The Return
Riverwitch 15
This is the final post in the ‘Riverwitch’ series: a collaborative project with my husband David Knowles, author of Elvers by Moonlight. In this series, we’ve re-membered 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 has offered a story-within-a-story as, ten years on, we tried 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’ve taken 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.
Read David’s post from last week here.
The audio of my posts is for paid subscribers, below the paywall.
August 2016
This was the one place I didn’t know how to leave. Which I couldn’t quite believe that I could leave. My place. I recognised it the first moment I saw it. In some curious way it defined my four years on Lewis. In some even more curious way, it defined me. This place that I am returning to now, two years after I left it and moved to the country of Riverwitch. On a pilgrimage that I promised I would make one day, when my heart had mended a little. To say sorry for leaving. Sorry for running away. Sorry for the abandonment. Sorry to have failed.
The Rocky Place, I used to call it, with its vast expanse of slabbed rock extending underfoot like a multicoloured, striped and layered carpet. It slopes gradually down to a long swathe of smaller rocks, coated with emerald-green algae, onto which the sea continually crashes. This undulating rock carpet is founded on gneiss, of course: Lewisian gneiss, one of the oldest rocks in the world. Gneiss is metamorphic rock – yes, metamorphic: a word shot through with all the possibilities of transformation that I could ever want. How could such a place not define me, obsessed with transformation as I am? It is phoenix rock, emerging renewed from temperatures greater than 1500°C and pressure that is greater than 1500 bars. Such things of necessity cause profound change if you mean to survive them.
There is a corner of this place which is a shrine. Cliff walls provide a home to succulent plants and to a miniature version of Scots lovage; an unexpectedly deep and glassy pool at the base never dries up and is inhabited by a species of fairy shrimp, or maybe Gammarus. Back in the day, I sat here often by the pool, cross-legged.
In the cliffs behind the pool, if the light is right and you’re used to cohabiting with the imaginal, you can identify several faces in the rock. One is the outline of a younger woman with a snub nose; another is the outline of a craggier face which belongs to a crone. All the way to the left you might see, if you are looking for such a thing, the silhouette of a heavy-eyebrowed hag carved into the cliff-edge – and indeed it is known that in such places the Cailleach might stand and look out to sea, perhaps searching for sight of her husband the Bodach, otherwise known as Manannan Mac Lir. I stood for long periods of time by the side of that old rock-woman and stared out to sea with her, imagining the long, lonely ages, the unyielding stone and the unforgiving power of the stormy ocean. I shared her vigil for a while and told her all of my stories; I wept by her side when, for a few months, life became unbearably hard.
Here, then, I would immerse myself in those stories of the Cailleach, the creator-goddess of this land. Here, if you’ll forgive my impertinence, I became Cailleach for a time. I became Storm; I listened to the stories of stones. Here, I learned about endurance. I learned about standing – and more than I ever wanted to know about making a stand. I learned about digging in, and for sure – oh, for sure – I learned about digging too deep. But I remembered too that the Cailleach, for all her seemingly harsh ways, danced her way across the mountains even as she brought to them the onset of winter, and I remembered that I too had always loved to dance. This place saw me grieve during the coming of my own wintering season, but it also saw me dance barefooted across its warm summer rock.
I had a dream, the night after I first stumbled across the Rocky Place. It was one of those that Carl Jung called a ‘Big Dream’: the kind you have just a few times in your life. The kind of dream you know is telling you something, though often enough you have no idea what, at the time. I dreamed that the Rocky Place was made from stone animals, and these animals formed the boundary cliff face as well as the surface of the ground. One was an eagle with outstretched wings; another was a stalking wolf with holes for eyes where the sky shone through. In a shallow but wide channel of sea-water which I would somehow have to cross if I carried on walking, lay a huge rock-whale which might act as a stepping stone. I could sense something stirring in the air around me; it was a sense of power and also of danger. If you tread on that sleeping whale, the place seemed to be saying to me, if you wake up the animals, the sleeping heart of the rock; if you wake up the sleeping power of this abandoned land and let loose its stories, you have no idea just what it is you are going to awaken. Will you do it, anyway? Will you do it, without fear of the consequences?
I did; of course I did. How could I not. I was younger then, and still all for hurling myself full-tilt into life’s adventure. Much to my irritation and partly to my relief, I was roused from my own sleep just as the drowsing dream-animals began to stir. I put the dream to one side; I didn’t then know what it meant. But one of its many lessons which I’ve come to understand since is that in merging myself so deeply with that abandoned land and its stories over all those years, I woke it up.
And then I left it.
On the day before we left Lewis for good, David and I, accompanied as always by the two collie dogs, went on a final pilgrimage to my Rocky Place. A pilgrimage rather than simply a leave-taking, because there are some moves in life which must be made more mindfully than others; some choices which must be made more actively than others. Tipping points, when worlds and lives hang in the balance.
Seven years previously (oh, behold that mythic period of time!) David and I had been married under a tree, surrounded by a circle of family and friends, at the Ceilidh Place in Ullapool. We wrote our own ceremony, with poems from friends and with our own words that were written for each other. And so, on that day before we left Lewis for good, we went together – and for the first time – to the Rocky Place. We went to stand before the Cailleach and the Bodach she was always waiting for, and to say some of those words again. This time there were no fancy dresses or smart suits – just a couple of grungy old croft coats and waterproof bog boots, with two little sheepdogs as our only witnesses. We said again the words that David wrote for us back in 2007, which had so much more resonance all those years on. And so we committed ourselves to this new journey, to this new migration to the country of Riverwitch.
We came here over rivers, oceans, mountains
Through fires and a darkness, across high passes
We scoured the rocky valleys for precious stones
We netted the seas for fish with pearly eyes
We ran and ran
We crawled and flew
We passed within a hair’s breadth
within a wing’s beat
of never finding
of never knowing
But we have come here through fires and a darkness, across high passes
over rivers, oceans, mountains
holding life by the tail
to take life by the hand.
Afterwards, I stood for a while alone with the Cailleach, my head level with her chin. I stood and stared out with her in the general direction of Donegal. Then I stepped down in front of her and found that I was just tall enough to reach up and kiss the mouth of the hag. And so it was that I found, finally, a way to leave.
Just around the corner from the Cailleach rock, there was a vast, flat stone slab wedged into an alcove up against the cliff face. It looked for all the world like a giant sofa, fit for any Flintstone. I called it the Cailleach’s Bed. One late-August night, tired of the too-light summer and longing for the glitter of stars, I slept on it, fitfully, with the Gasker light flashing slowly out to sea to the south of me, and the Flannan Isles lighthouse flashing at a quite different tempo to the north.
After we moved permanently to Donegal, eighteen months passed before finally we sold our old croft. Not everyone – or actually, not anyone, it seemed, was up for the rigours of such a remote place. Not for all its wild beauty; not for all its wild heart. When eventually we found a buyer, David returned to Lewis for a few days to gather up a few remaining possessions. I asked him while he was there to go to the Rocky Place and say hello for me, and he did. Here is what he found: the Cailleach’s Bed had gone.
So I am here now, several months later, and I can tell you: the Cailleach’s Bed has gone.
Yes, there are big storms in the islands, and yes, big storms can move rocks. I once was trained as a scientist; I was trained above all to be a sceptic. I understand that water, under great pressure, forced into gaps and crevices, can do remarkable things.
Moving an enormous, thick slab of solid, heavy Lewisian gneiss, bigger in both dimensions than a single bed? Lifting it completely out of the alcove inside which it so tightly fit, casting it aside, leaving no traces behind?
Under some circumstances, of course. And yet … just this one particular impossibly large and heavy rock? Which was so firmly wedged into its place?
You may wonder what I am trying to tell you here; I can already see you rolling your eyes. Am I mad, or filled with delusions of grandeur? Do I imagine that because I left, the Rocky Place had no more need for a Cailleach’s Bed and spat it out? That the land was in some way responding to me and, in particular, to my departure? Angry, perhaps – or grieving? The land’s great grieving, somehow matching my own? I can’t possibly be trying to tell you such a thing – surely it would be ridiculous – and yet I suppose I am. Because I woke that abandoned land up, and then I left it.
This land feels sleepy again, now; it feels strange to me. For the first time, I am a stranger here. I don’t think I will return.
I learned many things in this rocky place. But what I have learned above all else, all these years on, is that I am not, after all, a creature of solid rock. I am not made of stone; I am not ancient gneiss. I am a spirit of air and water: mutable, changeable, transforming. And when you dig yourself too deeply into an element that is not your natural element – as I dug myself into this hard, stony, sticky-peated earth – then if you are very, very lucky it will spit you out rather than swallow you up.
It was a close call, but that old Cailleach spat me out. Back to the horizon, and the distance; back to that clear light place where water meets sky. Moving on, ever fluid, always migrating.
