Driving Through The Sally Gap

I see that it's almost exactly three years since I last drove above Glencree towards the Sally Gap in the Wicklow Mountains. In 2007 the purpose was to get out of the suburbs and give my friend J some head-space (he had buried his mother two days previously). It's one of those places I keep meaning to return to, a brief high ground of wildness and vacancy with a thin road rippling through.

In 2007, we did not actually drive through The Sally Gap, that pass in the mountains with its little crossroads (onwards over another mountain, left to Lough Dan or right to Blessington). This time, I drove right through the gap, having an appointment in Hollywood (a tiny village beyond Blessington) with a woman who had found my wallet, which I had lost two days before in Courtown, Co Wexford. She had tried to give it to the police but the local station had been closed. So, instead of being able to drive down the road (from my wife's parents' place where we'd been staying), I had to make a detour of about fifty miles (and several hours) on my way back to Dublin.

But I wasn't put out. The drive over the mountains was wonderful, dramatically shifting clouds, a shadow-shawl thrown over a mountain, Shangri-La shafts of light dipping with gold-leaf a scumble of trees in the valley below. Then descending, as in a bumpy light aircraft, the long skinny landing strip that ravelled and wriggled its way into the long valley with its lumpy fields, tucked houses and farms, tall stands of old pines...

Then out onto a T-junction and on into the more quotidian-looking townland of Blessington, and beyond it, a very sharp swerve (almost missed the sign) into a different hinterland, farmland, a tucked-away little village with a largeish school and pub. the woman's house was in a laneway behind the pub. She was watering her garden, the kind of garden you'd find in any middlecalss Dublin suburb. She brought me inside and handed me the wallet, everything intact, including about 200 Euro. so I need not have cancelled the credit cards. But no matter. I was glad to have made the journey, a reason to retread my past, a dose of elsewhere. She wouldn't accept a reward. So we parted, and I plunged back into the mountains as if they were home.

I already used the following poem (from my first collection, AIRBORNE) in the 2007 blip, but it's even more appropriate this time, since I actually followed the direction in the title:


Driving Through The Sally Gap

Above Glencree,
the car bounces and the road rises
on wind-cured air, swatches of silky gloom.

The TV mast over on Kippure
is the only whisker of anything
four-walled or closed-in.

Cloud-browsed, darkening shoulders
go on down into a nesting ground
for the ghosts of glaciers.

Crossroads. A signpost
where a great elk stood, antlers
branching out of the mist,

belling the names: Blessington,
Roundwood, Enniskerry... it?s late.
Time for the long way home

where the line bellies and dips,
something with the wind up
galloping away with itself.