Ireland - Chapter One

 Day One – Trim and Tara and Scryne

I didn't prepare much for Ireland. I'd wanted to go for over ten years – for much longer, really, the place had always held some magic for me, some indefinable draw which left me pining insensibly for somewhere I'd never been. I was afraid to even think about it too closely. I didn't want to override my real experience there with some fantasy of what it would be like – I didn't want my expectations to be there, lurking, hoping for magic and faeries and doors to the otherworld right there to step through solid as stone. I had a child's dreams of ireland, and a babypagan teenager's dreams of ireland, and deep longing for something I didn't know would be real or just a daydream I'd been feeding for as long as I can remember. So when we drove up to the airport, trying to learn irish phrases from a CD, I was still trying to fill my head with white noise neutrality.

We flew out of Newark, NJ on a six hour flight, which by the nature of timezones, had us leaving at seven at night and arriving at six in the morning. We'd rented a car, which turned out to be a little red Corsa, which is something they don't have in the states. My mother was legally the only one allowed to drive – I had to be Navigator, which also meant I spent the first day of driving time trying not to have a heart attack as she got used to driving on the wrong side of the road in the wrong side of the car. It's terrifying.

I spent a lot of time this trip with a map spread across my lap, folded to reveal the area we were driving through, and it was actually a fairly fun role – like reading the lyrics of a new album while you listen to it, it gave me a much better feel for the layout of the country, the geography, and the places we visited.

 

Trim, in co. Meath, was our first stop. Cities, we decided, were too scary given the driving situation, and Trim was where the last Reilly of our family-that-emmigrated-over died. It was a really pleasant town, not too busy, with Trim Castle overlooking the rows of houses and businesses, a great big ruin of stone that had a park full of talking trails around it and the Boyne river curving along beside it.

 

 

 

 

Until Trim, I'd been having the growing fear that Ireland wouldn't be what I'd hoped – just another rainy green country full of rent-a-car scuzz and narrow back roads. Here, though, the Boyne murmured and laughed to itself as it sped along under arched walkways, and the sun came out to burn the green of the grass and grey of the stone into my eyes. I know the exact moment I said Hello to the land, as I walked up the hill from the river and the castle to an empty field fringed with blue sky – the wind whipping my hair and something in me opening up and reaching out.

 

It was my mother's birthday, September 14, and she wanted to spend it on Tara. This is where we encountered the difficulty of roads not on maps and the distinct avoidance of the irish to reliable road signs. We did, after some interesting time roaming the countryside along lanes that were definitely too narrow for the high speed two way traffic they were bound to accommodate, find the hill of Tara. There isn't a highway through it. There's a not-gut-wrenchingly-narrow road that isn't terribly far from it, but you can neither see nor hear it from the hill itself.

 

View from the Hill.

 I had mixed feelings about going somewhere that special when I was jetlagged, sleep deprived, and having a heart attack from the driving experience. But we went, and we had delicious veggie soup and brown bread, and we climbed the hill. It is indeed very high and green, and the wind there felt likely enough to pick me up and blow me away. On the hill there is a church and walled graveyard ringed by big old beech trees and younger ash trees, a thick, dark green foliage inhabited by very loud and very happy crows. The crows play in the intensity of the wind and offer raucous commentary to those hiking around Tara's green expanse. I'd recommend the cafe at the foot of the hill – it's very good, and frequented more by locals than tourists.

As I collect fallen crow feathers.

 My mother had her heart set on staying there at the foot of the hill, at a little B&B run by the cafe owner's mother, a very pleasant little old lady. However, to our chagrin, it was still barely past noon and it really felt like it should be much closer to six – not just because we were jetlagged, but also because we'd been to two major places for what felt like several hours apiece but really wasn't, somehow.

 

Penis rock. No, Really.

 

On the landlady's advice, we walked a few minutes down the road to the Holy Well at the foot of Tara, one of four such wells said to be scattered around the site. It's marked only by a simple sign and a gravelly widening of the road with space for a vehicle or two to park.

 

You walk a few meters along the curve of a path and there it is, a little gated grotto with steps down to it and offerings arranged around it, candles and a few broken shells, ribbons tied on the branches of a nearby bush. At first it looks like a dry little cave, with stones scattered on the bottom and ferns growing in the sides, but as I crouch down close, my face is inches away when I realize it is full to the brim with water that is as clear as air and casts no reflection to give itself away.

 

 I have to touch it to believe it, and even the ripples don't cast off light, a trick of the way it is covered by stone and earth perhaps – my mother doesn't believe it until I cast in a pebble enough to make a splash. On the very matter of fact instructions we were given about it having healing properties, we both take a sip from it in cupped hands, and move on.

“It looks different,” my mother says, staring at the stream that flows from the earth near the well. “Doesn't it look different?”

“Does it?” I reply, still tapped for words from wandering up on the hill.

We don't talk about it further. It's only the first such well we find, but it did a good bit for me in feeling connected to the ireland I'd hoped to find without truly understanding before I arrived.

We were given directions to Skryne, Tara's sister site, which can be seen very clearly from Tara itself – by the nice giftshop lady who told me with an air of assuredness that it was the next node on the ley line that ran through Tara, and that while Newgrange and Knowth were all very well, it was Loughcrew that had the most primal feminine and untouched energy. We were to see what she meant later – as we also had a secondary mission that day, to have a pint of beer. Now, if you haven't been to Tara, let me tell you – there isn't a major town nearby. There are a lot of private farms, and windy back roads, but there's no village square.

The only good pub worth going to in the area, confided several locals, was O'Connell's. It had been run by a much-loved woman who was 95 when she'd died a few weeks ago (they said this in such a way that it was clear they felt the pub was dead with her) but should still be open, later on, and was located right next to Skryne. In Skryne. Whatever. We were armed with directions and the amiable nature of being in no rush at all – it was hours before the pub would open, but we had nothing better to do than to find old rocks and wander around, anyway.

Skryne, pronounced “Screen”, is the site of an old church and graveyard too, as well as a T road junction at which O'Connell's sits. We wandered about the old tower for a while, before taking a seat on the bench and wondering with astonishment why it was only 3 pm, and if we would nod off before the little pub opened.

That green bump is the trees on the hill of Tara.

We got lucky. The current owner was there, and when we asked if we could use the restroom, she offered to let us have an early pre-opening pint, seeing as we were both horribly jetlagged and under the weather.

This pub was no touristy reconstructed building. It was, Margaret told us proudly, her mother's life's work and the site of the Guinness Christmas commercial every year, as well as the location shooting for scenes in a couple of movies. She was still mourning her mother, and her brother who'd passed away the year before, and told us stories about the place as we sipped our pints and learned a few irish phrases from her.

It was five by the time we went back to the Tara B&B, and six by the time “let's read for a while” turned into deep states of unconsciousness. That, my friends, was my first day in Ireland.

 

Castle Trim from surrounding walkpaths.