Cailleach

The Cailleach — the Veiled One, or Hag — is the great divine ancestor and weather-shaping goddess of Gaelic Scotland and Ireland. A one-eyed giantess of immense age, she is the very personification of winter: she washes her plaid in the whirlpool of the Corryvreckan until it turns white as snow, and with her hammer and creel she shapes the land itself, letting boulders fall to raise mountains and carve out glens. Many a Highland peak and cairn is held to be her work or her resting-seat.

She rules the dark half of the year, from Samhain to Beltane, when she either turns to stone or gives way to the summer goddess Brìde — in some tellings the two are one being, eternally renewed. As guardian of the wild places and herder of the red deer, the Cailleach embodies the harsh, sovereign power of the northern land. She survives in countless place-names and in living tradition, among the oldest and most formidable deities still remembered in these islands.