At the Edge of Ireland Read online

  “It was a great time. I met Ladysmith Black Mambazo with Paul Simon after they’d made their fabulous album Graceland. I made a pendant that symbolized how their music had spanned the globe, bringing awareness of the horrors of apartheid.

  “Then things changed. My mother died in 1991 of ovarian cancer. Immediately afterward I got a phone call from a friend. She’d moved to Ireland but was returning to the States and asked me to come and help her pack. I needed a break, so I flew into Dublin in midwinter for a two-week stay. When I got there I found out that my friend could not get off work for longer than three days. So we worked hard together packing all her stuff, and after she left I decided to just drive wherever I felt like driving. I took my map and just set off. And as I worked my way down the coast, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the land. Finally I drove into Bantry, and there was a market going on. I bought some old lace and some jewelry and heard a voice in my head saying, You could live here. So I decided to explore the Beara Peninsula, and as I drove, it just got more and more beautiful. I stopped for toothpaste in Glengarriff at the drugstore and saw a sign that said HARRINGTON’S PUB AND AUCTIONEERS. I knew ‘auctioneers’ meant real estate over here, so it suddenly hit me to go in and ask how much oceanfront property was going for in those days.

  “Bernard Harrington was behind the bar, and I asked him, ‘Is this a real estate office or a pub?’ ‘A little bit o’ both’ was his answer. And when I asked about oceanfront property for sale, he took me out to one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. A valley carved out of the side of a mountain with lovely green fields and the ocean crashing in on huge rocks. I took one look and knew I was gonna change my life and live there.

  “It was one of the best decisions I ever made. And I quickly learned so much about healing in this place where there are so many wonderful healers who’ve come to this enchanted land. And I needed them. My body was a bit of a mess. I feel in my heart it’s because the land is so ancient and untouched in so many places. There’s still a pure energy here that’s not compromised by industry or overpopulation. The light, the rain, the rainbows, and the quick wit of the people embrace me here. I’ve discovered so many beautiful places at the end of small dirt roads. The sea was so close to me that every day I looked out of my window to see seals, birds, and swans. It was, and still is, a place of incredible beauty. And I’ve known a happiness here that I don’t think could be replicated anywhere else in the world.”

  CAREY’S CONTAGIOUS SPIRIT OF urgency and energy energized us, and when she started to plan a series of exploratory expeditions for us to her favorite “secret spots” around Beara, we found ourselves unable to resist and decided just to go with the flow. Her flow, of course.

  And quite a flow—and show—she provided over subsequent weeks. She had a deeply empathetic understanding of the Irish instinct for the mysteries of religious faith, for the supernatural, and for the long storyteller epics combining real and mystical events, which still form such a vital part of the fabric of the national psyche here.

  In typical American fashion, Carey quickly opened her heart and spirit. “I try to find a kind of balance—six months here on Beara and six months back in the USA. But the trouble is, it’s so hard to leave this place. I just love being here.”

  We mentioned to her that we’d both been impressed by Julie Aldridge and her spiritual healing activities at Soul Ray. Carey laughed and clapped her hands. “Ah, yes—Julie! She’s the best! Her art therapy is amazing. You know, she teaches that at Cork University every week. Her approach seems so simple the way she describes it—she says, ‘Your soul will talk to you through your drawing, and if you have someone to work through the process with you—a kind of interpreter—you start to see what you’re trying to unravel in your life—patterns of hurt, abuse, whatever.’ She knew I’d been through some traumas earlier in my own life and she said, ‘Look at your family and you’ll see patterns that keep repeating themselves. It can be depression, early pregnancies, divorce, illnesses—all sorts of things. Emotional patterns, physical patterns—when you start recognizing and acknowledging the patterns, you can stop them from reemerging in your and your children’s lives. Otherwise you’ll just keep on continually repeating them.’”

  “Yes,” said Anne. “And all this apparently can be revealed through art. That’s what she was explaining to David and me. We were up there with her last week, and we saw her studio in the old cow byre at the back of their cottage. She kept most of her own artwork there—big ethereal canvases of oceanscapes and cloudscapes. Beautiful glowing colors. Sometimes she used gold leaf to emphasize horizons and reflections.”

  Carey nodded vigorously. “Yeah, wonderful pieces. So energetic and yet…peaceful too. I tell you—this whole peninsula is a real hotbed of artistry and healing. There’s a new generation of people here with amazing powers…I really feel blessed that I found this place. In some ways I think, well, like it kind of ‘saved’ me. I was a bit of a mess when I first came and a lot of stuff I’d heard sounded a bit too mumbo jumbo for my tastes—for my needs. But you know, as time went on and I met more people and got involved in handcrafting this house, things began to make much more sense. They lost that dodgy ‘New Age’ image and became…well, I guess you’d say…much more pragmatic…eminently sensible and focused.”

  Then Carey suddenly stopped and chuckled. “I’m wondering…are you two open to a spot of eminently unsensible spontaneity? Right now?”

  “Always,” we answered in unison.

  “Well…why don’t we take a little drive into the mountains. There’s so much to see out there. We’ve got two hundred and fourteen official prehistoric sites on Beara and countless others that aren’t even on the formal record—stone circles, dolmens, souterrains, standing stones, the lot! And there are special places—really special. Julie helped me find my own ‘mother earth place’…I’d love to show it to you…”

  You don’t turn down offers of this kind, and of course, even if you tried to, Carey would somehow carry you off anyway in a surge of effervescent energy.

  Which is precisely what she did.

  Looking back, I remember a magical jumble of images and stories as we drove on rough back roads deeper and deeper into the mountainous heart of this wild peninsula. The scale of the place is utterly confusing. From the map we knew that Beara at its widest point was barely eight miles across from Bantry Bay in the south to the Kenmare River and the hazy hills of the Ring of Kerry to the north. And yet it seemed with Carey as our guide that we wriggled and romped for hours and never appeared to get close to either coast. And it didn’t matter. We had no particular destination in mind, and we were happy just to bounce and float through this secret hinter-land, listening to Carey’s tales and seeing the landscape through her eyes. Eyes that brought the land to life as she pointed to a huge up-surge of broken strata that tore through the turf and towered a good thirty feet into the chill moorland air.

  “That’s Mass Rock—one of a number of places where the Catholics would gather to worship, away from the prying eyes and terrible punishments of the British Protestant overlords a couple of centuries back.”

  She pointed to a nearby broken capstone of an enormous neolithic dolmen, two small stone circles half hidden in thick brush, one very prominent standing stone over ten feet high, and a host of shadowy lumps and bumps in the earth that she insisted were the remains of human settlements over three thousand years old.

  Then we descended rapidly in a series of sudden twists and curls through a rumpus of tumbling hillocks down into a lush valley of alders, dwarf beech, green meadows, and remnants of ancient peat beds close to a winding stream.

  “People around here still treasure their ‘turf rights.’ They’re written into the house and farm deeds and were once very jealously guarded. There’s not so much cutting going on nowadays—you can still see a couple of stacks up there.” Carey pointed up the valley, where a small waterfall tumbled lacelike off a rocky precipice. “But once it was yo
ur lifeblood for the winter. If you didn’t cut enough turf and dry it properly on the moor before carrying it back to your house in your wicker creel basket—some could weigh a hundred and fifty pounds when they were full—then woe betide your winter nights. It’s not so much ice and snow and the like. We never got much of that because of the Gulf Stream. It’s more the damp chill, which can eat into your bones like acid. And I know! I’ve got arthritis, which is why I usually go back to the States during the winter. I could hardly move about if I stayed here!”

  At that very moment, as she conjured up the gray glop of winter, a shaft of brilliant light shot through the clouds and bathed the central part of the valley in a golden sheen. It was almost Edenic in its haloed intensity, reminding me of one of my favorite Dylan Thomas snippets: “And so it must have been after the birth of the simple light in that first spinning space…”

  Carey seemed so delighted in our delight at her secret places that she may have been a little carried away at times. As, for example, when she described bizarre theories about a vast network of underground souterrain communities that once existed across these wild moors. She also told us of a tendency toward cat worship in ancient temples here, as reflected in stones carved with feline faces; the Celtic acknowledgment of “ancient feminine energies”; a theory that pre-Celtic settlers here were of Far Eastern origin; and a great national fear of fairies and their penchant for stealing babies and leaving behind nefarious “changelings,” which still persists today and explains the deposits of “little gifts” for the fairies, particularly around May Day and Halloween.

  “You might well laugh,” said Carey (I was only smiling benevolently, I thought), “but there are still many places here that people are nervous about.” She stopped suddenly at the far edge of the valley with the peat beds. Ahead of us rose an enormous rampart of bare rock hundreds of feet high. A great gash filled with dense scrub split the hillside from top to bottom. “Y’see that place ahead of us?” asked Carey with a sinister tone in her voice. “That’s where the Witch of the Red Door lives. Y’see just to the right of that big split in the rock there’s an area that looks darker than the rest…sort of blood-red…”

  We were a little unsure we could see anything red but nodded anyway.

  “Well—it seems there was once a tribe living here in this valley, and they were starving. The crops had failed and people were dying, so the chief went high up into this cleft, and for three days he prayed to the gods for water and sustenance. And on the fourth day that area of rock—now called the Red Door—opened and out came this beautiful young woman carrying two enormous baskets of food. She walked down toward the people in the valley, and they cheered and grabbed the food from her baskets. And as fast as they grabbed and ate, the baskets would refill themselves. But when the chief saw what was happening he rushed down from the cleft. He was immediately jealous of the power of this woman but also doubted if she was indeed ‘a gift from the gods’ and declared her to be an evil presence. She smiled and approached him, but he turned his back. She approached again, but he cursed her and her ‘evil fairy ways,’ so she dropped the baskets on the ground, walked back into the hillside, and disappeared. And as she vanished, so did the baskets and all the food, and a sheen of red, like a huge spilling of blood, covered the place where she had vanished. And immediately the chief fell dead and all his tribe was left to starve horribly…”

  Carey paused dramatically. “And they say this is still a cursed place and that you must never go anywhere near the Red Door over there…They say people have disappeared…”

  I love the silence that follows an eerie fairy tale and the little tinges of terror, or certainly trepidation, that scamper up and down your spine.

  “And if you like that tale, then I’ve got a real special place I want to take you…I’d like you to meet my favorite person on the whole peninsula…The Hag of Beara.”

  “A hag?! You mean an old woman—a witch?” asked Anne, slightly bemused.

  Carey chuckled. “Well—in essence, yes. A very ancient woman…a mythical figure…the Cailleach Bhearra. You’ve always got to be careful when you visit…You should take a gift—flowers, ribbons, coins, or something shiny—and when you leave, you have to give a bit of yourself as a sign of respect. The locals usually spit on the ground, like they do when they enter cemeteries. They spit and say, ‘God bless all of you.’ Or you can cut off a bit of hair—anything to acknowledge her and the fact you’re pleased to visit her and meet her.”

  “Sounds fascinating,” said Anne. “Is she close by?”

  “Not far—just out of Eyeries on the Kenmare road. Past that very ancient Ballycrovane ogham stone marked with a unique script that looks like knife cuts. One of the world’s earliest written languages, so they say. Up past Kilcatherine church—or what’s left of it. She’s high on a hillside looking out across Inishfarnard island to Kenmare Bay and the Skelligs.”

  “Sounds a great spot. Let’s go, and you can tell us the tale on the way,” I said.

  “Oh God, no! That’s an ancient terror of a tale. Dozens of different tellings…dozens of different names for her.”

  “Yes, but from what I understand, she’s such a vital part of not just Beara folklore, but also the whole of Ireland,” I suggested.

  There was a pause. I knew Carey wanted to tell the tale. She was a natural seanachai, but something was holding her back, and it wasn’t coyness or modesty. I wondered if it was the old bardic fear that, if a tale was told inaccurately or any of the subtle nuances were missing, dire consequences could befall the unfortunate tale teller.

  Eventually she capitulated. “Okay—but mind you, I know various versions based on all kinds of different tales. They’re not gospel or anything. Lots of people will tell you different stories. But this one is about as simple a way as I can tell it—it’s based on Julie’s version of the legend. Some say the Hag’s real name is Boi—wife of Lugh, the Celtic god of light, and one of the original great land goddesses. Y’know, the Great Mother—Magna Mater, source of all fertility, female power, corn goddess, protector of wild nature, symbol of enduring longevity, and all that kind of thing. And she lived on Innes Boi at the tip of Beara. We call it Dursey Island today—a focal point of Ireland’s ‘other world’ of the dead and mysterious beings. There’s a great poem-lament about her written, so they say, around AD 900. She’s the mythical, some think sinister, ‘old woman’ of so many Irish legends. I’m not sure if I can remember all of it, but it goes something like this:

  ‘The old woman of Beara am I

  Who once was beautiful

  Now all I know is how to die

  I do it well

  ‘Look at my skin

  Stretched taught across my bones

  Where kings have placed their lips

  Ah the pain, the pain

  ‘I do not hate men

  Who swore truth rested in their lies

  But one thing I do hate

  Is woman’s eyes

  ‘I drank the great wine with kings

  They rested their loving eyes on my hair

  Now among stinking old hags

  I chew the cud of prayer

  ‘Time was broad as the sea

  And brought kings like slaves to me

  But now I fear the face of God

  And crabs crawl through my blood

  ‘The sea—ah the sea—grows distant now

  Away, away it goes

  And I lie here when the foam dries

  On this deserted land

  Dry as my shrunken limbs

  As the tongue that presses my lips

  As the veins that break through my hands’”

  There was silence. Carey seemed to be trying to remember more, but then she smiled. “I think that’s where it ends…”

  “Fantastic—well done!” said Anne, patting her shoulder. “Amazing images—kings as slaves, hating women’s eyes, crabs crawling in her blood, veins breaking through her hands…”

  “Yeah,�
�� nodded Carey. “Wild stuff, eh? They could really write in the ninth and tenth centuries.”

  “Yes, they could but…I hesitate to ask. What does it all mean?”

  “Well—once again, it depends who’s telling it. She’s been a key part of Celtic-Gaelic tales for so long. You also find talk of her in Scottish legends…but she shape-shifts, depending on the age of the story and the source. The earliest one shows her as the corn goddess, possessor of all the secrets of seed sowing and harvesting, destroyer of male reapers who fail to equal her reaping prowess. Then she becomes kind of a legend for longevity who seemed to live ‘the seven ages of womanhood,’ constantly and simultaneously breeding ‘all peoples and all races.’ And I suppose she was a giantess, because tales of her footprints all over Beara and Dursey Island are well known.”

  “Y’know—Julie told us a long complex tale about her great leaps,” I said. “There was one in particular where she’d soared from a rock near Eyeries across Coulagh Bay to Kilcatherine, leaving behind two huge indentations, which we could actually see in the rock and touch—definitely a size twenty-four in boots, she was!”

  “Well, that sounds like a mixed-up version of another tale where the Hag punished a woman near Hungry Hill for stealing butter. She transformed her into a giant cock, and it left footprints all over Cuaileach and other parts around here. But there’s all kinds of versions, from Yeatsian reverie to gothic horror! Some say she changed herself into a rock on that hillside to guard Ireland’s shores and await the return of her husband, Mannan, Lord of the Sea. Others say that the Hag—as Mother Earth—got into a fight with Mannan. She became so angry that she turned into molten lava and Mannan overwhelmed her. And, as happens to lava when it hits the ocean, she became a solid lump of rock. And—ironically—that rock is claimed to be the only piece of lava on the whole of our peninsula! Another says that this is the form she took in perpetual humility to God when she rejected her pagan origins and became a Christianized nun. A fourth suggests pretty much the opposite—that she transformed herself—or was transformed—into stone because of her hatred of the Christianizing impact on ancient pagan gods. A lesser theme was her being turned into stone by an angry priest from whom she’d stolen a Mass book.”