A short film made in the Scottish Highlands, as part of a post doctorate scholarship program. Told through traditional Gaelic language storytelling, this film depicts the winter goddess known as the Cailleach. A fearsome and powerful deity, the Cailleach rules over the coldest months of the year, is credited with creating mountains and lochs, and is a guardian of forest animals.

Beautiful video of landscapes in Scotland, poem voiced in English and Scots Gaelic

Here’s a virtual movie of an ancient Irish Poem translated into English “The Old Woman of Beare”. The poem tells an eternal tale of old age and beauty lost.The poem relates the thoughts of an old woman who is nearing the end of her life, living a monastic existence amongst nuns. She recalls her youth with pride — a time when she had many lovers, a time when she “drank wine with kings” — and she derides the way young women treat their lovers today. Her ailing health, perhaps related to her wilder youth, provides a counterbalance to these thoughts and reminiscences. The old woman’s presence is a ghostly and other-worldly spirit.

How the Cailleach created the cairns and landscape of Ireland. History, myth, and archeoastronomy

A modern poem about the ancient Mother of the land

Dialogue with Anthony Murphey, his dream of the Cailleach, and the dying of the old self and the old system

The Cailleach was dependent on this one thing… every hundred years she must get back to the water and immerse herself so that she might become young again.

Hearth Storytelling of the Creatrix of the land and weather. A crone and a great walker.

Similarities and differences between these powerful female forces, explained by Lora O’Brien.

Both The Cailleach and Brigid herald important times of change around the wheel of the year. They mark the beginning and end of the coldest and darkest quarter. Some mythologies view them as two aspects Diana or Danu. In other myths, the Cailleach locks Brigid away during the months of her domain. One can even trace the story of the groundhog’s shadow on Imbolc day to an earlier tale of Cailleach gathering her last firewood.

An exploration of various aspects of the Cailleach in Scotland and Ireland by respected folklorist, Kris Hughes. If you click on her name, you will find a rich channel of Celtic folklore.

Discussion by Philip Carr-Gomm, long-term Chief Druid of OBOD, Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids.