Falling Away
Riverwitch #9
‘Riverwitch’ is a collaborative project with my husband David Knowles, author of Elvers by Moonlight. It’s the re-membering of a blog duet we began in 2014, mapping our dislocation from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides to Donegal in north-west Ireland. It offers a story-within-a-story as, ten years on, we try to make sense of the ways in which places claim us, mark us – and then, when it’s time, cast us loose. We take turns every Wednesday to revisit an old post and add new reflections and insights. If you’re new here, for the background to this project, please read this post first.
The previous post in this series was David’s ‘Escorted off the premises’, which he posted last week. Read it here.
The audio of my posts is for paid subscribers, below the paywall.
Leavings, May 2014
Poised as you still seem to be on the edge of a sharp knife, there is a moment when it no longer cuts both ways, when the mourning stops and the longing begins. That moment is now, as you pack your bag and the dogs’ bags in anticipation of your journey on Friday to ‘a house with no upstairs/ But heaven enough/ To be going on with’ (Seamus Heaney, ‘To Mick Joyce in Heaven’). In that moment you realise that in truth, you left this place some months ago, that the creature who has been clinging to these so-familiar watery edges is little more a ghost, haunting the shadows of what formerly was. Which is no bad thing at all, in this long, strange chapter of the story of your life: some things need to properly die before others can be born. But the fact is that you have little patience with ghosts. You want that small green country that sang to you first at four years old, and you want it now. That land of your great-grandfather, that place to which you have always felt you might possibly belong.
This is no final leave-taking, though: there’ll be a month by the river and then one last return, to pack up your belongings and run a long-scheduled women’s retreat in the big wooden house at the edge of the village. But it’s now that you begin to properly say your goodbyes.
What you will carry with you, to the river?
Lapwing and sea-eagle, otter and seal. Rock and stone, seaweed and seashell. Bog-water, saltwater, burn and stream. Seaswell and landswell, strainer and post. Bones and bog cotton, beachcombings and beach-foundlings. Mealasbhal, Mealista, Mangurstadh. Scarp, the Flannans, Hiort and Boreray. Celandine, milkwort and sundew. A small, close-knit tribe of black, horned Hebridean sheep: Wonky, Little Horn, Mrs King. Small, Mrs King’s last lamb. All their relations. Norma, a gentle Jacob ewe who ate out of your hand. A fine and lusty Light Sussex cockerel called The Lewis Man; the bones of a faithful, dead old dog, buried at the foot of the croft. The shadow of a cow called Brighid and the memory of a pig called Doris. Two lost hives of bees. The too-bright maddening nights of summer, and the long, hard winter dark.
What you will find there?
A story for another day.
Arrivals, May 2014
The early days in any new place, no matter how longed-for and eagerly anticipated, are always intensely dislocating. That sense of being other, alien; the fleeting flashes of anxiety when you venture beyond the safe boundaries of the beautiful little house by the river which called to you from the first moment you saw it. When you wonder for a moment where it is that you have landed, what you will do there, what you will become.
A sharp dislocation has haunted the edges of my first days here with David and the dogs, though I am confident about my reasons for being in this place. I’m here because this is the country I always want to run to when I don’t know who I am any more. When my poor choices nip and tear at me, and the safety I’ve spent my entire life trying to capture and tame breaks free of its bonds and runs, cackling, for the hills.
It’s the tiniest of moments that first fractures the spell that has kept me frozen and afraid. It is six in the morning and I walk across the river with two eager collies, heading up the track to the old bog road. The early light constantly shifts. Sun over Muckish, mist over Errigal. Dark clouds in the wide skies between, lacerated by insistent rays which tease and flash through every torn gap. Three mallards splash up from the river below us and clatter their way south.
I let the dogs off the leash and slowly turn full circle, knowing now what I will see. The brightness of the sea reflected in the sky, and the remarkable silhouette of Tory Island to the north-west. Muckish mountain to the east, the Derryveagh mountains to the south-east, Errigal to the south, Gortahork to the west. In each direction the light is different. The dogs play chase-and-tumble among dry tussocks of grass and stonechats flutter in the heather.
A heron flies high, heading downstream along the path of the river, and in the moment that I spot her I know for sure that I will come, and soon, to know and love this strange, wild land. I’m not quite there yet: I don’t understand the stories of this place and I can’t read its seasons. But I know that there are eagles in the Derryveagh mountains and selkies in the Donegal sea; I know that sooner or later, they will find me.
The process of learning to belong to any new place is in part a process of internal mapping. Not just physical mapping – I know where this track leads; I know what is over that hill – but emotional mapping, as the landscape begins to reveal its mysteries to you, to hint at its stories. It is about building attachments to particular locations and features which, over time, become familiar and loved. You can learn to belong anywhere in this way, if you choose. It’s an act of creation, and like all acts of creation, it’s also an act of love, an enormous leap of faith.
There are no easy answers to the many questions of belonging. All I know is this: when the earth trembles beneath me and the wind threatens to blow the roof off the house; when tidal waves come crashing around my feet and fire burns away the tree trunks I’m trying to anchor myself to – the image of this country rises up from the ashes. Where it has always been, locked in my heart since I was a child. ‘What does it mean to belong,’ a friend wrote recently, ‘when so little, if anything, in this life can truly be said to belong to you?’ I don’t know the answer to the larger question, but maybe I can answer the smaller one nested inside it. For now, at least, it simply means this.
Loudly, I breathe out – and even though I will have to head back across two seas one last time before I can sink my roots firmly into this new soil, something in me seems to have settled that has been unsettled for far too long.
Reflections, November 2024
It’s true that, ever since I was a small child, an image of Ireland as a country full of music and magic has been lodged in my heart. Though I didn’t actually set foot on Irish soil till I was thirty, I had always loved the country with an intensity that I could never really explain. Maybe, in part, it was ancestral: my great-grandfather Jimmy Dunn was an Irishman – and a family legend. He had, we were told, fathered thirteen children on his first wife in Ireland, who died giving birth to her final set of twins. He then had another thirteen children with his second wife, in the north-east-of-England town in which he eventually chose to settle. The youngest of that second set of thirteen children was my maternal grandmother.
When I was four years old, after my mother had divorced my Scottish father, she fell for a golden-haired, blue-eyed Irishman whose roots were in County Tipperary. Sean moved in, and brought with him a small but perfectly formed collection of Irish folk music LPs: a vivid miscellany of comic and cautionary tales, tragic ballads and fiery rebel songs. Those songs infused me with a strong sense of the landscape, history and culture of this vibrant, passionate country which seemed so different from my own. And as an antidote to a drab and difficult world, I spent much of the rest of my childhood and teenage years engrossed in Irish folk and fairy tales, myths and legends, literature and poetry.
I spent a couple of years in Connemara in my early thirties, before the break-up of my first marriage sent me fleeing across another sea to America. But I always felt as if I’d left unfinished business behind me – as if I hadn’t fully imbibed my share of Ireland’s magic and mystery before it became necessary to leave. Perhaps it was that feeling which sent me back again, twenty years on.
In 2014, I imagined I’d stay in Ireland forever. (Not necessarily in Donegal – and indeed, three years later, we moved back to Connemara, where my love affair with that unique west-of-Ireland combination of bog and lake and mountain had begun.) I soon embarked on the long process of becoming and Irish national, and you’ll appreciate perhaps the irony of the fact that I attended the citizenship ceremony a couple of weeks before we returned to Britain, six years later. Ireland, it seemed, still couldn’t hold me the second time around.
