Recovered Landscapes

By RÁ Costello:

It is a Tuesday in December. The rain drifting off the Irish Sea washes Dublin in a briny, opaque silence and as I cross Dawson Street, a cyclist plummets past me, like a gannet headed towards the Liffey. I am on my way back again, to the glass case where the Gleninsheen gorget sits, glowing in the dust-heavy air of the national museum. A broad, oxbow-shaped collar made of gold. Hammered into being during the Bronze age, I have been visiting it for as long as I can remember. In Irish, you would say that I am 'gafa leis.’ That something in its form has snagged on my mind. I could not tell you what in it catches me. Except that it was pulled from the rock of my home county. That it is a tangible piece of a landscape I struggle to name. 

Our family home sits on a lip of rock, one of a string of houses perched on the faces of a long line of small mountains which plunge in swollen ripples of limestone into the toss of the Atlantic. ‘Folt fionn na farraige’ the white-crested mane of the ocean.

Arthur Conan Doyle said that limestone landscapes are hollow places, secretive, and this is the kind of landscape where things that do not belong manage to endure. Along the edges of this coast, from Ballyvaughan down through Gleninagh and Murrough to Fanore and Craggagh, up the valleys into Fermoyle and Caher. The Irish language held on. A tongue to itself in an area you could walk across in a day. Enduring in the small community that lived in these pockets of watery rock, where glaciers have stripped the soil away and left the grey limestone ribs of the land exposed. 

As you leave the soft fields of Galway, the first hills of this karst landscape begin to rise suddenly, at Boston – a place whose name is, perhaps, the Anglicised sounding of the Irish Bos Toinne, ‘the palm of the wave’ – named for the scalped shoreline nearby which legend says was stripped clean by a great tsunami. These first hills mark the boundary of the Burren, their peaks picked out against the sky by the lattice of dry-stone walls that run across their peaks.

These stones and fields and crested hills had names once. Not the English names we use now. Names all of their own, with stories to explain them, stories built over centuries as each generation placed their layer on what had been laid down before. These are names hardly anyone knows now. Stories people do not even know they have forgotten. There were once Irish names for the gentians that flower in the warm shadow of a limestone pavement here. Not Irish versions of English names but Irish names which had never heard how English named their flower. And did not care. There was a name for the local practice of wintering cows on the mountain and summering them by the sea. A name for the lakes that bloom, like mercury rising from the low fields, in bad weather. These places had names that told you their history and their nature – cluain, inse, léana. The water meadows, the low-lying grassy places.

National surveys record widespread use of Irish here in the 1930s, yet, two generations later, as I was speaking my first words of Irish, the language had already faded from the landscape of my home. I can count my summers on the rocks of these mountains, but the distancing lens of translation means the knowledge wrapped in its Irish names, is now mostly lost to me. And yet I find I can’t give up on it.  I spend time trying to hunt down scraps of what time has worn off our maps. ‘Sa tóir ar’ I would say in Irish. ‘Sa tóir ar’ - to pursue. Derived of, or maybe simply adjacent to, the middle Irish ‘tóraidhe,’ - a bandit, the pursued. The root from which Tory island off Ireland’s far North-West coast gets its name – the famous home of outlaw pirates, pursued across the sea. The name given to the bands of guerrilla fighters who opposed Cromwell's armies during the seventeenth-century invasion of Ireland, and, by a process of crude association, the political label given to those sympathetic to the Catholic Duke of York at the end of Charles II's reign – The Tories. This is what I am pursuing, I think - these shapeshifting insights that come from the intimacy of knowing a language beyond its constituent parts. The magic of familiarity which can, by a process of consubstantiation, turn a word from a label for those outside the law to the name for those who sought to eradicate the language the outlaws spoke. 

Language and landscape go together here. They hide each other. I find a field that has no English name. But it has an Irish one. Scribbled on the neat, lined pages of a child’s copybook in the national folklore collection is a list of places near the author’s home. Recorded in that golden window when Irish had not yet begun to fade off the landscape. The child’s name attaches her to a house where her family still live. I retrace the directions in her description.

It is late August. Marsh thistles worry my ankles as I cross the wall and into the long grass of a sloping field. Water seeps through my runners as a dun cow and her white calf watch me balefully. A month earlier and I would have been up to my waist in feileastram, the tall canary yellow Iris that grows in wet places around here. Talamh feagacha this kind of land – rushey. Wet footed, I crouch down – listening – because, in Irish, this field is called ‘Poll a’ ceoil.’ The hole of music. And as I squat there, in the silence between cars passing on the narrow road nearby -  I hear it. The rushing softness of water hurrying through some hidden path in a trickle of excited notes. Poll a’ ceoil.

Irish is not made for outsiders – the names it gives things are designed for those who are part of its landscape – internal references made of layers of locality that make them useless for a person who wants a precise co-ordinate, invaluable for those who seek a place. The language will exclude you if you let it but, in its strange acts of micro-identification it gives away the secrets of a landscape that run beneath the surface. Makes it difficult not to inhabit the place you describe.

The Irish poet Biddy Jenkinson refuses to translate her work into English, offering the refusal as a small and deliberate challenge to those who “think everything can be harvested without loss.” So much is lost in harvesting this place as a map of English names. And yet the landscape is sometimes difficult to listen to. There is so much I cannot recover. More silences in the landscape than I will ever fully fill. I look at these hills now and they confront me with a language and a landscape I am clinging on to but know I can never quite claw back. Waving goodbye to the cows, and the field, I clamber back over the stone wall to my bike. Back North-East is Gleninsheen. Ghleann insín, the valley of the small, grassy grazing places. They seem like such small victories, but in each name is a history, a landscape recovered.

***

Róisín Costello is a bilingual writer and academic who lives and works between Dublin and County Clare, Ireland. Róisín writes about the connections between language and landscape, and how to recover feminist understandings of place. Her writing is forthcoming in The Hopper and has been shortlisted for the Bodley Head/ Financial Times essay competition.

On Place and Time

By Ian Grosz:

‘What am I doing here?’ I asked myself, emerging from the trees as the lady from the house whose grounds I was rummaging around in, politely pointed out that while under Scottish laws of trespass I’d every right to be there, I had parked on her lawn. She raised an accusing finger toward my camper van left on a patch of grass clear of what I took to be the entrance to her property and the narrow lane leading up to it. 

I had left the van beyond a large stone wall and gateway that looked to me like an obvious boundary. It’s true I had crossed that boundary on foot to gain access to a ruined mausoleum that lay in the trees just on the other side, and adjacent to the property, but I hadn’t thought the property extended to the mausoleum or the access road leading up to it. I apologised and told her as much by way of inadequate explanation, telling her I’d move the van. She nodded gruffly, turned, and began her long and dignified walk back to her large steel-framed house just visible beyond the trees. 

This was in the tiny farming hamlet of Bethelnie where I’d come to look for the visible traces of lost and half-forgotten histories, a pattern I was beginning to repeat at various places all over Aberdeenshire. Bethelnie, according to the Banffshire courier of December 1893, comes from the word bethnathalan, meaning house of Nathalan because of a church Saint Nathalan is supposed to have established here, after which, the parish of my home turf was once named. The mausoleum still extant houses the medieval remains of the Seton, Urquhart and Meldrum family lines, dynasties that once gave the area its identity and can still be found in its place names. 

All trace of Saint Nathalan’s church has long-since vanished, but his legacy is retained in local folk memory. In the village where I live, there was a public holiday dedicated to him celebrated until the late 19th Century. An ash tree marks the spot where Saint Nathalan is said to have collapsed and died, having become exhausted through ridding the area of a plague by making a circuit of the district’s bounds on his knees, praying to God to spare its inhabitants. Where his staff of ash went into the ground as he fell, a holy spring came forth and an ash tree grew. The tree is known as the Parcock Tree, the current tree planted in the 1990s and replacing a much older tree that was said to have stood for over three-hundred years in the same spot, itself arising from a lineage of trees going back to the time of Nathalan in the Seventh Century. 

The holy spring at the site of the Parcock tree is long-gone, with only the trickling outflow of a drainage pipe that carries the run-off from a small hill nearby in its place. This far from holy water passes under the modern bypass that borders the site of Nathalan’s alleged demise, unlikely to be of any assistance in the modern pandemic that is playing itself out across the world. But up until the mid-twentieth century, local children would go there to play, drawn, perhaps, by the tales of Saint Nathalan and the spring’s legendary healing power. 

Outside the ruined mausoleum, possibly built on the site of Nathalan’s church, erratic gravestones span the 12th through 19th Centuries: layers of time and burial, records of forgotten people with only a long-ago placed stone and a fading inscription to tell us they were once here. Among them is the sad and simple inscription for Isabella Gordon-Hunter who died at the age of three, joined by her parents many years later; the three children of Arthur Sangster and his wife Elizabeth Smith: George aged eighteen, Ann aged eleven and Robert aged just seven years, all dying in the year 1837, perhaps due to the influenza outbreak of that year. The earliest stones, stretching back into the 12th Century, are barely readable. 

Stood amongst the trees and the graves, I felt I was intruding on not only the privacy of the property owners, but on the silent, layered gathering of the dead. Their witness to time’s unstoppable cruelty felt pressing. How many lives have passed and never been known? How many absences are there in our histories? What is so compelling about these absences? Why is it that what is not there, what is not known, is more compelling than what is? Is it simply mystery: our innate curiosity that always seeks out a puzzle? Or is it something else? 

Perhaps it is simply the knowledge that something was but is no longer. Through living inside of time – constrained by it – comes a need to try to reach the past, to somehow gain a tangible sense of a larger and continual process of collective loss from the landscape. But what is it I hope to gain by visiting the ghost-sites of these places? Is there some secret message to be found in picking up on their atmosphere, their mood, their sense of place, as though the air or the ground, the trees, the crumbling walls, the grave stones, might be encoded with a form of language that, if not difficult to discern, is like the sighting of a ghost itself: quite probably just a figment of imagination? Is there some additional information available that cannot be gleaned from a map and google? 

Presence in absence - knowledge of what was - however that’s communicated, imbues the landscape through a combination of imagination and literal sense. But what is it that we sense? We sense the air, feel the breeze on our faces, see the same contours in the hills and fields that others now absent once did, and this connects us through imagination. We begin to sense that the past is somehow more present, as though almost coexisting alongside our own time. It is like standing on the far side of a precipice that we wish to cross, and find there is a half-standing bridge that, while it doesn’t allow us to cross fully to the other side, closes some of the gap, brings the two sides of the divide closer together. 

In the book Senses of Place, the philosopher Edward Casey tells us that ‘space and time come together in place,’ by which he means that places are defined by event. They are simultaneously the where and when of things, and in this way they draw space and time into them. Experiencing them brings us closer to those who went before. We see their absence, but we feel their presence. We begin to hear their voices across the precipice of their time and ours. Perhaps it is time itself that I am grappling with, finding its most poignant expression in place, the unstoppable forward motion through which we perceive the world leaving me with a feeling of wanting to hold on to time, to pause and to dwell outside of its relentless march. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and as well as previously featuring on Elsewhere, is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity.

False Mountain

By LJ Kessels:

When I think of the word mountain, I think of home. Which is ironic, as I come from the Netherlands, from Limburg in the south, the dangling leg bit, treated by the rest of the country as its forlorn relative, with a funny accent, customs, and catholicism. It is a place of poverty, corruption, melancholy, and exuberance. An exuberance generally described as bourgondisch, in reference to the enjoyment of life, wine and hearty food. The people in Limburg are an alienated people, both from one town to the next, and then together, against ‘The Hollanders’.

In the south of Limburg is the Vaalserberg, a hill just over 300 metres above sea level and the highest point in mainland Netherlands. Vaals sounds like False, or the Dutch word ‘vaal’ meaning less bright or washed out, like a shirt that was washed too many times. There are stories that the hill used to be higher, but that it sank due to mining activities underneath it. In actuality it was first mentioned in 1041, and comes from the latin in Vallis, meaning in the valley. Due to the run of history three countries (Belgium, Germany, and The Netherlands) claim part of the Vaalserberg. 

Nevertheless, it was the highest ‘mountain’ in the Netherlands, until this source of pride was taken in 2010 with the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles. The Caribbean island of Saba was incorporated into the Netherlands and with it Mount Scenery , nearly 900m above sea level and the new highest point on Dutch soil.

I only went to the Vaalserberg once, my roots are more towards the ‘armpit’ of the province, in the swampland of The Peel. I grew up in Nederweert-Eind,  a small village, close to the city of Weert. In Dutch, Weert is a piece of low land surrounded by water. During 1944 Nederweert-Eind was the front line of the war, and completely shot to bits. So much so that when my step-grandmother arrived in the village after the war, she described it as the place where the world literally had ended. 

I like that story as it describes what it felt like growing up there: life was flat and bleak, stuck in the cyclical nature that comes with life in the countryside. A life that echoed the seasons: work, eat, sleep, repeat. After Christmas comes Carnival, after Lent comes Easter. The summer ends with a fair. Repeat. For some it is reassuring, for others it gives them the feeling there is no way out. Of never making it to higher ground. 

The first question people ask around there is where are you one of? What family do you belong to? You don’t answer with your surname, as that is only how you are ‘written’, in reference to the time of Napoleon where people had to ‘pick’ a surname. Instead, you provide your family nickname. This can be a name referring back to the old family homestead, an infamous character in a family's history, or (as in my case), just a succession of patriarchs. Like an instant family tree. 

As a kid I told my teacher, I could not wait to be older, have my own place, and be able to make ends meet. I had more ambition than small town life, where everyone knew everyone’s business all of the time. I felt alienated in that place. My first escape attempt came when I decided to move to Amsterdam at 18 and study philosophy. For the daughter of a working class, illiterate single father, this was unheard of. All of a sudden I became a person. I was no longer the daughter of so-and-so, or the little sister of so-and-so. I was taken out of my context, where everyone knew your entire family history by simply knowing what family I belonged to. For everyone I met, I was the single point of reference, and became my own person. This became more clear to me the moment someone had asked me to spell my surname. A strange question when you grew up in a place where nearly every third person has the same surname. Then my second attempt to escape came in 2016, when I boarded a train with two bags and a bike, and moved to Berlin.

Remember my step-grandmother who arrived at the village of my childhood shortly after WWII? A war-torn place in the throws of trying to (re-)build. Another aspect to this story is that she was in her early thirties when she arrived at this place, around the same age I am now. She had met a widower with seven children, and decided to leave the comfort of her family home, to move to a small village, and become a mother to a brood of traumatised children. She would remain there, mainly accompanied by her mentally disabled step-daughter, until she got too old, placed into a care home, and died not long after.

Life goes on, up and down, like the outline of a mountain. Wanting to climb it, also means the risk of falling down. Something that in a flat country, where I might have stayed, rarely happens. As a reminder of my own ambition I have a tattoo of a mountain on my forearm. To give myself a push. For when I’m afraid. To remind me to listen to my own saboteur. To push myself further and not fall down the valley, or sink back into the muddy waters. 

***

LJ Kessels is a writer based in Berlin, Germany. She has a MA in Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam and has worked for various (film) festivals, events and whatchamacallits across Europe. Her work has previously been published in Bull & Cross, OF ZOOS, and Stadtsprachen Magazin. 

Sketches of China 05: The Great Wall

Illustration: Mark Doyle

This is the fifth instalment of Sketches of China, a collaboration between the writer James Kelly and the illustrator Mark Doyle.

The graveyard shift, sitting alone in the candlelight as the clock strikes four, the night wearing on, surrounded by the room’s thick stone walls and the damp smell of the salt air, hearing the lullaby of the waves outside and sitting, key in hand, turning it over again and again, the key to a kingdom that lies in ruin, the barbarians camping outside, their advance checked – for now – by the wall, by that enormous structure built of human sweat and blood, marking out the northern frontier, a border running west from where the mountains meet the sea, tracing an improbable boundary across rocky limestone hills cloaked in rich verdure, joining the dots of torch-lit watchtowers burning in the night, a structure only as strong as its weakest link, plunging over the face of a cliff, down into the fast-flowing waters and foaming narrows of a ravine before resuming on the other side, continuing across the vast expanses of scrub and wilderness, across the steppe, before petering out somewhere far in the west, that tormented figure sitting alone in the candlelit room, the night wearing on, meditating on the territory guarded by that immense structure, only as strong as its weakest part, key in hand, turning it over and over, the wall marking out the space where the heavenly empire dwells, the self-sufficiency and sanctity of one kingdom above all, the barbarians waiting outside, key in hand, over and over again, mulling over the decision as Beijing lies sacked and smouldering, the tortured faces of a father and a lover, meditating on their fate, on the price of revenge, weighing up a choice between the lesser of two evils – treason or an empty throne – and intuiting that the decision is perhaps already made, the candles flickering in the damp salty air, the touch of the metal, a key, the key, the key to a future preordained, destiny – or so it would seem – in the palm of a hand.

***

James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. Read more of his work at www.geosoph.scot/writing/.

Mark Doyle is an artist and illustrator working in painting, sculpture, printmaking and digital media. See more of his work at www.markdoyle.org and on Instagram @markdoyleartist.

High Water

By Fiona M Jones:

I am underwater, give or take four days or maybe five. I stand below the ever-breaking surface of a galloping umbrous river: the Teviot carrying meltwater, silt and detritus down from the Cheviot Hills to the Tweed. 

February, in Scotland, drops slow grey rain from low grey skies, then turns to sleet and stays there far too long. One night the distant hills turn white, the short grey daylight fails to break the frost, and snow finally advances down across the landscape. 

It lingered this time for almost a week, reclaiming trodden tracks and drifting again over roads. On a brighter afternoon it began its thaw, icicles crashing from eaves and roadways turning to slush. The wind veered south-westerly; the rain arrived. 

That’s when this happens: when rain and slush and sliding snow all hit the streams at the same time. The rivers rise, heavy with silt, heavier still with the debris they rip from their banks. Branches of deadwood and torn-up greenery/brownery. Charging like wild horses, the water loosens last year’s whitened reeds and sweeps them along until every obstacle gathers its own tangle of strawlike flotsam. 

When the river subsides and the riverside walks re-emerge from water to mud, it’s the high-flung heaps of dead river-reed that mark where the water was: beside you, in the undergrowth; across glades of greening snowdrops and wild garlic; and, here and there, in the trees above your head. The Teviot has fallen back to a sedater cantering pace, still murky with silt, still covering more than its usual bounds. You can see where in its haste it has stripped away ground from under its nearest trees. You can see the broken stems of last season’s river-reeds, half-overlaid with mud now, ready for this year’s new spikes to take their place. And you can see new gravel-banks and newly-lodged fallen trees—things that will either wash away once more next time the river rises, or will gather enough grasping plantlife to grow into islands. 

This high-water mark will fade out over the weeks, swamped not by water now but by new foliage; atrophied by decomposition; removed piecemeal by wind and nest-building birds. Only for now it sits above my path, in places higher than my head, a boast or maybe a threat: This is my river-bed, and I am not always quiet. Can you feel my speed and coldness flowing through you where you stand?

***
Fiona M Jones writes short/flash/micro fiction and CNF. One of her stories gained a star rating on Tangent Online's "Recommended Reading" list for 2020. Fiona's published work is linked through @FiiJ20 on Facebook and Twitter.

Names and Purposes

By Eytan Pol:

There is a juniper tree rooted in the red desert flats south of Twin Rocks in south-central Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park. Like most junipers, its bark and branches are not straight or smooth, but twisted, rolled upward and seemingly folding into itself. Junipers have a way of looking as if they are under constant pressure from within, the veins almost popping out, intensely tightening its muscles so it can.. so it can do what? It almost looks as if they are trying with all their might to get every single drop of water from the nearly-dry desert soil. Every fiber in their being is tensed up in the effort to reach it. 

But this particular juniper tree near Twin Rocks, looks different. Two sunburnt and scarred limbs stick out from the main trunk, reaching upwards and outwards in the soft blue desert sky. The bark is twisted like all others of its kind, but the way in which it is formed can only remind one of a ballerina posing beautifully on a stage. I do not know anything of dance and theater, but in a way, this juniper reminds me of exactly that. Posing on its own desert stage. A constant performance without an audience, a fact that makes it more captivating. 

Overwhelming and soothing serenity. An emancipating sensation of the necessity of self-reliance. If I were to disappear, how long would it take for people to take notice? How long could I wander around undisturbed if I strayed off-trail, disappearing into a side canyon? Hidden in vast and dry fields of red rock, heated by the high summer desert sun. A cottonwood or overhanging cliff to shade my mind and body. A solitary place to nurture and reset the synapses of my brain, a place of everything and nothing. Perhaps I tend to romanticize too much, and I might be a naive idealist. Know that this is by choice after careful consideration of the alternatives. 

A heavy red rock sits sturdy in place, lodged between brothers and sisters, big and small. It has fallen from the crimson Wingate sandstone cliffs hundreds or perhaps thousands of years ago. I see blooming cliffrose with soothing yellow flowers, exuding toughness rather than beauty. It has rooted in vertical nooks and crevices so unlikely and small that even their existence is simply a wonder to behold. A couple of green cottonwood trees are standing somewhere alone hidden in a canyon and filled with dozens of webby nests made by thousands of tent caterpillars. All hanging by a thread. It is a reminder that even here in this wretched wasteland, life does not only find a way, it thrives. A thought which results in joyful, tearful liberation, powerful enough to erode even the fear of death itself. 

The moment inspires elation with my time and place in the world and the finite nature of my existence. I am sitting in a part of the park that has no name. At least, as far as I know. In every direction, there are soft rolling desert hills, steeper to the foot than to the eye. They are sparsely scattered with as many black basalt rocks as green desert shrubs, prickly pear cacti and blooming yellow wildflowers. The occasional but lonely pinyon or juniper sticks out from the red dirt canvas in which it roots. Hidden between these gentle ups and downs are washes, gulches, gorges, and canyons. Invisible to the outsider’s eye, unless you know where to look. Carved by the patient forces of wind and especially water, although most of them exist in a dry state now for much of the year. 

It is becoming clear to me that this desert landscape is a metaphor for desert life. The superficial sameness of these arid hills can be mistaken in the same manner one misinterprets the days in the desert as monotonous. Yet, as this rolling horizon in front of me harbors secret depths and hidden places, so does the seemingly gentle line of time. 

***
After graduating in North American Studies, Eytan spent a number of months living and working in Capitol Reef National Park in Utah during the first wave of the corona pandemic. He is currently working on a larger project on the desert and the American West.

On the verb 'to be'

By Ciarán O'Rourke:

After they died, I experienced a slow longing to see my grandparents again, but also for Rossinver itself. Their now-permanent absence seemed increasingly entangled with my yearning for that small corner of north Leitrim where they were from: the acre of mown grass at the back of their bungalow, within earshot of the Ballagh river, and haunted in summer months by quick-darting swallows, skirting close to ground whenever skies were changing, blue to grey. 

The poems I wrote for my grandparents – deathbed portraits, reaching through loss – were also tributes to this place that had shaped not just my siblings and myself, but several generations of my Dad’s family: a weathery place, rich with rain, that for me, visiting in summer months from the Dublin suburbs, had always been both recognisable and strange, a home away. 

I felt a similar sensation last autumn when I moved to Carrick-on-Shannon, with my bicycle and a bagful of books in tow. There was a quiet happiness in arriving not only in this town – with its wide, surging river and cautiously bustling streets – but at being able to call Leitrim my home county. By choosing Carrick, I imagined that I was somehow mending a gap, bridging the long aftermath of my grandparents’ lives.

The first time I decided to read the elegies for my Grandad in public, I had forced myself, beforehand, to practice the lines aloud, like an actor, until I knew their sound by heart. Regardless of what I consciously felt while reading, my voice and body could complete the performance, by reflex if necessary. This is now one of my preparatory rituals for any live event: I read (noisily) to myself, the very repetition of the words gradually providing a protective shelter against whatever gusts of panic or self-consciousness may arrive in the actual moment.

In decamping to Leitrim, of course, I was entering the demesne of a number of literary figures, past and present. On my daily walks, I pass a mural celebrating Carrick’s writers, including John McGahern, whose stories and often mordant essays my Grandad used to quote with admiring precision. “It takes some skill”, I recall him saying, definitively, “to finish a sentence with the verb ‘to be’”: a feat the Leitrim author had managed to do, with his adage that “all understanding is joy, even in the face of dread, and cannot be taken from us until everything is.” 

Another of McGahern’s creative credos concerned “the quality of feeling that’s brought to a landscape”, and his belief that this “is actually much more important” in the making of literature “than the landscape itself”. The question of “whether it contains rushes or lemon trees”, he said, is less vital than “the light of passion” that an author brings to the view. I agree with him. But I also suspect that he made these remarks partly in resistance to a culture accustomed to placing (perhaps even pigeon-holing) its writers: as if by re-affirming his fidelity to literature’s universality, he were also implicitly raising a question mark over its so-called “Irish” variety, or the applicability of this brand to his own origins and literary practice.

In fact, Leitrim, specifically, rooted and nourished McGahern: filtering that “light of passion” he so sought and valued, and helping to sustain the restraint and fierce clarity of his writing, with its breathing fields and hedgerows, its turning seasons. It was here that his revolving cast of reticent, perceptive characters became real, where his skill in rendering their flinty, sidling conversation was honed. His stories of endurance and return (both human and natural) were invariably drawn from Leitrim’s rushy hills, sodden with darkness and light – without a lemon tree in sight.

McGahern’s was a particular kind of attachment to a particular part of the world, his work lit through by a clear-eyed attentiveness to his own locale – an observational intimacy, allowing both vividness and depth. What I find in McGahern’s fiction is close, I think, to what led me back to Leitrim in life: the desire to stand on the fringes of a single place, only partly my own, with its hidden history and visible dailiness, looking in, hoping at last to belong.

***

Ciarán O'Rourke lives in Leitrim, Ireland. He has won the Lena Maguire/Cúirt New Irish Writing Award, the Westport Poetry Prize, and the Fish Poetry Prize. His first collection, The Buried Breath, was published by Irish Pages Press in 2018. His second collection is due to be released in 2021.

Maps in Sand

By David Lewis:

My family has passed through any number of forgotten towns and cities, losing languages and leaving our dead in overgrown graveyards.  What connects us to time and place?  Unless attachments are actively preserved, the connections become fainter with each generation.  

My grandfather William Eyton Jones was born in Llangollen, north Wales.  My grandmother Janet was born in Glasgow, but Llangollen became very important to her, and for my mother it was a second home.  When I was a child we visited the town to tidy the family graves and visit my mother’s cousin.  I felt that we belonged and did not belong; we ate ice cream in the sunshine with the other tourists, yet we had graves in the hillside cemetery and family on quiet back streets.  

I returned to Llangollen before lockdown to walk the streets and refresh the memories.  Strengthening these connections between memory, family and landscape is like maintaining maps in sand, retracing the outlines of a story to revitalise it, but what I am really strengthening is how my family feels about this town.  This was a landscape we knew for 160 years – windows, brickwork, chimney pots, the endless roar of the river; things of no importance, the secret elements of our lives unknown even to ourselves.  What stories took place on these streets? In thin sunshine I walked through love stories, family walks, chance encounters, laughter, funerals.  

I stopped at the war memorial.  The granite glinted in the sunshine, awaiting its moment of importance in November.  My grandfather knew and served alongside these Great War dead, the Hugheses, the Griffithses, the Lewises, above all the Joneses.  Family history is an emotional spotlight of memory and narrative that illuminates some people and hides others.  Many of these Joneses would be family who had faded from my story and become important in others.  Perhaps my grandfather joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers on the same day as these Joneses, the lost cousins from the hill farms.  Is it irreverent to think of this war memorial as a monument to unknown family?  Perhaps.  

The steep road to the cemetery was still narrow and quiet, but new houses were creeping up the hillsides, building on what was open farmland and a shaggy, gloomy playing field.  But the little cemetery was still a quiet place of yews and damp grass, wild-flowers and benign neglect, with superb views over the town and the distant hills.  My Llangollen grandparents are buried there.  This was the focus of our visits, the maintenance of their resting place; even today all my Llangollen excursions end at the grave. 

These maps in sand refresh family story and family history, but there is only so far back in time I can travel.  My most valued family connections to Llangollen are two battered 1930s photograph albums; my mother and her older sister at Plas Newydd, an uncle playing with his dog in the sunshine.  Yet one album is unlabelled, marooning the family in a permanent unknown past, their names forgotten.  Some I recognise, most I don’t.  For all the time spent reaffirming old stories, here is a bridge I cannot cross; I cannot travel back any further, and here the past cannot be reached.  

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David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside. He posts urban/rural images on Instagram -davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter -@dlewiswriter