We have seen how the [Celtic] maze is tied to the journey of birth and the path of rebirth. But why the link with the bull? The bull may have become associated with the goddess because the womb resembles the shape of a bull’s head, the fallopian tubes extending to either side, like horns.
from Celtic Design: Maze Patterns by Aidan Meehan
A few days later in Kiltimagh, my mother and I sat down to nouvelle Irish cuisine at the only off-season restaurant in the town’s only hotel on the only major street. We curled up next to the fire as if it were January. It was October.
The manager came over to take our drink order. “Oh, you’re American. Where are you from?”
When he found that we were searching for our roots and that we had ancestors right from that very town, he offered to do a little digging. He put in a call to some local guy who knew everything about Kiltimagh. Then suddenly, he hung up and was asked us to follow him to his car. He drove us around in the dark mist to see “Cloonmore,” the name of the Kiltimagh “neighborhood” where my mother’s grandmother was from.
In fact (as we would piece together over the days to come) Cloonmore, though joined to Kiltimagh today by a winding road, was once nothing but a cluster of peasant houses on the outskirts of an already hick town.
We had only the lights of the manager’s car to guide us through the blackness. A soggy thatched roof cottage in ruin stood against the dark sky, flashed by the headlights for a moment then darkened again. Another cottage in a worse state of disrepair, the roof caved entirely in. Then a modern house with skylights. “County Mayo is one of the richest territories in all of Europe now,” said our guide. “It’s recovered quite impressively since the days of the famine.”
A man went into a house and found the owner dead and a rat eating the corpse. He killed the rat and brought it home and ate it.
John Doyle, b. 1900, a labourer, Co. Wicklow (from Famine Echoes by Cathal Póirtéir)
In Dublin, I’d later learn, red-necks from the countryside are known as “Kulchies,” a word derived from Kiltimagh—which was once, supposedly, the most ragged old pothole on the map. Contrary to our host’s incredible claims about his county, things hadn’t changed all that much in the years ever sense, aside from the occasional dreamhouse in the brambles. Besides, there was a desperate something in the air in Kiltimagh. Perhaps it was no more than our thirsty imaginations, or perhaps there was something to the pagan myths.
The fairy lights on this particular field have been seen a number of times by other people. Only a few years ago a Mrs. McNicholas—Anna-Maria of our childhood days—who lived not far from the Shanaghy cross and in sight of the fairy ground, saw them clearly.
from The Middle Kingdom: the Faerie World of Ireland by Dermot Mac Manus
I wasn’t afraid of ghosts in the blackness, but I did wonder about the possibility that our host might be some nut who’d taken us out on this lonely backroad with its rotted cottages to shoot us dead and throw us into a bog. But no, this really was the place where my great grandmother had come from. She’d lived in a cottage so rotted that it was no longer standing. Our guide wanted nothing more than to insure the reputation of his hotel by helping a pair of strangers, or maybe he wanted even less. Could he have been using us to help him fill the first in a long, lonely series of empty winter hours with friendly conversation?
No matter. We followed his tips the next day and got more information. We started at the church. My great grandmother had once sent a postcard of its exterior back to her family in Chicago when she’d come to visit Ireland. She’d hated the place—cooking in a big kettle in a dirt-floor cottage, she’d cried herself to sleep, as the story goes, and came back to the South side of Chicago kissing the urban ground. We went into the priest’s house for family records. Cloonmore, we discovered from an old man painting the manor a bright lime green, was never considered a part of the parish of Kiltimagh but was a part of the parish administrated from either Claremorris, some twelve kilometers away, or yet another tiny town somewhere else. I considered how far half a dozen miles must have seemed in my great grandmother’s day, long before the invention of the automobile. If the people of Cloonmore hadn’t been welcomed in the neighboring parish, it meant that doing any official business—such as registering births, deaths, or marriages—would have taken them on a full day’s excursion to the far away parish. They had, apparently, been shunned by the main parish due to their appallingly low standard of living. As it turns out, my ancestors hadn’t even lived in the biggest hick town in Ireland, they lived on the outskirts of that hick town.
We drove back up the winding Cloonmore road by the light of day and knocked on several doors where we were invited to teas, which we declined. We finally found the home, or rather the site where the home once stood. There was a concrete block tool shed standing where the cottage once was. A neighbor came out. She now owned the patch of land we’d come all these miles to see. She said she vaguely remembered the visit of my great grandmother decades before. She remembered our family by different first names than my mother had written on her list. There was an Edward who’d been known as a Paddy, for example… They’d changed their names in America, certainly. “I went to the Keane’s house for tea, once,” said the neighbor. She seemed embarrassed.
My mother helped her out by recalling her grandmother’s story of the dirt floor she’d slept on when she’d visited Ireland. The neighbor looked relieved. Now she didn’t have to be the one to say it first. “Yes, I remember the house,” she said. “There was a dirt floor, and the animals were fed near the fire.”
And that was long after the famine was over, I thought, so what must have been the conditions that had sent previous generations of our ancestors across the sea?
In crossing the hills they often saw groups of men cornering cattle which they would bleed by cutting a vein in the neck of the beast and extracting a few pints of blood, or whatever amount they could safely take, without endangering too much the life of the animal. When they would have sufficient blood extracted from a beast, they would fix up the wound to prevent further bleeding by putting a pin through the skin across the incision in the vein, then clapping a few hairs from the animal’s tail around the pin to keep it in position. The men would carry the blood home in jars and other vessels slung across their shoulders, some of them having to travel many miles before reaching home. When they would arrive their women folk would carefully salt the blood and some of it would be cooked by frying in a pan.
P. Foley, b. 1890, a farmer, Knockananna, Co. Wicklow (from Famine Echoes by Cathal Póirtéir)
I took a picture of my mother with the neighbor standing in front of the shed, and then my mother whispered, “Let’s get in the car and get the hell out of here.” I’d already felt the desire to leave swelling inside me since that morning, but in my mother it had taken on urgent dimensions. Being here was, for her, like standing on the edge of a void. I was fascinated, but I believe my mother felt death’s wings brushing too closely. After all, she’d known her mother and grandmother. For me they were both nothing more than fireside tales.
We rolled off to Sligo without waiting for the hotel manager to come out of his “meeting” to say goodbye. We felt strangely free for having broken this unwritten obligation. It was as if in unearthing our roots we’d severed ourselves from them, thereby releasing ourselves from a forgotten past that had been enslaving us all our lives without our knowledge.
Foidin Seachrain, the “stray sod” or, as it is called in some localities, the “lone sod,” is a very well-known and long-established affair in Ireland… The most generally held view of it round my home is that the fairies sometimes put a spell on a piece of earth, usually a sod of grass, and whoever inadvertently steps upon it loses his way at once and cannot find an exit from whatever place he is in, whether field or wood or open bog, until the fairies tire of their game and at last throw open the unseen doors. It is also widely believed that one can counter the spell by turning one’s coat inside out and so wearing it, but I have never heard of an authentic case where this has been done successfully. When two or more people are together and the leader seems uncertain of the way, and you fear that he has stepped on the fatal stray sod you say to him in Irish, “Will thu ceart?” (“Are you right?”) . If he answers, “Nil iosagam” (“I don’t know”) and then adds “Taim a’ gol amu” (“I think I am going astray”), you quickly reply, “The Lord save you” and then make the sign of the cross. It is maintained that to work effectively all this must be spoken in Irish.
from The Middle Kingdom: the Faerie World of Ireland by Dermot Mac Manus