And what you’ve done with Hagitude is explore the beauty and the magic and the wonder and the yes, I want to be that. Sharon: Well, when I moved to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, there was a great residue of stories about the Cailleach there. Which is why I liked in the book, providing the templates if you like, over so many different archetypes. This limited printing of Hagitude comes as a luxury slipcased hardback with a unique design and exclusive content – a new and original story. So you have these very simple stories where the characters are not particularly drawn in any great detail, but they are archetypal characters.

But in that part of Western Donegal, as it was at the time, it’s just it was yes, it was the obvious question to ask.Under thirty five naysayers need to get over themselves; go back and re read Twilight or something else.

And for me it was a consequence, I suppose, of being in my late fifties and I’d always seen sixty as a kind of barrier year.This limited printing of Hagitude comes as a luxury slipcased hardback with a unique design and exclusive content – a new and original story. Manda: I think Sharon is so erudite and goes into such depth in her writing, but it’s always an honour and an edgy excitement to speak with her. As well as writing five books of fiction and nonfiction, including the bestselling If Women Rose Rooted, her writing has appeared in several international media outlets, among them the Guardian, the Irish Times, and the Scotsman.

You knew how to persuade the mice to help you sort, by giving them a little bit of your daily porridge, for example. I would have liked to hear about women in lower classes and how they connect to nature and their truest selves while juggling two jobs or going through poverty struggles. And I said to him, oh go down to the rocky place for me and, you know, and say hello to the Cailleach and all of the other beings that I’d found there in the rock.But under the gaze of her discerning eye, we’re inspired to discover and to value the truth about ourselves.

I remember in one of the very old Rosemary Sutcliffe books that I read, the Spear of the Warrior had heron feathers around its neck. So I think it’s if you’re going to actually find these stories useful, I think it’s important to try to step out of the more literal meaning and the more historical meaning and just say, okay, what is this story really telling us about the human condition?In our culture,” she says, “old women are mostly ignored, encouraged to be inconspicuous, or held up as objects of derision and satire. And the fact that that’s survived two millennia of patriarchal Christianity is quite amazing, I guess, and it would have to be hidden quite, quite deep in the structures of these things.