Hinterland: (Shelter 3)

Went for a drive with Johnny before the evening repast. He hung a sharp left in Spiddal then up for a mile or so. We got out and went for a stroll into into the hinterland: a lovely little place that was hardly a place at all, trimly well-kept houses on the crests of drumlins, from which we could see the new crop of extra-huge wind turbines down on the bog about a mile distant.

When we got back in the car I mentioned the big boulder he'd drawn my attention to while I was visiting a couple of years ago: it have a windswept, ivy hairdo which provided shelter for grazing cows. I wondered if the ivy was still there and of course it was. Johnny drove west before going back and we stopped to look at it. Then we drove a bit further around the wee lake and parked in another tiny townland in the midst of a place that was very definitely somewhere: a place between a village and hamlet, with a dreeping derelict schoolhouse and some scattered houses, again on the little drumlins above the lake which was almost flooding the road.

We walked over the little hill and Johnny showed me a kind of grove of old wind-bent oaks, holly and rowan. Another kind of shelter, somewhere to pitch a tent (if you could endure the midges) or throw a rug or just take a girl's hand. I thought of Heaney's little poem, Song, the one that begins with the line: "A rowan like a lipsticked girl" and ends with:

There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.

Rest of the poem HERE.