One need not assume that a “spirit” objectively exists in order to record whether the place produces repeated imaginal forms. The first task is phenomenological: what appears in awareness, under what conditions, and with what stability?

If a sigil-like form appears repeatedly, draw it. Date it. Note the place and state of mind. Do not immediately interpret it. Let the place teach its own vocabulary slowly.

The Pocilgais oval as a working hypothesis

The working hypothesis is simple:

The Monte Pocilgais oval is a materially anomalous, spatially coherent stone formation in a liminal position between hill and river. Its form, orientation, stone contrast, old trees, internal passage, and proximity to water make it suitable for study as a genius loci and as a possible landscape node for esoteric phenomenology.

This hypothesis contains no claim that the oval is prehistoric, megalithic, ceremonial, or magical in origin. Those questions remain open. The hypothesis says only that the site is worthy of careful documentation because it combines hard features and soft perceptual force in an unusually concentrated way.

A second hypothesis can be added: a Chumbley-inspired landscape method, combined with Vecco’s theory of genius loci, provides a useful framework for approaching the site without collapsing into fantasy or reductive scepticism.

This means we can hold three questions at once.

The archaeological question: what is the structure, how old is it, how was it formed, and what was it used for?

The genius loci question: what material and immaterial qualities give this place its specific character?

The esoteric phenomenology question: what happens to attention, perception, imagination, dream, and bodily awareness when the site is repeatedly and respectfully engaged?

These three questions should not be confused. But they can enrich one another.

We will walk it. Measure it. Photograph it. Sit with it. Dream near it. Return after rain. Return at sunrise. Return at dusk. Let the stones and trees become familiar before turning them into theory.

If the site has a genius loci, it will not be created by imagination alone. It will reveal itself through the meeting of stone, tree, water, slope, memory, and repeated attention. That is where the work begins.

Taxonomy of What We Want to Do

Where this project might connect to serious landscape work is here:

Ecological landscape design / regenerative landscape design looks at how landscapes can be designed or cared for as living systems, enhancing biodiversity, water flow, soil, habitat, and human/ecosystem well-being. Recent regenerative landscape design literature explicitly frames landscape work as moving beyond maintenance toward enhancing both human and ecosystem well-being.

Environmental psychology studies relations between people and their physical environments. In design contexts, it asks how space, form, vegetation, enclosure, paths, and sensory qualities affect perception, behaviour, stress, restoration, and well-being. One landscape-design text defines environmental psychology as the study of “people-environment transactions,” bridging psychology, sociology, geography, and design disciplines.

Therapeutic landscapes / healing landscapes is very close to your question. This field studies how places support physical, emotional, mental, social, cultural, and sometimes spiritual health. Landscape and health research explicitly asks how the cultural and natural construction called “landscape” affects well-being. A recent healing-landscape design study identifies ecological environment, spatial organisation, sensory experience, and social interaction as key design elements.

Landscape phenomenology is perhaps the most precise academic cousin of your project. It studies how landscapes are experienced through body, movement, paths, stones, orientation, memory, and perception. Christopher Tilley’s A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Movements and The Materiality of Stone are classic references here, and they are often cited in heritage and landscape studies.

Genius loci / spirit of place studies gives you the most elegant bridge between landscaping and the “soul of the place.” Vecco argues that genius loci is the intangible quality of a material place, perceived physically and spiritually, and made visible through tangible features, non-material perception, and underlying natural and human processes. In your post, you already use exactly this structure: hard features, stones, trees, slope, river, geology, and soft features, atmosphere, attention, boundary, memory, dream, imaginal form.

Psychogeography is another legitimate frame, though originally more urban and Situationist. Today it is often used more broadly for embodied walking, drifting, mapping, and recording how places affect emotion, perception, identity, and behaviour. A recent article defines psychogeography as a research method based on embodied drifting through place followed by documentation and creative cartography.

Where it enters esotericism is through the Chumbley/Patterson/Howard line. Your post uses Andrew Chumbley as a methodological inspiration for landscape-based esoteric phenomenology. Patterson and Howard describe late Chumbley’s work as focused on landscape, walking, spirit contact, genius loci, omens, trance, and sigil reception, and they explicitly describe a hybrid method combining history, textual analysis, practitioner memory, phenomenology, and direct engagement with sites.

So, you wonder is this “a real thing”? Yes, it could become a real thing, but not under one single discipline.

The formal academic umbrellas would be:

landscape architecture, if the aim is design and land-care
ecological landscape design, if the aim is biodiversity, water, soil, habitat, and sustainability
environmental psychology, if the aim is how place affects mind, body, emotion, and behaviour
therapeutic landscape studies, if the aim is healing, restoration, and well-being
landscape phenomenology, if the aim is embodied perception of stone, path, slope, orientation, and place
cultural geography / psychogeography, if the aim is walking, mapping, memory, emotion, and symbolic landscape
esotericism studies, if the aim is spirit of place, ritual, omens, trance, sigil, imaginal perception, and magical practice

Your project’s best name, academically, might be:

phenomenological landscape practice

or:

genius loci-based ecological landscape practice

or, more specific to your work:

esoteric landscape phenomenology

or…

psycho-ecological landscape practice

References

Patterson, S., & Howard, J. (2024). To reveal the hidden kingdom of Eld: Andrew Chumbley, the Cultus Sabbati, and imaginal space in Cornwall. Praxis-Knowledge, 1, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.61149/QNQT7324

Vecco, M. (2020). Genius loci as a meta-concept. Journal of Cultural Heritage, 41, 225–231. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.culher.2019.07.001