A place of everyday magic – Lough Owel

By Hannah-Louise Dunne:

Here in the middle of Ireland, there is a lake that shines bright as a blue button in the darkest of winter days. When I was younger – much younger that is – it acted as the backdrop to long lazy summer days for my sisters and me, where we jumped off the jetty and took turns in paddling friends out to a waiting buoy on our battered surfboard.

It’s the place where I first splashed around as a toddler, and where, years later my youngest sister tested her nerve as a 3-year-old when she took a long-running jump into the deep water from the jetty. Her armbands abandoned on dry land, we watched in shock as she sailed through the air, curls flying in her wake and surfaced victorious before doggy-paddling to shore.

Many years previous to that, the lake set the scene for the dramatic drowning of the Viking, Turgesius, dispatched to his fate by the powerful King of Tara, Máel Sechnaill mac Máele Ruanaid, in 845. Captured for posterity in the Annals of Ulster, the dramatic event is recalled today in the name given to the nearby Captain’s Hill, which overlooks the shore of Lough Owel, down which Turgesius is said to have rolled to a watery grave.

Local folklore recalls a more magical past, in tales of a betrayal between two sister witches. Legend has it that one sister loaned her favourite lake from Connacht to the other sister in Leinster, only to find that her sister refused to return the lake to its rightful home.

Elsewhere, ruins of an old stone church on the lake’s Church Island are evidence of a more devout history. Once called Inis Mor, it’s said to have been home to the monastic St Loman, who centuries ago survived on his lone outpost by eating edible herbs grown on the island’s fertile ground. 

Whatever its origins, there is no denying the lake’s everyday magic, where fresh springs bubble underground to keep the water bright and clear and well-fed trout dart here and there, leading local fishermen on a merry dance around the water. While the addition of tiered diving boards to the lake offered generations of swimmers the ideal spot to cool off in the summer, and nowadays, to test their mettle in the cooler months.

But at 18, its appeal was lost to me. Back then, conceding to the pull of the lake’s cool waters meant failing in a bid for independence. So, placing its beauty firmly in my rear-view mirror, I headed for the freedom of life as a student in Galway. Nights out at Cuba, racing into lectures with the Galway rain rising in damp clouds of steam above my head, and working a variety of part-time jobs across the city kept me busy and distracted from what I’d left behind.

Visits home were rushed and infrequent, and with the focus of youth on remaining stubbornly indifferent to the hold that places you love can exert on you, the next decade and a half were spent trying out new places to call home. A stint abroad where I found myself drawn to a city intersected by water in the form of winding canals, and later a move to Dublin, where years later, life led me eventually closer and closer to the sea.

As it turns out you see, places you love stay with you always, revealing themselves in the most unexpected moments.

They are there in the re-discovery of the joy of wild-swimming, of immersion in the open water. In the feeling of perfect harmony when you surface and swim under a clear blue sky.

There over Christmas on a trip back home, when months spent in various stages of lockdown in the city put the wide-open spaces, the everyday magic of the lake, in sharp focus.

Where the unusually bright winter weather crafted an otherworldly backdrop to daily swims as dropping temperatures transformed the fresh water into cold silver sheets of ice, stretched out along either side of the diving boards.

Bathed in bright winter sun, we dipped our toes – and then our whole bodies – into the thrill of ice-swimming, marvelling as we swam alongside great floating sheets of ice underneath the winter sun.

Afterwards, groups of plump robins hopped from branch to branch as we dressed, darting closer and closer, in search of tasty treats.

It is there now for you to visit on your next trip across the country. And there for me too, when I return.

***

Hannah-Louise is a former journalist, turned advertising executive, and writer, who is interested in the way our past and present intersect to form and shape us. She has written about family, places she loves, and formerly, celebrity culture, for national press publications, and is currently building her first long-form fictional work. You can follow her on Medium, or catch her searching for calm waters to swim in around Ireland.

Memories of Elsewhere: The Road to Skyllberg, by Anna Evans

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Anna Evans:

I can picture the house where we stayed, my grandmother’s house. Painted yellow and white with steps up to the door, and a balcony above. Walking up the steps and opening the front door, the smell of wood and paint. Inside the feel of wooden floors warm and solid under my feet. The kitchen with its green painted wooden cupboards, like being in a ship’s cabin. Together around the table in the evenings eating crispbread and cheese, and boiling water in the saucepan for tea, always served in big cups with saucers, the tea light and delicate. Unwrapping the tea bags and trying not to let the paper get wet. Sitting on the wooden bench at the table, darkness falling and a lantern in the window. The feeling of being away from home, everything is cosy. I plead to be allowed to sleep in the little wooden trundle bed that is made up downstairs so that I can hang on to the feeling of being in a story; and so I become Heidi, tucked up in the little attic room, far away in the mountains. 

Sometimes unexpectedly, the feel and smell of a Swedish summer day will appear from nowhere. In this landscape, with its red-painted wooden houses, its forests and lakes, wildflowers and meadows, I spent long summers. It is a place I have never lived but that I visited frequently as a child, my mother’s hometown of Askersund, at the top of Lake Vättern. 

It is a place I associate with a feeling of space, and of openness. This feeling I have framed, from a trip back to Sweden, in the archipelago where we walked. The road ahead bridges, stretching out into the seemingly unending blue horizon. 

For me, this place will always recall the sense of time and of space I felt there, of the hours spent riding my bike and the sense of freedom it gave me; something like the allure of childhood memory and its summer skies. I think of time outside by the lake, and long summer nights. The rocks covered in moss, and adventures outside; the forests like a picture book. Arriving in Sweden, it is the rocks I look for first - those great expansive rocks which seem to be everywhere. Gathering blueberries in the forest, which tasted so fresh and alive. And the time we picked wild mushrooms and cooked them, the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. Swimming in the lake and walking to the harbour in the town to look at the boats. If you continue walking, you can cross the bridge out to the island. 

There is a peacefulness and gentleness to the forest, the suggestion that there might be places to get lost in, and places where people have never set foot; but it is not a place to feel afraid in. The feel of a world co-existing and of non-human habitation. The forest provides a refuge for all kinds of creatures, not often seen by human eyes; even quite large animals like the mysterious and majestic elks. I am entranced by the lily pads, and the tiny frogs that can be found everywhere along the ground, that are given life in the picture books we read together; for the small creatures have as much value as the larger and more powerful ones. In these books there are trolls, the kind of trolls who watch over and protect the forest and its inhabitants. To look around the landscape, it seems to make sense that they are there, in the skies, the rocks, and trees; in all the hidden places of the forest. They are caught up in my mother’s journeys to England and in the stories of her childhood growing up on the farm. Her artists eye for detail, finding magic in the everyday. 

On a trip back to Sweden, we stay in a house in the forest and it rains for a week. I am looking for summers spent by the lake, the boats and the harbour; the light which brings openness and a sense of space. Every day we drive past and see the sign enticing, as divergences often are. From the house in the forest, we turn off the road and find a hidden valley and meadowland, fresh and bright after the rainfall; wildflowers growing by the side of the road. 

The road to Skyllberg is the turning we take off the main road on the last day of our trip. Not just a location on the map, but a symbol, found somewhere between the past and present. Each recall of memory is like a draft worked over and over. Each time I want to recreate the moment when we turn the corner and find the lake hidden behind trees. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she has completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a project on place in Jean Rhys’s early novels, and you can follow her progress through her blog, And The Street Walks In.

Postcard from… Szent Mihály, Balaton

Photo: Katrin Schönig

By Paul Scraton:

From the bike path that was leading us around Lake Balaton, a small track led up through the trees, winding its way around a couple of tight hairpins until it reached the top. There were picnic tables up there and a clearing in the woods that clung to the hillside, offering views across the curve of the lake’s western shore, back to Keszthely where we had started out that morning and across to Fonyód where, the previous day, we stopped to watch a congregation of egrets as they stalked along the pebbled shore.

Photo: Katrin Schönig

Also atop the hill was a white chapel, bright against the blue sky, and a series of crucified figures, carved out of wood and looking sorrowfully down towards the picnic tables and the views belong. The chapel was dedicated to Szent Mihály, and St Michael’s chapel had been built on this promontory above the lake for a very specific reason. The chapel was there to remember a day almost three hundred years before; a day very different to the one we experienced beneath a hot, June sun.

Over the winter of 1739, a group of fishermen walked out onto the ice on the edge of the partially frozen lake. As they worked, lifting fish from the cold waters, the ice they were standing on broke free and began to float off into the lake. The waters were so cold it was impossible for them to swim for safety. Six died, from the cold or from falling into the water. The other forty were left, floating on the lake, waiting to meet a similar fate.

That the forty fishermen survived was thanks to a shift in the wind, which began to move the ice floe back towards the shore. Once back on dry land the fisherman decided to build a chapel in thanks to their miraculous survival, and they built it on the hill that looked down on where they had returned to shore, so that it could continue to watch over the fishermen of the Balaton from that point on.

It was hard to imagine the lake frozen as we sat there on the picnic table beneath Christ on the cross and the tower of St Michael’s chapel. There seemed little movement on the lake as the sun rose higher in the late morning sky. But the church on the hill stood there as a reminder, not only of those who survived that winter’s day, but those that hadn’t been so lucky to be saved by the changing wind.

About the author:
Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. Paul’s book Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast is out now, published by Influx Press.