Tigh nam Bodach — The House of the Old Man

A shepherd still carries a family of river-stones out of their turf-roofed shrine every Beltane and back in every Samhain — a ritual local tradition holds has run unbroken for two thousand years.

Tigh nam Bodach — the House of the Old Man — is a small turf-roofed stone shrine at the eastern end of Glen Cailliche, the high tributary glen above upper Glen Lyon in Perthshire. It holds a family of weathered, human-shaped river-stones: the Cailleach herself, her husband the Bodach, their daughter the Nighean, and several smaller children-stones acquired over the centuries. The ritual attached to the shrine is unbroken. At Beltane, on the first of May, the local shepherd takes the stones out and places them, facing eastward, in the open air, where they are held to guard the glen and its cattle through the summer months. At Samhain, the first of November, he turns them around, returns them inside, and seals the doorway with turf for the winter. Local tradition holds that this cycle has been kept continuously since before the Christianisation of upper Perthshire — potentially making it the oldest unbroken pre-Christian ritual practice anywhere in Britain. The underlying folklore explains the stones as a gift. The Cailleach — the divine hag of Scottish winter — and her family are said to have arrived in Glen Lyon as travelling strangers and been given hospitality by the glen's inhabitants. As they departed, the Cailleach blessed the glen, promising fertility to its cattle for as long as her family continued to be honoured there. The river-stones were the physical form she left behind as the mark of that promise. The shrine is unmarked on most maps and reaching it requires an eight-mile walk up Glen Cailliche from the nearest public road; there is no signage at the site itself. The shepherd who currently performs the ritual belongs to a family that has held the responsibility for at least four generations, and walkers who make the journey are expected to leave the shrine and its stones untouched. Sheep, cattle, and red deer graze undisturbed in the glen around it, and the grass at the shrine's threshold has been noted, in modern photographs as well as older accounts, as visibly greener than the heather surrounding it.