The Bog Shaman: An Invitation to Intimacy, Wonder, and Place at the home of the Cailleach Bhéarra

On the Beara Peninsula, winter enters quietly through the bog. It always has. This is the land’s first threshold, the place that feels the shift long before the rest of the world takes notice. Winter comes on the scent of damp earth and peat, in the faint metallic clarity of cold air, in the soft resistance beneath your boots as you step onto the dark, springing ground. Before frost etches its fine geometry across stone and heather, the boglands are already turning inward. Mosses deepen to a richer green. The last gold of summer is held like a memory in the fibres of dried grasses. A resinous breath rises from the winter herbs and low evergreens. And beneath it all, quiet and ancient, is the mineral exhale of peat itself. This shift is not retreat but beckoning, a summons back into the deeper strata of being, to the parts of us that remember how to move at the pace of earth and bone. This is the Cailleach Bhéarra’s domain, her winter kitchen, the ground where she stirs the season into being.

Across these sacred wetlands, winter draws its circle of characters. Bog moss, thick with water and memory, softens what it touches: stone, root, branch. Lichens bloom across rock and old wood like constellations in miniature, showing how galaxies exist in small forms when we lean in close enough. Grasses bow and rise with the Atlantic wind, holding a pale radiance even as the light thins. Beneath their roots, fungal threads and hidden networks turn what has fallen into new nourishment. Winter appears austere on the surface, yet the bog holds its own quiet abundance beneath. The last dark berries keep sweetness close to the ground. Resin seals clarity in small evergreen leaves. Roots gather the final light of the year. Thorn and briar are present too, shaped by narrow soil and long weather, offering their teaching on where to open and where to hold fast, how to guard what is tender without hardening the heart. Everything in this landscape participates in the old choreography of winter. Each being has its role in the season’s making.

For generations, the bog has been a place of cure and crossing, a threshold ground in Irish memory. People sought healing clays, cut turf for their hearths, whispered prayers into its quiet, and came here for contact with what exceeds human time. The bog preserves and transforms. It remembers without judgement. It holds centuries of rain, root, seed and sediment in its layered depths, the earth’s long archive. These are the lands of the Cailleach Bhéarra, the great winter figure whose apron stones formed mountains, whose tears carved riverways, whose staff turned the seasons. She is the original bog shaman, keeper of thresholds, sculptor of terrain and psyche. In winter she is said to walk these wetlands and headlands, pressing the land into stillness so it can gather itself again. Her presence is not garnish to the story. It is the root of it, the ancient pulse beneath every quiet turning.

The upcoming Winter Collection grew out of this rhythm and from the ecology, mythology and emotional architecture of the boglands. I was raised on this ground. It is the first landscape my body knew. I have felt the way winter settles here, not as bitterness but as depth. The ingredients at the heart of this collection are not concepts. They are medicines drawn directly from this place: roots storing the last of the year’s light, frost-kissed berries, aromatic leaves that hold their clarity in the cold, moss-soft greens, peat-rich browns, the resin of shrubs leaning into wind, hawthorns gripping stone with a tenacity shaped by centuries. These are foods and botanicals the Cailleach herself would recognise, the true wintering pantry of the boglands.

The flavour architecture mirrors the peat beneath your feet. Each recipe is built in strata: bright, dark, earthy, resinous, quietly sweet, sensual, unfolding at the tempo of slow fire. This is culinary poetry rooted in deep time rather than fleeting sensation. The scents carry the same lineage. They are grounded, green, honeyed, mineral, unfolding with the patience of the land itself. Time is an ingredient too, as essential as any root or berry. Everything in this collection moves with the rhythm of peat formation, slow and deliberate and inevitable. These flavours and scents speak to marrow rather than surface, to bone memory rather than mood, reminding the body of its inner ground. Skin remembers earth. Breath remembers wind. Blood remembers bogwater. Bone remembers stone. The body is the landscape turned inward.

This work is not a theme placed upon winter. It is a translation of a sacred landscape into lived experience. This collection invites you to encounter the bog through your senses. To taste the slow sweetness of dark fruit. To breathe in resin and root. To feel the give of earth beneath your feet. To trace the geometry of lichen. To watch winter light catch on grass. To sense the shape of wind. To receive the depth steeped into a bowl brewed slowly from berries and root. Each small noticing becomes a doorway. The bog reveals itself as an open-air oratory, a portal without walls, a threshold place where you can meet the world as it truly is: ancient, intimate, alive. And in this meeting, reciprocity awakens. What we attend to attends to us.

The earth does not need saving. We are the ones who must remember how to belong again. That remembering will not come through argument or abstraction, but through intimacy: through allowing the land to move through the senses, through recognising that the elements shaping the bog also shape the body. The Cailleach’s winter walk teaches this. She is sculptor and psychopomp, midwife of endings and beginnings. Rest, descent and slow time are her teachings. Even in the deepest dark she carries the sun’s small ember, protecting the seed of its return.

If you come with quiet feet, the boglands of Beara will meet you. Their rhythms will rise through your body like something long remembered. And this collection, shaped by peat and stone, by moss and lichen, by berry, root and thorn, by story and the subtle virtues of winter, and by the warm smoke from her hearth, will accompany you back into a way of being that is felt in the senses, nourishes the marrow, and settles, gently and enduringly, in the bones.

This article is taken from the Winter 2025 Seasonal Newsletter and from the terrain out of which my upcoming collection 'The Bog Shaman' has quietly grown – offerings shaped by the boglands of the Beara Peninsula, their myths, medicines and teachings, and the slow wisdom of winter. If you would like to receive the full seasonal writings and early, subscribers-only access to the Winter Collection, you are warmly invited to sign up for the newsletter here.

© 2025 Niamh Criostail and Heartlands Publishing. All rights reserved.