Cailleach

Three days before winter properly arrives, the sea between Jura and Scarba begins to turn. The tide drags over a pinnacle of rock on the seabed and the water stacks itself into a standing whirlpool, and the roar of it carries as far as twenty miles inland, through shut doors, across fields from which nobody can see the coast. On the west coast of Scotland everyone knew what that noise meant. An old woman was washing her great plaid in the cauldron. It would take her three days. When she was finished the cloth would come out pure white, and she would spread it over the whole country, and there would be snow.

Her name is not a name. Cailleach is an ordinary word, still alive in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, and it simply means old woman. Behind it sits the Old Irish caillech, the veiled one, an adjective built on caille, a veil, borrowed early from the Latin pallium. The same root gives the Gaelic for a nun and, for reasons nobody has entirely settled, the Gaelic for an owl. The figure who raised the mountains of two countries is called, in the plainest available terms, the old woman.

That plainness has consequences. There was never one Cailleach with a fixed genealogy and a settled biography. There were dozens of hags across Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man, each fastened to a particular mountain or headland or lake, and the word gathered them up. Gearóid Ó Crualaoich’s work at Cork has done more than anything else to read those scattered figures as facets of one older tradition of female power over land and fertility, pushed to the margins by Christian and later storytelling without ever quite being killed. Whether she began as a goddess or became one by accumulation is not a question anyone has managed to close.

What she does, everywhere, is make ground. She walks with a creel on her back, a deep wicker basket loaded with boulders, and the mountains are what falls out of it. Sometimes the spilling is careless, a strap slipping while she strides from one range to the next. Sometimes it is deliberate, and the hills are stepping stones she laid for her own convenience. She carries a hammer for the finer work, striking valleys into rock the way a smith works a blank.

On a wet afternoon somewhere in the middle of the country she stops and shifts the weight higher on her shoulders, and half a hillside goes down the slope behind her in a long grinding slide. She does not look back at it. There is another range to reach before dark.

The evidence is spread across both landscapes, in the names. Slieve na Calliagh in County Meath is the hag’s mountain, and the passage tombs on its summit are said to be stones dropped from her apron; one kerbstone at Cairn T is still called the Hag’s Chair. Ceann Caillí, Hag’s Head, is the southernmost tip of the Cliffs of Moher, where the profile in the rock is hers. Leaba Chaillí near Glanworth in County Cork, the hag’s bed, is a wedge tomb that local tradition makes her grave and the house she kept with the druid Mug Ruith, whom she is supposed to have pinned to the floor of the River Funshion with a thrown boulder. In Argyll she fell asleep on Ben Cruachan after a long day herding deer, and the well she was tending overflowed, ran down through the highlands and filled the valley below to make Loch Awe. That story has company. Boann floods the Boyne into existence in much the same fashion, and the neglected well is one of the oldest Gaelic ways of accounting for water.

Ask what she looks like and the older material mostly declines to answer. Vast, veiled, ancient, able to step between mountain ranges: that is close to the whole of it. The vivid portrait most people now carry, a one-eyed giantess with dark blue skin, white hair and rust-coloured teeth, mother of all the other gods, comes out of a single book. Donald Alexander Mackenzie, a Scottish journalist and popular folklorist, published Wonder Tales from Scottish Myth and Legend in 1917, and it was Mackenzie who called her Beira, Queen of Winter, and gave her that face. It is a fine invention. It is not an old one, and the century of retellings that followed almost never says where it came from.

The oldest sustained voice belonging to her is not a description at all but a complaint from inside her. The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare, an Irish poem of the eighth or ninth century, is spoken by a woman the prose preface names as Digde, of the Corcu Duibne in Kerry, called the Old Woman of Beare because she fostered fifty children there. She had passed through seven periods of youth one after another, so that every man who lived with her died of old age while she began again, and her grandsons’ grandsons became whole tribes and races. By the time of the poem all of that is finished. The sea ebbs and does not come back for her. She remembers arms that were beautiful and are now bone, and kings who poured her mead, and she is drinking whey in the dark with other old women. Kuno Meyer edited it in 1899, Donncha Ó hAodha again in 1989, and it has never lost the quality of something overheard rather than composed.

She could also be cruel, and funny about it. Fionn mac Cumhaill climbed Slieve Gullion in County Armagh and found a beautiful young woman weeping beside the lake under the summit, because she had let a gold ring fall into water she could not reach. He dived for it. He found it in the cold at the bottom, brought it up, and dragged himself onto the shore as a withered old man, white-haired, his strength gone out of him. The woman on the bank was laughing, and she was no longer young. His warriors got most of his youth back out of her afterwards. They never got back the hair. The passage tomb on that summit is still the Calliagh Berra’s House, the highest surviving one in Ireland, and the lake still carries her name.

Her calendar is the real substance of her. In Scotland she holds the year from Samhainn at the beginning of November until Bealltainn on the first of May, when Brìghde takes it back, and F. Marian McNeill’s collecting preserved both readings of that handover: two goddesses trading power, or one goddess wearing two faces. Her staff hardens the ground where it strikes. She herds the red deer and she fights the spring. On Là Fhèill Brìghde, the first of February, she goes out to gather her firewood for whatever remains of the winter, and this produced one of the more practical pieces of folk reasoning in the Gaelic world. A bright, dry first of February meant she was out working and would lay in a good stock, so the cold would run long. Foul weather meant she had slept through it, her fuel would fail, and spring was close. On the Isle of Man the Caillagh ny Groamagh was seen on that same day as an enormous bird with sticks in her beak.

At harvest she entered the fields as an object. The first farmer in a district to finish cutting made a figure out of the last sheaf, called the cailleach, or in Lowland Scots the carlin, and pitched it into the field of a neighbour who was still working. It travelled from farm to farm ahead of the reaping until the slowest man in the parish was left holding her, obliged to house and feed the old woman all winter. The competition to avoid this was not gentle.

In one glen the arrangement was never broken off. Above Loch Lyon in Perthshire, in Gleann Cailliche, stands a shieling small enough to step over, roughly two metres by one, rebuilt by a local dyker in 2011 after its roof collapsed. Inside it sit several heavy water-worn stones lifted from the river, rounded by the current into something close to human shape: the Cailleach, the Bodach her husband, and their children. They are brought out at Bealltainn to look down the glen and put back inside at Samhain to be made secure against the winter, and the bargain, as it is told locally, is that the glen stays fertile for as long as this is kept up. It is still kept up. The place is generally described as the only surviving shrine of its kind in Britain.

Her powers all issue from the same fact: she is older than the ground and she made most of it. She raises storms and drives snow, freezes soil at a touch of the staff, hollows valleys, floods lochs, herds the deer as another woman would herd cattle, and returns from age to youth as often as she cares to. Nothing in the landscape is shut to her, because she put it there.

Her limits are the calendar and the stone. Her reign ends at Bealltainn whether she has finished or not, and in many tellings she does not simply retire but hardens into rock until Samhain calls her out again. The firewood runs down. Brìghde arrives. Where the turning year fails to release her, the stone keeps her for good: on the Beara peninsula in west Cork, above Coulagh Bay at Kilcatherine, a rock is pointed out as the Cailleach herself, back to the hill and face to the open water, caught in the middle of waiting for Manannán mac Lir to return from a westward voyage that has not ended. One version has a saint do it to her. The older one needs no saint at all. She simply waited long enough.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the Cailleach?

The Cailleach is the divine hag of Gaelic myth in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man, credited with creating the landscape and ruling the winter half of the year. Her name is an ordinary Gaelic word meaning “old woman”, from the Old Irish caillech, “the veiled one”. She is less a single figure with a fixed biography than a title that gathered up dozens of local hags attached to particular mountains, headlands and lakes.

How did the Cailleach create the mountains?

She carried a deep wicker creel of boulders on her back, and mountains formed where the rocks spilled out as she walked. Some accounts make the spilling accidental and others make it deliberate, with the hills laid down as stepping stones for her own use. She also carried a hammer for striking out valleys, and the passage tombs on Slieve na Calliagh in County Meath are said to be stones dropped from her apron.

Is the Cailleach the same as Beira, Queen of Winter?

Beira is a name given to the Cailleach by the Scottish journalist and folklorist Donald Alexander Mackenzie in his 1917 book Wonder Tales from Scottish Myth and Legend. Mackenzie also supplied the familiar description of her as a one-eyed giantess with dark blue skin, white hair and rust-coloured teeth. The Cailleach herself is genuinely traditional, but that name and that portrait are a twentieth-century literary creation rather than old Gaelic record.

What is the Cailleach’s relationship with Brigid?

In Scottish tradition the Cailleach holds the year from Samhainn at the start of November until Bealltainn on the first of May, when Brìghde takes over the summer months. Some accounts treat them as two separate goddesses handing power back and forth, and others as one goddess with two faces. In several tellings the Cailleach turns to stone at Bealltainn and returns to living form at Samhain in time to rule the winter.

Why does bad weather on the first of February mean an early spring?

The first of February, Là Fhèill Brìghde, is the day the Cailleach goes out to gather firewood for the rest of the winter. If the weather is bright and dry she can collect a large supply, so she will keep the cold going for a long while yet. Foul weather means she has slept through the day, her fuel will run short, and winter is nearly finished.

Related Entries

Bodach, Brigid, Finn mac Cumhal, Manannán mac Lir, Morrigan, Bean-Nighe, Banshee, Dagda, Lug, Hag, Black Annis, Each Uisge, Baba Yaga, Marzanna, Perchta