Irish Peat, Pots and folklore embedded in the beautiful Irish scenery
When we purchased our little acre in West Cavan we were novice gardeners but we soon found out that in our townland we were thought to have enviable gardening soil. It was rich in peat and while that is highly acidic it also is very fertile. The blackberries and nettles that flourished confirmed that local opinion. The peat rich bog land hosts a wealth of natural flora. My personal favorite is seeing the appearance each spring of bog cotton, which most certainly does seem like the fiber that fed the engines of the Industrial Revolution. This plant is completely rural though.
There is a sort of saucer shaped dip in the southwestern corner of the field where a previous owner had harvested turf to burn for fuel. We have never done this but there are plenty of locals who have turf rights to cut sods from the bogs on common land on Boleybrack. Handcutting and ‘footing’ of the sods is still done in the early summer and the turf is stacked to air dry before being carted home for a family’s consumption.
Machine harvestings has become outlawed on blanket bog which is now conserved. The blanket bog on Cuilcagh Mountain National Park has been brought back into good heart with the help of the Marble Arch Caves Global Geopark. Harvesting had adversely affected water run off into the lower lying land in counties Cavan and Fermanagh. Flooding became more prevalent in the underground caverns that zigzag beneath the international boundary between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Conservation management measures create a win-win for natural habitat and humans who can be affected by flash flooding. Apart from being used for home heating there is another product from the bogs.
Turf Stacks near Cavan Burren Forrest
When we started to create our garden on this peat rich acre we needed to deal with one problem – drainage. In came the JCB. In the course of creating a series of ditches for rain run off the digger also unearthed some bog oak. Both bog oak and bog fir have macerated and been preserved for thousands of years in peat. One of the first human residents might have used a flint axe to fell that tree. Or perhaps weather or other non-human agents topple the preserved wood that has been buried for thousands of years.
This naturally hard wood is used by Irish sculptors to create many works of art and jewellry. Welsh born artist Idris Bowen is just one artist who uses this material to create unique carvings that are inspired by Irish myth and Celtic legend. http://www.irishtwistedspirit.com/celtic-pate.html
The moorland bogs that surround our part of the Cavan section of the Marble Arch Caves Global Geopark is rich in legend and lore. Coming across the Bellavally Gap one dark night we spotted a will o’the wisp, a spectral light darting across the lonely moor. Now there may be a scientific explanation (escaping methane?) or it might be fairies. Or perhaps it was the ghost of a murdered maid servant whose perfected preserved body was accidentally exhumed by turf cutters fifty years after her disappearance!
The moors high up on Cuilcagh and the other mountains along this border feed those underground caverns that I mentioned criss-cross this international border. The mighty River Shannon has its source in those underground caverns in County Fermanagh before it bubbles up on the Cavan side of the border at Shannon Pot.
This cauldron shaped ‘pot’ is alive with Ireland’s own creation myth where it is Síannan, rather than Eve, who is hungry for knowledge. In this case she seeks the salmon of wisdom, the oldest animal on earth, who is key to knowledge rather than a fruit on tree. There are trees in Ireland’s legend, too, but they are nuts of wisdom from the hazel that fed the salmon.
I’ll close with a poem I wrote after that JCB departed from the acre and I was left to ponder the three bog oak logs that had been unearthed.
Bog Oak
This is what is made by
time, temperature, water,
the patience of insect life
underground
under the cover of peat
its acidity burnishing
earth’s black gold.
When the man with his
mechanical digger exhumed
the three bog oak logs
prehistory
reached out
and shook me
by the shoulders.
Eternity is not hard won
or over in an instant.
What means the millennia
that was in the making?
Now the light and air
gives the appearance
of brittle bark
but let them stand in the rain -
their heart is ancient
and indissoluble as
stone dolmens
Irish Country Living: “Back to Rurality”
Real Irish Country Living:
You are now entering our Townland
“I’m heading back to rurality,”my first Irish boss Prin would say when he took his leave from my workplace in the town. The town had a thousand souls. It had banks, a few shops and other amenities – a library, a theatre/arts centre, cottage hospital, a sculpture studios and ‘resource centre.’ It was a friendly place where you would hear the familiar Leitrim “How ya?” as you walked down the main street about your business.
It was hardly the heaving metropolis we’d left behind when we moved to Ireland. And that was exactly what we needed.
Of course, when Prin was leaving ‘town’ he was announcing his imminent departure for his ‘townland.’ For anyone who has Irish heritage and does a ‘roots trip’ to Ireland, knowing your family townland is really important information. Towns may have administrative or economic significance, but if your ancestors were uprooted from the Irish countryside then that elusive piece of information may be the deal breaker on your ancestor hunt.
Let’s get this straight. A townland is NOT a town. It’s more like a hamlet, or a cluster of neighbouring dwellings that is in the Irish countryside that fringes the towns with their shops, banks, schools and other points of local focus. Towns have an administrative and economic function. Townlands are where Irish country living actually happens!
Townlands are uniquely Irish. In the townland were Tony and I settled there are four houses and a barn on one side of Lough Moneen and four houses, a cottage and another barn on the other. Before the mass immigration of the 1940s and 1950s there were scores of people living in the townlands surrounding our home village.
To add to the confusion our townland has an anglicized spelling on the house deeds but an Irish spelling on the Ordinance Survey maps! For folks who are on an Irish heritage trail this can compound the problems when they are trying to find an ancestral grave or the church where they may find the vital record to confirm family anecdote. This is where genealogical hunts in Ireland can get frustrating.
But it is in the Irish place names that you discern the beauty and personality of these remote places. Place names are so rich that they have a whole genre in Irish poetry, dindshenchas, that includes that particular Irish place’s folklore, sometimes right back to medieval times.
Just translating our townland underlines it’s unique ecology. We live in ‘the briary place’; it certainly applies to our acre! But those blackberries attest to the soil fertility, which we have benefited from as we developed our organic garden and cultivated our vegetables in a polytunnel.
There is a term in Irish literature that refers to women as ‘wildish.’ Our bit of Irish country life has that wildish element – from the south-westerly winds that sometimes rampage in from the Atlantic over Knocknarea, the drama of the aurora borealis reflected in the water of Lough Allen, the constant shifting of cloud and light and precipitation over Arigna or Cuilcagh mountains.
I could no more go back to city living – the traffic, the constant background noise, the crowds and hasty pace – then I could turn back the years. We have lived for ten years now and I am still learning new things, still having my eyes opened and heart moved by this magical sacred landscape. Irish country living – where Irish folklore comes alive in the very stones – is where my heart has truly come home.
In the first few years here I tried to do a ‘biodiversity survey’ just of the species I spotted along our lane. We have rare red squirrel as well as long eared bats, badgers, deer and pygmy shrew. That’s just the fauna. When I started on the flora I gave up when I passed eighty!
My partner has written elsewhere describing our little parcel of Ireland as an ‘acre of diamonds.’ In this blog I’m going to share some of that precious quality – the beauty, the peace, the inspiration both raw and rarefied – with you.
You are Welcome
Local Sphinx
The Playbank – aka the Dog Mountain
In 2001 I found myself settling in an unexpected area of the world. It only goes to show that when some intuition tells to stop or turn left that you should always obey that instinct. We thought we were heading for one place but along the way were beguiled by another, quite different, but ultimately the absolute correct location for us.
Ten years ago in the wake of 9/11 I found myself emigrating from England to Ireland. This was my second country move, since I was born in the United States. My partner, Tony Cuckson, and I had lived in cities all our adult lives; but we were small town bred and we both had a hankering for space, a garden that was not 8” x 10” concrete, some quiet to be able to contemplate and have the spiritual growth that is characteristic of the middle years onwards. There had been a family bereavement in 2000 that had prompted us to question, “ What are we waiting for?”
Tony had gone ahead the week before with a van load of our belongings and the two dogs. It was autumn equinox at 4:55 that morning in 2001; I was just waking up to get myself and our feline household goddess Sophie ready for boarding the 6am train out of Leeds, West Yorkshire.
The first leg of our journey was on the spectacular and justifiably acclaimed Leeds-Settle-Carlisle railway line. By our first change of trains in Carlisle Sophie’s mournful meowing had simmered down to the occasional sob. However, all the Scots travelling to Glasgow made such a fuss over her that she began to think this emigration lark was okay. We changed again in Glasgow for the train to the Stranraer ferry. We smoothly sailed into Belfast Harbour where Tony’s twin brother Jeff picked us up.
A brief comfort stop at Jeff’s home in Holywood and we only had another two hours to go to arrive at our new home (which we then thought was just temporary) in Dowra, Co. Cavan. Tony had organised a rental house that was beside the River Shannon. As we travelled along the R207 for the last ten kilometres I was blown away by the beauty of Cuilcagh Mountain and the Playbank. Dusk was just settling. I was utterly enchanted by their indigo profiles. Fourteen hours from setting off Sophie and I arrived and had a happy reunion with Tony and our dogs Murphy and Pippin.
The region, previously sight unseen, bewitched me and I am still under the sway of its spell. I have heartfelt gratitude for which ever angel, faerie, goddess or deva lead us to find this home. Having spent the previous forty-five years as a nomad (first house move was at three-months old), the Land decided that it wanted to keep me. 
I’m grateful that the Land decided to like me, tough love me and cherish my spirit over this past decade.
I live in a place of ever shifting light and shadow, a place where diverse species thrive and delight the eye, ear and nose. This is a place of borders – being less than three miles as the crow flies with Northern Ireland and County Fermanagh. Half the village is in Leitrim and the rest in Cavan. Therefore we are also straddle the ancient kingdoms of Ulster and Connaught. It is a land of liminal places – holy wells and sweat houses, megaliths and powerful myth.
This is a very mystical part of Ireland and this area marks the boundary between the ancient kingdoms of Ulster and Connaught. There are rumours that there are the remnants in the village of the old earthwork fortification called the Black Pig’s Dyke. We are also in a little known kingdom of Briefne that is associated with the O’Rourke and Maguire clans.
We live four miles from the Shannon Pot, the very source of the River Shannon and also the home of the Salmon of Wisdom. It feels as if we have most assuredly arrived at the source. Living here and being nurtured in this landscape has lead me to become a tour guide to share with visitors to this mystic part of Ireland. Because, let me tell you, there are fairies in ‘them thar hills!’
Locals often refer to the family acreage a The Homeplace. For someone’s whose family skittered around various American states over several generations, this is is an alien concept. Although to my knowledge there are no atavistic blood tying me to this part of Planet Earth, the Earth itself has embraced me as if to say, ” This is your Home. This is your Place. You are Welcome.”
The Road to Our Homeplace
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