My friend, Frances, has been asking me for a few years to come and write here at her family cottage, but it took me until now, while I’m on leave from teaching, to make the time to visit when the place wouldn’t be awash with tourists.
I’ve been to Beara, and I thought it had my heart after I wrote there, just outside the village of Eyeries, in the summer of 2012, but now I’ve seen this place and I’ve spent a few days walking and writing here, and, well, I’ve found a new creative space to work in. I’m grateful.
Fran picked me up at Shannon on Saturday, offering me a cup of tea, and we whirled through the day. We visited Dromoland Castle, saw artfully made faeries in its beautiful walled gardens, and then drove back here to have an evening hike at the White Strand, where the sea smashes up against the rocks with great fury. From there, if you look to your right, you can see the cut out Cliffs of Moher. If you look out, too, you can see the Aran Islands. They get misty and almost erase themselves when the sea is fierce, but you know they’re out there.
Sunday, we went up to Lahinch. I wandered on my own for a couple of hours, finding a café in which to stare out over the sea, and also wrote a poem for this place, O’Neill Cottage. I’ve written a poem for a house only once before, so I don’t do it often. I love old houses, mostly, so the place has to strike me on a visceral level of sorts. It has to sing a bit, raise its voice, tell me its story. Then I am compelled to write a poem, to thank the place for letting me stay in its energy for a bit of time, and to let its people (living and dead) know that I love it. After Lahinch, we drove up to Loop Head, down by Kilkee. I’ve seen the Cliffs of Moher and, while they’re stunning, I don’t think they even compare to the views from Loop Head. There’s something raw and primal about that road and landscape. On one side, there’s the Atlantic, and then the other has the remnants of fields, left over from times before the Famine. The only thing that tells you what once rooted itself there–the houses and outbuildings–are the long stone walls that are falling into themselves, or held together only by blackberries and ivy. There were clearances here, too, just like those in the Scottish Highlands, and the land seems to ache. There’s an absence that is made present by the way in which the people left imprints on the land, and on the soul of the place.
Monday brought Fran’s departure and my settling in to O’Neill Cottage. I discovered that my grandmother’s family was rooted in Tipperary, which I already had some inkling of, but also that they would have lived closed to the Clare border. This is likely why my great-aunt, Clare, was given that unique spelling of her name. She always loved it, proudly telling anyone who would listen that her parents had named her after the county in Ireland. There was, she often said emphatically when spelling out her name, “no i” in her name.
She didn’t come here to visit Ireland until she was in her 70s, alongside her twin sister, Maureen, but what I recall of that trip was the delight with which they planned it, and the way in which they told their stories afterwards. The highlight, for them, was a visit to the shrine of the Blessed Mother at Knock. Clare especially, I remember clearly, was very keen on perhaps encountering Mary in a new way. They didn’t see her, though, but they did come back with rosaries made of Connemara marble, and stories of nights singing songs that they’d grown up with as children.
So far, it’s been a warm and welcoming place, with greetings given to me in Irish by the bookseller in Miltown Malbay. Then there’s the local hiking guide who takes people for tours of the Burren, Donnan, whom I’ve only met once in person in Ennis, and who says, over the phone line, “Listen, I don’t want you to worry about this, but we need to pick a fine day early next week. There’s no use going when the weather’s dark. It’s stunning on a fine day.”
I’ve revised my poetry collection one more time, taking two days to read it over and over, out loud and then in silence, looking for spelling mistakes and shifting punctuation around like a mad woman. I’ve written four new poems, all set here, and I’m ready to head off to Dublin tomorrow to see the Seamus Heaney exhibition at the National Library in Dublin on Friday. I know I’ll likely cry, or at least try not to while looking reasonably well put together in a public place, in a library that I love dearly. Every time I come to Ireland, I always go to the National Library of Ireland. It’s beautiful, elegant, and unbelievably ancestral for me as a writer, and as a lover of Irish literature. (It’s how I got my nickname in grad school years ago. I was studying Heaney’s poetry, and a friend in the postcolonial lit course kept saying, “I know what I’ll call you: Modern Irish. You know a lot about Modern Irish lit, so it makes sense.”) I miss her, and often wonder where she got to. Funny, how time separates you from a person, fades them out in watercolour as it all moves on.
This place, Spanish Point, fascinates me. It was named after the happenings of September 1588. The Spanish Armada was blown off course, and a number of ships ended up swept around the west coast of Ireland. Two sank off this shore, but the one that sank off Spanish Point was the San Marcos. Local archaeologists have found what looks to be a mass grave up on a hillside, near to where the lighthouse used to be. Local people remember that they were told, as children, not to walk on a certain piece of land. There, it was implied, were the graves of the Spanish sailors from the San Marcos. They had either drowned and been washed ashore, or they had been ‘rescued’ and then executed, hanged by English troops, or by local people who were siding with the English.
The Spaniards thought that Ireland would be a safe place to land, given that it was a mostly Catholic country at the time, but they likely didn’t take into account the complexity of the politics that existed here even then. Some places were still ruled by Irish chieftains, and they might, in certain villages, have stolen the Spanish gold and then killed the sailors and captains. Some places, though, harboured Spanish soldiers. A law was put in place that said that anyone harbouring a Spanish sailor could be severely punished, but it still happened that some were taken in to Irish homes and families. Then, naturally, some of the Irish women here fancied the tall, dark and handsome Spanish sailors, and new families were created. (Here, if you look at Irish history, is where the notion of the ‘Black Irish’ comes from. Some say it’s about the selkies, but the Spanish blood line is also a plausible explanation if you aren’t fond of the selkie one…)
I go down to the sea each day. I think it pulls at me, as all large bodies of water do. I’ve fallen in love with Lake Erie this year, but this place calls to me on a much deeper level all over again. Oceans and great lakes seduce me, it seems. In any case, I go down to that beach, and walk down the shore, especially when the tide is out, picking up pebbles tossed up from the water, watching the oyster catchers dancing away from the waves as they search for their dinner, and listening to the pounding of the surf, through my ears, my feet, my heart.
Today, standing there on the beach, on what was a rainy and wet day, I kept thinking what it would have been like to have seen so many Spanish sailors, either trying to swim to shore, not knowing what fate would await them there, or seeing their bodies carried by the waves. If you stand there, on the road above the beach, you can imagine that there wouldn’t have been buildings where there are buildings now. You can imagine that the weather would have been fierce in those storms. You can imagine that it would have been a hellish scene. Now, there’s the lovely Armada Hotel. There’s a car park. There are the surfers who boldly strip down without care of anyone watching at the end of the day. There’s a school down the road, and a circle of cottages for rent in summer. I kept thinking, though, of how this place is woven into its history, into its stories, and how lovely it is that people here know them still. I wish we were better at that back home, in Canada.
This place is beautiful. There’s the full moon, hanging over these green fields, with mist rolling across them, and the shadows of cows silhouetted against stone walls. All of it is not to be forgotten.
peace,
k.
The Republic of Poetry 
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