The great winter hag Cailleach is not content to make life miserable solely for her Scottish citizens! Legend has it that many of the shipwrecks that have occurred in the Gulf of Corryvreckan off of the west coast of Scotland have done so because of Cailleach scrubbing the great plaid she wore around her shoulders vehemently until a whirlpool formed. This occurs at the turn of the season from fall to winter, and once Cailleach's plaid has turned snow white, she violently pulls it from the sea and blankets the Scottish Highlands with it. How did that legend begin, you might ask? Well...

Long ago, a Viking sailor named Breacan had fallen in love with a Scottish townswoman. Her father, wanting to test the young man's loyalty, insisted that the Viking must endure three nights of A'Chailleach's (Cailleach's) mood swings and temper tantrums in order to win the respect of his true love's father. Terrified yet determined, the Viking agreed to the test, much to the dismay of his crewmates.

Later that evening, the Viking consulted a local witch for advice on how to survive the wrath of A'Chailleach. She advised him to create three anchor ropes, one each of wool, of hemp, and of the hair of a virgin maiden. Gathering the wool and hemp, he reluctantly asked his true love if he could use her tresses for the task. She obliged, and though there was not enough hair of hers to create a sufficient anchor rope, she and her beloved Viking prayed that her virtue would be strength enough to see him through his task.

As night fell, the Viking launched his vessel close to the cauldron where A'Chailleach scrubbed her great plaid and caused the seas to become violent. A great whirlpool formed, thrashing the Viking's boat throughout the night. Yet the anchor rope of wool provided adequate protection from the angry goddess A'Chailleach, and in the morning, the Viking had survived.

On the second night of his trial, A'Chailleach scrubbed her laundry with even more vehemence than before, causing the seas to spiral out of control! The Viking thought for certain that the hemp rope would never hold, and that his death was imminent. Yet again, the sun rose the next morning, and the Viking had survived his second test.

On the third night, the Viking was confident that his beloved's hair would hold back the anger of A'Chailleach and would keep his vessel from being consumed by the whirlpool, which was more violent than ever this evening. Anxiously, his virgin love waited for his return from the shoreline, hoping that the rope made from her hair would be enough to save him. After hours of surviving the thrashing whirlpool, the sailor's confidence turned to arrogance, and he began to relax. His arrogance turned to incredible fear as he realized that her hair was snapping and an alarming rate, and he was heading towards the whirlpool and his destiny. Looking back upon the shore before he met his demise, it suddenly dawned on him that his Scottish love was not as pure and virtuous as he had believed. Had she been as virginal as she claimed to be, surely the rope would have held together and the Viking would have been safe! The last thing that the Viking heard before plunging into the icy whirlpool was the shrill cackling of A'Cailleach as she pulled her enormous, now-white plaid from the sea.

The Gulf of Corryvreckan is named after Breacan - the Coire Breacan - and is a very famous location off of the west coast of Scotland. The whirlpool still rages in the Gulf, and is at its highest around the winter months, when Cailleach is still rumored to be washing her plaid.


Author's Note: This is my favorite Cailleach story for a lot of reasons - the whirlpool creation myth is AWESOME, it involves someone who isn't a Scottish villager, and it shows where the moral of the story is. Rather than just being about Cailleach being an awful hag, it also shows the traditional Western morals of purity and honesty. If you're not pure and honest, you could kill someone. That's a pretty powerful moral to me! There are honestly thousands of versions of this story, and I wanted to take the most interesting elements of each story while keeping true to the theme of Cailleach. There are many good stories about Cailleach creating the whirlpool while scrubbing her laundry at the turn of the season from fall to winter in order to blanket the land with her snow white plaid, yet some of them are very long and deviate from the main point of the story a bit. I chose to incorporate that story with the story of the Viking sailor to give the story a bit of humanity and to do a little bit of a different story. There has even been a book written about Cailleach (I wish I had known about this sooner!) and the whirlpool mythology features relatively prominently in the story.

Bibliography:
"Coire Bhreacan - a local tale about the naming of the Whirlpool," by Scot AnSgeulaiche (2008). Web Source: Corryvreckan Whirlpool.
"Gulf of Corryvreckan," from Wikipedia (2009). Web Source: Wikipedia.

Introduction | Beira | Brighde | A'Cailleach | Samhainn