In the country of Riverwitch
Riverwitch #5
‘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 ‘Dropping Back’, which he posted last week. Read it here.
The audio of my posts is for paid subscribers, below the paywall.
Early February, 2014
Last weekend I made a pilgrimage – a journey to the territory of Riverwitch. To the simple old cottage which I have named Teach Dhoire an Easa: the house by the waterfall in the oak wood. For this one week, to take possession of it – or, so it now seems, to have it take possession of me. Don’t doubt that it’s a pilgrimage to come here: it’s a journey across two seas. First, the fumbling old ferry across the Minch (ever vigilant for a rare glimpse of the mythic Blue Men); then, after a long drive all the way down to the far south-west corner of Scotland, on across the Irish Sea to Belfast. A three-hour drive through the rolling hills and fertile fields of Ulster, a snowy stumble through the mountains, on a little farther, all the way west – and now I find myself here, and home.
Home? Home vanished in a puff of smoke on the sunny seasonal festival of Lughnasa last year. Lughnasa! – you couldn’t make it up. The early-August quarter-day in which, so the old traditions would have it, we mythically reap what we mythically sow. It’s an idea that works quite well in theory, until you end up mythically reaping what someone else has mythically sewn. Then, quite simply, you’re fucked. And so here I am, dispossessed. I’m running now for Ireland, which might just be the last place I properly felt at home.
There’s a stillness inside this cosy, damp old cottage; it wraps itself around me and seems to smile. It has caught me up and landed me, for all my unexpected unmoorings. It is strong while I have felt so weak; it is solid and squarely grounded, while the river it watches over is fleeting and fluid.
Riverwitch! It’s her voice which catches you first: a raucous, joyful clatter of sound as she tumbles down the waterfall, somersaults across the stepping stones, and plunges down through the lush green valley to the ocean. Her voice is everywhere, in and around this tiny old house. Today she is in full spate, and she is glorious. Always she flows on, and there is no stopping her: she is everywhere and nowhere; she travels on by, and still she remains. The land thirsts for her; the sun sees himself reflected in her. She is the Earth’s laughter, her accompaniment the whispers of trees, her stories the dreams of fish.
She is what I have thirsted for, for so long. The flow of all of my longings, the flow of all of my journeys.
No matter how deeply we lose ourselves in the dark woods, we can always picture the shining thread of the river, far off in the distance. There are times when you need to retreat to the wilderness, to cast yourself away on a treeless island surrounded by stormy seas. But there are times when you need the subtle flow of a river, the laughter of a waterfall and the deep, slow presence of trees.
October, 2024
Some things are hard to explain. Sometimes, years later, we might lose the will even to try. There’s too much backstory wrapped up in it, too much personal cartography, too much deep-time psychogeology. So I’ll simply say this: by the time I arrived in Donegal on the eve of Imbolc in 2014, I had long stopped believing in the idea of forever. In the space of four short years I had now reluctantly departed from two places in which I’d once planned to stay forever; you can bet that I’d stopped believing in the idea of home, too. But here I now was, in possession of a single key to the rickety red front door of a tiny old white-painted cottage with an attached, stone-stepped hayloft, nestled in the Seven Sisters Mountains of Donegal. You’ve read the old stories, and you’ll know how this one goes: I put the key in the lock, I turned it – and everything clicked perfectly into place.
It was only my second visit to the cottage; the first had been just four months earlier. Floored, and desperate for a safe place as far away from Lewis as possible, I’d snapped it up on what might have appeared to be a whim. I spotted the photograph on the estate agent’s website and off I clattered, flying across two seas to see it. It was the stark, simple beauty of it that caught me, nestled as it was in a hollow, with iconic, conical Mount Errigal looming over it a little way to the south. When I stepped out of the car to the rush of running water at the bottom of the garden, that river seemed to be singing a song of home. Whether or not I still believed in home, home still seemed to believe in me.
Ireland still seemed to believe in me, though I hadn’t been back for eighteen long years. Eighteen years since I’d had to flee from another tiny stone cottage by a river, just a four-hour drive to the south of this one. The irony of it wasn’t lost on me. I’d been fleeing an increasingly unstable first husband, and I didn’t stop running till I’d leapt across the Atlantic and crash-landed in America. Fleeing from, fleeing to, and Ireland somehow in the centre of it all, balancing everything, holding it all together.
Would it hold me together, now? The river seemed to promise that it would.
To the extent that we ever have the ability to look back and plot our uncharted courses – and for sure, I’m no wise old Fate, assessing the larger map, measuring and allotting and clipping a stray thread here and there – it seems to me now that the leaving of Lewis was a painful but necessary step for me to take. I don’t believe I would have done the work I’ve done, written the books I’ve written, if I’d stayed there. Nevertheless, the rupture left a heart-shaped, world-sized hole at the centre of me that would take some time to fill.
