The Cailleach is a powerful female figure who fights the exploitation of animals and the land
Dr Sharon Blackie, writer and psychologist, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2016. Photograph: Gary Doak / AlamyMyths and folk tales seem to be having something of a renaissance today – not just for children, but in adult circles, too. Fairy-tale retellings and reimaginings abound; books, television programmes and movies are dripping with mythical themes.
If, as ecofeminists have argued over the past several decades, there are many parallels between the patriarchal suppression of women and the suppression of nature, then a new ecological awareness also calls for a renewed, reinvigorated, positive image of the feminine. It’s no accident, it seems to me, that more and more around the world, women are taking the lead in the environmental movement.
Several old Scottish stories depict the Cailleach as a passionate guardian of the natural world’s balance and resources – especially when it’s necessary to protect it against humans. One such story tells of her preventing Donald Cameron, a hunter in Lochaber, from killing a herd of hinds which she was driving.
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