OUR STORY

Deep in the forest in the Scottish Borders, there’s a hidden cottage that’s home to a shapeshifting witch. In this ghost story, a handsome, duplicitous laird falls in love with the woman who can turn into a hare, and his entire world is turned upside down.

OUR GUEST

Katy Swift is a storyteller, maker, mother, and lifelong gatherer of the stories, skills, and ways of living that root us back into the more-than-human world. A Northumbrian lass with Highland and island heritage on her father’s side, she has made her home in Scotland for nearly twenty years and carries that lineage forward through her love of the Gàidhlig language and the old tales. Today she lives in the Scottish Borders with her partner and their two wee boys, in a landscape thick with ballads, hawthorns, and haunted towers.

These threads come together in The Wildcraft Way, her online course and community for families who want to walk the Celtic Wheel of the Year together through foraging, herbal remedies, seasonal recipes, Waldorf-inspired songs, traditional skills, and the stories that have always marked the turning of the year.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mama.moon.storytelling

The Wildcraft Way:

https://www.epiphany-learning.com/program/wildcraft-way-samhain-and-introduction

OUR CONVERSATION

• This story takes place at Littledean Tower, a lesser-known Borders ruin where visitors still report a feeling of unease
• From the Flames We Rise, a 2023 gathering at Traquair honoring the folk burned as witches in Peebles, and the new memorial on Tweed Green
• Stories as living, evolving things, retold and embellished around the cèilidh fire all winter long
• Isobel Gowdie of Auldearn and her 1662 confessions of hare shape-shifting, flight, and the King and Queen of the Fairies
• Listening from both places: skepticism, belief, and a Gaelic otherworld that waits at crossroads, woodland edges, and beneath the hawthorn
• Guising, turnip lanterns, and what American Halloween has kept and lost of Samhain
• Laying a place at the table for the year’s dead
• How to Kill a Witch by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi of the Witches of Scotland podcast

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Music by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com