Ireland - Chapter Four

Cong, Cross, and Neal

Connemara is wild country. It is mountains and bog and no houses, no people, no cows. Golden and stretched long from the late of the day, sunbeams spill across miles of stark mountains with enigmatic faces, across vast flat stretches of marshy red and green with the occasional long boulder to interrupt. Lakes shimmer one one side, then the other. We drive through the Maam valley and later we both talk about how it is a beauty that is forever burned in our hearts, unreal and unlike anything else we are to see in the country. We take no pictures. Sorry.

Our plan is to go to Cong, where, thanks to McCarthy, we know there are several ancient cairns located in a trio of towns on the isthmus between Lough Mask and LoughCorrib. Lough Corrib is massive, and we drive along its shore for a while on the way. The water is beautiful, and the land meets it steeply, with scatterings of little islands and mountain teeth. By the time we get to Cong it is late in the day. They filmed the QuietMan there – which anyone will tell you, in addition to there being a Quiet Man Museum and other such attractions. That just goes to show that, even when something happened fifty years ago, people here will remember it. We eat at the Crow's Nest pub, which boasts such rarities as pizza – we get something else. I drink an alcoholic ginger beer advertised, which is very good, and stay up reading McCarthy's accounts of Cong.

The morning brings the same sort of weather we've been having for most of the trip, which is to say, sudden rainstorms followed in ten minutes by blue sky and sunlight. We eat breakfast at the Hungry Monk, which has real coffee and delicious food, and wander around town. I am entranced by the idea of the “rising of the waters” that happens in Cong, but there is water everywhere, and while my mother fills up the car at the gas station, I wander across the street to a book shop. Every proper town should have a book shop.

It is more interesting than I'd hoped, a large building with part of it walled off to a back room or stock room. New books mingle with used books, and there are antique volumes both on the shelves and behind the counter. I browse for a while and settle on a palm-sized little black and white book that looks as if it were written by someone in town – indeed by a German hiker and the man who runs the Quiet Man Museum. The book is about Cong and the various caves, trails, islands, and local legends that are attached to these places. Sometime over the course of the night and the rainy-sunny-rainy morning, I have realized I feel a very strong attachment to this place.

My mother has joined me, and we check out, and as we do I casually ask the bookshop owner about the rising waters – which he says are just outside, and actually that Cong is on a small island created by the parting streams – and Moytura. He scoffs somewhat at this, and is of the opinion that Sir William Wilde, father to the far more well known Oscar Wilde, invented much of what is currently accepted as ancient mythology sometime in the mid-1800's. He had a summer lake house here in Cong, and his wife was much more interesting, fixated on collecting the local folklore – even publishing a book on it which was never reprinted, while also writing pro-Irish-independence and feminist-leaning articles under the pen name of Speranza. At my mother and I's hopeful glance at the shelves behind him, the book seller shakes his head and says his only copy recently was sold for 300 euro. He is Scottish, and returned to Cong after 10 years away. He seems a little tired of stone-chasing weirdos like us, but he lends us his umbrella to get to the car through the sudden downpour and we drive on.

Off to Neal. Or was it Cross first? The two towns are roughly equidistant, and there are many strange things along the way. I see my first proper stone circle here, marked by a brown sign half hidden by trees. As we climb through the gap in the wall, sky sky opens up, and we run across the field towards the stones and the thick trees that grow in a circle around them, more for cover than anything. There is a fence, but the fence has holes, and we step among the stones and trees with as much reverence as we can muster what with hiding from the rather heavy rain.

After it eases up, I notice a second circle of stones over a wall enclosing a cow field. I hop the wall, startling a cow, and wander around it as well. There's a concentrated feeling in both places, a sort of stillness that vibrates.

As we walk across the field again to look at some very old trees growing on top of a wall that must be even older, the sun breaks the clouds and the ground becomes cool green fire, too bright to take in.

The beginnings of a suspicion have taken root in my mind, having to do with trees and holy places. I don't say much about it, but we get into the car and drive on.

Same stone circle and fence, sunlit.

 

Since right now I can't remember if we went to Neal or Cross first, so I'll tell you about Neal, and the Gods of Neal. We stop at a little grocery and are directed on a “loop” walk that takes in the stone we came looking for, a holy well, and the two “follies” built by some enterprising man who decided that what the town of Neal really needed was an Aztec style Pyramid and a more Greek-styled temple. When it starts to pour again, I suspect we are close to Neal. I look for the first place that fits with my theory, a small strand of trees, and indeed, as we take shelter from the nearly horizontal rain, we find ourselves face to face with the stone of Neal.

Our pictures don't really come out of it, and we leave it at that. After sheltering behind the stone itself for a while, we move on, walking a very beautiful path around fields and peering in passing into the little well. When we emerge onto the road again, we head back to Cross, from which our journey will turn again southwards.

There's a cairn along the way, mentioned in both Pete McCarthy's book and the little Cong guidebook I bought in the bookshop. It is supposedly the cairn of this particular legend, wherein at the end of the first day of the firstbattle of Moytura, the Firbolg king bade his warriors bring back a stone for every warrior they slew in battle. Eventually, the king's son – or in some stories the king himself? Is laid to rest here as well. It is also cited as very likely being a passage tomb just like Newgrange and Knowth, but no archaeological digs have been made.

I see one of the brown signs indicating a historic site, and we pull off the road. The blue sky turns decidedly grey, which I have been taking as a sign we are going to find something interesting, and we walk along what is most assuredly someone's driveway until that sky opens up on our heads again. Over the thick bushes lining the stone wall, I see a grove of trees. Suspicious, that. There aren't a lot of trees in ireland, see, because there are an awful lot of cows and sheep that eat an awful lot of grass. And so when they let the trees grow, there's generally a reason they've been allowed to. As I spotted the pale and distinctive glitter of white quartz against the grey sky, just barely taller than the trees, I pointed to it and we jumped the stone wall into the field. The rain was really coming down at this point, so we ran to the trees and took the first opening through the brambles we could find.

Within the grove.

And there it was – ringed by trees and underbrush, a sizeable mound of loosely stacked stones. It was made eerie not just by the wind and rain that surrounded us, but by the cool cave-like atmosphere of the dark green growth. We don't exchange many words, instead finding a path further in and around, out of the wind. As with the rest of the weather, the rain is brief, and it's less than ten minutes – or maybe a tad more this time – before it eases up. My mother has by then circled further without me, and I begin the task of climbing the cairn to the curious structure at the top.

Much bigger than it looks.

It's tricky. The stones are loose, not stable, and slippery to boot. It feels like the thing I am climbing is only half there, not real or quite solid, and that's unsettling too. When I reach the top I hear the exclamation from below that my mother has discovered the startling venom of the nettle plant. My fingers throb in sympathy that isn't entirely psychosomatic.

I'm in most of these for scale.

As I stand beside the cairn, the sky opens a blue eye down on us and the sun spills through – the view is spectacular.

Before we drive away, we are drawn to a secondary copse of trees, because surely it concealed something – and we are not disappointed, though it is much harder to penetrate the brambles here, and the feel within the nest of trees is sad. It felt like the ghost of a place, and indeed there are stones there, though scattered and torn away. A few white-quartz faces glitter from the long grass around the grove. As we leave, we spy sloe berries growing, blackthorn and whitethorn hand in hand to guard the path we walk.

We turn south from Connemara and some part of me wishes we could stay. Cong, the Aran Islands, and Doolin are three places I'd return to and stay longer, if I could. But we are off to the Burren, to some of the oldest tomb structures and strangest geological sights of Ireland, and the Cliffs of Moher in the county that shares one of my names.