Memories of Elsewere: The Secret Square, by James Carson

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 James Carson

About ten years ago, I was sitting at my desk, and longing for an end to the working week.  As a distraction from boredom, I lost myself in my computer’s wallpaper.

Wallpaper is a very personal preference. Some people choose images of their family, others prefer football or food, the Crab Nebula or Justin Bieber. I’m more inclined towards places that stir old memories, or locations that can make new ones.

In those days, my wallpaper of choice featured a small, cobblestoned square, enclosed by lovely old buildings painted in lemon and terracotta. In the foreground, a jaunty little flag hung from a sturdy stone wall, emblazoned with a single word: Bibliotek.

The image had a magnetic quality, something that beckoned me into the space, and away from the tedium of office life. I had no idea where it was, but I allowed myself the fantasy of visiting this place. I could imagine savouring the atmospheric light and the stillness of the square, exploring the public library, and capturing the scene with my own photographs.

A few years later, I took a trip to Stockholm. Civilised, organised, full of interest, Sweden’s capital city was instantly appealing. The Gamla Stan – Stockholm’s impossibly handsome old  town  – seduced me with its treasury of architecture and alluring alleyways. 

It was here, with great anticipation, that I turned a corner and entered a place that, until then, had been just a photograph on my computer screen. A bit of internet sleuthing had helped me locate it, and now here I was in the square called Tyska Stallplan.

It was oddly exhilarating. But the pleasure of finally achieving a longstanding ambition quickly melted away.

The morning light had failed to penetrate the square. Alone in the gloom, I saw that one of the buildings was smothered in plastic sheeting, and the wall at the rear of the square was adulterated by graffiti. The little library flag was missing, and so was the library.

What to make of this? Had I been deceived by a skilful photographer’s sleight of hand? Was anticipation really the better part of pleasure? 

The truth is I’d forgotten that over time all places undergo subtle and substantial change.

A little more digging unearthed the story of this modest space. Beneath the cobbles of Tyska Stallplan are the vaults of the Blackfriars Monastery. It was built in the fourteenth century, scarcely a hundred years after the name of Stockholm first appeared in any historical record. The Dominican friary proved its resilience through pestilence, fire, and siege. But its luck ran out during the Swedish reformation, when King Gustav Vasa had it destroyed. The outline of the monastery walls can still be seen in the layout of the cobblestones.

By the eighteenth century, the square was surrounded by stables. These, along with a nearby German school, gave Tyska Stallplan the name it retains to this day: German Stable Square.

As for the public library, its fate was sealed by declining numbers of visitors. The collection was moved to a more central location in 2013.

Nowhere stays the same. The picture on my computer screen captured a fleeting moment in the life of this age-old place. Since my visit, the scene will have shifted again, the plastic sheeting removed, the graffiti washed away. As winter turns to spring, it won’t be long until the bare trees on Tyska Stallplan are again in full leaf.

A virus with a diameter of one ten thousandth of a millimetre has changed our way of life, including our freedom to travel. But even when things return to normal, few travellers will be beating a path to this ordinary little square in Stockholm. That’s understandable. Yet, just because places like Tyska Stallplan go unnoticed, they needn’t be disregarded.

For those willing to take a closer look, this secret square has a tale to tell.

***

James Carson is a writer from Glasgow. His work has appeared in various magazines, including From Glasgow to Saturn, The Skinny and ExBerliner, and his stories have also been selected for anthologies such as Streets of Berlin, Tip Tap Flat and A Sense of Place.

Nowhere else to go

By Fiona M Jones:

I’ve always loved moss, and I can’t explain why. In my view, every stone wall should be covered in moss, every wooden fence-post topped with it like a tiny wig, and every unfrequented roadway carpeted in vivid velvet-textured life. 

I like to see the crumbling brickwork of nineteenth-century coalworks swallowed up in a slow tsunami of mosses, and I like to watch old fallen trees turn green again in its grip. I like moss so much that when my children were little and they’d invent imaginary solar systems, they always made a green mossy planet for me—and they’d leave me there with a cup of tea while they waged their spaceship wars on intergalactic baddies. 

I’ve never understood why people wage war on moss, blasting it from their stonework and spraying their lawns to kill it. Moss isn’t a baddie. I feel a secret sense of triumph when I hear of city councils, desperate to solve their crisis-level air pollution, building concrete frames of mosses to purge their unclean air. They’ve finally discovered that moss knows what to do with diesel fumes as well as bare ground and fallen trees. 

And here’s my favourite place of moss, in these Coronavirus-shutdown times when Boris has told us we can only Walk From Home, and Once A Day; and the local farmers say Don’t Touch Our Gates. From Crossford village you follow Waggon Road south to the 985, then walk along to the right until the Charlestown exit. Just before the narrow bridge, you take an almost invisible footpath to the right, skirting a new plantation of baby trees still hidden inside their protective tubes. You find yourself quite suddenly above a rushing burn in the greenest valley you’ve seen for months—sheltered and damp and multi-hued in green where new spring growth has just begun to compete with the darker tones of ivy and the yellower greens of moss. 

Down the trodden path beside the noisy water, you come across the remains of stone buildings, ruined, rebuilt in brick and metalwork, ruined once more by time and creeping vegetation. A semi-cylindrical metal barn, the most recent building, stands open too, disused, roof sagging and ready to fall in a cascade of asbestos-laden rubble. Most of these constructions would have pertained to coal-mining. Across the burn, on the steeper side of the valley, three long-abandoned coal seams open onto the burn, mysterious dark entrances of sliding scree hung over with ivy from above. 

If you follow the burn downhill, you come out under a disused railway bridge, full of nesting birds, on to a flat muddy shore of driftwood, seaweed, flotsam and seabirds; and here, if you look in the right place, you can find multitudes of squirming, wormlike fossils in the crumbling mudstone above the tideline. 

Assuming you’re wearing sturdy clothes you can fight your way along the ivied, brambling railway until you come to lower Charlestown, then back around by road to make a longer walk. Because, after all, it’s springtime, the clouds are almost shining, and we’ve nowhere else to go. 

***

Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. Fiona is a regular contributor to Folded Word and Mum Life Stories, and an irregular contributor all over the Internet. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.

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.

Berlin: A spring diary

By Paul Scraton:

On a midweek morning, in these strange and anxious days, I go for a walk. Sometimes it feels like all I can do. I cannot concentrate on the words I would like to read and write. My eyes ache for something other than the gentle glow of a backlit screen. The sun is shining and our pavements are wide. In Berlin it is springtime, our balcony full of the sound of bees delivered to a neighbour by mail order. I head out into the city.

My walk takes me south from where I live in Gesundbrunnen, crossing the route of the Berlin Wall into Mitte before following a familiar route through Rosenthaler Platz to Hackescher Markt and Museum Island. The first stretch feels reasonably normal (whatever that means right now), with kids on scooters, joggers and dog-walkers, and apartment dwellers escaping the inside for sunshine on a bench. Apart from the playgrounds being locked up, it feels like it always does.

Closer to the city centre, it is all a little more eerie. The hotels around Rosenthaler Platz are darkened. The pavements are empty. It is a reminder not only of current events, but in a strange way of the changes that took place over the past two decades in these neighbourhoods, ones that perhaps we did not notice while they were happening. Without the tourists, the hotel and hostel guests and the AirBnBers, the population is diminished. As I walk, I wonder how it would have looked on these streets had these contact restrictions and ban on tourist stays in the city happened twenty years before. 

In a recent essay for Literary Hub, the walker-writer Lauren Elkin explored the idea of what we remember when we walk the city, reflecting on the idea that “[w]e city-dwellers are recording devices, forever observing the micro-adjustments time works on our neighborhoods, noting what used to be where, making predictions about what will last and what won’t.” 

This is always true, I think – although sometimes we don’t notice as much as we should as the city changes around us – but as I walk through a Berlin that was stalled about a month ago and only just starting to move again, the question of what will last has become more urgent than ever before. Will these hotels ever reopen? The restaurants and bars, where chairs were lifted onto tables all those weeks ago and have not been down since? The clubs, where only ghosts dance, behind their heavy, locked doors?

And we think of the stories from the hospitals and care homes, we read the testimonies of the key workers and we see the numbers going up and up and we think not only of what will last but what we’ll have lost.  

We walk the city to remember. 

On Rosenthaler Straße I pass the place where we used to go drinking in the basement of a junkyard and the bar on the corner that never seemed to close. One is an adventure playground now, a place where my daughter spent afternoons during primary school. The other belongs to a hotel that was built on what was still an empty space when I first moved to Berlin. I walk down this street all the time, but usually I am going to or coming from somewhere, to meet my daughter from school or my partner after work. I don’t remember much then. But today I do.  

At Hackescher Markt I bump into a friend. We don’t hug and stand a distance apart as we talk about how everything is, at work and home. We ask about our respective partners, families and what our daughters make of it all. It feels like we are the only two people on this street, a place where normally crowds bottleneck at one of the few locations where Berlin actually feels like a proper city. We say goodbye without the normal gestures of farewell. We don’t say that we should try and meet up soon. That we should hang out sometime. It all feels awkward. Strange. 

Down by the river I watch as the sun catches tiny waves caused by the wind and realise that it is not only people who are mostly missing from the scene, but also the river boats. There are no cruises out on the water, no sightseeing to be done even though the weather is fine. The city by the river has a different sound now. Birds and distant traffic. The laughter of a little girl on her bicycle. What’s missing are the engines of the boats and the commentary in different languages that crackles through loudspeakers before drifting off on the breeze that blows in between the grand old museum buildings at the water’s edge.

My route home takes me close to where my partner and I first lived together and the playground by the tram tracks, as empty as on a freezing winter’s day. I walk along the route of the Berlin Wall, the no-man’s land emptier than I have ever seen it, apart from maybe the last time I was here during the anniversary celebrations, when it was blocked off to allow the safe arrival of politicians and other dignitaries, who did their own short stroll to remember, from the black car to the chapel.

There are not many here to remember today. Those people who are out and about are all moving. No-one lingers, to read the memorial boards or look at the photographs. At the corner of Bernauer Straße the bakery is open, and I pause on the pavement to let a young woman in a face mask, cup of coffee in each hand, cross in front of me. When we walk we make predictions of the future. Of what will last. No-one can say how long our city will be like this. What version of Berlin will emerge on the other side. We do not know how much loss and sadness we will have to deal with along the way. 

A few blocks from home, a small group of workmen are putting the finishing touches to a new bar that is currently not allowed to open. But still they paint the window frames and inside tables are being laid out and the first drinks have been added to the shelves behind the bar. The day that it opens will be some party, but we don’t know when that might possibly be. The only thing is certain, I think as I turn the last corner, is that the city that welcomes it will not be the same as it was before. 

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).  

Memories of Elsewhere: The King of Rome, by David Lewis

Image adapted from ‘harmonie of civilizations’ by JASOVIC; licensed by CC BY-SA 3.0

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 David Lewis:

The corona virus has made it impossible to travel, but in memory we can revisit places we have not seen for many years. This morning cypress trees against a blue sky reminded me of Rome, before Easter 1995.

We had a strange, confusing night high above the harsh floodlights of Santa Maria Maggiore and were delayed, directed, and redirected, until eventually we washed up at Salvatore's crumbling palazzo on Via del Clementino. A soft midday light fell down the stairwell onto the palazzo’s blood-brown walls, protected by a small Madonna and Child with a flickering electric candle. Salvatore welcomed us with a roar. 'You have the Queen in England,' he bellowed, 'but I am the King of Rome!' The palazzo was being restored. Thick plastic sheeting instead of walls, staircases without hand-rails, rubble. Our rooms had a lopped square of blue sky, three storeys of families, a courtyard of scooters and a solitary battered Fiat. Every morning I ate alone in a tall grey room, the windows open to the clatters of the street below. Billowing muslin curtains, iced croissants and coffee, but I remember no other guests.  

We had no money. Warm days carved the city into slabs of chocolate-black shade and fierce sunlight and we walked everywhere, saw broken arches, crowds, Lambrettas, tombs. The light fell from a strip of blue above the ochre streets, from the oculus of the Pantheon or from a high unseen window, showering dusty light onto angel and cherub - the huge Roman churches were cool and gloomy, as if we walked a cold marble pavement on the floor of the sea.  

Lunch was usually small tubs of olives, fish, tomatoes and rice from Piazza Nicosia near the palazzo, picnics on the dry grass of the Villa Borghese gardens, the Palatine Hill, the old street market in pre-hipster Trastevere; but I also remember lunches in the flower market of Campo de' Fiori, a table for two in the cool gloom, the long tables outside taken by the flower sellers' families.  

And the great ruins - we crept around the giant silences of the Colosseum, the shaggy remnants of the Forum, isolated fragments of towering wall. We saw gold and silver foil eggs in shop windows; sunlight on book spines and vine trellis in the Keats-Shelley House; gleams from golden icons in the Vatican, after emerging blinking from the cold graves of the Catacombs.  

Salvatore's Madonna welcomed us home as the scooter kids roared in from college. An irregular flag of sunlight played on the wall opposite, a cracked fresco of brown-red and cream plaster. As the light darkened, we finished the crumpled tubs of lunch, drank flasks of Orvieto, read Byron’s journals. Sometimes we walked the streets as the soft darkness and jagged splinters of light divided the city, as a door was opened and closed like a lantern veiled and unveiled, a Caravaggio moment when hooded spies were revealed as students turning to laugh at a shout from a passing Vespa. I remember moments – footsteps echoing on snakeskin cobbles, floodlit churches, a night in the bars around Piazza Navona.  On our last night, a Chinese meal near the Oratory of St Philip Neri, where the Saint broke out of the solemn procession of consecration to play football with local boys.  

Memory is as slippery as fishes. How many days were we there? Were we really the only guests in the palazzo? It does not matter. In memory we can revisit lost places, and strengthen our recollections of time and place. In times of quarantine, I find this a comfort.  

***

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

Parenthesis in Time: Journal entry from a road trip in northern Chile

By James Kelly:

Down in the valley, among the verdure, the landscape seems still, immobilised in time. Giant slopes of sterile rock bear down from above, arid, expectant in an epochal wait for rain. Yet carved between the high walls, the valley floor, with its regular crops of alfalfa and corn, is of a different time. The boulders and pebbles that lie scattered across the riverbed stand at rest, a temporary pause on their journey down from the Andean highlands to the sea. These petrified fragments of an immense telluric memory are testament to the youthful vigour of the mountains that bore them, the wave of rock that surged up from the Pacific Ocean to form the Andes.

Some of the stones, no doubt, have siblings way up there, up where the air is thin and fresh, where the snow-capped volcanoes of Isluga and Guallatiri attract giant storm clouds with their magnetic pull. Some of the rocks would have been present in the immense columns of burning ash and debris thrust skywards from the bowels of the Earth to hang suspended in the air by great updrafts of igneous gas, before collapsing in devastating waves that ripped down the mountain slopes with force enough to bury a small country under the volcanic rubble. 

And it’s there, up in that other world, in the heart of Cerro Anocarire, that the river begins, the same river whose flows have sculpted the valley and its hillsides. It’s there that the source of the water can be found, the water that washes gently over the pebbles, polishing and massaging them, conveying their sediments on towards the ocean, the same water whose minerals now nourish the transience of these sun-kissed plantations, day after day, year after year.

15:25, 9 January 2018. Camarones Valley, Arica and Parinacota Region, Northern Chile.

***

James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. His work explores interactions between different timescales, from the human to the geological, and what we can learn from the cosmovisions of other peoples in our relationships with the land. More of his work can be found at www.geosoph.scot/writing/.

Memories of Elsewhere: Plateau of the Sun, by Sara Bellini

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 Sara Bellini: 

The first thing I think about is the rain. The sound of a summer storm beyond the window pane just before going to bed, no other noise in the room. And then the petrichor, the smell of water on the grass slope behind the house the morning after, the earth still dark in the daylight. The first thing I think about when I think about the mountains is heavy rain on a summer night.

I cannot tell exactly when we stopped going to my grandma’s holiday home in the mountains. It must have been sometime before my teens, after my grandpa died, but I can say I went there every summer during my childhood from when I was six months old. My mum’s mum lives down in the valley, half an hour by car, and used to spend the whole summer there when the weather got too warm. My mum and I, and later my little brother, would join her, my grandpa and his sister (and the occasional guests) for a few weeks.

The second thing I think about is the smell of the pine cones burning in the little wood burner in the bathroom, their soothing crackling keeping me company during the shower, the stove’s warmth cosy and earthy. The pine cones and kindling were fetched during trips to the nearby woods, usually by my grandma and her sister-in-law (her partner in crime), both wearing skirts and comfy old-fashioned shoes. 

My grandparents’ holiday home was at the edge of a village on what is called the Plateau of the Sun, right behind Monte Altissimo, the mountain visible from my grandparents’ kitchen. They bought the house when my mum and aunt were in their teens and used it mostly during the warm season. The garage on the side was added later, and the old one on the ground floor was turned into a spacious kitchen/dining room/living room. I remember opening the house for the season, the big heavy key turning into the glass door and behind it a wall of peaceful darkness, heavy with the smell of wood panelling and sofas and cold stone fireplace.

The third thing I think about is the food. Like any Italian woman that had grown up during the war, my grandma’s main concern was that we were all well-fed, and happily fed too. This idea practically translated into all of her signature dishes: homemade lasagne, polenta with mountain cheese, pasta fresca with ceps, risotto... We would get fresh bread from the little stone bakery every day, and ice cream from the gelateria on the main street. And then of course there were the blueberries and mushrooms we picked in the woods, and ice-cold water magically pouring out from the mountain side. My own idea of a mountainscape is located very precisely in those experiences and in those places. Even now whenever I enter a forest my sensorial memory unleashes images of my childhood there: smells of pine trees, wet soil and wild strawberries.

My mum told me that one of the first solid foods I had were grapes. Once when we were on holiday in the mountains and I was about one year old I disappeared and everyone searched the whole house and went as far as the street looking for me. They found me quietly sitting inside a kitchen cupboard enjoying some grapes. I was too little to remember this, but my mum and my grandma have told the story so many times that I consider it a memory. And it’s the same with the many photos of me taken there in my early years: holding my great-uncle’s hand, playing with fresh mushrooms picked by my mum’s cousin, sitting on the dining room table while entertaining the grown-ups.

The fourth thing I think about is the old deck of Trevisane we used for the card games: briscola, scopa, Marianna. It had been handled so many times that the cards were almost soft, their laminated slipperiness worn away by time. We would all play – me, my mum, my grandma, my great-aunt and the regular guests. That’s what we would do on rainy afternoons or after dinner, for hours, chuckling and strategising. We were never bored. I think that’s where we got the habit of playing cards after eating, and even now, in the rare occasions when I see my mum or my grandma, it feels like a deeply familiar thing to do. 

A few years ago my aunt mentioned in passing that my grandma had sold the house in the mountains. My mum had probably forgotten to tell me. My grandma was just too old to be there by herself and all her holiday companions were dead. I hadn’t been there in a decade, but I was utterly shocked at the realisation that the possibility to go there was lost forever. And after the first instinctive shock came a second one when I thought how it must have felt for her to touch every familiar object and have to decide on its fate, to disassemble each room piece by piece, one memory at a time, and then leave the house for good.

When I think about the wooden house in the mountains I think about family and home. When I think about the mountain I think about my grandma.

 ***

Sara Bellini is an editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. She lives in Berlin, the place she calls home at the moment.

Boneyard

By Claire Margaret Howe:

There are very few places I would happily spend the rest of eternity. The graveyard in Miobhaigh is one of them. It’s a stone’s throw from the seashore, lapped by the cold water of the north Atlantic. It sits squarely between the sea and the sky and on a sunny day it throws up a solid blue vista. The air is so clean that it is frequently thronged with midges, making it almost unliveable. It is surrounded on four sides by a dry-stone wall clad with lichen, ivy and a few flowering bushes. On the seaward side there is an accommodating dip in the wall that makes for a scenic seat. I like to sit there and watch small fishing boats trawl up and down checking their lobster pots. On a calm day the noises of busy work and conversational shouts carry up from the boats. In early autumn seals bask on the rocks at low tide and their occasional barks break the easy silence of the valley. Delicate sea pinks grow along the high tide mark. Strategically speaking, the graveyard is well placed to avoid surprises. Guarded on one side by a long stretch of sea, the east and western reaches are swathed in high grass and marshland. The occasional industrious beast grazes them; usually a donkey with an alarm call that reverberates for miles around. The sprawling brambles house birds that will alight noisily at the sight of any intruders. It is accessed only by a long, winding lane that twists steeply down the valley. The graveyard’s inhabitants – myself and the spirits – have ample opportunity to survey visitors before their arrival. 

This graveyard is very old. Local tradition puts it at ‘chomh sean leis an gceo agus nios sinne faoi dho’. Roughly translated, as old as the fog and twice as old again. Its earth is packed to capacity. It has been decommissioned as a burial ground, but exceptions are made. My grandmother is here, one of the last burials allowed. And my grandfather’s ashes – there was room for an urn, but not a coffin. Often, gravediggers would disturb an old grave, or unearth a coffin, or old bones. I remember hearing about occurrences of it as a child. It was never a cause for unnecessary ceremony. Coffins were re-buried. Bones were lifted from the ground, placed in a small sack and put to one side while the funeral of the day took place. After all the mourners had left, the old bones would be placed carefully alongside the new coffin, and the grave was filled. When the remains of several bodies were disturbed, they were grouped together and placed in one coffin. After decades of this practice, it was not unusual to open a coffin and find six or seven skulls. Once or twice, I have watched the gravediggers at work, silently sweating, and heard the rhythmic clink of spades on stony soil. The ground is treated with respect, but no solemn pomp or pageantry. It is a place of peaceful purpose. 

The graveyard is multi-denominational, much like death. It was used by every village and household for miles around. The deceased from across the peninsula were rowed over in currachs, traditional skin boats. There is a ‘coffin stone’ on the shore were the bodies rested before being carried to the grave. Surrounded by fishing villages, many of its inhabitants are victims of drowning. The locals believed that those who drowned lasted longer in the earth due to the salt in their bodies. The graveyard has seen epidemics and war and famine. There are hundreds of children buried here from the tuberculosis outbreaks in the 1900’s. Sitting on the wall watching the grass rustling over the graves, unwelcome thoughts must intrude. The southernmost corner is clear of headstones. This corner, not unique to this graveyard, is known as ‘the lonely corner’. Unchristened babies and suicide victims were not permitted on consecrated ground. Traumatised families, fearful of their lost ones spending an eternity in hell, would bribe clerics to bury their dead here. Buried at night, the graves weren’t marked, and the deceased were not spoken of again. This graveyard saw the rise and fall of Ireland’s booming trade in graverobbing in the 18th and 19th century. Fortunately, I can find no evidence to suggest that the trade disturbed the inhabitants of this soil. There would be little anonymity in small rural villages to protect graverobbers. It is comforting to think that for all the hardship my companions might have endured in life, they at least didn’t see this ignominy in death. This ground is, in all respects, a final resting place. 

Perhaps that’s why the graveyard is a peaceful place to sit and think. Here, where so many were committed to the earth, I am never lonely. Still, when I look at the unmarked corner and the flagstones where desperate people made offerings to a wealthy church, I can’t help but think that graveyards would be decidedly more pleasant without the oppressive religious overtones and the distressing histories. But then, I reason, they would be parks, and parks are often boring – with history as featureless as their lawns. This old boneyard has a history and a presence that will keep me sharp and keep me humble. I am happy to sit with these spirits, these old grafters. Soldiers, sailors, scholars. Crowded and muddled as they are, they have a quiet place to observe the fishing boats haul in their loads. Only the keening of the gulls to disturb them. 

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Claire Margaret Howe is a freelance writer and mixed media artist based in Ireland. She divides her time between the sea and the hills and draws inspiration from both. She can be contacted at clairehowewriting@gmail.com