Restorative Matters
February edition
The Cailleach and the House of Winter
There are folk stories that speak of a woman so ancient she shaped the land itself.
Of mountains formed from stones dropped from her creel.
Of winter arriving only once she had washed her cloak in a great whirlpool and laid it across vast hills.
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She is ancient.
She is weathered.
And she is grey in the way stone holds light, and in the way cloud gathers before snow.
In the old stories, she is known as the Cailleach.
Long before she became a figure in books or a curiosity of folklore, she was understood as the elder of winter.
The embodiment of winter.
A presence that held authority and reminded us that some seasons must not be hurried, but instead respected.
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For most of human history, winter wasn’t treated as a problem to solve, much as it is now, but rather the act of enduring it shaped the pace of everyday life.
In a time when life was physically harder, winter would have dictated what could happen and what could not: food, movement, work, gathering, rest - all of it shaped around the reality of colder months, shorter days, darkness, and scarcity.
Our ancestors would have had to adapt by slowing down, learning how to survive within these harsh conditions, doing so together as a community.
And that community would have meant those across generations of individuals who would never have met in person, as well as those living alongside each other in daily life.
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I find this idea rather fascinating.
This secondary sense of community that is stretched out over time.
I’ve searched for a word that accurately describes this kind of human connection, and to the best of my knowledge, it turns out there isn’t one, at least not in modern language.
So I will refer to it as an intergenerational community; a community that runs through ancestral lines, a community that includes those who came before and those who will follow.
A community shaped by memory and inheritance of knowledge.
And perhaps the best way we can begin to understand this intergenerational community is through folklore.
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Folk stories are a form of memory, a way of passing knowledge across generations.
Historically, they held valuable life-giving information such as weather, danger, and survival, alongside narratives such as humour, restraint, love, and grief.
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For me, however, my personal interest in folk stories has come later in life.
As a young autistic child, I had very little interest in them growing up.
I now, of course, understand that lack of interest through an autistic lens: the need for clarity, for things to be exact, precise, and factually correct.
I’ve long been a person who favours ideas that line up cleanly with reality, and so for much of my childhood and until quite recently, many of the archetypes and storylines found in folk tales have felt messy, too complex, and often frustratingly contradictory.
Mostly because they seemed to change depending on who was telling the story or where it was being told.
That kind of chaos unsettles me.
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I have always felt more at home in the space where curiosity meets evidence.
In other words, rather than dismissing myths as symbolic stories, I have been interested in whether they point toward realities that were once observable, and in a sense, ‘true’.
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Like many in the West, I have grown up in a culture that trains us to dismiss ancestral stories altogether.
They are often treated as childish or indulgent, and now, against the backdrop of our modern scientific lives, as something rudimentary.
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As a culture, we are encouraged to believe we have outgrown them, that they belonged to a less sophisticated time that existed before the precision and certainty we now value.
That, too, is likely part of why I never felt much draw towards them.
But of course, human history is threaded with many kinds of stories and myths.
Stories of dragons, for example, are a particular love of mine: tales of benevolent gold, green, and crystal-shining white creatures moving through the air like living starlight.
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Enormous fire-breathing allies, ready to protect, ready to serve.
But even if dragons aren’t your thing, it’s still easy to understand the pull of that image.
Power without apology.
Loyalty without negotiation.
Especially now, in a world that often feels unstable and on fire in more ways than one.
Dragons appear again and again across cultures, particularly in the East, where they were often understood as life-giving rather than monstrous dragons of the West.
These stories carry their own questions; they open doors that could easily take us elsewhere, but for now, I want to bring our attention back to the folk stories.
The ones shaped directly by land, weather, hunger, and survival.
The ones my own ancestors would have told as a way of making sense of the world they lived inside.
For me, as happens for many women in midlife, the pace of life has of late begun to shift.
My relationship with truth and with the natural world around me has slowly changed, and it is within that change that I have found myself drawn to folktales and archetypes.
Of course, age does that: realising that life doesn’t move neatly forward.
Energy, and the demands of life, ebb and flow; the bigger perspective widens.
Somewhere along the way, the ebb and flow take longer, and the pace of life changes.
With that comes more space.
Space to notice.
Space to sit with complexity.
Space to understand that not everything meaningful can be pinned down or proven in the way I once needed.
And so the folk tales and stories I once rejected have begun to pique my curiosity against the backdrop of the demands of midlife.
They have become a welcome stop to rest my attention for a while.
I have made peace with them as reflections of how people once related to the world, rather than literal explanations, carrying insights into land, season, ageing, power, and restraint, and how people stayed connected to those who came before them.
Among the figures I have learnt about recently is a character named the Cailleach.
The Cailleach appears in folklore originating in Scotland, my ancestral home, as well as Ireland and the Isle of Man, and often she appears under different names.
She is called the Hag of Beara, or Beira, the Winter Queen.
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The Cailleach, in old Gaelic, translates plainly as that: old woman.
Except in these stories, old does not carry the same meaning of diminished in the way the word age often does in today’s modern life.
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And it is only from this understanding of the word old, and therefore of age, that the power of a figure such as the Cailleach begins to make sense.
The Cailleach, as a character, is associated with winter, with mountains, with stone, with storms.
In some stories, she forms the land itself, dropping stones from her basket to create the hills and valleys.
In others, she washes her cloak in the great whirlpool until it is clean enough to lay as snow across the mountains.
Of course, this folktale was never an attempt to explain the world in any scientific detail; it was simply a way of honouring great, uncontrollable forces that shaped people’s lives.
They were a way to respect those forces, just as in the stories of the Cailleach, the image of the great whirlpool becomes a way of speaking in relationship to experience rather than trying to define it in fact.
The folklore surrounding the Cailleach asks for respect, recognising that winter has a rightful place in the seasonal year and calls for a different kind of intelligence than the one we tend to bring to it today, with our modern habit of rushing through to spring and longer days.
In the lands of Scotland, Ireland, and England, before the arrival of Christianity and, in many places, the colonisation of our native cultures approximately 1,500 years ago, land-based ways of knowing helped people understand winter with authority.
The Cailleach, as a figure in stories, held memory; she represented the kind of knowledge that only comes from having lived through enough winters to recognise patterns in the world around you: when to wait, when to conserve, and when to allow something to fall away.
Winter, in this worldview, was part of how life was made possible.
These stories and tales of winter as an archetype would have provided continuity.
In communities where literacy was rare and written history unreliable or inaccessible, stories were how memory stayed alive.
To know the story was to know how your people had survived before you.
To hear it again was to be reminded that others had stood where you were standing now.
And isn’t that what we are all always reaching for, whether we name it or not?
A deep need for a sense of connection.
That sense of community and continuity does something powerful.
In the depth of winter, when the world narrowed and resources were thin, there would still have been a feeling of being held by those who had already walked through similar seasons.
The cold would have been real, the hardship real, but you were not alone within it.
Intergenerational community, in this sense, is a vertical community rather than side by side, a long, quiet thread that runs through generations.
And I must suppose that living inside that kind of generational belonging softened the sharp edges of individualism.
When hardship was shared across time, not just across neighbours, there would have been less pressure for a single person to carry everything alone.
Today, much of that thread has thinned.
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We live with fewer rituals of remembering, fewer shared narratives that locate us inside a longer human story.
In some cases, we have even turned backward with accusation rather than understanding, placing blame on previous generations for the trauma we are now trying to name.
And I think something subtle must surely be lost when connection is framed only through fracture.
Folk stories, however, offered another way.
They reminded people that survival itself was communal work, carried forward, imperfectly, by many hands.
When I happened to encounter author Sharon Blackie at a talk a few years ago, I learned that she is also a mythologist and psychologist whose writing sits at the meeting point of folklore, landscape, and women’s lived experience.
Blackie writes about myth as something we can be with.
She treats figures like the Cailleach as carriers of psychological, cultural, and ecological truth.
Her work is based on scholarship, but it is written for the body as much as for the mind.
She is particularly interested in what happens when modern people, especially women, lose contact with land-based stories that once helped them understand their place in the world.
In If Women Rose Rooted, her breakthrough non-fiction book, Sharon Blackie writes about the selkie stories of the North Atlantic coasts: selkies, shape-shifting beings, half-woman, half-seal, who live in the sea but on rare nights shed their skins to dance on the shoreline as human women. In many of these stories, a selkie woman strays too far from the water, her skin is hidden or taken, and she finds herself unable to return to the sea.
She lives on land, often marries, and may even bear children.
Blackie is careful in how she reads these stories.
The selkie is not punished for her wildness, nor is the sea presented as a place of escape from responsibility.
Instead, the slow loss happens when the selkie forgets her own nature.
Life on land is not wrong, but it is incomplete.
When she eventually finds her skin again, she returns to the sea out of necessity.
Read this way, the selkie story becomes a way of speaking about belonging, about what happens when a woman adapts so fully to the expectations placed upon her that she loses touch with the deeper rhythm of self.
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This story is not one of betrayal of love or community, as it might at first appear, but rather it is shaped as a restoration of wholeness.
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And as Blackie presents it, it becomes a way of speaking about dislocation: about what happens when a woman adapts so fully to the expectations placed upon her that she forgets her own nature.
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The recovery of the skin is a remembering of self rather than any rejection of responsibility or relationship.
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The Cailleach belongs to the same lineage of remembering.
As the archetype of winter, she offers containment and asks for discernment. She reminds us that not everything is meant to be carried forward.
Before these stories were written down, they were spoken in longhouses and around hearths. Children heard them alongside elders, and they were absorbed through repetition.
They helped people understand why winter mattered and how to live inside it.
This is one of the reasons folklore feels so different to modern self-help narratives. It does not necessarily promise improvement or centre around progress and solutions, but rather it sits alongside experience, allowing it to be shared and named.
In this sense, these stories carry something distinctly feminine.
Long before frameworks of productivity and consumerism took hold, folk stories emerged from worlds organised very differently: cultures that valued endurance and relationship, alongside hierarchy and power, rather than being wholly governed by them.
Patriarchal systems were already present, I’m sure - that system is said to have evolved since the time of the Sumerian tablets - but the term was not yet totalising. It existed alongside land-based knowledge, communal memory, ritual, and forms of authority that were cyclical rather than extractive.
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Much of what has been lost from those old worlds did not remove patriarchy, but narrowed life around it, leaving fewer counterweights to balance control with care and progress.
In the lands I write from, the consolidation of institutional Christianity would surely have further narrowed the field.
The stories that once lived in fields and forests and around shared fires were overwritten by doctrine.
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The loss was not simply pagan myth, but a feminine, seasonal way of understanding life that did not require dominance, certainty, conquest, and progress to remain valid.
So before sharing my own telling of this winter story, I want to invite you into that same orientation.
To listen in the way people once listened, when stories were part of how a community stayed connected.
If you’re able, read what follows slowly.
The Cailleach and the House of Winter
If you have ever felt winter as something more than a season,
as a mood, a state, a deep turning inward,
then you already know her.
You just haven’t met her properly.
Not yet.
In this story, you are walking alone.
Not because you have no one.
But because winter asks for solitude sometimes,
even from those we love.
You are walking a narrow path into a forest
that knows how to be quiet.
The trees stand close, dark with rain,
their roots knotted into the earth
like old hands clasped in prayer.
The air smells of leaf-mould, pine resin, old stone and damp bark.
A blackbird calls once, then falls silent,
as if remembering
it is not the time for singing.
Your boots find the soft give of moss.
The world has been washed clean by weather,
as if rain has been trying to rinse away
everything loud and bright and unnecessary.
And you realise,
with the gentle shock of it,
that you have been living
as if winter were an inconvenience.
Something to endure
until spring returns you to yourself.
But the forest does not agree.
The forest has no use for impatience.
It has no interest in your plans.
It teaches you, without words,
that the dark is not a mistake.
The path leads you deeper.
You pass an ash tree split by lightning,
pale wood exposed like bone.
You pass rust-brown bracken curled inward.
You pass a fallen branch wrapped in lichen,
already being reclaimed.
Then the trees thin.
The land opens.
And the wind arrives,
cold and clean,
carrying the scent of snow
that has not yet fallen.
The sky is a hard pewter lid.
In the clearing stands an old woman.
She is taller than you expect,
broader, built to withstand weather.
Her hair is grey-white and unbound,
whipped by wind.
Her cloak hangs heavy from her shoulders,
the colour of storm cloud.
Her hands are strong.
In one of them she holds a staff
cut from a living tree.
Her face is lined,
not with softness,
but with time.
With seeing.
She does not smile.
She does not greet you.
She looks at you
the way the sea looks at the shore:
steady, indifferent, endlessly patient.
“You’ve come looking for warmth,” she says.
You want to argue.
You want to explain yourself.
But honesty is hard to abandon
once you have stepped into it.
So you nod.
“Warmth returns,” she says.
“It always does.”
Then she looks at you more closely.
“But you are not meant
to live only for warmth.”
She turns,
and you follow.
At the edge of the clearing,
the land drops into a valley.
The hills fold into one another like ribs.
In the distance, a mountain rises,
its shoulders lost in cloud.
“They say I made the hills
by dropping stones from my creel,” she says.
“Some of it is true.
Some of it is how humans make sense
of what they cannot control.”
She taps her staff lightly against the ground.
“What is true is this:
winter makes the world.”
She leads you on.
The wind strengthens.
The sound grows louder.
And suddenly there is water,
dark, churning,
pulled into a great whirlpool
that turns like a living mouth.
She lifts her cloak.
“For three days,” she says,
“I wash my plaid here,
until it is clean enough
to lay over the mountains.
And when it lies across them,
the snow begins.”
As the water takes the cloak,
something loosens in you.
Winter is not random.
It has rhythm.
It is tended.
“Winter is not a thief,” she says.
“It is a maker.
A distiller.
A season of discernment.”
She looks at you.
“You cannot carry everything
through winter.
The land does not.
The animals do not.
The trees do not.”
You feel the truth of it
land in your body.
“Winter asks for community too,” she continues.
“Women have never survived alone.
They have survived by gathering.
By tending fires.
By passing stories hand to hand.”
The world shifts.
You stand in a high glen,
quiet and held.
A small stone house rests against the land.
Nearby, old stones stand like a family,
waiting.
“In places like this,” she says,
“people remembered.
Not with clocks,
but with ritual.
With attention.”
“Did it keep them safe?” you ask.
“Nothing keeps you safe,” she replies.
“But some things keep you together.”
She turns to you.
“You came for remembering.”
Her voice softens.
“Winter is not a season
to push through.
Winter is a season
to belong.”
She steps closer.
The scent of peat smoke and rain surrounds you.
“You do not need to be young
to be powerful,” she says.
“You do not need to be loud.
You only need to be true.”
She touches your forehead,
not a blessing,
just a waking.
And you return.
To the warmth of the room.
To the ground beneath you.
To your breath.
Winter no longer feels like something to escape.
It feels like a wise old woman with weather in her hair,
telling you quietly:
Slow down.
Belong.
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Stories like this endure because they speak to patterns that repeat, which change from place to place, but whose deeper shape underneath stays.
The shape of winter arriving as a personification, and the shape of being asked to slow.
If this story has felt familiar, it may be because, deep down, you recognise the importance of this season, even if modern life leaves little room for its celebration.
Instead, we are encouraged to override tiredness, to treat slowing as something to fix.
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And yet, as I sit with these stories now, I cannot ignore a quieter that runs alongside them.
In these lands, winter is changing.
Not just in theory, not just in charts and forecasts, but in felt ways.
It is wetter. Softer.
Less sure of itself.
The long, dry frosts that once held the ground firm are rarer.
The sharp, clarifying cold that reset soil, seed, and nervous system alike feels fleeting.
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There are real and frightening consequences to this, of course: flooding, instability, loss.
Many people are already living with those realities far more directly than I am.
But beneath the practical fear, there is another layer that is harder to name.
A sense that something ancient is thinning.
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That a season which once knew how to arrive fully is being eroded.
If the Cailleach is the keeper of winter, then we have not treated her gently.
Through constant energy use, and our collective insistence on comfort without pause, we have learned how to push winter back.
I am not outside this. I benefit from it as much as anyone.
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But there is a cost to conquering a season rather than living inside it.
In the old stories, the Cailleach washed her cloak in the great whirlpool until it was clean enough to lay across the hills and bring the snow.
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Now, the water is murkier.
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The cloak is thinner.
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And when it is spread across the land, it no longer carries the same cold authority it once did.
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Some plants need frost to germinate.
Some cycles require cold to reset what has grown too fast or too wildly.
The same is true for us.
Winter was about recalibration, not just survival.
It was about stopping growth long enough for life to reorganise itself.
When winter fades, that pause fades too.
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And so perhaps part of what we are feeling, beneath the anxiety and the unease, is grief.
Grief for a season that once held us more firmly.
Grief for an old woman whose presence was strong enough to be trusted.
Grief for a kind of winter wisdom that asked us to wait, to endure, to rest without apology.
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As this season draws towards its end, and the light begins its slow return, it might be worth asking ourselves something gently, without judgement.
Did we wish winter away this year, or did we allow ourselves to live inside it?
Did we notice the long evenings, the inward pull, the invitation to be smaller for a while?
And if we rushed, as so many of us do, perhaps next winter we might try something different.
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To sit, just for a moment, with the old woman.
To feel her presence.
And to remember that some forms of strength are deeply necessary.
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Written in love, with wonder,
Olivia,
