Sligo 2008

Arrival at Ballyconnel West
Once again we passed the churchyard under Ben Bulben where he is buried, the ‘he’ that draws tourists to feel the words long written in stone. Turning off the main road that passes Yeats’ grave, the land begins its pull. In two short years the twists and turns of the road out to Ballyconnel, have become familiar, become cellular, like a bird on its migration track. This time we know that Jack will not be there to welcome us, we have not made other contact and do not know what we will find. All we hear from Ellen’s, is that Jack has had a turn. We travel towards the land that Jack has lived on for the last eighty years and we for three weeks in the last two years, it is already in our skin and bones, what is it to Jack all of his life of eighty years. On we drive till the road runs out and becomes creases in the surface of the sea field, this is our home for the next while. Jimmy, the nephew, is there at Jack’s, with his lads checking the cattle. He knew we were coming and made us welcome, though we were strangers to each other. We erected our temporary home on the land by the sea amongst the curiosity of the cattle and sheep.

Fish in Raptor Bay
The tide was high, so I had to wait to climb down onto ‘raptor bay’. I lay on the rocks laid down millennia ago, a surge of movement in the earth some time had shifted them to 45’, the angle provided a tilted resting place to watch the sea as it turned once more to follow the pull of the moon and the sun. As the sounds of the sea and the air washed over me, my eyes adjusted to the light on the water, I began to see beneath the surface. There, large dog fish, scavengers of coastal water, nosed around and filtered the water for any tasty detritus or fruits of the sea. Sleek and grey, their backs breaking the surface, they swam as the pull of the waves jostled them beneath the overhang of rock. Shadows of a gull passing overhead sent them swiftly below, shortly after, once more to return to their slow meandering at the surface. I watched them while they searched for food in the turning tide of the Irish coastal waters of the Atlantic.

Empty Nests
The nests in raptor bay have been empty in the years of our visits. I have a sense that these are now unused. They sit on rocky stilts under overhanging rocks, safe from predators from above and from below. Bones still decorate these thrones of sticks, memories of past lives made food. Perhaps the absence of the nest builders is simply the timing of the young now fledged, the nest is no longer their resting place. I have seen no buzzards in the skies over Ballyconnel, which feeds the sense that these nest sites are no longer active.

Colours
The colours in the landscape here fill my heart. They are more green and blue and gold and grey and black and brown and white and yellow than any artists’ pallet could hope to capture, though my eyes see it all.

Cowries
There are cowries on the beach here; their familiarity helps me to land, to arrive. The quiet meditation of cowrie hunting has been passed through the generations of my Fife family. My eye quickly becomes accustomed again to their shape and form, I walk with a sort of non-looking, as I meander along the beach, that reveals them to me. The wind touches my skin, the sounds of the waves filter through my ears and over the thoughts in my mind and my being begins to relax. I feel my mother and my uncle, both cowrie hunters at my side, I feel the generations before them that passed to them this simple thrill. My uncle, now in his eighties, collects cowries each day in the early morning, he collects them in memory of his first wife, once collected, he returns them to the beach the same morning, he says they are becoming scarce and if he does not return them perhaps his daily routine will end, he is a man of routine. Here, in Ireland the cowries lie over one particular part of the bay, I know from experience the places where they may be found, the particular quality of beach surface draws me in for this exercise of non-looking. Of my three siblings, I have caught the real compulsion for the peaceful dialogue with the liminal zone between land and sea.

The East Coast of Scotland and the West Coast of Ireland
I come to this place and I feel at home. The resonances between this place and Fife are clear and tangible. It is wilder here, it is not my country, I am at home.

Hares
The rusty hares of Ireland are magical beings. It is wild enough here for them to scour the tidal band for food with out fear. The hares among the rocks at the edge of the sea move between stillness and the intensity of searching. If disturbed they merge with the land, impossible to see, their noses sensing, their ears funnelling, their fur vibrating with all they need to know. ( note to self ) what is the name of the mythical Irish hare that Michael refers to?

Heron
I am always surprised by the raucous call of the heron. It seems to be ‘other’ than the stillness of the bird, ‘other’ than its patience as it hunts, the quick accurate piercing of its pray. This strange creature lopes across the sky, a flying U-bend, long thin legs held behind, grey body, striking eye, piercing beak. This bird seems hardly that, living between the worlds of water, earth and air with a fluidity that belies its size. This bird is seemingly unruffled by other avians that would wish it on its way, as it continues through their territory. It feels an old one from times gone by. I watch the heron with respect and take the teachings of patience and stillness and the focus of its looking.

Weather
I am never in doubt that weather, in all its forms, will be part of our stay in Jack’s field. I have never been disappointed.

Jack’s
When did this place, this piece of the earth, become ‘Jack’s’? I have a sense that it will be ‘Jack’s’ long after Jack is no longer on this earth, and yet this land is unto itself.

Jack’s house
When you reach the end of the road and the cluster of dwellings that is Ballyconnel West you will find Jack’s home, it was his mothers’ house before him and his fathers, it housed all his siblings. He is the youngest; he remained living with his mother until she died and since then continued there on his own. He has never married. The house and the holiday house ‘Cliff View’ stand at right angles to each other, the buildings face inwards on to a courtyard, the buildings have their backs to the sea in the west and in the north, for they lie on the edge of a promontory of land that extends out into the Atlantic Ocean. The land itself is protected form the full force of the sea by a rise in the land where it meets the water. The bands of fossil filled rock create a protective headland that transforms the full force of the ocean into turquoise swells and huge plumes of spray that mount the cliffs. The house sits inland, hunkering down as near as it can to the earth. The building that is Jack’s home is small by any standards, a room, a bedroom, a cubicle of a space that is a cooking place and a later addition of bathroom and toilet at the back on the north wall. The room is the room that Jack lived in and still lives in should he ever return home. Formica, everlasting holy flame, votive offerings, photographs, memories, stories, furniture and fireplace fill the space. There is nothing more that is needed, no clearing, no design, no cleaning, no sprucing, it has held many lives, there is nothing to do or to say, a welcome filled with the breadth of living a life so close to the earth greets us when we enter. Here there is no comparison of the past with the present, the haves and the have nots, for here are riches born out of the continuum of living in a place, on land where the wild and domestic animals know the habits of the humans and the humans the habits of the animals. The land is fiercely itself, few crops will grow although cattle and sheep do well and share the land with the wild creatures. The same few people have used the holiday cottage over many years, a landscape painter, and people from Dublin. ‘Cliff View’ has its back to the West, a field and a rise and an ocean between the wall and America. Few windows are exposed to force of the winter gales that mould the trees and create wild topiary in case the glass should be smashed in a storm, an event well recorded here.
Jack welcomed us with an overwhelming generosity the first time we arrived, unknown, at his gate, the car full of camping equipment and us full of hope. To begin with, Cathy had to translate his words for me until I begin to sink in to his sound, the whiff of the brogue, Jack aiding me in his habit of repeating words into a song. Cathy won Jack fast, her gentle humour and his, tickling each other; it was a joy to witness. We deeply missed him this year at his home, visiting our tent, memories of going on enforced pub-crawls and our driving him to Mass.

Jack at St Josephs
John Donlon is his name, it hangs above his bed in the men’s ward at St. Josephs’ nursing home in Sligo, along with his feeding instructions. The Beijing Olympics are busy on the small television. Jack’s bed is next to the window and opposite the bed of a half disappeared elderly man curled up in a ball. The only other intern able to speak is at the other end of the ward, he and Jack banter loudly from time to time over the disappeared. The proximity of the window allows Jack to plot the weather but hardly sniff the air or feel the wetness that has accompanied the summer months. He talks about his land and the animals and wants to know if Jimmy is doing a good job. He wants to go home, though he can only hint at it, it feels as though the pain of the separation is too much to mention. He shows us the repair of his body, as he stands, still unable to walk unaided; the stroke back in November has shattered his existence. Someone has sent him holy water from Lourdes, he proudly shows us and he rubs a few drops on his useless left arm and leg, we share some of the water, it is hard not to weep. It is a treasure to visit Jack, he knows us instantly, he knew we were going to the field and when, from the card we had sent, he has a phenomenal memory born mostly from the fact that he never learned to read or to write, his fine mind activated by holding all necessary information. Jack knows when the holidaymakers are coming to Cliff View, Jimmy forgets, Jimmy is used to remembering through the written word. Jack’s mind is still as keen as mustard. We leave Jack we turn away full of our own loss and longing.

Jimmy and the Lads
We meet Jimmy and his youngest lads the moment we arrive at Jack’s. He is there checking the house and the livestock, he greets us and knows that Jack was expecting us to stay in his field again. Jimmy has had to undertake an intuitive crash course in animal husbandry, there are some prize beasts in the field, thriving on the excesses of the Summer rain. The grass is rich with nutrients from its’ proximity to the sea, the mix of plants that make up the turf a tasty untreated feast, in dry years this land is almost barren as it eakes its growth out of a bed of thin earth overlaying sand and rock. Jimmy welcomes the unkownness of us to the land, he apologises for the cattle, he and the lads whack the thistles and nettles with their sticks as they cross the field to check the stock. Jimmy and the lads are around most days and also welcome our friends when they arrive a few days later.

Sea Otter
There is something special about finding dead creatures. Wild animals are understandably timid in the presence of humans. I feel that the discovery of the dead of a species may mean that there are live ones just out of sight. The discovery of the carcass of a sea otter on the golden strand was a stinking, but treasure indeed.

Cow breath
The cattle were extremely curios about us and about our tent, when we arrived. During the first couple of nights we were woken by heavy cow breath around the edges of our tent and once or twice a tugging of the guy ropes and a hoiking out of the pegs, the up turning of the washing up bowl, the chewing of my haul of whale bones. After a day or two they seemed to encompass our camp in their daily ritual of specific movings around the field. We imagined that we had camped on their night-time spot.

Finding bones
There were a number of bones of whale on the far end of the bay, I collected some and left others. By the time we returned to Dublin there was a very strong smell in the car, we thought it was a leaking gas bottle, it was in fact whale bones still going through the curing process! Three layers of bin liners got us to our next camping spot in Dorset without being asphyxiated! The bones are now confined to the garden in Oxford where the weather is continuing to cure them. They are beautiful bones of the spine of a small whale that became stranded on the beach at Ballyconnel last winter.

Lizard
A small lizard found its way into our tent and survived.

Knock Knock
It was the week before the Novena, when Knock fills with pilgrims from all over the Catholic world in remembrance of the vision of the Virgin Mary that appeared to a few, one August, even now in this August, it was becoming busy. Yellow lines full of parked vehicles of the curious and the religious filled the streets of the small town heedless of the counties’ coloured guidelines, more intent on prayer and the collection of holy water. The high street near the cathedral is filled with shops selling empty plastic bottles in the shape of the ‘mother’ and Celtic crosses to fill from the line of water fountains that grace the entrance to the holy place. Water here, perhaps now from Knock mains, is filled with meaning and held in reverence. Here, I exchanged some water from the Thames, a river once deemed sacred, with water from one of the blessed outlets in the wall. I imagine long queues for the water during the Novena and the lives that the water will touch as it takes a prayerful place in the world.

Water from Croagh Patrick Spring 07.08.08
A few days after the main yearly pilgrimage to climb Croagh Patrick, when hundreds of Catholics and others from near and far most of them bare foot, walk up the mountain, we followed their route. In the car park at the base, beside the café, an elderly man sold and rented walking sticks cut from hazel and blackthorn to aid the climb. We had brought our own, mine of holly from beside the river Dart in Devon and Cathy of hazel from woods near home, we were glad of them, a third leg while travelling over the shist was a bonus. We walked the walk of many before us, pausing in the ascent at the sites of the decade circumnavigations for breath and to take it the expanding view. It was on this mountain that St. Patrick is said to have banished snakes from the emerald isle after his forty days and forty nights alone on the summit. Evidence of the recent mounting and descending throng is littered about, a few shoes, empty plastic water bottles and a large mound of tea bags on the summit. We were told that this year the priests assent was by helicopter, while the earthly pilgrims still put one foot in front of the other to reach the top to spend time in and around the small chapel in prayer. Many on the day we climbed, on their arrival at the summit, called their loved ones on mobile phones, loudly clarifying their assent. Some come here to shine their badges for entry into Catholic heaven, some as a physical challenge all, I imagine, leave with a sense of something else. Families, parents with small children cajoling, teenage sons encouraging elder fathers, lovers, parents, those labouring under the strain and those whose physical fitness allowed them to create speed records for the assent, they all walked with the collective of prayer for other and self, some thankful, some joyful, some filled with grief, some in yearly ritual of prayer had joined us in our assent, all belonging to a growing web of pilgrims. On our descent, I left the main pilgrim path and set out over the heather and peat to find the source of the stream we had walked beside on the lower slopes. I had a renewed sense of the numbers of feet and many hours of walking that had created the pilgrim pathway and had worn away the heather and the peat to expose the rock beneath. I spent time at the spot where the water emerged from the ground under the protection of small mountain trees. I collected some of this newly emerged water and drank of it deeply and took some with me to add to my gathering collection of waters and stories, each one touching my heart. At the bottom of the mountain a newly restored and empty shrine to ‘Our Lady’ awaited visitors.

The Circus Comes to Town
We squinted out of the window at Ellens’ Pub. Even through the rain we could see our round canvas bell tent across the fields below at the shore. The pool player joked, ‘I saw the circus had come to town’.

Fishing Poles in Ireland
St. Colmcille’s well 10.08.08
Hair of the Banshees
Donkeys’ Feet
Irish on the Breath
Ireland and Korea
Eithne and Michael
Emmet and the Spyglass
Conversations on Catastrophes
Tent Cooking
House Hunting
Air at the Glencar Waterfall
Frills of Kelp
The Mountains
Living with Wind
Pancakes with Helen and Dermot
Triangle Pool
Eclipse of the Moon
Tent Circle where does the chlorophyll go
Brown Weed Green Weed
Tree Guardians on Ben Bulben
Living with Rain
Birds making Air patterns Visible… flying the line of least resistance over the sea
Departure from Ballyconnel West