Many of these early songs were originally recorded onto reel-to-reel tape in a tiny garden-shed-studio on Dartmoor. All of them have travelled widely and continue to be performed, shared and adapted for concerts, choirs, circles and ceremonies around the world. The songs are presented here in their original form. They were created while Carolyn was in her thirties, when she was newly living on the moors with her young family, when she was starting to paint the iconic images that accompany so many of these songs, and when her singing voice tended to hover at least four tones higher up the musical scale than the voice of her seventh decade.

This collection, released to celebrate thirty years since Carolyn’s first recordings, reflects the themes of awakening to the spirits of wild land and to sacred women archetypes; arriving to new motherhood and the untamed moors; journeying through womanhood from maiden to mother to crone; and travelling with many of the magical and mythic strands of work that have deepened into Carolyn’s later songs, paintings and books.