Ireland - Chapter Three

Day 3 and 4 – Inishmor

We wake in the morning before the rest of Galway does, and subsequently, breakfast and coffee is at first difficult to obtain. We get them, then wander to the tourist office to buy ferry tickets to the Aran Islands, which have been on the list of things to hit for a while now. I'm lucky to have my mother as a travel companion. We like and want to see the same things, and have the same loose definition of “plans” that basically contain a list of things we'd like to see but don't have to, with plenty of room to run off to the next destination.

Over a quick breakfast, listening to irish talk radio hosts playing fairly dramatic love songs while a call in waxes poetic about how he met his husband in an airport, I lament that the ferry logistics forced us to pick a single island rather than seeing all of them.

The ferry departs from Rossaveal along the coast of Galway Bay. As we drive along the coast, the sun is coming out and the water glitters. Then we hit a place it's impossible not to stop at, a beach where a rapidly flowing river meets the bay and pale sand stretches between tumbles of rock. It's beautiful, and strikes the sort of homesick chord you get when you see a place you miss but can't stay. A lot of places in Ireland hit this chord for me, but I'm an ocean thing, a seaside girl, and the rushing water draws me out and makes me smile though the cold wind hurts my face.

We drive on. Rossaveal is nestled on an edge of Connemara, which is wild country, bogs and stone. The town is tiny, and the ferry won't come until later. We drop into the pub for a while, where a local tells us jokes and quizzes us about our own country, entertaining at first and annoying later. I am beginning to learn that while everyone asks you where you're from (even though they can already tell you're from the US by your accent) unless you're from Boston or New York, they just stare at you blankly and expectantly when you name a place they don't recognize. A guy who lays pipes and other public works jobs on the islands tells us the smaller island is better because they have no Garda and the pubs stay open until 3 or 4 am. Eventually an old guy who speaks more irish than english and is extremely drunk hits too much on my mother and we leave.

Rossaveal

We pass more time in the car until a crowd begins to gather for the ferry. I write my first batch of postcards, not really knowing what to say in many cases, because there is both too much and too little – too many people I wish to travel this country with, and yet a strange feeling of being utterly removed from their world and lives. Before the ferry comes, I watch fisherman feed a gray seal at the docks, daydreaming of selkies and hugging myself against the chill of the wind. My leather jacket is well insulated but short, and though my layers serve me well through most of the trip, I wish I'd brought more of them.

 

Despite the cold, and because of my love of the open water and boats, I stand at the open air top deck of the ferry with two other people – a young man from Switzerland who speaks very little english and an old irish man with a really excellently carved out white beard, who tells me about the Burren, which is all craggy rock with the most beautiful wildflowers growing in the cracks, and how the Aran islands are formed from the same rock. The three of us teeter and totter along the ferry as the waves toss the deck to extreme angles, and it would have been impossible to pry the smile off of my face.

 

 

 

The trip is 45 minutes, and the sun is going down stunningly over the island as we race towards it. I take an embarrassing number of pictures of this, licking salt-spray off my lips and clutching to the rail with numb fingers. As we get into the lee of the island, the waves calm and we see a rainbow touching down onto the land.

Kilronan

Night falls fast, here, and once we check in to our B&B we head out in search of dinner. A local pub, good food, and a musician that tunes his guitar but never plays. When we leave it is night and there is a tangible otherness to the air, a spooky, hair-raising energy that causes us both to laugh into the dark, but quietly, and express to each other that it was the sort of electric feeling that ends in things rising unexpectedly from behind stone walls, strange shapes dancing in empty fields in the light of the glittering stars. The wind is more alive here, whispering softly, so that you strain to catch words that would most certainly not be in English.

Up until this point, my mother has been quoting a book at me, which she picked up at a thrift store a month or two prior to our trip. It got a bit on my nerves – how could one guy be the go to source on an entire country, anyway? But that night I started to read McCarthy's Bar and I found it very difficult to set aside. It was ten years out of date yet managed to be both funny and accurate, and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in travel stories. McCarthy also shared our interest in old rocks, and later we would follow his advice to find some very out of the way sites that otherwise we'd never have known about. From that night on, his experiences helped me to better frame my own in some ways – with the culture, the people, and even the navigation.

I cannot sleep that night – there is a stillness here that is bones deep, and in that stillness there is a music. I know that the waves are whispering on pebble beaches, and in my dreams figures wait to speak with me there if I'd only wander out to see them. Here is not a place of seeking to connect – it is being surrounded by the thing I have always sought to connect to, feeling the bedrock of it beneath my feet, tasting it in the perfect clarity of the air. The trees whisper, and that music one hears not with one's ears pulls at me, beckons me, and my rest is fitful from the lure of it.

 

In the morning, we ate breakfast while it rained, and rented bikes with the well-meant plan to ride around the island, to Dun Aengus and the other interesting spots on the map, including several megalithic tombs, a holy well or two, and a seal colony.

Oh, intention. It rained on us intermittently which was not at all unenjoyable, and I began what was to be a days long discussion about why on earth the Irish don't have blackberry everything, since every spot that isn't cow field or stone seems to be covered with thick thorny bushes full of bright, ripe berries. I snack as I go, and the sun comes out briefly as we reach a small, swan-filled lake. They swim in groups of four, and we talk briefly to one another of the story of the Children of Lir and try to take photos. They show off for us, and the sun goes away again.

At the seal colony, I stop and walk down stair-like slabs of dark grey stone to the rainswept vista. There are a few seals, and they circle in the water, curious but cautious. Tidal pools and kelp are scattered in my path. I spend a while there, and listen to the water and feel the rain on my face. When we begin to move again, the sun is back and I soon spot a brown sign, which, consulting my map, I leave behind my bike and hike up a narrow path to what I hope is a stone circle.

I never did find it, but the sign I followed was for Teampall Chiarain, which I also didn't find. Not that time, at least. At last we stop in a small neighborhood of houses, at a loss as to where the brown sign was leading us, when a very kind woman came out and began to talk to us. She didn't know what we were looking for in regards to stone circles, but we talked about the Teampall Chiarain and the holy well there, which is rumored to heal eyes and eyesight. She tells us that no one here really cares about saints or legends, that the history the elders of the community wish to impart is the one of their own hard work, about how difficult and harsh their lives were, and how their efforts had combined to make things better in the present day.

“The holy places, though, the wells, the water places, everyone is still drawn to. Something about water, eh?” She pauses, considering this. “You know, they were drilling here to put in a pipe system, very deep, and they discovered, just this year, there's a massive underground river running under the island, and many streams.” When I ask if they used dowsing rods, she nods. “Oh yes, I asked them to take a look at my parents' home, you know, because it was always so damp, and apparently they have an underground stream running right under their front doorstep!”

We thank her, making a note to visit the holy well, and I wander around fruitlessly looking for stone circles for another half an hour before giving up. This was my first real conversation about the underwater network of streams, and the holy wells. The people of the Aran islands specifically seem to be more powerfully drawn to these places than most, I am to later learn, but I too feel it, and as we cycle ever onwards (and upwards) I think about the ocean, the water that surrounds us, and the water that flows beneath us. It is strange for me, being a pagan for so many years, yet finding such real and physical elements of that belief here.

Water is life, is sacred, is healing, and the people here know that in their blood without the cage of religion on it. There isn't a question. Things are, and you can see them and taste them and touch them. The very geography of this country formed the beliefs of the people who lived there long ago, and even today, and I think people sort of forget that about earth based belief systems, get too lost in the stories and names and words of it.

We eventually, uphill and against the wind, reach the foot of the hill on which Dun Aengus is situated. We climb. People pass us going back down, and others walk along behind or ahead of us, all wanting a look at the ancient, triple ringed fort. It is beautiful and strange, the kind of thing that really makes a person wonder what the people who lived there were like, and why in the name of all the stars anyone was crazy enough to try to take it from them – the place is desolate, the hike is steep, and the rings end in a steep drop into the churning and beautiful sea. People creep up on bellies or crouched on hands and knees to get pictures over the edge of the cliff. I do this, and the wind makes my eyes water to the point where I cannot see unless I blink rapidly.

The color of the water is astonishing against the dark grey and green of the cliff and the flat silver of the sky. It's deep and vibrant, and the waves seem to make glyphs as they fold and foam in layers atop one another. We wander a while longer, and eventually descend the hill to the little shops, where I find one in particular I was looking for, some friends having purchased a hanging scroll print there some years before. They had new designs but neither the owner or her son were there and the shop lady, while happy to give us descriptions in detail of every piece, did not offer the artistic connection I'd hoped for. Nonetheless, I want to purchase something from there, though at the time it would have simply gotten ruined in the rain and wind on the bike ride back.

A couple of pints and thick hot soup later, we return by a different road. Midway down it, I see another sign for the Teampall Chiarain, and skid to a somewhat more dramatic halt than I'd intended. I pointed it out, and my mother too halted, as did the young man who was riding behind us, who turned out to be from Seattle. Together, we wandered down the side lane for a ways, though no temple presented itself. Instead, the sun burst out and we got another rainbow – and the other two, to my disgruntlement, decided to turn back. Reluctantly, and feeling now as if I had to find the thing, I followed.

Our ferry left at five, and we had a little less than an hour, but we were nearly back to town. It was then that I saw the third and final sign, and with the stubbornness that comes of having not seen any bleeding stone circles yet, I dismounted my bike and wandered down the lane. I ought to have taken it with me, but instead, I kept going – just past that house I'd turn back, I said, and then that one. It was at this point that a kindly man changing his horse from one pasture to the next noticed me, a wayward tourist with a camera slung over one shoulder, and we talked a bit.

 He offered to let me take a picture of the horse, which I happily did, and told me the place I was looking for was just a half mile down the road – and he'd give me a lift if I wanted (he said, gesturing to the tractor parked in his drive). I accepted, and my mother wound up riding behind on her bike, having gotten worried I'd wandered off for good and us running out of time.

He pointed out both the well and the old church (rumored to be built amidst curiously carved standing stones) and the third time was indeed the charm, because I finally found the thing. By now the sky was blue and the sun warm and bright, and we walked the winding path to see what we could see – a small stone structure, a long and narrow stone with a hole in it that was said to have wish-granting properties, and the trickle of a stream nearby.

I tried to part the plants to find the stream and got a finger or two worth of nettles. Let me tell you something about nettles. You read “stinging nettles” and you hear about nettle tea being healthy, and nettles being edible once you cook them, but AGH do those things sting. It was not unlike tiny wasps, raising up fiery welts on my hand and in general being very unpleasant. Also, it lasts. Just in case you thought it was like a thorny bramble or something... no.

Ahem, anyway, I was in a great rush to find the healing well after this, as you might imagine, and when we did we had so little time left that all we did was dip in our hands briefly, and dab our eyelids (after I held my wounded hand under for a bit – which helped immensely) and we were off again, my mom biking and me walking as fast as I could after biking and hiking all around the island all day. We were cutting it close, we knew, because we still had to return the bikes and pick up our bags.

Then, I heard it. Plaintive, distressed, and utterly unmistakeable – a cat in distress. I am incapable of ignoring that any day, and moreso having been away from my kitty for a few days, so I stopped dead in my tracks, made apologetic handwaving, and turned to face the source of the noise. There was, you might imagine at this point from the pictures, a stone wall, and from behind it, amidst the thick tangle of blackberry bushes with some very impressive thorns, came the cries. They were loud, insistent, and continued without pause. My first thought was that the cat, or kitten, as I was beginning to suspect, was hurt and trapped there. I was wrapping my arm to the elbow in one of my layer shirts, and peering through the cracks between the stones, when I attracted the notice of a local man who was walking down a connecting lane, workbag in hand.

He stooped next to me, wherein I expressed with distress the situation. He told me he had heard the cries in the morning when he went to work, and that he'd found a couple of cats recently, abandoned by one of the Traveling folk. We were both peering into the wall when the kitten emerged, from some slightly larger hole. I have not seen a tinier mobile bit of fluff. It couldn't have been walking long, and indeed was toddling around like a drunk, rubbing its tiny skull on anything even remotely close to express its pleasure at being found and expressing its happiness all the while with a volume that really did sound like it came from a cat twenty times its size. We both waited, me with a hand outstretched in offering, for the kitten to make a move, and its stumbling walk eventually collided with my fingers. I picked the kitten up and was uncertain. I could hardly take it with me in any practical way.

But then the man told me he would take her, as if he was surprised I hadn't realized that. He scooped her up and told her in the gravelly voice with the unique island-burr that they'd have to get her some milk, and planted a kiss on her tricolor forehead. As I watched, he picked up the tool filled and dusty workbag in one hand, cradling the kitten in the other, and walked the other way down the road. Reading this, you might think me sentimental for in that moment loving him and the people he came from deeply for being the sort that would, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, be so unconditionally kind. If I learn no irish, if my other memories of the people and places there fade, I hope that some of that nature has lodged in my own heart and soul. It's like the healing wells.

At this point, there's pretty much no way we'll make it on time but we try anyway – my mother going ahead to return the bikes and me tasked with retrieving our stuff from where it was stashed under the staircase of the B&B. I walk, and sing to myself, and try not to think about time passing. It works. When we board the ferry, we both sit at the top, alone this time, aside from the skeptical look of the captain. The journey back is much smoother, and the sky ripples with a mixture of cloud and sun, and I think about the book, and about the island, and I almost wish we'd have missed the boat to stay another night. But sometimes you have to let the momentum of the journey carry you on, to not fight the flow of the river you're riding, or, in this case, the ferry on the bay.

When we find our little rental car, I open the map again, and we turn our faces north to Connemara and the mountains.