Late March, in Ireland. As I write on Saturday a storm is washing in. All week the rain has drummed heavy on the roof in the night, the ground is sodden with it. My dreams are flight-ridden with the sound. By day the rooks, my mother’s birds, pick through the garden for the worms and rainbows appear near solid in the southern field. Last Sunday morning the house smelt of soot and a scratching, fluttering sound came from the wood burner, another Starling. Stunning after having written of that incident so recently. I removed the backplate to get it out, my hands black with it and caught the panicked creature, returning it to the pale, Paddy’s Day sky. So close its wings looked like the aurora across a starry night, the druid’s bird, in my hearth, again. I pay attention. It flits through worlds like my dreams. I make an offering of poitín at the hearth. The next night I listened to a descendent of our last Bard talk of Ireland, of the remembering so newly awakened here, and I move a little closer to the heart of the labyrinth I’ve been tracing my whole life long.
Tomorrow morning brings March’s Full Moon, tonight it is at its fullest in the night sky. Worm Moon. Wind Moon. Plough Moon. Seed Moon. I brought you the names and some stories last year but not the lore. The soil is warming now. We are, by the old ways, half-way through Spring. The rainstorms blow through, March winds roaring. The rain drums up the worms, who are on the move in the warmer earth. And soon (when it is a little less sodden) it will be time to plough before sowing the spring barley and wheat, this too turns up the worms from the soil. In keeping with that moon, the town we are making our home held its annual Horse Ploughing Match on St. Patricks Day. It is the oldest running match of its kind in Ireland and is believed to be the only all-horse ploughing match still held on the island.
Farming began in Ireland during the Neolithic period (6000 years ago), with our forebearers using oxen to pull their ploughs until the plough horse was introduced in the 13th century after the Anglo-Norman invasion and settlements (1170 AD). These settlements meant tillage intensified and forest clearances accelerated. The plough horse was originally bred as a military animal in Europe, but their size and strength made them well suited to the heavy work of pulling a plough through dense, damp soil. Oxen bones were given as offerings by the ancient Irish and given the significant presence of their bones at sacred sites, there is some speculation that these powerful animals were used to pull stones in the construction of these Megalithic monuments.
With that full moon I begin a new writing project in this space. This project, published with each month’s full moon will recount a piece of local folklore and use it to inspire a new tale. This first one is a sneak peek of a story from my ongoing collection of interwoven narratives each shot through with local mythology and folklore and set against the backdrop of Ireland’s most recent traumas. They are told by unreliable narrators interconnected via the few degrees of separation Ireland, and particularly the North of Ireland, enjoy. Their stories thread through each other to create a tapestry woven with a particularly Irish mythic imagination and which examines issues of identity and humanity amid conflict and trauma. I have already published one here, and today I bring you another alongside the local folklore that inspired it and the lore of that moon. Most of this project will root deeper into the land than this initial tale, a deeper remembering, I hope singing true after all this time. Be sure to subscribe to get them directly to your inbox. Next month for April my ongoing New Moon Writing down the Weeds project and this, na scéalta, the stories will weave throughout each other for the entire month bringing you Irish mythology, nationalist fairy tales, plant lore, artwork and analysis.
Today’s story is set partly on Rathlin Island, an inhabited island just off the County Antrim coast. Rathlin abounds with folklore and has a rich history, a lot of which is shared between Ireland and Scotland. The island rises from turbulent seas between Ballycastle sound and the Mull of Kintyre. So in-between is the island that an old folktale tells that its ownership was settled by letting a snake loose on it, the snake perished and therefore Rathlin was declared to be Irish. Another tale tells of the Scottish king Robert the Bruce taking refuge in one of the islands many caves during his flight from the British, he was, the story goes, inspired to continue his fight for Scottish freedom by the tenacity of a spider he encountered in that inhospitable place. The seabed around Rathlin is notoriously covered in shipwrecks and the island boasts three lighthouses despite only being four miles wide, the narrow channel between the island and Murlough Bay, to the East of Ballycastle, is incredibly dangerous with its fast-moving tides and currents. Standing high on either headland you can watch it shift and swirl, and I can watch it crash into the bay from the windows of our new home. Today’s story is set in those waters and is inspired by a folktale from the island itself which will be recounted in a note after the text. Being part of my collection, it is longer than most of the fiction I publish here, and in a very different voice with a lot more dialogue than long time reader will be used to me writing, but I hope you will enjoy it all the same. So, grab a cup of something, settle in and let me tell you a story;
The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
No one else could have stuck the landing that was the trouble. Or so he’d told them. He was regretting that now. He was regretting a lot of things.
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