Athlone.

Written 1/8/08 for The period between 28/7/08 and 30/7/08

My next host, John, was absolutely amazing. I really regret that the constraints of time and space dictate that I keep him only as someone I see from time to time if one of us happens to be on the correct continent. He and his roommate, a lovely boy named Dave, were house sitting for the directors of Athlone's theatre and street theatre troops, respectively. I stayed in the house belonging to the theatre director, a place filled with pretty musical instruments, art, three gigantic dogs, one toothless old cat whose name may or may not, according to its owners, have been Topsy, fish in a pond in the garden, and a snail on the garden wall. The house was in a pleasant part of town, and directly across the street from the front door was a nice grove with big trees and a little sign in Irish surrounded by flowers. My Irish usually isn't at all bad when it comes to things that might be on signs for the names of places, but the second half of this one was beyond me and I wondered what it might have said. John happened to remark on my last day there, as he started the car to take me to the bus station, that it was an old children's grave, from the time before stillborn, unbaptised infants could be buried in hallowed ground. The sign read either church of the children or wood of the children. Having been an outlawed language, it honestly is not entirely certain whether the Irish word "cill" means church but implies wood, or whether it means wood but implies church.

John took me everywhere in the area I possibly could have wanted to go, offered me tea as often as even I could have wanted it, and took me out for a nice vegetarian Irish breakfast.

We went to Clonmacnoise, an ancient monastic site that, at one time, would have been the cultural centre of Ireland. There were high crosses, round towers, ruins, and objects and locations said to offer healing powers. The one for back pain, unfortunately, was blocked off. It was once part of the framework of a church window, but has been lying on the ground looking rather like a seat or a throne for centuries. One was meant to sit in it in order to take the cure. I took pictures, hoping that the transference might happen in that way as well.

He took me through a gate, down a path, into a field on the top of a hill where we found a stone carved almost imperceptibly with ancient sigils.

We went to the bog at Corlea where an ancient trackway had been found: the widest such thing ever found in Europe, made of wood and perfectly preserved under the peat. No one knows exactly why it had been built. Either it was meant to connect ancient ritual sites (it did stretch between them, certainly) or it had been built to sink. Nothing that large would float atop the bog for long, as the Celts, who had been sinking sacrificial victims in it with some frequency, would have known. I side with both, actually. They built the sort of architectural feat the Romans are still bragging about, a perfectly straight road connecting two of their most impressive religious sites and cities, and used it until it was claimed by the earth itself and became a passageway for and in the underworld. And the conversation at the little museum planted atop the trackway (on top of steel support structures many metres deep, I should mention) was fantastic. We were taught about the particulars of the local bog men, the royal victims found broken and murdered in antiquity, but so well preserved by the highly acidic peat that, when found, sometimes cause the police to begin searching the missing persons registries. My little group was well informed. In the course of the talk we found one another assisting the expert, listing the uses of sacred trees, filling in the names of the old gods and other sites with similar archeological finds. I learned about fairy forts, a term which refers specifically to ancient artificial hills with trees on top. Our guide told us of a former visitor whose father, she'd insisted, had been a sensible man, not at all given to telling mad tales. They had a fairy fort on their property, but no one ever went near it. In a rush one day her father cut through it, not thinking much about it, and within was confronted with what he thought, at first, to be a beautiful woman dressed in grey, but then found to be a terribly old man with very long, knotted hair. Her father ran, and no one ever went near the place again. I think this makes them sound a bit cowardly, honestly, although I'm willing to believe that the encounter felt sinister for reasons that were not adequately conveyed. Making others uncertain as to whether you're a curvaceous young thing or an old man sounds a bit too much like what I do to people on an average day for me to be much frightened by it.

That evening John took me to the oldest bar in Ireland, a place called Sean's Pub that had been open since approximately the year 900. I had a marvellous time, drinking with John and one of his friends, and with an Irish metal band that had been living on a boat. I'd presumed that this was for purposes of touring, but looking back on it, I'm not at all certain. We stayed up a good deal later than the taxies, but the long walk home was good for me. I had to wake up earlier than I would have liked to catch my bus to Dingle, but was able to do so without any trace of a hangover.