Late April, in Ireland. Everything is a sudden rush of green, in a thousand shades. The weather has been swinging wildly from mild days outside in bare feet to mornings with snowfall, and seemingly always the rain. Heavy on the roof in the night, soft drizzle in the afternoon making walks sodden, swimming through the green. Rainbows as if a permanent fixture in the south field, but some nights, oh some nights with every star hanging from the salli (willow) tree.
The lilac in the garden is about to bloom, and the blackbirds are following me. In this house they come to the windows if I haven’t left out food that day and sing after dark by my bed, but one flew from the garden of our soon-to-be-home and perched itself on my car bonnet as I sat in the car crying over the builder butchering a privacy hedge. This butchery means the hedge will take the best part of a decade to regrow and leaves me (a fully-fledged country girl, used to nothing but horses, hedges, a meadow and wild animals for neighbours) looking awkwardly into the eyes of my human neighbours in what was to be the most beautiful and most used room in the house. The room with views of the beach and across the bay. The room in which a fortune is being spent replacing rotten windows and building a window seat. Now unusable for lack of privacy. An incredibly privileged problem of course. And nothing in the scheme of things that makes a life or in the big picture of what we are facing in our world, or indeed in the face of the devastation visited upon entire populations and streamed into our hands, so horrific that I feel ridiculous being upset about a hedge. But it is a problem that floored me all the same. The preverbal straw. And the blackbird knows. It was his hedge more than mine. I am reminded that I am but a custodian of this house and its mature garden. It has stood for almost one hundred years, in a town that has weathered centuries, in an area that has been inhabited for thousands of years, and it should stand long after I am gone. So, we stared each other in the eye, that blackbird and I, and I pulled myself together to promise him I’d fix it. And off he went, back to his partner in the ivy by my garden gate.
Blackbirds are my sign from whatever powers you believe in that I am on the right path, that there is gold here somewhere. They show up when I need to take a breath and pay attention. And so, I resolved to find the treasure, the opportunity in the loss; dense layers of native hedging to replace the butchered box perhaps, honeysuckle threaded through, and roses, there should always be roses…
April’s Full Moon will be with us in the wee hours of Wednesday morning (24th) and so will be at her fullest in the night sky on Tuesday night here in Ireland. April’s moon is named the Budding Moon, the New Shoots Moon, and the Seed Moon colloquially. The trees are budding, there are new green shoots everywhere and our farmers should be planting Autumn crops; Spring barley and early potatoes, but they cannot this year as the ground is too sodden.
This needs to be a much bigger, much louder conversation. For over a year I’ve written up these local monthly names for the moon which map directly onto the agricultural year, or at least they did for hundreds of years, until our lifetimes, when the cycle has shifted far enough that they no longer line up, when farmers are struggling to work as they have for generations. Crops cannot be planted or harvested, they rot in the fields too waterlogged to retrieve or resow. The rivers course foul with runoff and pollute our water sources. The land is screaming. Further south a Christian Priest said a mass specifically to ask his god to amend the weather. Up here I’m wondering what “king” we need to hurl into the bog… perhaps the lot of them. Perhaps we need our leaders to come to the land once again as a lover on their knees and beg her forgiveness. Let her choose one worthy amongst them, if any could be found. Their hands are too soft, too clean, their suits too shiny. Give us a king with his hands in the dirt. The man who knows this land like a lover, in all her moods. Give us a warrior who can name the woods, the herbs, who can hear her, who will avenge her cries.
With that moon it is time for the second piece in my new series of tales set in the immediate landscape surrounding our new home. A type of rooting down with each retelling of folklore and history. Na Scéalta, the stories. The first can be found here.
April’s landscape tale is set just a few miles west of the house, at Kinbane. Ceann bán, meaning White Headland (it’s chalk), juts out into the Atlantic west of Ballycastle Bay and on it sits the ruin of a sixteenth century castle. The site is inaccessible by road, and difficult to access by boat due to the rocks and tidal currents, the only way in was once a narrow track down the cliffs edge. Today that track is now one hundred and forty uneven steps offering stunning views of Fair Head to the east and Rathlin Island with Scotland beyond.
The castle was a strategic stronghold of the Scottish MacDonnell clan and the English besieged it several times. The small rocky bay to the west of the castle is named for one such incident. The English arrived by boat and lay in wait in the bay, those within the castle walls sounded the alarm and it’s said a kitchen boy was sent to light the beacon on the tip of the headland. Clansmen and neighbouring clans rallied, arriving to the top of the steep cliffs on above the castle, where they hurled rocks and boulders onto the English below. The water of the bay ran red with their blood and has been known since as Lag na Sassenach, Hollow of the English.
The castle remained in use until the eighteenth century, being rebuilt and passing from the MacDonnell’s to the McAllister’s. Now just the ruin of the tower remains, and seals bask on the rocks in the bay, largely undisturbed by the tourist trail as the site carpark thankfully remains inaccessible to coaches and there aren’t many who fancy the climb back up those steps. It is however now, bafflingly to me, a popular engagement shoot spot; I suppose for some the site of several massacres serves well as a backdrop for your love…
Tucked in along the cliffs, right on the edge looking east, there is also the ruin of a more recent fishing cottage, complete with a winch to haul in lines or pots. From here you can see the cliffs running back towards Ballycastle town dotted with caves.
I grew up listening to Ballycastle men telling stories of Kinbane; of ghost echoes of the battles, smugglers hiding their loot in the caves[1] and of the seals being Selkies in the bay.
Selkies are shapeshifter tales. They are said to be seals who can step out of their skins into the form of a beautiful woman. They are particularly northern lore, you find them mostly in Ireland, Scotland and further North in Scandinavia. They often get rewritten as mermaids here in Ireland with the English settler influence, however, dig a little deeper and you’ll find tell-tale hints of the origin of the story, such as the mer-wife returning to her seal husband, or seal island etc. Tales abound of fishermen stealing their skins and making them their wives. Almost invariably the wife, usually after bearing several children, finds her skin and returns to the sea, leaving the children alone on the beach or sometimes taking them with her, transformed by their mother’s magic into seal cubs. Although one story from our west coast leaves the children turned to rock in the bay, permanently watching for their mother in the waves.
One of my sons’ favourite films is the Irish made Song of the Sea, which tells the tale of two children whose mother is a Selkie. She has long black hair so seeing this and my “seal skin” wetsuits stashed out in the garage my son decided in all his childhood innocence that his mother too must be a selkie. And with all the wisdom of a child he is right, in a way. Before he was born, I spent my days in that cold North Atlantic, swimming and surfing as often as I could, my hair full of sea salt and soul soothed by the waves, having left my skins behind for too many years tending to him I miss it with an ache. Part of my reason for the move is to allow me to be back in the sea daily and the longing for it moves like an itch under my skin.
Today’s tale is below and one I began last May, set in Ballycastle and at Kinbane. Here it is edited and continued. It is longer than most I publish here, so settle in with a cup of something and let me tell you a story, of a Selkie, of the sea and of love.
[1] More on the infamous smuggling along this coast, and particularly in the house where I spent most of my childhood another time, for now you can read my tale of a smuggler on Rathlin island here.
Of the Sea
It’s May again. All the world is white with it. A tide of Hawthorn blooming in the hedgerows. All through the summer before it had tapped at the windows and doors. And slowly, so slowly no one noticed it laced its way around the house. Turning everything a murky grey. Its scent lingering in through the rooms, staying long after the blooms had gone on the wind. Soon all the days looked the same and when she discovered the clocks had stopped, it was already too late. Time had grown so brittle nothing could be done.
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