At the head of Glen Lyon in Perthshire, in a side glen called Gleann Cailliche (glown KAL-yi-chuh), there is a stone hut about two metres long and a metre and a bit wide, with walls not quite knee height and a turf roof. Inside it live a family of water-worn sandstones taken from the bed of the River Lyon. The largest, about forty-five centimetres tall, is the Cailleach. Beside her is the Bodach, the old man. Beside them both is Nighean (NEE-un), the daughter, about seven and a half centimetres tall. There are smaller stones too, taken to be more children.

Every year around Bealltainn (BYOWL-tin), the beginning of May, they are brought out of the house and set facing down the glen. Every year around Samhainn (SAV-in), at the beginning of November, they are put back inside, the front is sealed up, and every crack is chinked with moss against the winter.

This is Tigh nam Bodach (tie nam BOD-uch), also called Tigh nan Cailleach, and it is widely described as the oldest continuously observed pre-Christian ritual in Britain. Nobody advertises who does it. It is simply still done.

Who she is

Cailleach (KAL-yuch) is Scottish Gaelic for an old woman, a hag, a nun, a carlin. She is the counterpart of the bodach (BOD-uch), the old man. In Carmichael's glossary the word also carries a sense of a period of time.

She is not a goddess in the tidy Greek sense, with a temple and a job description. She is bigger and stranger than that and considerably harder to pin down, which is exactly what you would expect from a figure this old.

What she consistently is:

  • She made the landscape. Across Scotland and Ireland, the mountains are her work. She dropped stones from her creel and made the Hebrides. She built cairns and carried boulders. She is not a figure who lives in the land, she is the reason the land is that shape.
  • She is winter. In her best-known Scottish role as Cailleach Bheur (KAL-yuch VAIR), she rules from Samhainn to Bealltainn. She strikes the ground with her staff to harden it with frost and to keep the grass down. She washes her plaid in the Corryvreckan whirlpool and it comes out white, and that is the first snow.
  • She keeps the deer and the wild things. She herds them, protects them, and does not much like hunters.
  • She is old, and she renews. One tradition has her drinking from a well at dawn on a particular day and becoming young again. Another has her turning to stone at Bealltainn and back to flesh at Samhainn. In the Glen Lyon material, she gives birth to a new child every hundred years.
  • She is dangerous in her own place. Terrible things are said to happen to anyone who disturbs her wintering grounds.

She is also, and this is the part I find most useful, not remotely interested in whether you like her.

The Glen Lyon shrine

Tigh nam Bodach is the only surviving indigenous shrine of the Cailleach anywhere, and it is worth understanding exactly what it is and is not.

The ritual is tied to transhumance: the seasonal movement of Highland cattle up to the summer shielings and back down again. The people who kept it were pastoralists working the high glen. An early party each spring would re-thatch the shrine's roof around the first of May and move the family of stones outside, and they would do this before repairing their own shielings. At the end of October, before returning to the foot of the glen, they closed her up for winter.

The Cailleach, in return, blessed the stock and the pasture and looked after the weather.

So this is not devotional in the abstract. It is a working relationship, conducted seasonally, between a community of herders and the being who owns the glen. The stones come out when the cattle come up. They go back when the cattle go down.

  • A note on the archaeology. A report from 1967 records that there were originally twelve stones in the shieling, which is generally read as a later attempt to lay a Christian frame over the site by recasting the figures as a saint called Meuran and his eleven disciples. That did not take, and the family of three is what survives in living practice.
  • A note on the claims. You will read that the ritual has run continuously for thousands of years. That is what folklorists suspect and it is entirely plausible, but it is not demonstrable, and the honest form is: this is a genuinely old, genuinely unbroken local custom of unknown but considerable antiquity, still performed. That is remarkable enough without inflating it.
  • A note on why you have heard of it. For most of its history the site was known only locally, and those who knew about it deliberately kept quiet. That changed when a proposed hydroelectric scheme threatened the area and the Glen Lyon History Society made its existence public in order to protect it. The scheme was shelved. The shrine is now known precisely because keeping it secret stopped being safe.

There is an unhappy irony in that and it is worth sitting with before you decide to visit.

What the Church did to her

When Christianity arrived, the older figures were sorted into categories.

  • Brìde (BREE-juh) was assimilated. She became St Brigid, kept her wells, her fire, her feast day and most of her attributes, and survived more or less intact.
  • The Cailleach and the Bodach were not. She was demoted into a hag: jealous of spring, malicious, ugly, an obstacle to be got past. He became a bogeyman who came down the chimney to take naughty children, or the Bodach Glas, the grey man, a portent of death.

That is a very specific piece of cultural work and it is worth naming. The young, fertile, maternal figure was baptised. The old, powerful, unbiddable, weather-making woman was made into something to frighten children with.

If you want a reason to care about the Cailleach specifically, that is mine. What happened to her is what happened to old women in this country generally, and the trials were the sharp end of the same thing.

Working with her

I would be cautious about the language of working with here, because she is not a figure who arrives when called.

  • Go outside in the worst weather you can find. This is the honest way to encounter her. Not on the altar. On a hill, in horizontal sleet, in February. She is a weather being and a land being and she is available in exactly those conditions.
  • Do not ask her for softness. She does not do it. What she offers is endurance, boundary, the authority of age, and the right of the land to be left alone.
  • She belongs to particular places. Beinn na Cailleach on Skye, the Corryvreckan, Glen Lyon, the Paps of Jura, Loch Awe, and a long list of others across Scotland and Ireland. She is not a portable deity and I would not treat her as one.
  • Winter is her half of the year. Samhainn to Bealltainn. If you keep a wheel, she holds the dark half, and the transition at Bealltainn is her going into the ground.
  • Old women. If you take one thing from this article, take this. She is the divinity of the elderly, powerful, unwelcome woman. Honouring her that costs nothing and means something is not done at an altar. It is done by how you treat the actual old women in your life and in your street.

If you go to Glen Lyon

It is a serious walk into remote country and it should be treated as such: proper boots, map and compass, weather forecast, and somebody who knows where you are.

The shrine is looked after by local people. It is not a visitor attraction and there is no interpretation board.

  • Do not move the stones. Not to see them better, not to photograph them, not at all. Their position is the ritual. Somebody put them exactly there, at the right time of year, and it is not your turn.
  • Leave nothing. No coins, no ribbons, no crystals, no offerings. The site has suffered from well-meant deposits.
  • Take nothing. Obviously.

Sit down for a while and then go home. That is the whole of the appropriate response.

Sources

  • Tigh Nam Bodach — Highland Perthshire, on the seasonal ritual and its link to cattle transhumance.
  • The shrine of the Cailleach at Glen Lyon — Celtic Countries, for the dimensions, the stone family, the 1967 report of twelve stones, and the hydro scheme.
  • The Season of the Witch — Walkhighlands, for the route and the current custodianship.
  • Canmore — Historic Environment Scotland's record for the site.
  • Carmichael, A. (1900). Carmina Gadelica. Glossary entry for cailleach, including the water-carlin and the period-of-time sense.
  • Campbell, J. G. (1900, 1902). Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Via Internet Archive.
  • Black, R. (ed.) (2005). The Gaelic Otherworld. Birlinn.
  • Mackenzie, D. A. (1917). Wonder Tales from Scottish Myth and Legend, for Beira as Cailleach Bheur. Available via Internet Archive. Treat as a literary retelling rather than a source.
  • Ó Crualaoich, G. (2003). The Book of the Cailleach: Stories of the Wise-Woman Healer. Cork University Press. The best scholarly treatment.
  • MacKillop, J. (1998). Dictionary of Celtic Mythology. Oxford University Press.

Related: [Rowan Tree and Red Thread]; [Named and Unnamed: The Scottish Witch Trials]; [The Quarter Days]