Irish vignette, 1975
It's the height of summer. The weather has been a mix of low cloud and rain with days, like today, of cloudless skies and vibrant sunshine. Irish weather. At age 16, it's my first visit to the land of my Celtic forebears, and I'm standing, shirtless and perspiring in a lightly boulder-strewn field on my grand-uncle Sean's farm. The land in front of me gently falls to the property's northern border, An Abhainn Bhuí, the Yellow River, a tributary of the larger Moy. Foaming ochre as it tumbles over rocks, the Yellow River derives its name from the peat dissolved in its waters. Beyond the river the land rises impressively to the beginning of the Sliabh Gamh, the Ox Mountains, pink with heather. To my right, the land rises more gently to patches of uncultivated, scrubby land dotted with prehistoric remains, some of which lie on the farm itself. Lights at night are often ascribed to faerie folk, legends of which attach to those ancient sites but, in reality, it's more likely to be salmon poachers on the river.
It's difficult to see how a family could make a living on this seemingly unpromising land, but they did, and they do. The hay has recently been cut by a neighbour and, because of the current, unpredictable-but-often-wet weather, we have been turning it to keep it dry, to prevent it from mouldering and becoming useless. There are several fields to be turned. A hayfork apiece, we have been doing this by hand and it's hot, palm-blistering work—but not unenjoyable. I absent-mindedly throw the hayfork in the direction of the river, away from anyone else in the field—I learned that lesson, at least, after a horrifying, slow-motion near miss with a javelin on a school sports field. I then have to find the energy in this torpor-inducing heat to retrieve it. To my horror, I discover I have detached a frog from its hind leg. There's nothing I can do, and I realise I haven't learned my earlier lesson after all.
Sean is the primary reason for our visit. He's now the last of his generation of the family—his elder brother, Connor, having recently died—and he's not of an age nor in such good health that he can continue at the farm on his own, especially given its lack of amenity. The house is a traditional thatched cottage, straight off a postcard, known as a teach ceann tuí. Now home only to Sean, seventy years ago it would have held a much larger family: William and Maeve (his parents, William an unlikely name for a Catholic Irishman), Sean himself, and his older siblings Ann, Aidan, Thomas ('Tommy', my grandfather), Neil (a grand-uncle who later lived with my paternal grandparents in England), Cormac ('Mac', who emigrated to the USA after a brief spell in England), and the now recently-deceased Connor. Amazing, considering that the cottage consists of essentially two rooms: a larger living room, heated by a peat fire, with an alcove to the rear serving as the master bedroom, separated only by a curtain, and a partitioned, better-lit kitchen/washroom topped with a flat, wooden platform where the boys of the family would have slept en masse. Goodness knows where they kept Ann until she left home to become a nun.
Connor and Sean had a mains electricity supply only recently connected, but the cottage still lacks anything at all in the way of plumbing, let alone hot water on tap. Drinking water is obtained from a wellspring in the field in front of the dwelling, a faint blue film of oil, from the peaty surroundings, on top of each cold bucketful drawn, to be stove heated when required. It's a different world, a still-living distant past.
Behind the cottage is a stone-built barn, of both a more recent and—to be honest—better construction. It even has a slate roof. When we move Sean to his new domicile, lodging with a mature couple in a comfortable, modern home, he instructs us to retrieve something. Eschewing such complex and untrustworthy contrivances as bank accounts, the brothers kept their savings in rolls of banknotes in a biscuit tin, hidden under the straw in the barn (it's something of a family trait, it seems, as Neil similarly kept his wages—often unspent—as similarly bundled cash in a drawer. He had little use for money, devoting his free time mainly to the care of his chickens and other animals, when such were kept at the grandparental home in England).
The mixed weather continues, still allowing our exploration of a beautiful part of Ireland, though sometimes we see it through a curtain of rain, the rhododendrons at Cong Abbey doing their utmost to force colour into the drab meteorological conditions. Then another dog-day afternoon: bright, hot, and still, but for the murmur of insects. Standing by the derelict gable of a ruined Medieval abbey, with a delightful view over a Lough, I'm absorbing the heat along with the ancient building, rounded stones as warm as freshly baked bread under my hand. The ruin is covered by colonies of yellow and grey lichen and gradually disappearing under encroaching gorse and rough grass. I feel sure I'll never again experience such a magical serenity.
Another glimpse of a passing way of life: an expanse of peat bog extends into the distance, as do shadows in this golden hour. It's late afternoon and we're loading a trailer from a cut and dried stack of peat, one of many in the immediate landscape, with its ditches of black water and its regular heaps and mounds. It's possibly the last load of fuel that Sean will use before his relocation to a more modern—and comfortable—domestic environment.
The trip over, and with all arrangements made for my grand-uncle's future, we go home. Our own village looks scruffy when we return, and I'm struck by the ill-considered nature of ad hoc British building development.
The Irish are unsentimental about animals, especially working or farm animals, but I'm appalled to hear, not long after going home, that a young bull on Sean's farm has somehow been allowed to starve to death since his departure. I can't begin to think how that might have happened unintentionally. Being sentimental and English, my brother and I had rather made a fuss of the beast, to the extent that it came to the fence of its enclosure to meet us when we approached—something to do with its acquired taste for the digestive biscuits we offered, I suppose.
Then, later, and much worse, we hear that Sean's neighbour has died. Her son, who had latterly been a frequent helper on the farm, discovered her body on returning home from work. Shock or some other emotional collapse overcame him and, in a scene both tragic and absurd, he had attempted to bury her in their garden.
These events transpired nearly fifty years ago—more than half a lifetime. Sean lived for several more years after his retirement and was buried with his parents and non-migrated siblings in a cemetery in County Mayo, Tommy and Neil are interred in a South Yorkshire churchyard, and Mac rests somewhere in the United States. It's a common Irish story that large families parted forever and dispersed to different parts of the world.
Ireland, too, has changed: the country is now more prosperous and more sophisticated than it used to be. The farm cottage is a ruin, like most examples of these once-common icons—its thatched roof having collapsed decades ago—while the magical location by the Lough is no longer idyllically remote, timeless, and other-worldly, but now more populated and developed. My presentiment was correct: I never will know that peaceful sense of place again, at least not by that lakeside shore.