Possessed by the land
Riverwitch 13
‘Riverwitch’ is a collaborative project with my husband David Knowles, author of Elvers by Moonlight. It’s the re-membering of fragments of a blog duet we began in 2014, mapping our dislocation from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides to Donegal in north-west Ireland. It offers a story-within-a-story as, ten years on, we try to make sense of the ways in which places claim us, mark us – and then, when it’s time, cast us loose. For the duration of the project, we’ll take turns every Wednesday to revisit an old post and add new reflections and insights. If you’re new here, for the background to this project, please read this post first.
Check out David’s last post here. The Riverwitch series will end by Winter Solstice.
The audio of my posts is for paid subscribers, below the paywall.
November 2014
There has been one big lack in my imaginal world, since we moved to the country of Riverwitch. A lack that unsettles me, that won’t allow me to relax and entirely to feel at home. In this one particular part of Donegal, I can’t find the Cailleach anywhere. This feels like the only parish in Ireland where there are no local stories about her and no landmarks named after her.
Yes, the Cailleach. You know: the Old Woman of Gaelic myth and folklore who created and shaped the land. That Cailleach who was everywhere on Lewis, who I spoke to every morning as I spread myself across the headland like a bad case of sea-haar. There in the Western Isles, the stories tell of her two aspects: Brigid, known there as Bride, and the hard, stony, one-eyed, blue-faced Old Woman herself. One version of the story says that the Cailleach dies and is reborn as Bride the spring maiden on the old festival day of Imbolc (1 February). Bride is fragile at first, but grows stronger each day as the sun rekindles its fire, and turns scarcity into abundance. But as autumn approaches and the light begins to fade, she weakens again, and her alter ego (or sometimes her sister) the Cailleach begins to awaken. And by the old festival of Samhain (1 November) it is the Cailleach who rules the year, and Bride who sleeps quietly in the hills. There are many stories about this battle for the seasons which takes place between Bride and the Cailleach, but they can clearly be seen as two aspects of life in balance, of the need for both darkness and light, for both summer and winter, the ever-renewing cyclical nature of the world.
Those two mythical beings kept me connected and kept me honest as, in the first throes of menopause, the wild, wintering rage in me battled with a need for warmth and for peace. The Cailleach’s stories always prevailed; they claimed me so powerfully, and dominated my imagination for the last four years – and so now that I haven’t been able to find that old Cailleach here in the land, I’ve felt curiously cast adrift. I’ve grown to rely on guardian spirits who are women – they’ve nurtured me, taught me – but this little part of Donegal is known as the lost kingdom of Lugh. I don’t want the gods, though; I don’t want the warriors and the kings. I want the Old Woman, who still has something to show me about how to age disgracefully.
On the hill behind our little cottage there is a wood, and in the wood there is a heronry. Every day, herons fly out of it and stitch their way along the river to the nearby sea. Often, as I walk out along the lane with the dogs at dawn, I will see a heron standing on a stone in the middle of the fast-flowing river. They are the still points in the turbulent birth of every new day. And when you live in close proximity to such beautiful, iconic creatures – and especially if, like me, you are immersed in myth and story – they not only capture your daytime imagination, but begin to infiltrate your dreams.
In the Irish language, the word for a grey heron is corr; it also happens to be the word for crane. This is because, just around the time that the Eurasian crane became extinct in Ireland, the similar-looking grey heron arrived to fill its ecological niche. Heron and crane, then, are interchangeable in Irish mythology, and in those old stories, crane is a powerful and a liminal bird. She haunts the thresholds where water, land and air merge; she guards the treasures of the Otherworld and is a guide for those who wish to travel there. Perhaps because she stands upright, tall and slender, she is associated with shapeshifting in the feminine form – and indeed, most likely for this reason, eating a heron’s flesh was once forbidden.
Now, surrounded as I seem to be by herons, I’ve read as much about them and their crane counterparts as I’ve been able to find. They are associated, I’ve discovered, with longevity; in some of the old stories they are connected, too, to shapeshifting hags and old women. Thinking about this as I walked along the lane last week, I stood and watched as a heron flew up from the riverbank, shrieking. There was something oddly hag-like about her call, and all of a sudden the world tilted a little, and a strange character popped fully formed into my head. Old Crane Woman had come to me, part woman, part bird. By the time I arrived home, she had taken possession of me. Springing directly from this place I lived in, rising fully formed out of my river, I had found the Cailleach in another form.
I can see her when I close my eyes; I hear her voice as I’m drifting off to sleep. Sometimes, if you happen to be walking along a track within reach of water at dusk or dawn, you’ll see her there, Old Crane Woman: a tall, gangly figure wrapped in a mid-grey cloak. Her legs and her arms are unusually long and seem to bend in odd directions. Sometimes you’ll find her standing in the river, still as can be, on one leg; you’ll know her by her long nose, her frayed grey and white dress, and her long, thin arms with the sharp, sticking-out elbows. Don’t startle her: she’ll be gone in a flash. I will write about Old Crane Woman, I think. I think she’ll have some things to say. *
November 2024
You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough – even white people – the spirits will begin to speak to them. It’s the power of the spirits coming up from the land. The spirits and the old powers aren’t lost, they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to influence them.
The words of a Crow elder[i]
In Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, Native American medicine man Betonie talks about the ceremonies and rituals which all humans must perform in order to keep themselves and the world happy and healthy. He stresses the need for them to change as the world changes, in order to retain their power and to connect with the world as it now is: ‘In many ways, the ceremonies have always been changing . . . only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong . . . things which don’t shift and grow are dead things.’ In the novel, Betonie’s respect for the old traditions coupled with an awareness of the new world enables him to create new ceremonies which bring true healing, and which keep humanity in harmony with the world.
The same goes for stories. The stories which are located in a place also change over time – it’s a body of lore which is constantly reconstructing itself, just as the world around us is in a constant process of transformation. Whenever we live in a place, we become part of its story. We bring new possibilities to it, forging – if we are prepared to countenance the possibility of such enchantments – unique relationships with it and with the plant and animal life around us. The fact of our being in a place changes, or adds to, its story. And so, although familiarity with the old stories of a place is an important part of coming to truly know it, to understanding how it came to be the way it is, and the history (‘real’ and imaginal) of human life in it – the storying of place doesn’t end there. Places, and their stories, are in a continuous process of becoming. And so, if we are truly enmeshed within a place, a new and unique part of its ongoing natural and cultural history, we’ll go on to make our own stories. We bring our own points of reference, and we will imagine new stories about the place which are based on our own ways of experiencing it.
Old Crane Woman was new in the ever-transforming mythology of that particular corner of Donegal, but she emerged in the only way that is meaningful: not just out of my head, but directly out of the place itself, and the creatures that inhabit it. Old Crane Woman occupies the space somewhere between the grey heron, the river and my own imagination. She’s an act of co-creation. This is how the land possesses us, draws us into relationship with it. This is how we build belonging, and this is how we re-enchant the Earth.
* Old Crane Woman had an awful lot to say. I’ll be sharing her stories for paid subscribers in December.
