Trolls, Kings and Other Solitary Souls

 

 

 

 

 

Many years ago, while on a geology fieldtrip in Norway, I had an interesting experience that clarified for me the origin of those ever so popular trolls in the tourist shops there.

One day, while mapping in the mountains, I came into a very remote and lonely valley that had at the far end of it a single stone cottage. A strange sight in that remoteness, I walked towards it to investigate. But as I approached, I saw there was an old person bent over, working at something on the ground. I approached slowly and with growing apprehension. The person seemed totally unaware of me and continued at his or her task.

Being in such a wilderness, so remote and alone, all the possibilities of the old fairytales solidified in my mind. A childish fear flooded over me. I moved towards the forbidding spectre, heart in my mouth. It wasn’t until the last moment that I saw that it was a gnarled old tree.

As did Patrick Kavanagh in his ‘Christmas Childhood,’ one crisp moonlit Christmas morning, I saw the three kings travelling up the hills outside Roscommon. It was a magical Christmas sight, and I stopped to look at it for a long time.

Now I am looking out at some scattered hawthorns on the slopes of the hills above Barnesmore. They pitch themselves against the winter gales and flaying rain. They stand, rooted in boulder strewn, thin soil, crabbed old codgers with tobacco coloured dead bracken all about. On another day, when the mist is heavy, they bend into the wind and prepare to walk. For eons they have passed travelers on the road without a word, or maybe they have lisped some message that seemed to come from souls long since departed.

The first day of 2015 came windy and wet

The first day of 2015 has come wet and windy. I’m looking out at the Bluestacks, their colours, shades of straw, duns and browns, muted in today’s mist; their heads stuck in dusty-looking cloud.

 Whatever the weather, this view is beautiful. On sunny blue days the mountains bridge the void between sky and earth. The low sun on crisp, shiny, winter days throws all the undulations on the mountainside into relief, bright swathes of sunlight are trimmed with rasher-shaped patches of shadow while broad expanses of dead  bracken gleam burnished bronze. Other parts of the mountains planted with larch, spruce and fir, have each tree sharply defined, steeples standing in serried ranks, bottle green, grey-brown rusting red. Lower down the slopes, a few angular fields, still clear, are traces of meagre living long gone.

This side of the valley is different. Ragged fields dotted with houses, mountainy sheep and rocky outcrops. If there was a logo for this side, it would be the hawthorn.

The hawthorn, more than any tree, evokes the character of this place. Rugged, resilient, sculpted through hardship; if the grey lichen-covered outcrops could grow into trees, they would be hawthorns. They are scattered up and down the humpy fields, ash-grey or black against the leaden sky. Sometimes their shapes are human-like, cries for help with starved limbs extended or stubborn resistance in the face of razor-edged winds.

But yesterday, the clouds were running, and spokes of smoky yellow sunlight radiated down on Donegal like God’s smile. In the distance Ben Bulben looked mythical in a warm, straw-coloured glow. The clouds were blue-tinted charcoal, some torn, others barrel-shaped; they had their own wars to contend with. Down here the hawthorns, standing bold on the curve of the hill, were transfixed like myself gazing westward, towards those lands of ancient legend. 

The world is beautiful. Happy new year.

Hawthorns on the mountain

Isn’t the windswept hawthorn the most perfect representation of the mountain weather in Barnesmore, Donegal. Gnarled, grizzled, stunted, they protrude from the moss-coloured slopes like the skeletons of prehistoric birds struck flightless at their moment of take-off. They are crusty old codgers caught in photogenic poses between the grey-lichened outcrops of granite and the moving outcrops that are the sheep on the mountain, and the tangling, cloud-coloured, gushing streams. They make for the best of neighbours.