Consecrated Ground

The scene was my first time at my husband’s home in Ireland. He convinced me to go for an evening walk. Walking into the pitch black was more than a leap of faith.

It was a leap into the unknown. I knew that somewhere in primal myth there was this kind of darkness, but this city kid never lived it. My eyes never adjusted.

It was minutes before my husband and I were scooped off the road, landed into a front room in front of a turf fire and cakes and whisky and tea and biscuits and loads of funny stories. That walk has become a ritual, a pilgrimage that never disappoints because the road delivers in its own unpredictable way.

Monument: Ghosts

Now about that road. Like so many Irish roads, it is three miles of narrow, twisty, brambly anarchy. It is organic, a former cow path. You know Irish roads, stone walls, munching cows and bleating sheep, the usual suspects.

But at the top of the road, a tombstone monument stands as a gut punch reminder of a not-so-distant history. Three innocent teenagers, murdered on the road by the Black and Tans a hundred years ago, remembered here.

I was walking on ghosts. Its mystery hooked me on the local lore and the language instantly.

Roscommon Football

This is Tarmon Road. On the right is a shed, nondescript as they come, but don’t be fooled. The county council recently anointed it with a ceremony and plaque as much to preserve it as anything else.

This shed was part of Dan O’Rourke’s training ground. The shed was where the seed of Roscommon’s only and by chance, back-to-back, All-Ireland Football championship titles germinated.

Greatness sure hides in some unlikely corners. Dan’s Olympian great-granddaughter is training in a shed right behind the original as we speak, keeping the legend alive. Legends aren’t made in fancy gyms. Ask Rocky.

The Village

The road is a miniature village. Past the shed, is the National School that Dan O’Rourke taught at. It has ballooned in size in the last hundred years.

One neighbor is suing over this expansion; you know there’s always one. A little further is the last thatched house on the road, now abandoned, with plenty of fairy stories to tell.

There are several more abandoned houses, silently waiting for whatever is to happen next and remembering the characters that once filled them. One sports a keystone above the door – an arm waving a sword that dates to the Fenian times, waiting for the wrong guy to come down this road again. Just try him!

The county Council have put a walking trail off the road into the bog. It’s lovely, mucky, and a little magical.

It winds around ivy covered knobby trees; kind of Wuthering Heights meets farm life. The path is intended to keep fitness minded villagers from becoming roadkill. And it gives them a portal to a place they may have forgotten.

One of the cottages has been reclaimed by a couple from England who are doing some of what the locals are calling New Age farming. Not sure about that but they are keeping flocks of multi-colored chickens and gamboling goat, selling organic eggs and goat cheese? Some say it’s weird but, yes, why not?

Old Meets New

Heading back up the road, we passed a few neighbors in cars, a few jokes, bit of craic, wished for more time. We met Elaine walking her Sheltie. She invited us in since we we were all on foot.

We eventually agreed, it’s hard to say no. The old ways are fading but the ones that have them hold on strongly.

I wanted to go in. It’s a lovely house. From the road, it has a new long window that lets you see straight into the backyard, right at Bessie eating grass. The main structure is all old country house and the addition is modern, but not really awful.

Some homemade Christmas cake, a few cups of tea and bit of news later, Elaine wanted me to see the rest of the house. Up those stairs I went.

To the left, there was a whitewashed bedroom with a chenille bedspread. There was an old bog oak dresser sitting on white floorboards. This room had old Irish cottage charm to burn.

Stepping out of that room and down the hallway, you walk into the view of the long window. The view goes directly front to back.

The front looks over the bog and the storybook countryside, rolling hills and little white houses speckled with cows and sheep. The back looks over their own bit of farm.

I walked down the stairs in a fog. How could that metaphor be lost on me? Old and new in the same place. What a wonderful way to save a house!

We sat back down at the table and remembered summers long ago. Picking black currants and making jam and pies was a summer pastime. Elaine reminisced about my mother-in-law’s black currant jam and I thought of how many of those I picked with her.

We left the house, jar of homemade jam in hand, and headed back up the road toward home. Late again.

The ritual delivered again too. The surprise connections. How things can be made newer without screwing them up?

Some people think that going to the same place is boring. Sometimes it is. But it also lets you really get to know the place and become more than a tourist. It has the magic of going deeper into something.