PLACES LINKED WITH BRIGID IN DORSET

The Irish Brigid or Bridget, Scottish Bride, or Manx Bree, or Breeshey derive from a common root, a female deity who almost certainly served as the tutelary goddess for the first Iron Age peoples to enter Britain in the first millennium BC. Her cult lingered through until Romano-British times, most obviously as the divine patron of the Brigantes, the powerful northern tribe famously led at the time of the Roman conquest by the warrior queen Cartamandua.
1. Brigid or Bride as earth goddess could be associated with Long Bredy and Little Bredy in Dorset; two villages nestled in the Bride Valley where the River Bride emerges and flows to the jurassic coast. Other possible associations could be with Bridport or Brideport ...linked again to the river and Brideton. Upon visiting this area, I was captured by its rural, pastoral beauty. The hills of Long and Little Bredy like the breasts of the goddess and the fertility of the river valley with its 'gushing', 'boiling' stream....Bride originating from the Celtic 'gushing or surging stream'. Here there seems to a topography naturally feminine and, just as Brigid is linked to Imbolc in February, a time of surging rivers and streams, so the river emerges at Little Bredy. Along the coast at Abbotsbury there is a swannery!!In Britain, the cult of the swan is likely to have come under the protection of Bride, whose feast day, 1st February, marked the northern departure of the migrating swans. The mark of the swan's foot was anticipated by the Scots of the western Isles on the hearth on the morning of her feast day. The swan was the form she most often took and in her role as Goddess of childbirth she was associated with The Milky Way teh celestial realm where the swan flies.

Obviously Dorset is Hardy country and an obvious link he makes with this landscape is with the figure of Sue Bridehead in 'Jude the Obscure'..the modern woman who defies Victorian morality by living with her cousin Jude and bearing his three children. Yet she remains virginal and strangely chaste, despite her modern outlook, in an unconsummated marriage to the former school teacher Phillotson to whom she returns wracked by religious guilt after her childrens' tragic deaths. Here we see the classic dichotomy of virginal whore and a tenuous link again with the goddess Brigid as maiden and mother.

I seem to be returning again to literature and the goddess as a link running through my posts.