Sally Gwenarby left university without finishing her degree in Earth Science, finding herself drawn to chalk and flint, and to the spirit and magic of the stones, the symbiotic relationship between the two rocks: secret silicaceous passages running through graded levels in the cretaceous, carbonate bedrock of the country.

 

She was an only child, slightly fey, living near the Long Mynd, and deeply into Alan Garner stories.  Her father was a Catholic priest, and they were a close-knit devoted family but, in 1979, when Sally was 9, her mother began to lose her faith in the Catholic Church owing to its treatment of women.  She began seeking a new spiritual home and talked to village women about pagan beliefs.  In Wǣrlogia she found what she had been seeking.  She still loved her husband, but, secretly, she joined a Wǣrlogian coven.  The nine-year old Sally absorbed Catholicism from her father and pagan flower craft and stone craft and rites from her mother, who was careful not to involve her daughter directly in the rites.

 

In 1981 her father discovers about her mother’s now deep affiliation to Wǣrlogia.  He became deeply unhappy but would not leave her, nor she him. 

 

In 1983 her mother developed cancer and died.  Her Father struggled with his faith and with depression.  Sally grew up immersed in both mother’s and father’s legacy.  As a teen she began to read about paganism.  She became a goth, but from her father also developed an interest in geology.

 

By 1986 she was still attending her father’s services, while no longer really an adherent.  Her father urged her to go to university and read geology.  Sally was not that keen but did so to please him and ease his depression. 

 

At Aberrheidol university she immersed herself in local occult customs.  She met Wendy Willowbank on GeogSoc trip into the hills.  Shortly that she found she was devouring books on paganism and had wholly lost interest in the course.  She left university and embarked on a pilgrimage across ley lines to the witch sites of England.  At her journey’s end she was initiated on St. Cath’s hill into her mother’s Wǣrlogian culture.  When not on spiritual questing she rented a cottage in Windcastle and worked as an administrator in a surgery whiles studying herbalism.  She became an herbalist and senior Wǣrlogian priestess but always remained at one remove from her fellow pagans as she sought her own spiritual path.