Sometimes, among the innumerable legend-
ary moralities which exist fragmentarily in
the West Highlands and in the Isles, there is
a coherent narrative basis — as, for example,
in the Irish and Highland folk-lore about St
Bride, or Brigit, " Muime Chriosd." Some-
148



Prologue

times there is simply a phrase survived out
of antiquity. I doubt if any now living, either
in the Hebrides or in Ireland, has heard even
a fragmentary legend of the Washer of the
Ford. The name survives, with its atmos-
phere of a remote past, its dim ancestral
memory of a shadowy figure of awe haunting
a shadowy stream in a shadowy land. Sir
Samuel Ferguson, in Congal, has done little
more than limn an obscure shadow of
that shadow; yet it haunts the imagination.
In the passage of paganism, these old myths
were too deep-rooted in the Celtic mind to
vanish at thel bidding of the Cross : thus came
about that strange grafting of the symbolic
imagery of the devout Culdee, of the visionary
Mariolater, upon the surviving Druidic and
pre-historic imagination. In a word, the
Washer of the Ford might well have ap-
peared, to a single generation, now as a ter-
rible and sombre pagan goddess of death,
now as a symbolic figure in the new faith,
foreshadowing spiritual salvation and the
mystery of resurrection.
