A Troglodyte Emerges

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Hermit tarot card—Odin carrying the light aloft through a dark solitude. Am I still walking beside him, or has he fallen back to push me forward? The last few years of the pandemic have been productive for me, but I have completely given up any face to face community. Everyone I see for any length of time is on my laptop screen, the size of a postage stamp.

That’s humans I’m talking about. Non human beings I’ve gotten to know rather well—re-wilded hunting grounds, graveyards, and the tides along the Elf Kirk in Banff. I frequently visit the caves and sacred well at New Aberdour. I dress the well with limpet shells from the high shore and sing to the water. I used to sit in the cave, but at the start of the pandemic that changed. The inside of the cave, which included old ‘witch marks’ carved in the sandstone walls, had been horribly vandalised— spray painted with names, dates and crude drawings. When I tried to return, I felt the full force of the cave’s no—no more humans. 

Allyson Shaw has built a monument in words to the thousands persecuted as witches in Scotland. A fascinating and necessary book. 

               -- Peter Ross

My book, Ashes & Stones, will go out into the world in eight weeks and two days. Already review copies have been sent out. I’m laying low—I’d rather not see any reviews, good or bad. They don’t change the work, after all, which is done. And yet— Peter Ross and Helen Callaghan have offered early praise, of which I am grateful!

In Ashes and Stone Shaw has written a compelling and intimate pilgrimage across Scotland as she visits the sites of notorious witch trials to connect with and comment on the memorials left there to the murdered people who perished through greed, misogyny, and superstition… The book is a fascinating exploration of the search for personal identity, the ever-present dangers of religious and political extremism, and how we examine and process the murderous injustices from our past.

—Helen Callaghan

There are a few readings in Scotland that are being lined up. I’ll share them once they are finalised. This will be strange, as I’ve not been in a room full of people in over three years! I will be wearing a mask, and am unsure what this will be like or how it will play out. 

Also, for those of you on Mastodon, find me there — @AllysonShaw@mastodon.scot

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