Thin Places

by Kerri ni Dochartaigh

  I sat at my kitchen table that satnav moth night and I knew I had to do something – anything – to make me feel like I was actually taking action. Like I was doing something that might make some kind of difference. I took out my phone and the first – the only thing – that I could think of was to find an online Irish translation app. I felt it so fully, for the first time, the link between the past and the future, the land and the language, and my place in it all. I felt stuck in the gaps between these markers of our confused, lost maps. I knew I was not alone; all of us in Ireland are living on a land scarred by much that has been lost, and by much that we must learn how to begin to protect. The hedgerows and rivers, the sea and the mountains, the laneways and stone-scattered bog-land: these are part of us. They are part of our past and our identity. The things that live alongside us have names that many of us do not know, were never taught – and that night I could see it all so clearly. Naming things, in the language that should always have been offered to you, is a way to sculpt loss. A way to protect that which we still have. Naming and language, hand in hand, called to me that night.

  I began to look, and to listen; I began to search. I didn’t stop searching until my phone battery died. Until I was shattered from the device’s blue lights, and from crying. That winter night, almost a year ago, I sat in near darkness flooded by memories from the past. That night, and for some time afterwards, I couldn’t quite tie it all up; I couldn’t see any thread that connected my thoughts – they felt jumbled and confused, born from grief. Grief so different from that which I already knew. This was collective, overwhelming, inescapable, unstoppable. Eco grief: the knowledge that we have lost so much – creatures, plants and places – that we mostly stand no chance at being able to bring back. The knowledge that the earth has been changed so vastly, so drastically, so fully, that we can never reverse the process. The knowledge that one person cannot stop, change or undo this – any of it – but that we have to choose if we will stand back and watch, or if we will fight. I had known for years that the climate was changing, the earth was being compromised, that our species was putting those we share this planet with at serious risk. But that night something was born in me that has grown and grown. A grief that has multiplied and magnified, that has taken up residence in me, that shares my habitat. I am changed by it, and I am ready for action. This grief settled in beside grief from so many other losses, from so many other stages of my life. Perhaps those of us who have lost so much already cannot help but feel differently about the loss of moths.

  The first thing I translated that night was the word ‘satnav’, mostly out of embittered anger. The Irish words for satnav are: loingseoireacht satailíte. The Irish word for the exquisite creature that the caller killed, that winged beauty is leamhan. I searched word after word – writing them down on a piece of paper and guessing how to pronounce them as they danced on the paper like lights on rippling water. I’ve never felt I was allowed to learn, let alone try to speak my own native language. There is not a single member of my family that was ever taught Irish, on either side. The Protestant primary school we were sent to, followed by the grammar school I attended, made the choice not to teach Irish. In the first housing estate we lived on, the Protestant one, a word of Irish being used in any way other than as ridiculing abuse, would have seen you victimised to the point of being put out. When we lived on the Catholic housing estate, Irish was used as a means of ostracising, too. I remember not even knowing if the words being spoken were real Irish, or if the lads from the house across the road were just making them up, testing us with a language that was indecipherable.

  When I thought back to the last time I’d heard Irish – the real language – being spoken, the memory came back much quicker and with more depth than I expected. It had been in the summer, around half a year before that night, and the day in question had been full of living moths and butterflies in the summer shadow of Muckish Mountain in the part of Donegal where the Irish language is still on people’s tongues. The light there was a kind that I had not really experienced before; the silence was the same. I was making my way along a path cut through the mountain, more or less unchanged for centuries so few are the journeys made through that part of rural Ireland these days. Less than two hundred years ago, this road would have seen so many human travellers it would have been impossible to keep count. The road I was on last summer, the last time I heard Irish being spoken, was a Famine Road: one of many rural Irish tracks laden with loss and sorrow. These tracks carried people from their homes across Ireland – from the impoverished dwellings of their kith and kin – to the boats at the quaysides, in which they would set sail from their homeland for ever. The lucky ones left by foot, traversing paths through the only land they had ever known, on roads that they would never set eyes or feet on again. Roads that will hold the memory of them on their surface for who knows how long still to come.

  I stopped at a wee stone bridge beside another vehicle and all of us, the occupants from both cars, stood together beneath a strong white light that seemed to be the root of all the stillness.

  The place where I stopped that day, where a couple beside me spoke to one another in soft, lapping Irish, was ‘The Bridge of Sorrows’. In my silent kitchen, still reeling from the death of a moth in a stranger’s car, I remembered reading about those emigrants who left Ireland long ago in hope of a brighter tomorrow.

  Right beside the little stone bridge a plaque reads first in Irish, with this English translation beneath:

  Family and friends of the person leaving for foreign lands would come this far. Here was the separation. This is the Bridge of Tears.

  The silence of the kitchen was nothing in comparison to that stone Famine Bridge. All of a sudden, I could almost hear the solitary curlew that had sung its siren song above me that summer’s day. I could see, in the blue light of the radio, all the butterflies that had danced around me in that space, so defined by loss, grief and sorrow seeping down through ancient peat bog into the otherworld. No matter the devastating loss that Donegal has been hit by, that ethereal, beautiful marsh fritillary has, somehow, returned to parts of the bog that are slowly being managed and cared for. I translated that creature in my kitchen, too – from English into the native tongue that I had never felt the loss of before: fritileán réisc.

  The next day, I bought my first Irish dictionary and started to spend my lunchtimes in Cultúrlann Uí Chanáin, the Irish language centre in Derry. I learned there, through talking to the barista in the café, that in the part of the Gaeltacht where I’d watched the butterflies dancing above the bridge – Cloughaneely – where Irish was, and may still be, spoken with strength, butterflies have a different name. She didn’t know what the name was but she was certain it was specific to that area.

  I researched for weeks, eventually finding the name. The Donegal bog word for butterfly is dealan-dé. It has roots in the word ‘fireflaught’, and speaks of the phenomenon observed by shirling a stick lighted at the end: a flash of lightning that comes to you from somewhere closer than the sky. The Donegal Gaeltacht word for butterfly, I discover, is the same word as for the Aurora Borealis: the lights that dance so magically in that liminal place between here and there, then and now, this world and the other. Like the marsh fritillary, my ancestors watched the Northern Lights dance above the vast, wild surface of the earth, imagining that the bog itself had birthed both of these breathtakingly beautiful wonders.

  I think back to that plaque on the Bridge of Sorrows, on a Famine Road that still holds its losses embedded in its stones. Those marks that spoke of separation and of tears, of an endless, echoing grief. Long before the building of the railway, or modern roads, this was the only real route from that place to Derry, the place I in turn had fled at the first chance I got. Those who made that journey from here into the port of my hometown were bound for England, Scotland, Australia, Canada or America. Those who were not tramping onwards, the friends and family of those who were departing, would have had no exp
ectation of ever seeing their loved one again. The moment of their parting would have borne a kind of loss I am not sure we can fully comprehend today – the loss from your life, without quarrel or other natural cause, of a dearly loved figure, the near death, in a way, of one who may still go on to outlive you, without you ever seeing their face again. I tried to envision all the weeping that hoary bridge had witnessed in its span, silvered, salted and scoured over centuries by bawling winds. By wailing bog winds, and by the caoineadh – the keening – that still vibrates like a dirge. That still echoes above the gorse like a tolling omen, a mourners’ hymn, knelling above the curlew’s nest like a chant. Like a pealing lament born of stone, born of tears.

  I, for one, am not ready for any more separation – from the natural world, from those I do not want to lose, from myself and my sense of worth. I know that I am not alone, either. I am not ready to lose another single thing.

  We have lost humans, too, so many people have died, or have left through trauma. Some have chosen to end their own lives; they had reached a point they could not see any way back from. Suicide has had an immense impact on my life, and on the lives of many in the North of Ireland. The suicide rate in Northern Ireland is the highest in the UK – over twice what it is in England – and one of the highest in the world. More people have now died through suicide since the Good Friday Agreement than were killed in political violence during the Troubles. Suicide rates in those years, have, in fact, doubled. Of twenty-eight countries that participated in the World Mental Health survey in 2017, Northern Ireland had the highest rate of PTSD. Talking about traumatising experiences, as peace has unfolded, has remained a difficult thing. A culture of silence takes years, perhaps, to break. This year alone, of the six deaths that have touched my life, it is likely that three of those we have lost ended their own lives. The cause of death wasn’t shared at the third funeral – that of the closest female friend I have ever had – and it all feels too raw to explore the events that led to her death. She had told me – so many times that I have had to lose count – that she was going to end her life. Every time the words came out, the pain I felt thinking about her suffering, and the worry about what I was meant to do, floored me. I have only recently stopped feeling wracked with guilt at ending our friendship the year before she died. She was one of the people I have loved most in my lifetime, but from the very beginning until its ending it was one of the most abusive relationships I have ever known.

  At least two other friends ended their own lives this year, that much I know for certain. One of those struggled with addiction; the other had long been suffering with mental ill health. Both men were gentle, good people who felt the impact of the place where they were raised. The fourth person died of organ failure, resulting from alcoholism. Loss in Northern Ireland, for many people, consists of layer upon layer of despondency and hopelessness – things that are exceptionally hard for one person to shift on their own, just trying to get through.

  I think of the loss of our identity, our language, of our traditions and culture: the things we are told make us who we are. I cannot help but see it all tied up together with the same rope. How can we protect ourselves from things that we cannot talk about? How can we protect things that we cannot name?

  I hope our Scottish caller, like me, struggles to get that moth out of his head. I hope that he begins to awaken every morning with the ‘want’ upon him, a hunger for all those things already lost.

  I have returned to the site of my trauma and I am allowing the land to hold me in its strong, silent hands. I have found the words for butterflies in my native tongue, and I am drawing their lines on my insides. I am ready, now, to speak of unnameable things. I know that so, so many of us are. To stand together under an ever-changing sky, and to speak of things like healing and learning, the saving of things that can still be saved.

  To stand together under a sky that – no matter how grey and uncertain – still holds room for butterflies, moths, dragonflies and things we once were too fearful to name; things like whispered hope.

  The Irish word for hope is dóchas, or dóigh, and holds, deep within its ancient roots, glimmers of the Irish word for giving, for belonging, for beauty: dóighiúil.

  Yes, we are ready, now, to speak of hope. We have the words for it, and that changes things. In fact, that changes everything.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Frozen River

  WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO come from a hollowed-out place? From a place that is neck-deep in the saga of loss? What does it mean when your origins trace a line made of leaving – of going away to far away lands – with the knowledge that this goodbye was to be the very last on any shoreline that you could touch? What effect does where you come from, and what that land has been through, have on the map of your self? How deeply can a person feel the fault lines of their home running through their own veins? In Celtic lands it is not unusual to use the landscape as a mnemonic map. Geographical features hold a particular importance for our history, beliefs and culture – places make up the lines of our very being. There is an understanding that we are part of and not separate from the land we inhabit. Celtic legends place the natural world at the very heart of the story, maybe even inside its bones. In such stories things in the natural world can possess a spirit and presence of their own; mountains, rocks, trees, rivers – all things of the land and the sea – sing their own lament. Locations can be associated with a particular warrior, hero or deity. Places are tied to stories by threads that uncoil themselves back beyond known history, passed on through oral tradition, only some of which have been written down.

  Amongst these geographical features, whether manmade – such as ancient mounds and standing stones – or naturally created features, it is not unusual for some to be associated with the worship of pre-Christian deities. The aos sí (or aes sídhe) is an Irish term for a race that is other than human, that exists in Irish, Scottish and Manx mythology, inhabiting an invisible world that sits in a kind of mirroring with our own. They belong to the Otherworld, Aos Sí – a world reached through mists, hills, lakes, ponds, springs, loughs, wetland areas, caves, ancient burial sites, cairns and mounds. The island from which I come had no choice, really, than to find a name for these dancing, beating, healing places where the veil between so very many things is thin, where it has been known to lift, right before our humble, grateful eyes.

  The folklore of almost every culture holds room for these liminal spaces – those in-between places – those unnamable places, not to be found on any map. Are these thin places spaces where we can more easily hear the land, the earth, talking to us? Or are they places in which we are able to feel more freely our own inner selves? Do places such as these therefore hold power?

  We have built up a narrative over many years – decades, centuries? – of ‘nature’ as ‘other’. There is so much separation in the language we use with each other; we seek to divide humanity from its own self again and again, and this has naturally bled into how we view the land and water that we share with one another – and with other species. What do we mean when we talk about ‘nature’? About ‘place’? I want to know what it all means. I need to try to understand. When we are in a place where the manmade constructs of the world seem as though they have crumbled, where time feels like it no longer exists, that feeling of separation fades away. We are reminded, in the deepest, rawest parts of our being, that we are nature. It is in and of us. We are not superior or inferior, separate or removed; our breathing, breaking, ageing, bleeding, making and dying are the things of this earth. We are made up of the materials we see in the places around us, and we cannot undo the blood and bone that forms us.

  In thin places people often say they experience being taken ‘out of themselves’, or ‘nearer to god’. The places I return to over and over – both physically, and in my memory – certainly do hold the power to make me feel light and hopeful, as though I am not quite of this world. Of much more power, though, is the way in which these places leave me fee
ling rooted – as utterly and completely in the landscape as I ever feel, as much a part of it as the bones and excrement that lie beneath my feet, as the salt and silt that course through the water. For me, it is in this that the absolute and unrivalled beauty of thin places lies.

  Due to the fact that I grew up on a sea and storm-sculpted island, my earliest experiences of thin places involved water. Being beside water, by a river, waterfall, stream or on a shoreline, carries us into a state of existence neither here nor there. Many people experience water as a nourishing, calming thing, and water features over and over in the history, economy, culture and mythology of Ireland. In Irish mythology rivers and streams are often a boundary between this world and the Otherworld. Ireland’s ancient rivers are steeped in tales about the ancient Gaelic gods of the Tuatha Dé Danann – the folk of the goddess Danu. The names of many rivers in Ireland are testament to the enduring power of these ancient deities. After the period of Christian conversion in Ireland (from the fourth century CE onwards) the awareness of old pagan deities was not lost. It remained in our stories, traditions and folklore and often merged into tales associated with important figures, and saints linked with the newly arriving religion.

  The River Foyle is around eighty miles long. It flows through Lifford, County Donegal, Strabane and County Tyrone. It then flows to the city of Derry, where the Troubles began, then into Lough Foyle and finally out – into the body of the wild Atlantic Ocean.

  The river that courses through my hometown shape-shifts at one point in its journey into a rich, silvery lough. A lough that speaks of belonging and of not, a lough that lies, in many ways, in the gaps in between.