When St. Patrick came to Ireland, he met the Cailleach near the three hills of Loughcrew. It didn’t take him long to figure out that she was the goddess of the land, the keeper of the landscape and its creatures. “Fill your apron with rocks and then hop across these hills in three steps”, he challenged her. “If you don’t drop any rocks, the land will stay pagan, but if you drop a single one the land will be mine. I’ll claim it for Christ.” The Cailleach accepted the challenge. She filled her apron with boulders, then loped from hill to hill in three long strides. At each hill several of the rocks tumbled from her apron. That’s how Ireland came to be Christian and also how the rocks that form the ancient monuments on the crests of the hills of Loughcrew were moved there.
The Friday at the end of our first week of classes is traditionally the day we go to Loughcrew in County Meath. Loughcrew, also known as Sliabh na Callighe, the Hills of the Hag, or the Three Steps of the Witch, is a Neolithic passage tomb complex spread across three hills, dating to 3000 B.C. At Loughcrew we are in the realm of the Cailleach, in a landscape created by her.
The word “cailleach” simply means old woman or hag. She is a figure who has fascinated me for the last several years. I first came upon her when Doug Bland asked me to do a story about Brigid for his annual Winter’s Light concert and I ended up telling about the Cailleach instead. Brigid and the Cailleach are often interpreted as two faces of the same goddess – her spring and winter aspects. The Cailleach shapes the earth, brings the winter, and shelters the animals. She’s often described as wearing an enormous cloak and carrying a mighty staff as she strides across the countryside. She has a reputation as a great walker, not surprising given her intimate connection with the earth. The image above by Barrie Maguire is a modern representation of the Cailleach, sheathed in the quilt of the landscape even as she stitches it together.
Like the rest of Ireland, Loughcrew is undergoing changes. The first year I went we were the only people there. The second year there was a small OPW (Office of Public Works) trailer in the car park at the bottom of the hill and a guide at the entrance to Cairn T, the largest and most impressive passage tomb on the middle hill. This year our group of 32 was there along with 30 school children from Dublin, with 100 more expected later that day. There were two guides, one of whom escorted us to the center of the passage in small groups of five or six.
I always appreciate having a guide. Ours was knowledgeable and efficient. She reminded us that the passage was aligned to sunrise at the equinoxes. She demonstrated with her flashlight how the sunlight traveled across the face of the carved rock at the back of the passage from the upper left corner to the lower right during the hour it is illuminated. She told us that Cairn T, the one we were inside, had once been covered with bright white quartz rock like Newgrange, so that the hill would have shone like a beacon. One of the old names for Cairn T is Carnbane, which in Irish means white cairn. I struggled with envy when she revealed that she had witnessed the winter solstice sunrise in Newgrange three times. “The perks of the job,” she told me with a satisfied smirk for which I couldn’t blame her. She said that two guides were now necessary since Loughcrew received over 6,000 visitors in 2006.
Most importantly, she told us the story that opens the entry. The story has been aggravating me since I heard it on Friday, and I suspect it will continue to do so. I’ve come across several versions of the story without St. Patrick. Here, for example, is a poem about her attributed to Swift, who purportedly gathered stories in the area in the early 1700’s. Carnmore (large cairn in Irish), and Carnbeg (small cairn) are alternate names for the Loughcrew passage tombs.
Determined now her tomb to build,
Her ample skirt with stones she filled,
And dropped a heap on Carnmore;
Then stopped one thousand yards, to Loar,
And dropped another goodly heap;
And then with one prodigious leap
Gained Carnbeg; and on its height
Displayed the wonders of her might.*
The image of her presented in the poem corresponds to my concept of the Cailleach. It makes sense to me that she chose to place the rocks on the hills as she “displayed the wonders of her might.” To think that she would accept - and lose - a challenge from St. Patrick rankles me. Why would she accept such a challenge? Why did she drop the stones, or why did she let them fall?
I’ve been thinking about what the Cailleach might say if I was able to pose these questions to her. In the process it’s occurred to me that my conception of her is too narrow. It doesn’t really make sense that a goddess of her scope and antiquity would buy into the primitive duality of Ireland being either pagan or Christian exclusively. It’s just too small a world view for her. Plus, surely she showed Patrick something that day, too. He witnessed her capabilities, her hill loping stride and her boulder bearing might.
That may explain why in another story about an encounter between these two titans, he “causes her to disappear in a red flash.” The story is included in Gearoid O’Crualaoich’s Book of the Cailleach. Here’s what he says about it:
"St. Patrick and the ‘new’ Christian order is shown as unsympathetic, to say the least, to the figure and the significance of the cailleach in ancestral tradition. Patrick is portrayed as immediately pronouncing the demise of the cailleach and all she represents. He causes her to disappear ‘in a red flash’ and that, we are told, was ‘the end of her’. We can again however, point to the continued transmission and performance of this narrative itself as a continuing afterlife for the cailleach and for the perception of ancestral cosmology in a worldview that is officially Christian and in the modern era, increasingly rational. In this, as in other texts that purport to show the displacement and expulsion of the cailleach, we can sense the abiding allure of the older wisdom and the poetically privileged way in which it continues to find expression even in accounts of its supplanting. Such accounts serve to renew the ambiguity of cosmological allegiance that marks the Irish repertoire of legend regarding landscape, as both domain of the hag-goddess and God’s creation. "
In other words, you never die as long as they keep telling stories about you. As any storyteller can tell you, being storied is the best kind of immortality. Should I ever get an opportunity to interview the Cailleach, I’ll let her know I’m doing my best to keep her stories alive within my own consciousness and in the imaginations of my listeners.
*Loughcrew: The Cairns by Jean McMann