The Cailleach's House

Today I felt called to the Cailleach. The Ballgawley mountains rise a few miles west from where I live in Sligo in the Northwest of Ireland. They are a close grouping of peaks, heather-covered upland bogs with specks and larger protusions of gneiss weathered out in greys and whites, pocked with quartz baubles.

Humans modified the skin of this landscape, cutting and burning the higher forests thousands of years ago to allow farming. The sheep and deer have taken over where we left-off and keep the vegetation pared-down.

I have traversed these hills many times, mainly sticking to the Sligo Way trail that contours around the shoulders of the peaks. A surging interest in local lithic sites begot research. I found references to Cailleach Beara’s House, a passage tomb on a lower peak to the southwest of the range.

In Irish mythology the Cailleach is depicted as an old hag, indeed the root of the name in Old Irish means ‘veiled one’. She is known generally in Ireland as An Cailleach Bheara, but her local name in Sligo was ‘Garavogue’ and we remember her in the name of the river flowing through Sligo town into the Atlantic. She is a deity who arises at Samhain (the pagan festival separating the lighter and darker halves of the year), bringing winter to the land and gaining strength through the season before giving way to the goddess Brigid at Imbolc (the festival marking the beginning of spring). In many myths she shapes the land by dropping rocks from her apron as she travels. In Sligo she is reputed to have lived on the mountain with the local mad king called Sweeney. They once turned themselves into geese and dived into a bottomless pool on the mountainside. That high lake is known as Lough Dá Gé (Lake of the Two Geese). The Cailleach is neither good nor bad, her ambiguous nature necessary to span two worlds. 

The stones of this tomb were placed here at least five thousand years ago by people living in the area. Their ritual centre was Carrowmore, a dense constellation of passage tombs lying a few miles to the west on the Cuíl Íorra peninsula. These people came to Ireland from Iberia and France, bringing their farming methods and worship of an earth goddess. They would mix in time with a new wave of migrants from the Pontic Steppe in modern day Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan who imported more efficient farming methods and a genetic trait of lactose tolerance.

As I lope through the heathers, picking-up sheep and deer trails, I find these mutable paths crossing more substantial trails of bare stone. Wandering, my mind wonders if these stones were trodden by those ancient people coming to the Cailleach. I have long learned to follow the animal ways when in the mountains. The depressions in the peat, the grass lying flat indicating their chosen route, the cambered intricacies of paths spiralling upwards, hugging the sides of slopes. I crest a ridge overlooking Lough Dá Gé and gaze across it to Ben Bulben and the Dartry range of North Sligo. The water is dark, befitting the Cailleach.

A connection with the past, with the land, is what we lack in our modern society. I seek that connection. Words rise, combining strands of disparate threads. This sudden coalesence of vigour to begin, to step forward, to put pen to paper, or fingertip to keyboard, has had a long gestation. Looking back to my college years and early twenties full of green anarchist theory and literary zeal, I see myself letting go of that radical rope, and submitting to the yoke of the norm, the monthly pay into the bank account and the self-promoting priorities those activities necessitate. The cultural aftershocks that followed the Covid-19 earthquake seem to have shaken me awake; a groggy drunk blinking in the light as he comes around. An even bigger element sculpting my perspective is my young family. Having kids bestows to you an experience of childhood a second time, at one remove. The wonder, trust and adventure that inheres in their being forge an insoluble bond, compelling your enchantment.

I walk these wild places, in the footsteps of people who knew and felt the land. In walking and in being present in these places, you find everywhere resplendence and meaning. I climb from the lake to gain the height of the peaks. Aghamore, Slieve Dá Éan (Hill of the Two Birds), Slieve Dargan. From cairn to cairn to cairn, from sacred to sacred to sacred. I add a stone to each, as is my wont.

I disturb a Golden Plover. In Irish she is known as ‘an Feadóg Bhui’, which means ‘yellow whistle’. She arises and darts away quickly, unsure of this giant.

Finally now to the Cailleach’s House. The stones here are populated with masses of ornate lichens, each bordering the next in a sprawling checkerboard. I peer into the dark depths of the chamber. Someone has placed a votive offering, a white muslin parcel, laced with pink ribbon. I hold it in my awareness for a time. A request to the Queen of Winter, perhaps, or a welcome issued on her waking at Samhain. As I sit with her the wind brushes my cheek. The same wind stings my eyes as I turn into it and begin my descent.

For a long time I thought that the ideal of personal progress was the distillation of some empirical truth, but I now know the way forward is a deep one tethered by a line to the past. Our truth is in communion. We live in myth, inextricably and inexorably, its tendrils reaching through all aspects of our lives. Our modern world relentlessly strips away the myths of our birthright; the knowledge of being and the land. As these myths subside, so does our agency. Ensconced in our bunkers we consume pale substitutes instead, new and superficial stories where we are what we buy, where the consummation of orchestrated desire is exalted. The implicit message is that each minute shift away from the dirt of the ground towards a sterile, risk-free technotopia should be hailed as an act of wondrous beneficence from the gods of Science. 

We must re-mythologise ourselves, re-integrate ourselves into the land that birthed and sustains us. We must tell ourselves the old stories to remind ourselves who we are and how we are connected to each other and all the beings we share this earth with. Charles Eisenstein calls this ‘The Story of Interbeing’. It is a story I love to hear, and to sing loudly.

As I reach the lower forest I think of home and of describing this place to my children. I will bring them here soon. My heart is lightened, centred.