Introducing Old Crane Woman

Introducing Old Crane Woman ã Catherine Hyde Until I moved back to Connemara in 2017, I lived for three years in a tiny old riverside cottage in the hills of Donegal, in the far north-west of Ireland. We had moved there from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, where I had immersed myself in a land which was steeped in the mythology of the Cailleach: the wild and powerful old woman of Gaelic mythology who created and shaped the land. Just as they are in Ireland, mountains and other places all around Scotland are named after her; she is immanent in the land itself. There are many, many stories about the Cailleach which, in that part of Scotland, also relate to her sister (or in some stories, her alter ego) Bride, who presides over the light half of the year just as the Cailleach rules over the dark. Directly in front of our island home was a long, low mountain which had the shape of a reclining woman; as I learned more and more about the Cailleach’s mythology and her association with high and rocky places, I began to imagine that she was present in the mountain, and to make up my own stories about how that came to be. The Cailleach-mountain dominated our village and the headland, and as I walked the land each day, through all the difficult times we had there, I spoke to her as if she was an old friend. Although much of Ireland is also steeped in the mythology of the Cailleach, in the part of Donegal where we lived I could find no local stories about her, and no specific landmarks named after her. I felt curiously lonely and utterly cast adrift. Where was the Cailleach in this place? Where might I find her? How could I possibly belong to a place where there was no Cailleach, whose stories had claimed me so powerfully and dominated my imagination for the better part of four years? On the hill behind our cottage there was a wood, and in the wood there was a heronry. Every day, we’d see herons flying along the small river which tumbled across stepping stones at the bottom of our garden; it wasn’t that far to the sea. And sometimes in the early morning, as I walked with the dogs along the lane which led up to the high bog, I’d see a heron standing on a stone in the middle of the fast-flowing river, the still point in the turbulent birth of every new day. When you live in close proximity to such beautiful, iconic creatures – and especially if, like me, you are immersed in myth and story – they not only capture your daytime imagination, but begin to infiltrate your dreams. In the Irish language, the word for the grey heron is corr; it also happens to be the word for crane. This is because, just around the time that the Eurasian crane became extinct in Ireland, the similar-looking grey heron arrived to fill its ecological niche. Heron and crane, then, are interchangeable in Irish mythology, and in those old stories, crane is a powerful and a liminal bird. She haunts the thresholds where water, land and air intermingle; she guards the treasures of the Otherworld and is a guide to those who wish to travel there. Perhaps because she stands upright, tall and thin, she is associated with shape-shifting in the feminine form – and indeed, most likely for this reason, eating a heron’s flesh was once forbidden. The most famous story about a crane is the story of beautiful Aoife, who was turned into a crane by a jealous rival; she went then to live in the house of the god Manannán Mac Lir. When Aoife died, 200 years later, Manannán made a magical ‘crane bag’ from her skin. Now, surrounded as I seemed to be by herons, I read as much about them and their crane counterparts as I could find. They are associated, I discovered, with longevity; in some of the old stories they are connected, too, to hags and old women. Thinking about this as I walked along the lane, one winter morning at dawn, I stood and watched as a heron flew up from the riverbank, shrieking. There was something oddly hag-like about her call, and all of a sudden, a character popped into my head: Old Crane Woman came to me, part woman, part bird. By the time I arrived home, she had taken possession of me. Springing directly from this place I lived in, rising fully formed out of my river, I had found the Cailleach in another form. Throughout that December, I wrote a series of fragments about Old Crane Woman, and published them on my blog. ‘Grey Heron Nights’, I called them: a Celtic antidote to the mythical Greek ‘Halcyon Days’, which bridged the Winter Solstice. Old Crane Woman seemed to have her own voice, her own rhythm, incantatory, the rhythm of place – or the power of place, speaking. And so powerful was this archetypal old woman that I carried on writing about her at Winter Solstice for the next two years. Although I haven’t written ‘Grey Heron Nights’ for some years now, Old Crane Woman has never left me, and I’ve always planned to write more about her. The Chronicles of Old Crane Woman is a work-in-progress. Welcome to one of her best-known stories. from The Chronicles of Old Crane Woman ometimes, if you happen to be walking along a track within reach of water at dusk or dawn, you might catch through the trees a glimpse of a tall, gangly figure wrapped in S a mid-grey cloak. You won’t see her face – she hides that too well – but as you watch her move, you’ll notice that her legs and her arms are unusually long, and seem to bend in odd directions. Hold your breath; you’ve been blessed with a sighting of Old Crane Woman. If she stays still long enough for you to get a good look at her, you’ll see that she carries a bag which looks as if it’s made out of some kind of hide. It’s actually made of crane-skin, and the skin it was made from was the skin of Aoife, who was turned into a bird by a jealous rival. Once it belonged to Manannán Mac Lir, that old salt-soaked god of the waters. The bag then came into the hands of the great warrior Fionn Mac Cumhaill, but when he passed into the Otherworld, Old Crane Woman crept into that deep cave in the heart of the mountain where the bodies of Fionn and the Fianna lie sleeping still, and she stole it away. She took back the power of the warrior; now, she is its guardian. And the crane bag is filled with her treasures: shed feathers, fragments of fleece plucked from barbed wire in the bog. The shattered shell of a robin’s egg, the last gorse blossom of autumn. Splinters of bog oak, a lichen-encrusted twig. Her treasure are the treasures of the land: no more, and no less. If you creep out down to the river in the light of a full moon, you’ll see her there for sure, Old Crane Woman. She’ll be standing on one leg, still as can be, and you’ll know her by her frayed grey and white dress and her long, thin arms with the sharp, sticking-out elbows. She’ll be staring into the river, for Old Crane Woman knows that inspiration comes always at the side of the water, there on the edge, in that troubling threshold place between one element and another. Don’t startle her: she’ll be gone in a flash. If you wait there, just as still as she is – if you wait for as long as it takes – maybe you’ll hear her whispering a story. Old Crane Woman, she knows all the stories; she is gathering them in, and sorting them. She knows all the men’s stories: the same old stories, told down all the long ages. She is tired of the men’s stories. She is tired of their stories about women. She has gathered them up and stored them safely away under a stone and she will not let them out again. No, she shrieks suddenly into the night sky, throwing back her head and shrieking it, shrieking it: No more stories like this. Her sisters need new stories now. And if you should question her, if you should doubt her, here is the tale she will tell you; here is the story she will scream out into the long dark. Here is the story Old Crane Woman will refuse. The Crane Wife nce upon a time, in a land far away from this land in miles but not so far in culture, there lived a poor man. He was a lonely man as well as poor, for his wife had died in O childbirth many years before. But no-one remembered exactly when, and as the long years passed, it seemed to the people of his village that he’d always been alone. They’d see him sometimes, leaving his house at the very edge of the village, wandering off into the woods to hunt, or to fish in the river and the lake. He wore his loneliness like a hair shirt, and never joined in at festivals or other occasions, nor smiled at the children playing on the green.

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