Ruins

There is a particular atmosphere that pervades the ruins of cottages throughout rural Ireland. I think it has to do with their former humbleness, sometimes their isolation,the fact that it our own (and not so distant) history and also knowing that the famine emptied them and left them bleak reminders of our impoverished past.

I am drawn to them: to recreate the rooms in my mind, furnish them, family and belongings, visualise what it was to read by the light coming through that window, sit at the hearth, drop the head to avoid the lintel coming through the front door.

When the ridges can still be seen in the vegetable plot or a line of fuschia still survives outside the door delineating what was the extent of their patch, it is doubly poignant. The most moving place in Ireland is, I think, the deserted village on Achill. A huddle of about 100 ruined cottages. You get a strong sense of what it was to be in a community living so closely together. While standing there, and drawing on what you know from books like Peig or maybe the film “Man of Aran”, you people the streets quite easily; the place does it for you.

The mental images can be extremely vivid, the feeling very strong: a haunting sadness, and somehow a memory. And because you know it you do not want to leave soon.
Ireland is littered with these ruins. Like holy wells, they transport you to another place, a more thoughtful place. It is good that they survive.

Flickr has a number of photographs of the deserted village at Slievemore on Achill Island and numerous others of ruins througout Ireland.

from Sunfire

The hunch-doubled thorns,
ingrown pantries
dung-puddled;
the moss-stone walls
tumble-gapped.

The nettle-cracked doorway,
lintel-fallen
byre-footed;
the cloud curtained windows
elder-berried.

The stone-sheltered air
bumbled still,
ruin-reverent;
the submerged garden ridges
dumb-founded.