The Cailleach: The Winter Hag Who Shaped the Mountains and Guards the Well of Youth
Before the gods of the Gael had names, the land itself had a grandmother. The Scots called her the Cailleach —the Veiled One, the Old Woman—and in the Highlands she needed no further introduction, for her portrait stood on every horizon: she had built it. The mountains of Scotland and Ireland, the old people said without a flicker of doubt, fell from her creel—a giantess striding through the primordial waters with an apron full of boulders, and where the apron-strings broke, there stand the hills to this day. Islands are her stepping-stones; lochs are the wells she forgot to cap; the whirlpool of Corryvreckan is her washtub, where in the nights before winter she trebles her washing of the great plaid, and when she has done, the plaid of Scotland is white. One-eyed, blue-faced, rust-toothed, older than the sea's own grandmother, she herds deer on the high tops, strikes the ground iron-hard with her holly staff, and rules, by ancient and undisputed title, exactly one half of the ye...