Celtic Clip Art Border by Gunther at Synergy.
'Joys of Spring.'
On a blustery day last week, Del and I heading north and west, the car packed with supplies and camping gear, off to explore Mayo.
Bypassing Limerick, thankfully, and driving up through Clare and on into Galway, where we play the tourist for a couple of hours and enjoy the aquarium, though just who is watching who I wouldn't like to say.
Then on through squally wet and dull afternoon driving through some dismal coastal bogland, muted browns and grays beneath a lowering sky and dotted with the worst kind of bungalows imaginable.
Quite disheartening.Late afternoon, or early evening, Clifden. Pleasant meal, then driving out in the failing light to find somewhere to camp; except that we forgot the tent! So at last stopping on a grassy place between the road and the sea, we settled down for the night in the back of the estate. Warm and dry, if somewhat buffeted by the galeforce winds shaking the car. Up early the following morning. Change a flat tyre, then a breakfast of lukewarm tea, bread, and fig-rolls!
Soon packed and on the road again. Head off up to Westport as the land about us changes from sodden open bog to small fields and starts to rise to the mountains, becoming more nod more dramatic. Down the fiord to Lenane (where 'The Field' was filmed), then turning around to go almost due west down another branch of the same fiord, passing roadside monuments to famine dead along the way.
As we drive through the countryside seeing dramatic changes, from high mountain bog and blanket bog, then dropping down through little fields to a strip of a coastal plain between the mountains and the sea.
Fertile land, of kindly fields and trees. .We see a sign for a stone circle at a place called Glebe. Small circle of much broken limestones amidst a bed of chives that seem to have colonized the site.
Then on a few miles and we see a sign pointing to "Kelly's Cave". The Book says 'an ancient natural cave in which were found Bronze Age burials'. Short footpath walk to where we find steps going into the ground, whit a half-barred gate into the cave proper.
We climb the gate into a wonderful dome-roofed chamber about 35' long, 20 high and 20 wide, with steps at the far end leading into a small 'chapel' with 2' of crystal clear water covering it's floor.
I make an offering of light. I bathe, feeling the power of offering my circle in this temple of the crone.
'Kelly's Cave' is, I believe, a corruption of Cailleach (old woman, crone).Then, back into the mountains climbing through a steep high pass and dropping down to a dramatic landscape of fields and lakes and high mountain moor. A sweeping breathtaking mournful landscape.
Who does not know of the Irish potato famine?
Well, in Mayo it was really bad. The people lived on potatoes and little else, maybe buttermilk and some pig meat in good times, so when the potato failed they starved and died in tens of thousands. You can still see the ghosts of their fields; long rows up the hillsides hand dug 'lazy beds' about a yard wide and as long as would go.
So sad and melancholic amidst this dramatic backdrop of mountains and lakes.
High on a hill amidst an ancient cairn of stones is a Cilin (killeen) a children's burial place. The final insult of the Roman church that would not bury unbaptized babies in its holy ground.
So as priest I poured water and asked my own gods to cherish any lost souls here, to be answered by the pressure of a clean wind that swept with great strength this stone encrusted hilltop
An irony, don't you think, that the christian Roman church abandoned its most innocent and precious dead to the old places and their kinder gods.
And so, with quiet and careful barefoot steps I leave this hallowed place, and for all its sadness felt in myself a lightness of spirit, and turned my footsteps (or rather the car...) to the last few miles of road leading to the friend that we were visiting.
Very conscious of Spring here at Pook. There is an embering of green fire over all the hedges, and the morning wake-up call from our songbirds seems to come earlier and louder each day!
Still no cuckoo. This herald of summer has not, I hope gone the way of the corncrake, and so many others of our wild family.So, on this note, I'll close, but with this:
If we are truly pagan, and this is Earth Based spirituality, then we should at least be conscious of our proper place within the circle of planetary being.love and hope.
Bev.
April, 2002.
