INSIGHTS INTO THIS COLLECTION

Winter on the Beara Peninsula has a way of stripping the land to its elemental truth. Mountains sharpen into silhouette. Boglands deepen into their richest tones. Stone, lichen, rain, peat and smoke settle into a palette that is unmistakably the Cailleach’s own. This is the season when the land speaks in its oldest voice – a vocabulary shaped by mineral, weather, and time – and it is from this voice that Mother Tongue of the Cailleach’s Ground has emerged.

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Released to coincide with the Winter Solstice New Moon, this year’s Winter Earth Element collection is rooted entirely in deep time and place. Its foundations lie in the boglands of Beara, the winter home of the Cailleach Bhéarra and the ground from which my own earliest sensibilities were formed. Here, flavour is not an embellishment but a geography. Scent is a memory. Texture is a landscape. Every offering in the collection draws from the strata of this terrain – peat’s depth, birch’s smoke, the resin of wind-shaped shrubs, the sweetness released from roasted roots, the frost-bright berries, the metal-bright clarity of bog water, the roughness and silk of winter plants shaped by saturated soil, coastal wind, and salt.

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In co-creating this work, I returned to the idea of flavour architecture as a way of honouring place. Each blend, each infusion, each skinfood, and soulfood was developed through layers, mirroring the formation of peat itself: what rises first, what emerges slowly, what anchors in the background, what deepens through warmth, and what remains as a final note long after the moment of tasting or touching. The land determined the structure. The bog taught the sequence. The ingredients carried their own intelligence, revealing textures and tones that could only have been shaped by this particular corner of the world.

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Culinary poetry became the third thread – the way taste, scent, colour, and texture gather into meaning. Winter on Beara is a study in minimalism and precision. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is unnecessary. The same restraint entered the work. Smoke and sweetness, resin and root, mineral brightness, texture, and slow, dark warmth are composed with the clarity that winter demands. These are not abstract representations of the Earth Element. They are expressions of the earth itself.

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Mother Tongue of the Cailleach’s Ground is therefore more than a seasonal offering; it is an intimate conversation with the landscape that has shaped me all my life. The collection honours the Cailleach not as symbol or figure of descent, but as the land’s own winter presence – practical, elemental, unembellished. It honours the bog as archive, as teacher, and as the imagined kitchen of a winter deity whose craft is inseparable from place. And it honours Beara as the ground to which I return, again and again, for clarity, for rest, and for truth.

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This winter’s work is private viewing only, offered in respect for the intimacy of the land from which it comes. It is a collection shaped by weather, by memory, by the craft of slow making, and by my deep fidelity to the place that raised me. What accompanies in this season's newsletter – the long-form seasonal writings, the reflections, and the unveiling of the pieces themselves – all arise from this ground.

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Full details of each season’s collection are shared exclusively through our seasonal newsletter. This missive carries the deeper ground of the season – its energies, themes, and archetypes. Shared only four times a year, it offers original long-form writings on the mythic, elemental, and archetypal ground of the season within Irish cosmology and the Celtic Wheel of the Year, along with the creative soil from which each collection emerges. The newsletter is the only place where you will receive an invitation to privately view each season’s ephemeral collection.

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