Tracey-anne McCartney

A stand-alone tale of women associated with the sea. Folklore and mythology blend with an essence of truth depicting the feminine spirit. This includes a love story of such complexity that its secret has been protected for eons. The origins for 'A Carpet of Purple Flowers Series'. 

In North America, a conch is often identified as a queen conch, found off the coast of Florida. "True conchs" are marine gastropod molluscs.  Conch shells can be used as wind instruments. They are prepared by cutting a hole in the spire of the shell near the apex and then blowing into the shell as if it were a trumpet, as in blowing horn.

In Greece, this Goddess is known as Aphrodite, although this name properly refers to her domain of a walled garden or “paradise.” A masculinized form of her is Priapos, who is borrowed into Latin as Priapus where he becomes the protector of Roman gardens. The Latin form of this Goddess is Venus. The name Flora probably is cognate, and the Floralia festival corresponds to the May 1st festivals which are general for these Goddesses who are especially associated with the blooming season of flowers. Venus gives her name to Friday, a day especially sacred to women wherever there was a seven day week.

The Western Isles are a chain of islands in the Atlantic Ocean off the Northwest coast of Scotland. The Islands are also known as the Outer Hebrides or officially called by the Gaelic name, Na h-Eileanan Siar or  Innse Gall ("islands of the strangers"). There are various important prehistoric structures, many of which pre-date the first written references to the islands by Roman and Greek authors. Much of the western coastline of the islands is machair, a fertile low-lying dune pastureland. The St Kilda wren is a subspecies of wren whose range is confined to the islands whose name it bears. In European folklore, the wren is the king of the birds, according to a fable attributed to Aesop by Plutarch, when the eagle and the wren strove to fly the highest, the wren rested on the eagle's back, and when the eagle tired, the wren flew out above him. Thus, Plutarch implied, the wren proved that cleverness is better than strength.  In Japan, the wren is labelled king of the winds. In Scotland it was the Lady of Heaven's Hen, a name used for Rhiannon.. It was a sacred bird to the druids, who considered it "king of all birds", and used its musical notes for divination. The shape-shifting Fairy Queen took the form of a wren, known as "Jenny Wren" in nursery rhymes. A wren's feather was thought to be a charm against disaster or drowning.

The wild man (also wildman, or "wildman of the woods", archaically woodwose or wodewose) is a mythical figure that appears in the artwork and literature of medieval Europe, comparable to the satyr or faun type in classical mythology and to Silvanus, the Roman god of the woodlands. In Etruscan mythology, Selvans was god of the woodlands, cognate with Roman Silvanus.