Some of our more pedantic brethren have expressed to me their confusion with the layout of the lodge tonight. Our lodge, as you know, usually has the figurative ‘East’ in line with the magnetic East but tonight we had our East facing South (which meant that we had our ‘South’ in the West).

Having a lodge room that actually corresponds to the associated magnetic direction usually means that your building has been specifically built with that purpose in mind. But, in the hay day of Freemasonry, many lodges were held in town halls and such like and the likelihood of them happening to be aligned East – West was slim.

Consequently, the layout of a lodge room does not actually *need* to be geographically correct. The points of the compass mentioned during our opening ceremony have to do with the symbology of the Masonic Story and not the physical alignment of the building.