Faces of the Goddess Magazine SGC 21

I came across these places when I was young
and when I found out they weren’t on maps I
created my own maps.
My dad would take us kids out walking around
the local hills. I used to play a game to remove
all traces of modernity. Blinking my eyes until
the streets, houses, and roads all disappeared
and the land returned to a state it might have
looked like hundreds of years in the past.
Later on in life when studying geology and
ecology I returned to this place, playing the
same game but my vision took me thousands
of years into the past.
Each time I walk this hill when my foot
leaves the tarmac and I cross the little arched
stone bridge I am tuned in, listening with my
entire body.
Usually, I feel her presence immediately; it can
exude from the earth as if the bedrock is her
very bones. She might be there in the trill of
the Skylark, or I think I spot her in the edge of
a rain cloud, whose dark shape is a stoopedover
old woman. She has taken many shapes
over the years from chatting crows, geese
down by the reservoir, and the humming bee
on a heather flower.
All the while I am looking and listening
in for her my body moves into a rhythmic
undulating gait, the familiar patterns of
moving from clumps of reeds to the next little
mound. I skirt the small bog, avoiding the
sponge-like mosses, which once you stand
on them, a squelch is the alarm to cold water
seeping in over the top of your walking boots.
Corryvrecken. Weaving by Jude Lally
Some days I don’t even head to the summit of
the hill preferring to coorie down against a dry
stane dyke, to sit and sink into the place.
The Whirlpool of Corryvrecken.
56° 9' 12.89" N, 5° 42' 25.41" W
This journey began on a beach on the Isle
of Eigg, perhaps it was because I was looking
through a great eye-shaped cut out in the
rock, which resembles a great hag’s eye, for I
once heard that it’s only through a hagstone
that you can ever see the Cailleach in her true
form
As I looked out, I saw her, towering tall. She
lifted her skirts and clambered over the Isle
of Rum, wading across the waters to Laig Bay.
Before you know it she was on the top of the
Sgurr, where she stopped for a minute to take
in the view before she was off again heading
down to between the isles of Jura and Scarba,
to the great whirlpool of Corryvrecken.
Cailleach Doll by Jude Lally, Carman Hill with Rowan Tree
99
She returns to this place each Samhuinn
to wash her great plaid in the waters of her
cauldron. Who knows what she mutters as
she lowers it into the churning waters. As she