Sruth: A love letter to the Irish Sea
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By Kate Chandler
“Stop. Where are you from?”
Armed with pepper spray and a scowl, the border guard at Pembroke Dock isn’t messing around. E and I glance at each other. Who should speak first? Whose accent would serve us best in this scenario? Mine, from southern England, or his from Dublin? The question - and its answer - passes between us in seconds. I smile at the guard and hand him my passport. He flips it open and eyeballs me, one hand on his pepper spray.
“You’re British?”
“Yes.”
“How long have you lived in Ireland?”
“Eight years.”
“Where are you going?”
“To visit my family.”
“How long are you staying?”
And despite the sing-song lilt of my happytohelp voice, each question cracks my smile.
You’d be forgiven for thinking navigating the Irish Sea is a simple journey. Perhaps it should be - it’s just a narrow stretch of water after all. But the passage is often fraught with peril. During World War Two it was known as U-Boat Alley - ships took circuitous routes to avoid lurking German submarines. In the 1840s, Coffin Ships took Famine refugees from Dublin to North America, many of whom succumbed to the appalling conditions on board. Further back still, St Brigid is rumoured to have crossed from Ireland to Anglesey on a nothing but a clump of earth, and St Modomnóc was forced to return to Wales several times after his own bees chased him over the waves.
You know that old nursery rhyme? The one where the captain says: “We’re going this way, that way, Forwards backwards, Over the Irish Sea. A bottle of rum to fill my tum And that’s the life for me”? Whoever wrote those words knew these waters well - the disorientating betweenness of them - even in the cadence of this merry song the crossing is alarmingly aimless, tethered only to the whims of an intoxicated helmsman.
When crossing, I feel my identity splinter - not Irish, not quite British any more. At Rosslare, Pembroke or Fishguard, in their clanging halls of metal and concrete, caverns of rusted iron and walls of salted steel, something becomes unstuck, cut loose upon the waves.
How long have you lived in Ireland?
Eight years. Eight years since I first landed in Dublin and roamed the streets looking for somewhere to live. Eventually I found a room in Rathfarnham, where lights from the distant docklands winked at night. I climbed mountains with the man I would marry, sitting beneath Fairy Castle cairn watching the city bleed into the bay. Endless ferries slipped out to Holyhead, cargo ships and fishing boats. When the air was sharp and clear, we could see right across to Snowdonia.
The Irish and Welsh coasts have long been places to look out from, in fear or anticipation of fortune. An Early Irish poem adrift in the margins of a medieval manuscript and translated by Kuno Meyer, reveals the terror of viking raiders on the Irish Sea, and the relief of a howling storm:
Bitter is the wind tonight
It tosses the ocean’s white hair
Tonight I fear not the fierce warriors of Norway
Coursing on the Irish sea.
But no fierce warriors frightened me then. The sea itself was a torment - that great seething barrier between me and everyone I loved. Almost everyone. So the next time I crossed, I didn’t go alone.
Where are you from?
We tried to make a life in England, but within a few months of arriving, the Irish Sea was the buzzword on everyone’s lips: borders and bridges, trawlers and ‘British fish’. Some say it’s among the most polluted seas in the world, but the referendum unleashed a poison of its own. It seeped into the edges of conversations with strangers, into side glances when E ordered drinks in the pub, into jokes at his workplace. It was time to cross over again.
We weren’t alone. Brexit triggered more travellers than ever as British people who voted Remain sought Irish passports on the strength of grandparents they’d never met. And strange times brought stranger tides. Covid came and the sea defied restrictions: a child’s Gaelic Football lost on a beach in Waterford drifted nearly 200 miles east to Llanrhystud Beach in Wales. A walrus from Norway swam from Kerry to Pembrokeshire.
During that year, when I couldn’t get home for nearly a year, I threw myself into the waves - literally. Plunging into the cold waters of Dublin Bay, I bobbed on my back beneath the Seapoint martello tower watching factories and cargo ships in the port. Much has been written on what walking does to the mind. Floating, too, changes us. It’s not the steady righting of the world you get by putting one foot in front of the other, it’s surrender - giving yourself up to the whims of a powerful element. It can be freeing, also frightening.
I wanted to love it - everyone else did - wasn’t it how we were all meant to find ourselves back then? But I was afraid: of the pandemic and its consuming grief, of what lay ahead, of what lay beneath. I didn’t want to be in the sea at all - I wanted it out of the way.
Where are you going?
In December we cross again.
Holyhead port is shattered, broken by Storm Darragh. No ferries dock or depart. Hundreds of people are trapped on either side, facing Christmas without their families. Rosslare was spared, so we’re the lucky ones: pitching back and forth as waves slam against the porthole.
They say storms are wilder now, that winds are getting stronger. St Modomnóc’s bees, St Brigid’s blessed clump of earth, a Gaelic football labelled with a child’s name - even these charmed things would struggle to find safe passage these days.
There’s an Irish word I’ve learned lately: sruth. In English it might translate as stream or flow, but it can also be used to describe a state of being adrift. The apparent contradiction of this meaning stays with me as we lurch out into the channel. Aimless, but with the relentless purpose of a stream: floating, but with direction. Perhaps the captain in the nursery rhyme was onto something after all. Perhaps he knew to cross the Irish Sea is to enter a state of sruth, and even as you go this way, that way, forwards, backwards, eventually you’ll reach land.
Dawn breaks over Milford Haven. Calm waters carry us past rocky cliffs and martello towers, scars of centuries that have shaped this coast.
The captain invites us to disembark. We exchange a glance, pull out passports, don our best smiles.
But when we step onto Pembroke dock, no guard stands over the border. Nobody tells us to stop.
Kate is an emerging writer from Somerset currently living in Ireland, writing about history, heritage, nature, and how we connect with special places. She is a student on the Nature and Travel Writing MA at Bath Spa University and is developing a portfolio of work which can be found on her Substack, 'Landmarking': https://katechandler2.substack.com/