Directions

A drive out to Glencree with my cousin Fiachra, to check out the location for a possible short film/script. Somewhat cloudy but warm and springy weather, a good day for it. We drove along the upper road of the little valley beyond Johnny Fox's pub, adrift in speculation and a kind of detached curiosity, two tourists looking to make something as far from a brochure as reasonably possible. I saw a strange looking house on the far side of the valley and decided to drive down and across to get a closer look.

We crossed a little bridge then I took a sharp steep right and the road steepened even further, so much that I began to have that nightmare sense of the car being too top-heavy, not mountain-goatish enough to keep a tyre-hold. Two farm dogs, a collie and something larger, sauntered out but they didn't raise much of a racket, more curious than angry.

I began to reverse down the slope and that's when we saw the woman coming up. We stopped, Fiachra asked directions and she began to talk, but I didn't take in a word, not even her name, which I had asked her when I introduced us. I did ask her if I could take photographs and she was fine with this, so that's what I concentrated on, because she had an interesting face, large, impressive hands and wonderful clear grey-blue eyes, and she kept waving that forked stick.

Afterwards, we drove out past Tibradden wood, where we found a strikingly panoramic view of Dublin, out beyond the South Wall and Ireland's Eye. We were also impressed by the mossy old trees. Looking upward then downhill, I noticed the highest branches gently swaying like fronds, above the more static but nevertheless furious warping and weaving, the deciduous, rooty, landlocked, electrical storm of mature woods.
You could see why the old tribes had their outposts here, an eagle's eye on The Pale.

What story might begin or end here, among the Entish tree-talk? Like The Sally Gap, a good place to bury a body, or find one. Was Tibradden part of Glencullen? Was Three Rock? (They all are, apparently.) Where did the boundaries end or blur? We sniffed about for awhile, took photos, took in the dumped refuse, car tyres and bags of waste. Directionless, we hovered, till the pull of the road brought us downhill towards the arboreal squirrel-suburbs: Firhouse, The Yellow House and Nutgrove Shopping Centre.