Homecoming
A Samhain Retreat on the Beara Peninsula
October 27 – November 01, 2026
A 5-Day Immersive Journey into Belonging, Mystery & your Soul’s Calling
Homecoming is a 5 day in-person Samhain retreat led by Kathy Scott, inspired by the stunning landscape, sacred sites and ‘thin places’ of the Beara Peninsula, West Cork, one of the most mystical places in Ireland.
This curated rite of passage is carefully designed to help you reconnect with your ancestral wisdom, release what is complete and step into the next chapter of your life.
Please note that this retreat is a space held by women for women.
"There are three great ages;
the age of the yew tree,
the age of the eagle and the age of the Cailleach”
- The Triads of Ireland
There are moments in life when something deep within us knows it is time.
Time to surrender what no longer serves
and remember who we truly are.
Samhain is one of those moments.
For five days, we will gather on the wild and mystical Beara Peninsula, homeland of An Chailleach Bhéarra, who is Ireland’s ancient sovereignty goddess and guardian of winter’s threshold.
Together, we will step out of ordinary time and into the fertile darkness.
We will listen to the wisdom of the land and honour the ancestors.
We will tend what is dying and midwife what longs to emerge.
We will remember that life unfolds not in straight lines, but in the cycles and spirals of
Birth.
Death.
& Rebirth.
This is an invitation to return to your wild roots.
To reclaim your soul gifts.
To remember your place within the great web of life.
This is Homecoming.
Why Samhain?
Rooted in Ireland’s ancient traditions, Samhain marks the Celtic New Year and the descent into the dark half of the year. As the Wheel turns toward winter and the earth draws her energy inward, we arrive at one of the most potent thresholds in the Celtic calendar: an ancient pre-Christian festival that later inspired Halloween.
A sacred crossing between ending and beginning, death and rebirth, womb and tomb.
Between who we have been and who we are becoming.
As the veil between the seen and unseen grows thin, we are invited to listen more deeply. To honour what is complete. To release what is ready to fall away. To trust the wisdom of the season and the ancient rhythms moving through all life.
In Ireland, our ancestors honoured the dead through ritual, ceremony, and seasonal practice. As animists, they understood ancestors not only as the spirits of those who came before, but also as the living spirit of land and place.
They left us a rich mythic inheritance, a trail of breadcrumbs woven through story, song and sacred sites aligned with the cosmos.
This gathering is an invitation to cross that threshold with courage and discover what new life is stirring beneath the surface.
“Crone... the most dangerous, the most radical, the most revolutionary woman in existence. This old woman stands between the worlds of rationality and mythos. She is the knucklebone on which these two worlds turn.”
- Clarissa Pinkola Estés
The call of Beara
According to Irish tradition, the Beara Peninsula is the home of An Chailleach Bhéarra, the ancient gatekeeper of Samhain.
The Veiled One.
The Mystical Hag.
Guardian of Winter Keeper of the Threshold.
She is the great Crone of Wisdom. The one who has lived, lost, loved, created and destroyed. She carries the death medicine that makes renewal possible.
Beara is her wild terrain.
A rugged landscape of mountains, valleys, stone circles, sacred wells and ancient pathways.
A place where the land remembers.
To journey here at Samhain is to step into a living myth.
To walk with the Cailleach.
To sit beside her cauldron of transformation.
To cross the threshold between what has been and what is waiting to become.
What kind of ancestor do you want to become?
Homecoming is more than a retreat. It is a rite of passage,
This gathering invites us remember our place within the great continuum of life.
We are living through a time of profound ecological, cultural and spiritual transition. The choices we make today will shape the world inherited by future generations.
Together we will explore how to embrace our role as ancestors-in-training with greater awareness, responsibility and care.
The lives of our ancestors live on within us through the landscape of our bodies, relationships, dreams and ways of seeing the world.
Each of us carries an inheritance:
Pain & Power.
Wounds & Wisdom.
Rupture & Resilience.
We feel it in our bones.
We feel it in our longing.
We feel it in the call to belong more deeply to ourselves, one another and the Earth.
Samhain offers a powerful opportunity to tend these ancestral roots.
To honour what has been carried.
To listen for the wisdom waiting to be remembered.
Together, we will explore what it means to live in right-relationship with our ancestors, descendants and the wild world, so that we may walk forward with greater courage, clarity and care.
For what we heal, remember and embody today will ripple out far beyond our own lives.
The Journey Home
At the heart of this Samhain retreat are three ancient Irish wisdom teachings that illuminate this path of remembrance.
꩜ DÚCHAS | Remembering Where You Belong
Dúchas is one of the most beautiful words in the Irish language (ár dteanga dhúchais). It weaves together heritage, place, kinship, belonging, and the living relationship between people and land.
In a world marked by disconnection, many of us long for a deeper sense of home. We feel separated from nature, community, ancestry, and even ourselves. Throughout this retreat, you will be invited to remember your place within the larger story of life. To deepen your relationship with land, lineage and community. And to experience what it truly means to come home.
꩜ DRAÍOCHT | Reclaiming Your Magic
Draíocht is the Irish word for magic, the living mystery that animates the world. The ancient Irish imagination understood that the world is alive, enchanted and filled with meaning.
Samhain invites us to reclaim our relationship with mystery. The 'doorways' to the Otherworld open connecting us to the realms of the supernatural. This is a time to listen deeply and trust your intuition. To enter into dialogue with dreams, symbols, ancestors and the unseen dimensions. To reclaim the part of yourself that modern life may have taught you to forget.
꩜ DÁN | Answering the Call of Your Soul
The Irish word dán weaves together destiny, skill, gift and calling. It speaks to the unique medicine each of us carries, our soul gifts we are here to cultivate the service we are here to offer.
Many people sense a stirring within them. A knowing that there is something more they are here to embody. A deeper life waiting to be lived from the inside out.
This gathering creates space to listen for that call.
To discern what is ending and clarify what is emerging.
To step more fully onto the part of your dán.
What awaits you
Over five days at Dromgarriff — a sanctuary of wild beauty nestled within ancient oak woodland on the shores of Glengarriff Bay — we will weave together:
꩜ Seasonal ritual and ceremony
꩜ Sacred site pilgrimage
꩜ Irish wisdom teachings
꩜ Somatic and embodied practices
꩜ Creative exploration
꩜ Stories, song and fireside gatherings
꩜ Community, reflection and deep rest
DAY 1
- Arrive & land.
- Opening circle.
- Welcome feast.
DAY 2
- Practices, Inquiry & Ritual.
- Sensory Practices, Movement & Ritual.
- Rest & Receive.
DAY 3
- Sensory Practices, Movement & Ritual.
- Excursion on the Land
- Introduction to Plant Allies.
- Rest & Receive.
DAY 4
- Sensory Practices, Movement & Ritual.
- Stone Circle excursion.
- Rest & Receive.
DAY 5
- Final Ritual & Blessings.
- Gratitude practices & offerings to the Land.
- Closing Ceremony.
This is an invitation to:
Honour what is ending.
Release what no longer serves.
Gather the wisdom of the year.
Listen for what is emerging.
Cross the threshold with courage.
Together, we will enter the fertile darkness of Samhain and discover what new life is waiting to take root. Not as an escape from the world. But as a deeper return to it.
In the held space of Beara, you will be met by the land, by the women gathered around you, by the parts of yourself that have been waiting to be healed. You will have time to grieve what is asking to be grieved, and to feel the relief of laying it down. To release what you have carried for too long and to sense the spaciousness left in its place.
And in that spaciousness, something will begin to open. You will leave Beara knowing, not in your mind - but in your body, blood and bones - who you are and what is yours to carry forward. The seed of what comes next, planted in the dark, ripe with all it has yet to become.
"We’re living in two worlds simultaneously: one the fall of Rome and the other a new Renaissance. We need to be both death doulas and birth doulas, helping die peacefully the systems that need to die and helping give birth to a wholly different kind of world."
- Marianne Williamson
Meet Your Guides
Kathy Scott is a cultural activist, entrepreneur and curator of creative experiences devoted to collective renewal.
A weaver of worlds and catalyst for change, she creates spaces where ancient wisdom meets emerging futures. As Director of The Trailblazery, she works to nudge humanity forward through cultural imagination, creativity and embodied praxis.
She is the founder of Moon Medicine, a global women’s movement, and The Hedge School, an award-winning initiative celebrating Irish culture, language, lineage and lore.
For over twenty years, Kathy has guided individuals, communities and organisations through creative transformation. She weaves her native Irish wisdom traditions with trauma-informed learning, embodied experience and deep ecology.
Her work aims to rewild Ireland’s cultural imagination and restore true belonging to self, community, culture and the living world.
You can learn more about Kathy here.
Jenny Ní Ruiséil is an Irish speaker, musician and yoga teacher originally from Kildare who has spent years also working for Irish-language college Coláiste Lurgan (TGLurgan).
She is committed to exploring, practicing and living a heart-based, creative life, using the traditional teachings of the Himalayan Masters combined with the deep roots of her Irish and Celtic lineage as guides and frameworks.
Her fascination with all things music, sound, language and energy-based has led her to explore the connections between these ancient spiritual practices (particularly mantra) and how rooting ourselves deeply in a practice, lineage or tradition can help to facilitate an even deeper sense of home.
Jen Doran is a yoga teacher and herbalist who is based in West Cork. Herbal tradition runs through Jen's bloodline, with her father and great-great-grandmother both being herbalists, which has gifted her a love of exploring connection to nature in all its shapes and forms.
She loves finding new and old ways of deepening our relationship with the natural world around us and to our own inner nature and health as well, which Jen views as one and the same.
Jen has a particular interest in the importance of ritual in how we approach and make medicine from the plants that are all around us. She loves creating space through her work for people to connect deeply with their environment and through doing so creating ripples of awareness for how people can look after and protect nature all around them.
Dromgarriff Rainforest
Homecoming is held at Dromgarriff, a sanctuary of wild beauty nestled within ancient oak woodland on the shores of Glengarriff Bay, West Cork.
Surrounded by mountains, rivers, waterfalls and stone circles, this landscape feels suspended between worlds, an ideal setting for a Samhain threshold journey on the Beara Peninsula.
Dromgarriff is one of Ireland’s rare Atlantic oak rainforests, where ancient oaks and beeches shelter a rich native ecosystem of holly, hazel, birch, aspen and bilberry. The Barony and Dromgarriff rivers flow through the valley, feeding a series of five cascading waterfalls.
The land here invites slowing down. To listen and to remember.
You will be held in beautifully crafted homes, designed to sit in harmony with the landscape. Built from local stone and slate, each house offers warmth, privacy, and quiet refuge, with wide windows opening onto woodland, water and sky.
This is a place to be held by the wild beauty of the land while you honour what is ending and listen for what is ready to emerge.
Together, we create space for ritual, restoration, creativity and deep connection.
For five nights you will be wholly provided for: a beautiful place to rest, nourishing food drawn from the land, and every experience held with care, so that all you need to do is soften, and belong.
And if you feel the pull to reclaim your dúchas, awaken your draíocht, and listen more deeply for your dán, this may be your invitation home.
Your Investment
Homecoming is an investment in your future: we have seen first hand how these six days can reorient people’s lives for many years to come.
This small, carefully cultivated community is for women who are ready to return to their wild roots, reclaim their soul gifts and remember their place within the great web of life.
- Your devoted facilitator Kathy, whose passion is to help people find the path of their dán.
- Beautiful eco-luxury accommodation on the Beara Peninsula.
- Private chef providing delicious and soul-nourishing meals, all locally sourced and organic where possible.
- Workshops, ceremonies, sauna and sacred site tours
- Special guest facilitator for our Samhain Ceremony.
- Private online vault with preparatory and integration work.
- Opening online ceremony, followed by an online integration circle which offers us a container for holding for our retreat.
Shared Accommodation
€2,499
5 nights · all meals · all experiences · ground transport
We have worked closely with the host team and guides to make this week as financially accessible as possible. Arrangements for longer-term payment plans to spread out the cost can be arranged - please email Ismahane at hello@thetrailblazery.com for more information if you need it.
Letter from Kathy
Dear Ones,
As I write, it feels as though we are living through a collective Samhain.
A threshold time - am tairsí.
Old structures are unravelling, both within us and around us. We are being asked to stay present and bear witness to a world in transition, where one form dissolves as another emerges.
This is not abstract. It is a felt experience in the rise and fall of our breath, and the contraction and expansion of our bodies. As the outer world shapeshifts, so do we.
We can feel it in our waters. We can feel it in our bones.
I believe we are made for these times.
There is a remembering underway. A return to right-relationship with what has been severed. A re-entry down and into the body of the Earth. A reweaving of belonging where it has been ruptured. And a re-souling of what has been lost.
We are being called back into connection with ourselves, with one another, and with the living world. To meet the fires of personal and collective transformation. To learn how to stay present without collapse or denial.
We have arrived at a crucible moment in the shared human story. A time that asks us to slow down enough to feel what is truly here, to release what has completed its cycle, and to surrender what no longer serves.
Samhain carries the ancestral intelligence for this passage. Its wisdom is not only seasonal; it mirrors the deeper process we are moving through
Being wintered can feel like a collective descent. The Cailleach calls us further down and further in, inviting us to loosen our grip on certainty and trust the deeper intelligence of life.
This is a time of revelation in its original sense: a lifting of the veil. What has been hidden is coming into view. The boundary between the living and the dead, the seen and unseen, becomes more porous.
And through it all, the great wheel continues to turn, inviting us to spiral even deeper into the eternal rhythm of life, death, and rebirth.
Samhain is the threshold into ancestral deep time and the mystery.
An invitation to remember what is essential.
If you feel the call, I invite you to step across this threshold with me.
In remembrance and belonging,
Kathy
