Wheel of Life

As the seasons turn, communities in Britain* will celebrate life and connect with our landscape through pilgrimage and expressive art events creating a Wheel of Life around Britain. We would love you to join us!

Our celebrations will move month by month through this ancient Wheel of Life’s 12 landscape segments, turning as the Sun moves  through the months and seasons of annual growth and transformation, starting in January in Winchester, journeying  through England and Wales* and ending in December in London.

Click here to see the Wheel of Life Programme for 2024

Read about previous years of Wheel of Life Events here:

You can take part in these Wheel of Life Events, or create your own. Look at Gatekeeper Trust's Wheel of Life map and list of events, locate your landscape segment and time of year, and then connect with the Gatekeeper Trust Coordinator: charlotteyonge@gmail.com

British Zodiac

The Gatekeeper Trust is a British educational charity devoted to personal and planetary healing through rediscovering and using the ancient art of pilgrimage and the expressive arts.** We  journey with an awareness of the sacred nature of our environment, researching, discovering and sharing both ancient and modern knowledge about the landscape.  Our full annual programme of journeys, workshops and conferences now includes Wheel of Life events.

The purpose of Gatekeeper Trust’s Wheel of Life project is to help us reconnect with earth and heaven, nature and spirit. Our shared journeys of celebration unite people in friendship and engender respect for the different cultures, times of the year and the multi-faceted landscapes we live in.

We follow in the footsteps of our ancestral ‘spiritual gardeners’, who created reflections of Nature's beauty in their art and practices, inspired by the way human evolution follows Nature's cycles of growth: from seed to plant to flower to fruit. Together in the Wheel of Life events we can create a garden of reflections on the beauty of our Earth with our vision of love, beauty and peace.

We are indebted to Suzy Straw's and Clare Higson’s ‘Encircling the Land’ dance and pilgrimage events 1998-2014, which set in motion these ‘circular’ celebrations around Britain’s Wheel of Life landscape. Suzy wrote:

Throughout the ages people have danced sacredly, as an act of worship and to bring peace and healing to the Earth. People have danced in churches, temples, village greens and even around the lands in special ways using the idea of the ‘zodiac’, a symbol of the heart centre of the cosmos that surrounds and shines from the divine being of light and love.…We feel it is helpful to see this process as conscious practice of ‘The Art and Science of Life’, doing the right thing, in the right place, at the right time, and with the right intention. We see it as a way of being in harmony with nature and the universe, and giving and receiving healing to and from the earth and heavens: a way of bringing heaven to earth.

Join us in the Wheel of Life events throughout Britain!

*N.B. In the terminology we are using, Britain = England and Wales, as distinct from Scotland and Ireland, each of which have their own landscape Wheel of Life.)

**Its aims include “the study of the origin and significance of temples, landscape temples, holy places, earth structures and their layout, and all beneficial forms of natural and metaphysical study, including the association of butterflies and plants in relation to such matters” (Gatekeeper Trust Deed).

For information on the events from the last two years, please click here: