People ask about the name. Some of them ask politely and some of them have already made up their minds. Since I am the one who chose it, forty-five years ago this spring, I had better be the one to explain.
We came here in the March of 1981, Wystan and I, in a borrowed van, with a kitchen table, a hive of bees and more books than was sensible. We had taken a cottage at the foot of a hill, at a rent that tells you how long ago it was. We had come to found a coven. Our High Priestess in the Midlands had given us her blessing, a copy of her cake recipe and a piece of advice, which was to choose a name that would not frighten the horses.
I did not take the advice, and I have been explaining myself ever since.
The name on the map
The hill behind the cottage is a long ridge, wooded on our side and bare on the other, with a clump of old beeches on the top that you can see from ten miles off. On the map it is called Cythrawl. That was all I knew about it for the first month. I liked the look of the word and had no idea how to say it. In the valley it is said, near enough, KUTH-rowl, with the first syllable short and the second to rhyme with owl.
The land next to ours was farmed by an old man who had been born in the house he lived in, as his father had been. I asked him over the gate one evening what the name meant. He looked at me for a while, in the way that people here look at you when they are deciding how much you can be told, and said that it was Welsh, or had been once, and that it meant the Devil.
What the farmer said
He gave me the story as he had it from his grandmother, and I give it as he gave it to me, without vouching for a word.
Long ago, he said, and neither he nor his grandmother could say how long, the young people of the valley used to go up to the beeches on the night before May Day. They lit a fire and danced, and some of them did not come down until morning. It had been done for longer than anyone knew. Then a preacher came into the valley, a great speaker and a hard man, and founded the chapel, and he preached against it Sunday after Sunday. He said it was the Devil's dancing floor up there, and that anyone who climbed the hill on May Eve was climbing to meet him. He said it in Welsh, which was still the language of the valley then, though it has long since gone from it. And his word for the Devil was cythraul.
The dancing stopped. The name stayed. The English-speaking children and grandchildren of the people who had danced went on calling it by the minister's word without knowing what it meant. It is written Cythrawl, in an old spelling, on an estate map of 1768, which is the oldest record of it that I have been able to find. What the hill was called before that, nobody now can say.
I asked the old man whether he believed it. He said he believed there had been dancing, because there generally was. I asked whether anyone went up there now. He said that he could not say, in a tone which made it clear that he could.
Choosing it
It is the custom for a coven to take its name from its place. When I told Wystan that I wanted to call ours after the hill, he said, quite reasonably, that I would be asking every member we ever had to spend their lives explaining that they did not worship the Devil. He was right. We do spend our lives explaining it. I have explained it to seekers, to other witches, to a locum doctor who saw the word on a card on my mantelpiece, and once, at some length, to a very civil young curate.
I chose it all the same, for two reasons, and at eighty I would give the same two.
The first is that it is the truth. This is where we are. A coven is not an idea. It is a few people in a particular place, under a particular hill, and I did not want a name out of a book of mythology that could have belonged to a coven anywhere. I wanted the name of the ground we stood on. If the ground had an awkward name, that was the ground's business.
The second reason took me longer to see clearly. Think about what that minister did. He found people on a hill, doing something old and harmless and happy, and he gave it the worst name he had. He did it to frighten them, and it worked. Now think about the word witch. It is the same story. For centuries it was the worst name that could be given to a woman, and it was given in order to frighten, and it killed. The founders of our Craft picked that word up out of the dirt and said: very well, that is what we are. They wore it, and by wearing it they changed what it meant.
It seemed to me that a coven of witches under a hill that had been named in the same way, for the same reason, could hardly do better than to follow their example. So we are the Coven of Cythrawl, and we have kept May Eve under the minister's hill, and climbed it on May morning, for forty-five years, and I hope that it annoys him.
What the word meant first
Since then I have learned a little more about the word, from friends who have the language. They tell me, to begin with, that we say it wrongly. The Welsh word is nearer KUTH-rile, and the old spelling on the map has pulled the valley's tongue after it. Cythraul is an old word, and the Devil of the chapels is not the whole of it. At bottom it means something like the contrary one: the adversary, the one who stands against. There is a book of Welsh bardic lore, printed in the nineteenth century, in which Cythraul is the name given to the formless dark out of which all living things must struggle into shape.
I do not lean on that. The book is a good deal less ancient than it claims to be, which is something it has in common with us. But I admit that the idea pleases me. A hill named after the dark before the beginning is not a bad place from which to watch the sun come up on May morning.
What it does not mean
I had better be plain, since this is the part people actually want to know.
We do not worship the Devil. We do not believe that there is a Devil. He belongs to another religion's account of the world, and he has no place in ours. The God of the witches has horns because he is the lord of the beasts, and people were painting horned figures on the walls of caves before there was a chapel or a church anywhere. Horns were being worn for a very long time before anyone thought of drawing them on somebody else.
Nothing is done in our circle to mock anyone's faith or to harm any living thing. I have been a witch for fifty-two years, and I have never been present at a rite that I would be ashamed to describe to that young curate, if my oath allowed me. As I recall, he took the point. He said that he had always thought the name of the hill was rather hard on the hill.
The hill itself
I do not climb it now. My knees have opinions. But I can see the beeches from my kitchen window, and on May morning I sit there with a pot of tea before it is light and watch for the torches of the ones who have gone up. There are more of them every year. When Wystan and I first climbed it there were three of us, and we had to carry the kettle.
The hill does not care what it is called. It was there before the minister and before the Welsh and before whoever raised the bank that runs round the top. It will be there when the coven is forgotten. In the meantime it has lent us its name, and we have tried to deserve the loan.