The Erne Estuary

I’m sitting beside a window full of the Erne Estuary. There’s not the slightest breeze. S-shaped, mirror-still, silvery grey. Shades of ivory, cream and seashell blend in curlicues out to the bar. Beyond there’s a stripe of charcoal and further out the narrow strip of brightness that marks the edge of the world.
By the side of the bay below the fields there is a rag tree before St Patrick’s grotto. On the algae-slimy rocks are small white crosses, the stations of the cross. On evenings like this when the smallest tick of nature can be heard in the briars and whitethorn bushes, it is an eerie but a wonderful place. You get that sense of being in your proper place within the flow of mankind that have lived along these banks since people first arrived into the west of Ireland; here at Ballyshannon, the oldest town in Ireland.