The Cailleach Shapes the Mountains

She has been walking the mountains since before the mountains were the shape they are now.

The Cailleach Bhéara — the Hag of Beara, the Old Woman of the World — is the maker of the high places. She walks the peaks of Scotland and Ireland with a hammer in her hand and when she strikes the ground the earth rises. The corries and glens of the Scottish Highlands are the prints of her footsteps. The lochs are where she stood too long and the meltwater pooled around her feet. The stones that dot the hillsides of Connacht fell from her apron when the strings broke.

Her age is the measure of the world’s age. She is sometimes said to have renewed herself five times by marrying new husbands and taking their life-force as they aged — fifty foster-children, fifty grandchildren for each, and she herself going back to youth with each new coupling. Other versions say she has simply always been old. There are stone pillars on the Beara Peninsula in County Cork that are her; there is a mountain in Scotland called the Old Woman that is her; there is a rock on the island of Jura that bears her face. She is distributed across the landscape the way very old things tend to be distributed: everywhere, in the ground itself.

She and Brigid are in tension. When the Cailleach rules, it is winter: the ground is frozen, the rivers are locked, the world is stripped to its bones. She holds winter in place by force of will. The longer she reigns, the harder she holds on.

On the eve of spring, in some versions, she goes to the sacred well and drinks before sunrise, which renews her for another year of winter. If she sleeps past dawn — if she fails to drink in time — Brigid arrives and the spring comes.

In other versions, they are the same woman. The Cailleach is Brigid as she will be when the year is old. Brigid is the Cailleach as she was before winter came. The goddess faces two directions and both faces belong to the same head.

The Cailleach on the mountain with her hammer is not destroying. She is making. The peaks of Ben Nevis and Ben More exist because she struck them into existence, the way a sculptor strikes with a chisel and what matters is not the blow but the shape that emerges. She is the force that creates difficulty, which is also the force that creates topography, which is also the force that creates beauty, since no landscape worth painting is without both.

On the last night of winter she throws her staff under a holly tree or a blackthorn, the green things she has been preventing. The ground begins to soften. She walks north and her footsteps mark the edge of the retreating cold.

She does not disappear. She goes to the high places, above the treeline, where it is always nearly winter, and she waits. The sheep who go up in summer find her there, in the shape of a grey stone on a cairn, in the shape of cold wind through a mountain gap, in the shape of an old woman resting on a flat rock who is there when you arrive and not there when you look again.

She has been walking the mountains since before the mountains were the shape they are now. She will be walking them after the mountains are something else. This is the comfort she offers, which is also the terror: permanence is another name for what she is, and permanence is not warm.