The rain and the centuries had long washed the blood from the rocks under our feet, but the echoes of history and voices long-stilled hung in the air like the smoke from a peat fire.
From atop the Rock of Dunamase, a craggy ruined fort last sacked by Oliver Cromwell’s forces in 1650, the plains of County Laoise fell away into a patchwork of green and gold under an impossibly sunny sky. It was the kind of picture perfect weather the Irish Tourist Board might post on a website to lull travelers and other hopeless optimists into thinking the Emerald Isle gets more than four or five days without rain in a year. My teenaged son and I had the fort virtually to ourselves on this morning, and we climbed and clambered to our heart’s content over ruined stone walls and the spongy grass in between.
This place was marked in the guidebooks as a stop worth making, but for a change all was still. There were no ticket takers here, no ice cream stands, no public toilets, postcards, gift shops, guided tours. We missed the tiny road sign the first time we drove past. And nearly missed the road again when we doubled back.
There was only silence broken by trilling of birds in the surrounding fields, the aroma of green grass mixed with the smell of crumbling rock, an eagle’s eye view down hillsides which had seen attackers—from Vikings in the tenth century to Cromwellian soldiers in the seventeenth–climb brutally upward to seize the high ground. Several long, vertical “arrow loop” windows still remained, and it didn’t take much to imagine drawing swiftly down with a longbow in times when lives were far shorter and mettle was tested up close and personal.
There is much about Ireland that leaves me entranced, a great deal of it to do with the fact that over there, I’m connected to a far-flung tribe of wonderful cousins who all talk even faster than I do. Talk about validation!! Conversations tumble and overlap like creeks and rivulets splashing into a trout stream, words pouring forth with a teasing joy of connection and not a little delightful and affectionate one-upmanship. Ah, bliss! And the profound joy that resonates every time I return to my grandfather’s home town of Templetuohy and sit in the kitchen of the old house, remembering visits past and tea and toast with Aunt Maggie as the turf glowed and crackled in the kitchen stove. “Feel your roots, honey,” I told my son as we stretched out on the warm grass in the graveyard beside the family plot, just up the street from the house, in his first visit to Ireland.
But a good measure of the enchantment has to do with the way that history is still alive there. Perhaps it’s because it’s been less than a century since Ireland threw off Britain’s heavy yoke, and the centuries of conflict and desolation that prefaced the nation are still within easy shouting distance and dinner table conversation. And perhaps its because every time you turn around, over your shoulder you’ll see yet another castle or crumbling, abandoned stone tower in a cow pasture, a reminder that the progress of peoples and nations is written in loss and anguish and bittersweet victory, and the opening of another fungible shopping mall on a landscape of concrete isn’t necessarily the be-all of human accomplishment. Even if you CAN get your favorite Starbucks coffee (“with whip!”), some snazzy wine glasses, and a cute skirt on sale within a hundred feet of each other.
Seriously, when was the last time you heard a political argument on this side of the pond couched in language of grievance about the latest ham-fisted arrogance of King George in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War? Or had any reason to discuss whether Abraham Lincoln had help in drafting, say, the Gettysburg Address...and how the writer was possibly connected to your family.
And yet, in the tiny fishing town of Passage East in Ireland’s southeast, it seemed somehow not out of keeping at all for aggrieved local fisherman, bitterly protesting a recently passed ban on salmon drift-netting, to post signs drawing stinging comparisons between the current prime minister and Oliver Cromwell’s brutal campaign of suppression four hundred years apart. And have the prime minister come out the worst. Or to sit at the dinner table at my cousin’s house in County Clare on the other side of the country and casually discover a six-degrees-of-separation link between my family and a member of the gentry who had helped the “Liberator of Ireland,” Daniel O’Connell, craft some of his speeches in the 1800s. And could you pass the butter, please? Peggy, the barbecued salmon is absolutely delicious! Please, tell me more! It doesn’t seem that long ago…
Under a sunny sky at Dunamase, classrooms and courtrooms and shopping malls were literally worlds away. There were no judges, no lawyers, no telephones, no teachers, and no coaches to break in on our feeling of discovery, and our moments of reverie. Just a steep and precarious walk upwards into the past. And the feeling, however short, of being absolutely spellbound.
From atop the Rock of Dunamase, a craggy ruined fort last sacked by Oliver Cromwell’s forces in 1650, the plains of County Laoise fell away into a patchwork of green and gold under an impossibly sunny sky. It was the kind of picture perfect weather the Irish Tourist Board might post on a website to lull travelers and other hopeless optimists into thinking the Emerald Isle gets more than four or five days without rain in a year. My teenaged son and I had the fort virtually to ourselves on this morning, and we climbed and clambered to our heart’s content over ruined stone walls and the spongy grass in between.
This place was marked in the guidebooks as a stop worth making, but for a change all was still. There were no ticket takers here, no ice cream stands, no public toilets, postcards, gift shops, guided tours. We missed the tiny road sign the first time we drove past. And nearly missed the road again when we doubled back.
There was only silence broken by trilling of birds in the surrounding fields, the aroma of green grass mixed with the smell of crumbling rock, an eagle’s eye view down hillsides which had seen attackers—from Vikings in the tenth century to Cromwellian soldiers in the seventeenth–climb brutally upward to seize the high ground. Several long, vertical “arrow loop” windows still remained, and it didn’t take much to imagine drawing swiftly down with a longbow in times when lives were far shorter and mettle was tested up close and personal.
There is much about Ireland that leaves me entranced, a great deal of it to do with the fact that over there, I’m connected to a far-flung tribe of wonderful cousins who all talk even faster than I do. Talk about validation!! Conversations tumble and overlap like creeks and rivulets splashing into a trout stream, words pouring forth with a teasing joy of connection and not a little delightful and affectionate one-upmanship. Ah, bliss! And the profound joy that resonates every time I return to my grandfather’s home town of Templetuohy and sit in the kitchen of the old house, remembering visits past and tea and toast with Aunt Maggie as the turf glowed and crackled in the kitchen stove. “Feel your roots, honey,” I told my son as we stretched out on the warm grass in the graveyard beside the family plot, just up the street from the house, in his first visit to Ireland.
But a good measure of the enchantment has to do with the way that history is still alive there. Perhaps it’s because it’s been less than a century since Ireland threw off Britain’s heavy yoke, and the centuries of conflict and desolation that prefaced the nation are still within easy shouting distance and dinner table conversation. And perhaps its because every time you turn around, over your shoulder you’ll see yet another castle or crumbling, abandoned stone tower in a cow pasture, a reminder that the progress of peoples and nations is written in loss and anguish and bittersweet victory, and the opening of another fungible shopping mall on a landscape of concrete isn’t necessarily the be-all of human accomplishment. Even if you CAN get your favorite Starbucks coffee (“with whip!”), some snazzy wine glasses, and a cute skirt on sale within a hundred feet of each other.
Seriously, when was the last time you heard a political argument on this side of the pond couched in language of grievance about the latest ham-fisted arrogance of King George in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War? Or had any reason to discuss whether Abraham Lincoln had help in drafting, say, the Gettysburg Address...and how the writer was possibly connected to your family.
And yet, in the tiny fishing town of Passage East in Ireland’s southeast, it seemed somehow not out of keeping at all for aggrieved local fisherman, bitterly protesting a recently passed ban on salmon drift-netting, to post signs drawing stinging comparisons between the current prime minister and Oliver Cromwell’s brutal campaign of suppression four hundred years apart. And have the prime minister come out the worst. Or to sit at the dinner table at my cousin’s house in County Clare on the other side of the country and casually discover a six-degrees-of-separation link between my family and a member of the gentry who had helped the “Liberator of Ireland,” Daniel O’Connell, craft some of his speeches in the 1800s. And could you pass the butter, please? Peggy, the barbecued salmon is absolutely delicious! Please, tell me more! It doesn’t seem that long ago…
Under a sunny sky at Dunamase, classrooms and courtrooms and shopping malls were literally worlds away. There were no judges, no lawyers, no telephones, no teachers, and no coaches to break in on our feeling of discovery, and our moments of reverie. Just a steep and precarious walk upwards into the past. And the feeling, however short, of being absolutely spellbound.
0 comments:
Post a Comment