My phone pinged at 8 this morning to remind me that we should be heading off for this afternoon’s ferry from Cairnryan to Larne; to remind me that I should be soon eating an Ulster Fry with fried soda bread and wheaten; to remind me that I should soon be supping my first velvet Guinness and licking the froth from my upper lip; to remind me that I should be ensconced in a deep armchair beside a peat fire slowly and languorously sipping a rich Irish Coffee through the sweet cream top layer and reaching down to the Bushmills Whiskey beneath. We’ve all sacrificed visits, holidays, outings and I could become very maudlin continuing this, through great craic with friends, our first view of Errigal over the brown and green tweed landscape of Donegal and then the Atlantic crashing through the jagged headlands. Listeners to the Shipping Forecast will remember deep depressions over Malin. This north coast of Ireland, from Larne all around the Antrim coast to the west of Donegal is Deirdre’s annual fix of the wild sea of her childhood. I have to let her wander off along white empty strands, paddling through the cold water, watching the clouds, staring at the distant cliffs. She needs to be Celtic and mistily mysterious for a bit, away with the little folk and the banshees.
Today would have provided a particularly significant opportunity to watch the horizon through the haze and to gaze back romantically1457 years to the day St.Columba set off from Ballycastle to found the Abbey of Iona. In normal circumstances we would have been driving past that very harbour late this afternoon – and coincidentally, today is St.Columba’s Day, the anniversary of his death in AD 597. The picture shows the Swans which are the children of Lir who floated for 100 years on the Moyle Sea beyond (don’t ask me why it’s Celtic and complicated). That sea looks very placid on the picture but can be swept by massive storms and very dangerous currents. To the left is Rathlin Island where St.Columba docked his coracle for the night and over to the right the Mull of Kintyre which provoked Paul McCartney into song.
A Seventh Century Gaelic poem describes the journey:
He crossed the wave-strewn wild region, foam-flecked, sea-filled,
Savage, bounding, seething, white-tipped, pleasing, doleful.
The ancient coracle battling wind and storm, the founding of the Abbey at Iona all swirling in the ancient Celtic mists – a lot of material here for Deirdre to get transcendent and mysterious. A bit of a spoiler is the fact that Columba was doing penance for a blood-shedding feud over his refusal to return a library book, but let’s not spoil the romance of this mystical Celtic moment. Deirdre was christened into the mournfulness of Celtic tragedy, the classic heroine of Irish legend being Deirdre of the Sorrows, who sailed away across this very sea to her doom, a tale singularly lacking in laughs. Finn McCool crossed the same sea on the Giant’s Causeway, which he built to fight the Scottish giant and at the behest of the National Trust, and Richard Branson nearly flew across it in a balloon but crash landed on Rathlin. So you can see it was a pretty busy sea-lane.
Unfortunately it is me now wistfully whisking us away to a land where the light is in the sky until nearly midnight, when in fact we are here in Crich where we don’t have the waves battering the headlands and we strongly deny any rumours of fairies. Ireland may have its ancient standing stones but Crich has the mysterious trail of painted stones magically appearing from the vicarage to the Glebe.
Round and round, like this Celtic Trinity knot, lockdown appears tangled and unfinishing, a mystery journey without end. It has provided lots of opportunities to be solitary and mysterious if that is our bent, and we can be Celtic – Crich after all is a Celtic word and we have some groves of oak trees, so the odd druid would feel at home. And we have had headspace and relief from more practical pressures should we want to explore our status within infinity or bathe in existential dilemmas, or even dream of lands beyond knowing. We can have moments among the stars to encounter the numinous or pauses in the woodlands to sense the spirit that drives the earth; or we can allow our imaginations to transport us beyond the horizons, seeking immortality with Ossian in the lands of Tír na nÓg.
But my advice is you would be better off walking along the canal.