Sisterhood of the Antlers

Walking the path of the Ancestral Mothers of Scotland with stories, art, and ritual

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Scottish Travel Journal. The Best Beach Combing Find Ever!

This part one in a series of blog posts as I head home to Scotland for the Ancestral Mothers of Scotland Retreat. I'll be spending time on a Hebridean island whose name means Isle of the Big Women, heading in search of hag stones and a visit to the Cairngorm reindeer herd.

We arrived on the small island of Eigg to some wonderful rainy days which are all the more enjoyable knowing they aren't going to last for the entire time on the island. We got properly soaked (even with waterproofs on) which is all the more wonderful knowing you can have a hot shower when you get in.
Mist was the perfect cloak to be wrapped in as we made our pilgrimage to the Well of the Holy Women. Throughout the UK and Ireland, there is a long tradition of women who tended wells, keeping the water free from overgrowing weeds and allowing the water to run free. This is the perfect place to sit and soak into this place. To consider who were the Holy Women and even to consider what in us needs to be tended, what weeds need to be removed from our lives in order that the same flow can run within us.

The weather cleared in a few days and we had glorious skies which darkened just for a few hours each night after a wonderful wash of twilight.

The disaster part of this trip was that by the time I  got home to Loch Lomond I started to feel a bit strange with severe aches in my joints. The next day brought a rash of spots and as I suspected - Chicken Pox in my 40's! 

 

A Beachcombing Adventure

Beachcombing has to be one of my most favorite things - who knows what treasures might be thrown up from the bottom of the sea. While on Eigg it's a great motivation to get up to reach a certain little beach when the tide is out. To join the seagulls, the oystercatcher's and to glimpse out to slightly distant rocks in the hope of catching sight of one of the seal people.

On this little beach is the hope of finding something rather special - a Scottish Cowrie Shell. Cowries have been prized by people around the world and by the earliest people to walk on this island around 50000 BCE (you can see the cowries in the photo above in the middle of the skull looking like eyes).

It was last year I came across this wonderful skull. As I held it and turned it around in my hands it took me a minute to realise it was a dolphin skull with the thinner nose cartilage had long gotten smashed against the rocks. How amazing to hold a dolphin skull and wonder what she had seen through her eyes as she swam in the sea channels around these Hebridean islands. What wise woman looked out to sea for the sign of a fin or flick of the tail and what women shapeshifted and dove down into the depths to find the answers to their questions.

I'll return her to the beach or the waves next year after we've shared a few stories.

The Seal People

Seal's really have been the pointers on this journey home. From books falling off shelves to an open page to a chapter I've highlighted in the past (that's some serious wu wu from someone who spent most of their life as a librarian). I was lucky enough to spot some seal people hanging out on rocks as we arrived on the Isle of Eigg and I've been exploring the dark, scary depths around towering kelp forests in my dreams.

It's been many years since I've read 'Seal Morning' long enough for me to forget most of the story so it was a perfect read - the story follows a young girl living in India with her parents who is sent to live with her aunt in a very remote croft in the North West of Scotland. The story is a wonderful adventure of self-sufficiency and survival of a small family of two humans, rats, otters, squirrels and a seal. Plus the wild animals visitors and the curious insights from their distant crofting neighbors.

Published in the 1950's there has been some controversy to wither the book is indeed a true account but it's such as wonderful tale woven with so many interesting characters and nature observations I wonder does it really matter if it's true or not?

 

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Jude Lally is a forager of stories. You’ll find her out wandering the hills around Loch Lomond, reading the signs that guide her to stories in the land.

As a Cultural Activist, she draws upon the inspiration from old traditions to meet current needs.
She uses keening as a grief ritual, a cathartic ritual to express anger, fear, and despair for all that is unfolding within the great unraveling.
As a doll maker, she views this practice as one that stretches back to the first dolls which may have been fashioned from bones and stones and ancient stone figurines such as the Woman of Willendorf. She uses dolls as a way of holding and exploring our own story, and relationship to the land as well as ancestral figures.

She gained her MSc Masters Degree in Human Ecology at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, Scotland) and lives on the West Coast of Scotland on the banks of the River Clyde, near Loch Lomond. She is currently writing her first book, Path of the Ancestral Mothers.

Website: www.pathoftheancestralmothers.com

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