Cailleach
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In Irish and Scottish mythology, Cailleach (also called Cailleach Bheur) was the "Mother of All". The word simply means 'old woman' in modern Scottish Gaelic. She was a sorceress. In addition to the Celts, the Picts also worshipped her. The name is given to many large hills in Scotland.
In art, she was depicted as a wizened crone with bear teeth and a boar's tusks.
She helped rescue Deò-ghrèine, along with Brian.
In Scotland, she is Cailleach Bheur, The Blue Hag of Winter, an Underworld goddess and a faery spirit. She appears as an old woman in black rags carrying a staff, who travels about at night with a crow on her left shoulder. She has a bad temper and is dangerous to people. She has fangs and sometimes three faces. She could turn herself into a cat.
One legend describes her as turning to stone on Beltane and reverting back on Samhain to rule as Queen of Winter. In another, she spent the autumn washing her plaid in her washtub, the whirlpool of Corryvreckan. By winter this was white, and became the white blanket of snow that falls over Scotland in January.
Each year, the first farmer to finish his harvest made a corn dolly representing Cailleach from part of his crop. He would give it to the next farmer to finish his harvest, and so on. The last farmer had the responsibility to take care of the corn dolly, representing Cailleach, until the next year's harvest.
The word Cailleach (Scottish Gaelic) has come to mean hag, crone, old woman. The Scots word for "hag" is Carline which has evolved to mean witch. In pre-Christian times legend named the Cailleach Bhuer as the creator Goddess. Early legends tell of her as a giantess creating one place or another from boulders dropped from her apron. She was often an old woman. Very often she was the destroyer or the winter goddess, her skin blue black, like a corpse. In later ones she is the witch of Ben Cruichan, as recorded on tea-towels and postcards sold in the visitor shop for the Hollow Mountain. But this is the very same legend records her as the Cailleach Bheur creating Loch Awe.
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