Lorraine O’Dwyer was once told she was no good for anything but gallivanting. As it turns out, they were right.
“I am very good at it,” she says.
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Today, gallivanting is not simply something O’Dwyer does; it is the name of her business and, in many ways, her vocation. She takes people into the woods, forages, tells stories, explores Ireland’s ancient mythology and introduces visitors to plants and traditions that would have been immediately familiar to our ancestors.
She is also a bean feasa, an Irish term she translates as “wise woman”, and describes herself as the eighth generation of wise women in her family. Once, those women made medicines from the plants around them. O’Dwyer brings people into the woods to show them what they used and, just as importantly, to tell the stories of the women who carried that knowledge.
It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate occupation for the girl who couldn’t sit still in school.
O’Dwyer was eventually expelled, something she discusses with characteristic good humour. She says she has ADHD, at a time when girls were far less likely to be diagnosed, and the conventional classroom simply didn’t suit her.
“I just wanted to be outside.”
She grew up with hospitality on one side of her family and something older on the other: woodlands, plant lore, medicines and stories. She subsequently worked for years in tourism as a driver guide until Covid stopped the industry in its tracks.
Suddenly O’Dwyer found herself in the woods, gathering plants and wondering what on earth she was going to do with herself. Years later, the answer seems obvious.
“This is what I’m supposed to be doing,” she says. “Telling stories.”
The stories O’Dwyer tells are not necessarily the versions many of us encountered at school. She talks of Irish goddesses, female warriors and powerful, independent women whose presence in mythology, she believes, has been diminished over centuries of recording and retelling.
“We actually have more goddesses than gods in the old Celtic pantheon,” she says.
She points out that Ireland’s oral stories were eventually written down by monks and subsequently translated through very different social and religious eras. In that process, she argues, angry women, independent women and women who did not conform could become less prominent.
Now she believes something is changing. “We are in the second Celtic revival.”
O’Dwyer is part storyteller, part historian of inherited knowledge and part irrepressible performer. A walk through the woods with her is not simply about identifying something edible growing beneath your feet. A tree becomes a doorway into folklore. A plant becomes a story about medicine. A holy well leads to goddesses, pilgrimage and the relationship our ancestors had with the landscape.
Take the humble plant traditionally reached for after a nettle sting. Most Irish people, myself included, would immediately answer dock leaf.
Wrong, apparently.
O’Dwyer points instead to ribwort plantain, which she calls by its Irish name, slánlus, or “goodbye plant”. For her, our inability to recognise plants once familiar to previous generations illustrates something bigger.
Her woodland walks are an attempt to restore some of that connection. She wants people to see the landscape as their ancestors might have seen it: not simply as scenery, but as somewhere filled with food, medicine, stories and meaning.
She is careful, however, not to romanticise traditional remedies at the expense of modern healthcare.
“I don’t believe in alternative medicines,” she says. “I believe in complementary medicines.”
Perhaps the most fascinating knowledge O’Dwyer is recovering, however, is not about plants at all. It is about women.
Traditionally, becoming a bean feasa was hereditary, with knowledge passed through families. O’Dwyer has decided that tradition needs to change. She now trains other people, arguing that knowledge once guarded for survival no longer needs to remain secret.
“This is the time of women,” she says. “Everybody needs this information now.”
She offers a wonderfully simple interpretation of two objects synonymous with the witch: the cauldron and the broomstick. Strip away centuries of mythology and suspicion, she points out, and they are a woman’s cooking pot and sweeping brush.
“A lot of the mysteries and magic and stuff of the past was just women’s work.”
O’Dwyer’s mission is to talk about women’s knowledge, especially when the women who hold it disappear from the history books, and what happens when another generation decides to go looking for it.
O’Dwyer describes herself as divorced, post-menopausal and “self-partnered”, rather than single. She talks with great affection about the ancient goddesses precisely because they were complicated. They could be angry, powerful, sexual, wise, frightening and independent. They were not required to be agreeable.
“It is a blessing and a curse to be a woman,” she says.
Women can be physically vulnerable. They experience childbirth, hormones and menopause and, throughout history, have been constrained precisely because they were women. Yet O’Dwyer sees something else emerging from that vulnerability: the instinct to find one another.
“That curse causes us to rely on each other a little bit more as women, to understand each other a little bit more, to support each other a little bit more.”
Perhaps that is why these ancient stories are finding new audiences.
O’Dwyer may take people into the woods to identify plants and tell tales about goddesses, wise women and warriors, but what she is really offering is connection: to landscape, to history, to other women and to knowledge that came perilously close to being forgotten.
Perhaps that is the real purpose of O’Dwyer’s gallivanting. She is not trying to take us backwards, but to remind us of what we may have left behind: knowledge of the land, stories of powerful women and an understanding that wisdom is something to be shared. The girl who was once told she was good for nothing but gallivanting has turned out to be very good at something else too — making sure those stories are not forgotten.
