Stuart McHardy, "Scotland's Sacred Goddess: Hidden in Plain Sight" (Luath, 2025)

Summary

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Scotland’s Sacred Goddess: Hidden in Plain Sight – An Interview with Stuart McHardy

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Stuart McHardy
Date: September 21, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode dives into Stuart McHardy's latest book, Scotland's Sacred Goddess: Hidden in Plain Sight (Luath, 2025), exploring early Scottish belief systems centred around the Cailleach—the shape-shifting goddess of landscape, weather, and fertility. Through oral stories, place names, and landscape features, McHardy reconstructs how ancient worldviews survived beneath layers of Christianization, lingering in place names, local myths, and the very geography of Scotland.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Who is Stuart McHardy and the Genesis of the Book

• Background: McHardy is a writer, folklore lecturer, and Teaching Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, specializing in Scottish history and folklore for over 30 years.
• Origin of the Book: Prompted by an archaeologist friend to collect and synthesize information on the Cailleach, responding to a scholarly gap in consolidating her lore in Scotland.

  "I was asked to put together all the material pertaining to this supernatural figure of the Cailleach... No one's ever collated this information to any extent in Scotland. You fancy it?" —Stuart McHardy [02:42]

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2. Sources and Research Methods

• Material Gathered: Primarily a blend of recorded oral stories, songs, place names, and landscape features noted by earlier folklorists.
• Living Traditions: New, previously unpublished stories are still discovered through oral tradition, showing the persistence and adaptation of myth.

  "I've actually come across material that is relevant to this book, contained in stories that are still being told today, some of which has never been in print before." —Stuart McHardy [04:15]

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3. The Cailleach: Dual Nature and Landscape Connections

• Key Figure: The Cailleach ("the veiled one")—primarily the hag of winter, but also associated with summer and fertility, embodying the dangerous yet generative aspects of the land.
• Environmental Reflection: She personifies unpredictable weather and the perils of Scotland’s mountains, explaining natural phenomena through myth.
• Duality: The Cailleach also appears in opposition or complement to Brigid, representing summer and life.

  "She is seen as this very kind of dark figure, representative of the winter period... but she seems to be a dual figure, and the other side of her is actually the summer and fertility." —Stuart McHardy [05:19]

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4. Landscape Shaping and Place-Based Myths

• Landscape Maker: The Cailleach often creates mountains and landscape features in stories—dropping boulders from her apron while flying, explaining erratic stones and mounds.
• Embedded in Geography: Local tales tie named hills, stones, and archaeological features directly to mythic acts.
• Example: The White Cattle Hillfort—a story describes a supernatural female (an “Amazon”) carrying stones to build it, echoing pan-Scottish motifs.

  "There’s a massive, great...hill fort up in Angus...it's known as the White Cattle...created by a supernatural female who carried all the stones to the top of this hilt in her apron." —Stuart McHardy [08:54]

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5. Archaeo-astronomical Alignments

• Stone Alignments: Consultation with archaeoastronomers shows some isolated standing stones and their relationships (e.g., lines between stones aligned to midsummer or midwinter sunrise, with former stone circles on intervening high ground).

  "You draw a line between them...there was a stone circle on the high ground...this was a midsummer alignment." —Stuart McHardy [10:22]

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6. Place Names & Body Imagery

• Naming the Goddess: Many Scottish hills are named outright for the Cailleach, especially those with distinctive shapes ("paps" meaning breasts).
• Body Parts Across the Map: Landscape features are often named after body parts—breasts, noses, teeth, backs—implying the land itself is imagined as the goddess's body.
• Ritual Sites: Places like the Paps of Jura and Paps of Fife have both mythic and archaeological traces (e.g., “Maiden Castle”), suggesting long-standing cultic or fertility associations.

  "What you're finding is that there are places in the landscape that seem to have been created for reasons which...archaeologists saw...as hill forts...But they're not." —Stuart McHardy [15:40]

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7. Powers of the Cailleach and Local Variation

• Weather and Creation: She controls weather, especially marking the change of seasons on the highest local hills.
• Many Cailleachs, One Principle: Every locality had its own iteration of the goddess, adapted to that specific environment, yet all are facets of a single archetype.

  "For the people in these different small communities, their Cailleach would be their own. So in that sense, there are many Cailleachs. But it's not a contradiction to say that though there are many Cailleachs, there is just one." —Stuart McHardy [19:57]

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8. Survival and Transformation: From Goddess to Witch

• Link to Witchcraft: The image of the Cailleach influenced later perceptions of witches; Scottish witch trials targeted knowledgeable women embedded in healing and ritual, many of whom echoed the goddess’s role.
• Focus on Locality: Localized traditions resist broad theoretical models, reinforcing the importance of micro-histories in Scottish folklore.

  "I think there is enough evidence to suggest that some of these groups date back far enough in time that they would be linked in with the beliefs that are associated with the Cailleach." —Stuart McHardy [22:23]

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9. Reading the Land with New Eyes

• Continued Pagan Traces: Sites with churches atop mounds are often older pre-Christian ritual grounds, deliberately repurposed by Christian authorities.
• Layered Belief: The book encourages readers to reinterpret the modern Scottish landscape in light of this deep, feminine mythic history.

  "If you go through the Scottish landscape and you see a church sitting on a mound, it's almost 100% certain that that mound was there before the church and it was being used for ritual, communal purposes." —Stuart McHardy [24:15]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Origin of the Book:
  "I was asked to put together all the material pertaining to this supernatural figure of the Cailleach...No one's ever collated this information to any extent in Scotland. You fancy it?" — Stuart McHardy [02:42]

• On the Locality of Belief:
  "For the people in these different small communities, their Cailleach would be their own." — Stuart McHardy [19:57]

• Landscape as Goddess:
  "Many of these Paps...seem to be surrounded with both stories, place names, and with archaeological remnants that suggest these were places of particular significance to local communities." — Stuart McHardy [15:40]

• On Scientific Verification:
  "I got my kind of friendly archaeoastronomer to check it out...there was a stone circle...which would be seen from one looking north at midsummer, the other one looking south at midwinter." — Stuart McHardy [10:22]

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Important Timestamps

• [02:33] – McHardy introduces himself and the inspiration for the book
• [04:15] – Discussion of sources: oral tradition, written records, new discoveries
• [05:19] – Who is the Cailleach? Her dual nature
• [08:54] – Examples of location-based myths (White Cattle, Angus)
• [10:22] – Archaeo-astronomical alignments and new research
• [15:40] – Place names and the body of the goddess; “paps” and ritual sites
• [19:57] – The local variation of the Cailleach and implications for Scottish folklore
• [22:23] – Connections between goddess traditions and Scottish witchcraft
• [24:15] – Reading the landscape: churches on pagan mounds and surviving ritual sites
• [26:11] – McHardy’s work in progress: “Scotland’s Geomythography”

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Closing Thoughts & What’s Next

McHardy urges readers to see the Scottish landscape as a palimpsest of ancient belief, encoded in names, stones, hills, and community memory. He hopes the book inspires readers to look anew at familiar places and recognize the powerful presence of the feminine in Scotland's mythic geography.

Next Project:
McHardy just finished a related book, Scotland’s Geomythography, and is teaching a course on the subject at Edinburgh University.

"I'm now about to spend time teaching it and we'll see what happens from there." — Stuart McHardy [26:11]

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Recommendation:
Scotland’s Sacred Goddess: Hidden in Plain Sight (Luath, 2025) is for readers wishing to uncover the living mythologies beneath Scotland's hills and in her place names, and to approach the land with a revitalized, mythic perspective.

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Transcript

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[Stuart McCarty]

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased to welcome back onto the podcast Stuart McCarty, to tell us about his latest book titled Scotland's Sacred Goddess Hidden in Plain Sight, which is going to take us very far back in time to look at Scottish beliefs, mythologies, ideas that in many cases are encoded in oral histories, in stories, in songs, in place names, in the landscape. We're going to be talking probably quite a lot about mountains to help us kind of revive a bit of Scottish thinking and ideas before we get to the more familiar, the more recent, the more Christian beliefs that are still in the country. So, so we're going to be going very far back in time to quite an interesting way of thinking and seeing the world and I'm quite excited for us to go on this journey. So Stuart, thank you so much for joining me back again on the New Books Network.

[Stuart McCarty]

It's an absolute pleasure to be here.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Could you please introduce yourself for any listeners who may not be familiar with your previous interview with us and Then tell us about this book and how it came to be.

[Stuart McCarty]

Well, I am a writer. I. I've also been a lecturer at Edinburgh University. I'm a teaching fellow at the Centre for Open Learning there, and I have been lecturing on aspects of Scottish history and folklore for over 30 years now. It creeps up on you. And this latest book is, in a sense, it's the progression of studies that have been really getting into, I would say, and it sounds a very long time ago now, since the 70s, actually. And the drive towards this particular book actually came from someone else. I was asked to put together all the material pertaining to this supernatural figure of the kayak by an archeologist friend of mine because he is interested particularly in this aspect of trying to find out more about ritual and belief in the very far past. And he actually said to me, no one's ever collated this information to any extent in Scotland. You fancy it? And I put the idea to my publisher and he said, go ahead.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That's always quite fun to have sort of a new challenge in an area that you were already very familiar with. And it is, in fact, that kind of putting together of all the information that I'd like to go to next. But what sorts of sources are we talking about? What kind of research have you had to go through to put all of these different pieces together?

[Stuart McCarty]

Well, obviously, because of the nature of, I suppose, this modern society, I have found an awful lot of material through the written word, obviously, you know, accessing books, but an awful lot of the original sources of this material was people noting down what were local stories and ideas that had come down through time. But also over the past 10 years, I've actually come across material that is relevant to this book, that is contained in stories that are still being told today, some of which has never been in print before. And I suspect there's a great deal more out there.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, we shall see, I suppose. Maybe. Maybe people will start coming forward and tell you more additional things that you can add to future editions of the book. Let's get into, then. The Caillach, the kind of key figure that we're discussing here. Who was she? Who is she? Tell us about this particular figure and kind of why she's so central.

[Stuart McCarty]

The Caillach is presented as, I suppose, fundamentally most of the ideas about her turn around the idea of her being the hag of Winter. She's seen as this very kind of dark figure, representative of the winter period of all sorts of. In a lot of the stories that she comes down to us she is seen as malicious, very dangerous, representative to a very large extent of the dangerous aspects of the environment in the sense that she's reflective of, of the weather and the seasons, basically the winter. And one of the things about Scotland that people don't really realize is that although our mountains are kind of titchy, I think is the word an awful lot of people would refuse, would use of them. They're only about our highest mountains, only 4,000ft. But our mountains are very dangerous. And even in the summer they can turn very dangerous. And most years there's instances of people becoming stranded in the mountains and sometimes with fatal consequences because they wander off. It's quite a nice day and they say, oh, that's not very high. We'll have a wander up there and just a couple of miles into our mountains and the weather can change instantly and suddenly you're an extremely dangerous conditions. And that aspect of our environment and of our culture, I suppose to some extent too is something. It's very much associated with her, though one of the most intriguing things about her is that she seems to be a dual figure and the other side of her is actually the summer and fertility.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Okay, so coming out of the landscape in a lot of senses, how else besides just the weather do these stories relate to sort of local geographies or places?

[Stuart McCarty]

Oh, one of the great things has been going through all of the different variations of stories about how she creates the landscape. And time after time we have these references to her flying because she's a supernatural creature, she's a giant, and she's flying over the landscape with an apron full of boulders, earth, all the rest of it, and she's on her way to create something else. And then this is fascinating to me. Then for some reason there's an accident and Chillitz's fall. And this particular story is told not just of mountains, because quite a few mountains are said to be created this week, but also the story has, through time has become associated with witch like figures, many of whom are actually said to have dropped sometimes single stones. There's this idea that she is a landscape maker and a landscape shaper. But the ideas that that started out as which are primarily mythological carried on into the culture and became associated in lots and lots and lots of cases with sometimes, well, not small stones, but individual bowlers. And the stories told about them still are extant in quite a lot of places.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Are there any examples you can share with us?

[Stuart McCarty]

I was absolutely fascinated recently with one of the things I should say about all this stuff. Is that I've been chasing this type of material certainly since the 70s, maybe earlier. And I keep on coming across things that absolutely surprise me. Like, for instance, there's a massive, great. What's known as a hill fort up in Angus, north of the Tay, and I've been going there since I was in my teens, and it's known as the White Cattle. And it was only, I think, about a year ago that I actually came across a story that. That it was actually created by a supernatural female, who in the local story is called an Amazon, which is quite interesting, who actually carried all the stones to make this massive. It's a massive, great structure, carried all the stones to the top of this hilt in her apron. And it's a variation on the same story. And just a handful of miles away, there's a stone sitting on its own by the side of the road that is said to have come about in the same way. And there's another one in the landscape which seems to be related to it just a few miles away, again, because the stories that are told of them link them together. But also sometimes these linkages are through other archaeological remnants.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Like what kind?

[Stuart McCarty]

Well, this Gibbedel stone just outside Forfa is relatively nondescript. It has copper wingmark on it. But again, this is very, very recently. It was actually a course recently that a student pointed me in the direction of this. There is to the southeast of it, about seven or eight miles away, there's another stone which is not quite as strong in local tradition, but when I got my kind of friendly archaeoastronomer to check it out, it seems that the two of these are linked, because if you draw a line between them, there was a stone circle on the high ground, the one piece of high ground that stands between the two of them. And it seems to be that this was a midsummer alignment.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That's quite cool.

[Stuart McCarty]

The two stones have separately had these stories about them, and then going and looking at the landscape and finding that there used to be a stone circle exactly between the two of them, which would be seen from one looking north at midsummer, the other one looking south at midwinter. There's something going on there, let's put it that way.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah. No, that's very cool. Can you tell us a bit more about mountains and hills and the way some examples that are named for the Caillach, or parts of her.

[Stuart McCarty]

Yeah. Well, there are several mountains across Scotland actually called a kayak. There's a couple in Skye, and these tend to have stories of either the kayak herself, or sometimes it's other powerful female figures. But one of the things about this whole notion of the kayak is that she is associated with mountains. And this is probably to do with the fundamental meaning of the name. Kaya is, according to all linguistic theory, veiled. And it was actually a few years ago that I, sitting at the top of a glen in Angus Llenclover, I was looking at Loch Negar, which is a very famous mountain in Scotland, which has kayak place names, interesting shaped peaks on it, and a whole load of potentially significant cultural artifacts. And I was watching it. I was up pretty high. I must have been almost as high as Loch and Gar itself. A grey day. And then the clouds began to come down. And as the clouds began, layer fell. Of course, it hit Loch Nagar Fossil because it's the highest peak in that part of the southeastern Grampians. And as I watched, it looked actually as if the weather was spreading out from the top of the mountain and then blanketing the surrounding area. I managed to get off and before the rain came and caught me. But watching that, it made me realize that this whole notion of the kayak as the veiled one and this association with mountains was actually based on observation. You could see how these ideas had come about. And it's a basic mythological construct of how the weather works and how you explain this, how you explain the environment, particularly to children. It's just the basic mythological process. But actually sitting there, seeing it happen in the landscape, I began to understand a great deal more of how this process has worked.

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, this is definitely a really interesting part of the book is kind of seeing the links between the myth, the name and the actual place. What about places that are named not necessarily just after the kayak generally, but about kind of particular parts of her, so named after her breasts or her legs or her hands. What sorts of examples do we see of that?

[Stuart McCarty]

Well, one of the. I suppose one of the markers that drew me into all of this was the Paps. Paps. There's quite a few of them in Scotland. Pap is just a word that means female breast. And there are quite a few in Scotland. I mean, mountains tend to be of that shape anyway. I mean, we can't ignore that. However, a lot of these different Paps are places that either have archaeological remnants or they have remnants of fish. Fertility rights. Locations where we know there were fertility rights. I'm thinking at the moment of Paps of Fife, which I can see from the front garden, and up there, there is, for instance, a maiden castle. And anything less like a castle, you could not find. It's a separate mound. It's obviously been ditched off. It's obviously been separated. And what it seems to suggest suggest is that this was an area that had been set aside for some purpose. And through chasing the ideas about the kayak and about her summer aspect, the idea of the maiden crops up quite a lot as well. And what you're finding is that there are places in the landscape that seem to have been created for reasons which, for a long time, archaeologists saw these places always as hill forts. And with a designation like hill fort, you can't help but think there's something military about them. But they're not. And these Paps, like the Paps of Fife, the Paps of Jura, the Eildon Hills and others, they are places which seem to be surrounded with both stories, place names, and with archaeological remnants that suggest that these were seen as places that were of particular significance to local communities. And I suspect that some of the other place names in our landscape, where, you know, there are backs in Gaelic, there are noses, there are also, you know, teeth. There's all sorts of different body names used to describe parts of the Scottish islands. And I wonder if in themselves, they are reflective of the idea that people possibly saw the world not just being as functioning by female agency, but as created by this kayak creature.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

It's really interesting to think about kind of how many names are still There that we can understand through this, have these connections. But aside from her body, something else you mentioned earlier is that she's got some pretty amazing powers. Besides flying, what else could she do?

[Stuart McCarty]

Well, she brings the weather. She actually organizes the weather and little mundane things. Like, for instance, all across Scotland, you've got lots and lots and lots of protuberant hills, and the highest hill in any given area is a place where the weather change is first exactly the same. That's why I described with Loch and Gap. And we have lots and lots and lots of rhymes about these, and these are always just seen as yet. It's just noticing what happens in the landscape. But you have to ask, how far did this go? What did people think? How did they understand it themselves? And her power, her power as being a landscape maker, a landscape shaper, and her power over the weather itself and the creation of the landscape all suggest that she was seen as in some way fundamental to how people understood their world. And I have to be careful. I don't want to speculate too much, but you get pulled into thinking about ideas and how people saw things, and then you start asking questions. And because nobody's really collated this material to any real extent in Scotland, I think there are questions that will arise, or hopefully will arise, now that I've put this stuff together and other people can start to look at it.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Would some of those questions be about other goddesses besides Cailleach? Do we have evidence that that might be there?

[Stuart McCarty]

Well, what I think is that we have a variety of supernatural figures, but I think there's only one. Well, there's one kayak, but the other side of her is Bridget, or Bride, who is the goddess of summer. They seem to be a dual aspect in that the goddess is seen as reflecting both life and death, and in that reflective life itself, reflective of the seasons and the whole continuum of life. But I don't think there were actual other goddesses. But one of the problems we have is that's not so much a problem, it's just how do we deal with this information? One of the things I think is extremely important and has been underestimated by scholars for far too long, is that all of these ideas that we can access have survived locally and they were part of local belief. Whereas the tendency of. Of scholars is to try and look for patterns, particularly larger patterns. And what I am trying to do is I'm actually trying to not so much isolate these, but to focus down on these ideas and how they survive locally. So you have a Local kayak in one glen, you have a different kayak in another glen. They do the same things, but their relationship to the community is a local one, and it is ingrained and embedded in the separate environments of these different communities. So what you're having is, you could say it's a variation of the same basic theme in all these different places, but for the people in these different small communities, their kayak would be their own. So in that sense, there are many kayaks. But it's not a contradiction to say that though there are many kayaks, there is just one which is.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that's definitely to say it's definitely an interesting perspective. And I can imagine from a research point of view, it can definitely make things tricky of kind of, wait, how do all these things sort of relate to each other? But having all the information in one place will definitely sort of help. Are there any ways in which we can see stories and figures that maybe we are more familiar with than the Caille that come perhaps from these roots?

[Stuart McCarty]

Oh, definitely. I think that the whole witch thing. In Scotland, we have had a great deal of research into witchcraft over the past 50 years, and all of it has tended to focus down on basically the gynecophobic persecution that was triggered off by James the First and Sixth. And the research has been into the, you know, the utterly, I mean, psychotic persecution that took place of so many women in the 16th and 17th centuries. But I think there's also enough material to suggest that there were functioning groups of women who got together for various reasons. I think mainly it would be. It could be, yes, magic practice, let's call it that. But I think it would very, very rarely would it be maleficent. It would generally be beneficent, because I think the people who were persecuted during the witch trial period were people who were very often the most experienced and the most knowledgeable about healing and about pharmacology. And they were, to a great extent, probably better looked at as wise women than witches. And I think there is enough evidence to suggest that some of these groups date back far enough in time that they would be linked in with the beliefs that are associated with the carrier.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hmm, that's definitely a very interesting avenue of further exploration. I'm sure, given then all of these things that we've mentioned and the kind of hints you've had of sort of hoping more comes from this, what do you most hope that readers take from the book?

[Stuart McCarty]

I hope really that people will look at the landscape anew, because one of the things that is, I Mean, there are lots of small things, but for instance, if you go through the Scottish landscape and you see a church sitting on a mound, it's almost 100% certain that that mound was there before the church and it was being used for ritual, communal purposes. I'm very reluctant to talk about ancient religion because we don't know what people thought. And when we use the term religion, we have ideas of our own of what that signifies. And I'm not sure that it helps to think of what was going on before as religion. So I tend to talk in terms of locales of ritual and belief rather than religion. But if people can go out in the landscape and notice the east and check it out, you'll find in virtually every case, the church is there, no matter the age of the particular building. They are pre Reformation churches. That is, they go back a very long way. And it was deliberate Christian policy from the 7th century onwards. I believe the quote was, take over the pagan precincts. And so you can see a link directly there in the landscape today. You can also see reclining figures in the landscape that seem to be tied into the same kind of belief. And I'm hoping it will encourage people to see the landscape of Scotland with fresh eyes.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, that definitely sounds like a fun thing to go about doing with this book. So a lovely place, I think, to end our conversation on it, leaving me just to ask what you might be working on now that this book is done. This is clearly something that you are very invested in. So what's the sort of next stage of the big project?

[Stuart McCarty]

The next stage finished yesterday, and that was hopefully the final edit of a book called Scotland's Geomythography, because the process of analysis of the landscape that has developed through my original Nine Maidens work and then into the kayak work and is now carrying on. I am teaching at the moment. I start next week again back at Edinburgh University, teaching Scotland's Geomythography. So that's the book is written and I'm now about to spend time teaching it and we'll see what happens from there.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, no, fair enough. Any listeners who want to get involved in this can of course read the book we've been discussing titled so Scotland's Sacred Goddess Hidden in Plain Sight, published by luath Press in 2025. Stuart, thank you so much for coming back onto the New Books Network podcast.

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