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