Falling into the story
Riverwitch 11
‘Riverwitch’ is a collaborative project with my husband David Knowles, author of Elvers by Moonlight. It’s the re-membering of fragments 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. For the duration of the project, we’ll 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 ‘Through the meniscus’, which he posted last week. Read it here. The Riverwitch series will end by Winter Solstice.
The audio of my posts is for paid subscribers, below the paywall.
September 2014
It’s just approaching dawn in this green, fertile glen; there’s a glimmer of pink now in the sky to the east. The fading moon is waxing, gibbous, its light still silvering the river which winds through the land, soft like the curves of a woman’s body as she stretches the length of the valley to dip her toes in the sea. A grey heron breaks the silence, shrieking from the banks as I make my way with the dogs across the narrow bridge, walk slowly up the rising lane. At the crossroads, three hares are sitting quite still in the middle of the road; they scatter when they become aware of us, tails flashing white in the moonlight then vanishing into the dark.
Up I go along the stony, uneven track to the high bog, face to the Seven Sisters mountains, silhouetted now against a gradually lightening sky. They are the guardian spirits of this place, gathering around the fringes of the bog like a semicircle of elders, enclosing and protecting the land as it stretches across to the sea. An Earagail, or Errigal, the oratory; Mac Uchta, son of the mountain-breast; An Eachla Mhór, the great horse; Ard Loch na mBreac Beadaí, the heights of the loch of the canny trout; An Eachla Bheag, the little horse; Cnoc na Leargacha, hill of the hill-slope, and old sow-mother An Mhucais, or Muckish, the pig’s back. Every morning I stand still on the boreen and say their names loudly, like an incantation. Every name tells its own story; every mountain holds its own secret; every secret whispered down the scree slopes and sinking into the bog below.
The two horses have fascinated me since I arrived here, but no one – not even the poet – has been able to tell me why these two mountains are so named. I’ve walked through this labyrinth of boreens for a good few weeks now, finding myself strangely drawn to their feet, gazing up at them, examining them, wondering what it was about those two particular mountains that had caused them to be named for horses – for no naming is casually performed in this old country. Names hold power, and memory; names tell the stories of people and their relationships with the land.
I’ve driven past the two horses from time to time; I’ve viewed them from all directions; I’ve sat and stared at them in all weathers. But now, all at once, with this morning’s sun rising behind An Eachla Mhór, with detail deleted and contrast increased so that only its contours can clearly be perceived, I see it. Shadow resolves into shape, and there it is, so very obvious that I can’t imagine how I have missed it for so long: the outline of a large horse, lying down in the bog, its head to the right and its long nose curved back around to rest against its east-facing flank. Next to it, a smaller version, nestled against the Big Horse’s rump, lying down in much the same fashion but facing west instead of east. The revelation feels like a gift for my persistence; it feels like a gift for the continuous seeking, for a genuine desire to understand the stories of this new land.
I wind back along a tiny path to cut home across the fields, but first I have to navigate the ford: a shallow pool in a sheltered hollow through which a deep and fast-flowing stream can be crossed. The ford froths blood-red at the edges with iron precipitates, and I creep down to it carefully in the still-dim light, half expecting to catch a glimpse of the bean nighe, the Washerwoman at the Ford: the old woman of legend who scrubs clean the bloody clothes of slain warriors.
Behind the ford is a single, clearly defined hill, a green breast rising from the soft contours of the land. It is crowned with heather, wiry and dormant now, spreading across its crest like a wide brown nipple. We call it a fairy hill, for these are the places which lead to the Otherworld – the beautiful, perilous dwelling-place of the fairy folk: the Aos Sí, the people of the mounds. Once upon a time, inside a hill like this, Celtic women were transformed into the wisest creatures in the land.
In the Otherworld, wisdom is largely possessed by women, since they are the ones who bear the Cup. The Queen of the Aos Sí decided one day to bestow that gift on human women too, and so she sent out an invitation to all the women of the land, asking them to come to her great hall beneath the hill on a certain date and at a certain time. The news was carried on the winds and the waves, by the birds and the fish; even the leaves of the trees whispered of it. Soon, women from all over the country began to set out on their journey. Some travelled alone, some came together, and when the appointed day dawned, the doors to the Otherworld opened.
The women streamed inside the hill – and gasped to find themselves in a beautiful hall which was draped with bright cloths woven from nettles and dyed with the blood of shellfish and the sap of plants. Soft animal skins covered the floors and seats; a feast was laid out on tables of wood and stone, set on plates of pearly shell. A soft green light pervaded the vast hall. When everyone was inside and the watchers saw no more coracles on the water, no more women climbing up the slope of the hill, the doors to the outside world were closed.
Into the hall then came the Queen, bearing herself with kindly dignity, her face shining with a strange but lovely light. She carried a large golden Cup in her hand, bright with unusual marks and carvings; eight fairy women followed behind, each carrying a golden flagon of sparkling liquid which they used to continually fill the Cup. The Queen passed through the hall, offering a drink from the Cup to each of the women who was present. The Cup held the distilled wisdom of the world through all the ages past, and as each woman drank she suddenly grew wise, and understood many things she had never known before. Some were able to see much, some were able to see just a little – but every one of them benefitted. And then the women feasted, and the next morning they went back out into the world again, filled with the wisdom and knowledge of the Otherworld.
(An addition to this story is sometimes told: Just as the ceremony ended and the feast began, there came a hammering on the walls and doors of the hall. The fairy folk looked out, and saw the hill covered with latecomers who had arrived after the doors were closed. They had been unable to enter and were unable now to receive the gift of wisdom. There is still a saying in Gaelic about a woman considered to be foolish: ‘She was out on the hill when the wisdom was distributed.’)
Here in Ireland, the Otherworld is as real as any other. This is a landscape steeped in stories, and those stories stalk us still. They have seeped into the bones of this land, and the land offers them back to us; it breathes them into the wind and bleeds them out into streams and rivers. They will not be refused.
November 2024
When I left Lewis, I wondered whether I’d ever again fall so deeply into the dreaming of any other land. Whether I’d ever feel myself so keenly to be a part of its stories, a member of its dreaming community. Though there has never been for me another relationship as profound as my relationship with the land on Lewis, moving to Donegal showed me that I’d nevertheless acquired some skill in the fine art of placemaking.
It begins with knowing the physical realities of your place – the ecology, the geology, the weatherscape, the other-than-human inhabitants – but it always ends in story. First, you need to know the pre-existing stories of the land. When places and features of the landscape are tied to old stories, knowing and remembering those stories as we walk through the land can help to weave us into its history, connecting us to ancestral voices and raising our awareness of the continuity of human relationship with the place – so helping us to establish meaningful and enduring bonds with the land in which we live. Specific geographical features of the land take on symbolic importance, and, knowing their stories now, we find ourselves forming personal relationships with them. As Canadian explorer of oral traditions Robert Bringhurst tells us, ‘stories are some of the basic constituents of the world’ – and to know a place’s stories – how it came into being, the history of human culture there, the stories of its flora and fauna, the legends and folklore which arose from it – is to begin to understand its basic constituents. Just like knowing the stories of a friend, we find that we can engage with the place in a deeper way, so that it becomes more personal to us, and more real.
The second part of the puzzle is the collection of new stories that we ourselves co-create with the land. In Donegal, I began to put into practice what I’d learned on Lewis, in memory of the strange and wonderful things that had happened to me there. I expected myth and I expected mystery – and so eventually, I found both.
