The Ovates, then, were seers and diviners, travellers in Time, and it seems likely that they were also healers, herbalists and midwives. The English word ‘Ovate’ comes from the various terms used by the classical writers: Vates, Uatis, Euhages, which may derive from the Indo-European root uat, ‘to be inspired or possessed’. The classical author Strabo described the Ovate as ‘an interpreter of nature’. It was the Ovates who were skilled in reading omens and divining auguries – whether from the flight of birds, the shape of clouds, or the behaviour of animals or the weather – and it was the Ovates whose task it probably was to heal, using their knowledge of herbs and spells to cure disease in humans and livestock. The Ovate seems, in many ways, to conform to the type of person most people would describe as a Witch, and it is certainly possible that when Druidry went underground with the coming of Christianity, the Ovate stream may have become a source that fed later generations of healers and followers of the Old Ways, until they came to be known as the Cunning Folk– healers who could still be found in villages in Britain up until the 1930s. And it is quite possible that these Cunning people were in fact the Witches of modern popular perception.