The Sweeping Melancholy of Eastern Ireland

by Amanda Castleman

Diarmaid Rankin shows us castles and churches, tombs and monasteries and long-forgotten forts. As an aside, the 40-year-old chronicles his own ruins. "That was my father's iron yard," he points to a rusted and derelict wall midriver. "Here was my aunt's cottage. Her helper was a bit simple, but Mae just instinctively knew when someone wanted something. No need for words."

Vines tug at the mortar chunks. The scene is forlorn: surely a home abandoned centuries - not years - ago? But the women lived right here in the Mourne Mountains, not three decades past.

Graves and the bell tower at the ruins of Mellifont Abbey

Such sweeping melancholy is typical of Ireland's eastern coast. Something's in the jagged North Sea spray, the granite-chunked crags and the heather that creeps in on little cat feet. And that something erodes and erases and exiles. Bones bleach into fable. Whiskey washes away fact. Then ivy muffles it all into mythology.

St Bronach's bell is the sound of this silence. A faint "Gong-gong; goooooo" tolled whenever storms swamped the harbor. Townsfolk decided that the local virgin saint was summoning them to aid shipwrecks. But no, a bronze bell - hidden during the Reformation - swayed in a tree, which slowly encased its shape. Cocooned in the branches, it slipped from history's stream, forgotten. Only the greatest gusts could produce a soft chime: misinterpreted as a sacred whispered warning.

One hundred years ago, a storm finally shattered the trunk - the bell was found, the legend lost. A church has sheltered it since; a rubber-headed mallet pokes past its brass security bars. "Go on, hit it," Rankin insists. "Everyone should hear history for themselves."

Like the landscape, the bell is sweet and strange. Wildness lingers in the overtones. But that's the way of this country, converted to Christianity by Saint Patrick in the fifth century, but still somehow pagan at its core.

The philosopher Henri Bergson once described humor as "something mechanical encrusted upon the living." Ireland is the somber inverse: something living encrusted upon the mechanical. Human conceits are mellowed by moss, undermined by roots, pushed to foreign shores by potato blight. Small wonder the Irish are such bold warriors and drinkers and Blarney-touched storytellers. Endeavor is their only weapon against erosion.

Nevertheless, this proud people erected monuments that survived both wind and water, not to mention Viking raids and, more recently, strife between the IRA and British. Newgrange is one such site: older than Stonehenge, the passage tomb is a wide, low pancake on the Meath plain. Milky quartz glitters on the exterior, beside slabs inscribed with inscrutable swirls.

A weed whacker hums and hacks atop the 5,200-year-old mound. Each year, dawn ignites the grave's inner chamber for five days around the winter solstice. Maybe the sun swept away the souls. Or maybe it was just a flashy bit of Neolithic engineering. Nobody will ever know.

Lost for centuries, stones wrenched away as paving, Newgrange slid under the sod. In 1699, laborers quarried more boulders from the cairn and discovered this sublime structure. Some legends claim it was a continuous font of fruits, roasted pigs and caskets of ale. Except who would misplace such a thing for millennia?

Perhaps the same people whose descendants crashed a school bus into the Market Cross of Kells. This heritage town is, of course, most famous for its illuminated manuscript (nabbed by Trinity College and now displayed in Dublin). But five high crosses mark its ancient roads - several still in use - and accidents happen.

Louise Gargan, manager of Kells Heritage Center, sighs as she pats a copy of the ninth-century scripture. "We have a two-ton replica inside and the actual one outside. Erosion is a recent problem."

Weed whacker hum atop Newgrange, a Neolithic passage tomb

The star-crossed monument has suffered much abuse. Oliver Cromwell's soldiers practiced marksmanship on it. Fallen, it moldered on the ground, until pundit Jonathan Swift modestly proposed its resurrection. The English hung Irish rebels on its arms in 1798. Later, its perch became the corner of two heavily traveled highways: hence the 1996 crash, which toppled it again. Conservationists shifted it to the Heritage Center grounds, but outcry kept the sculpture outside.

Kells doesn't want its Market Cross to come in from the cold. Doreen Fitzsimmons, educational tour guide, notes: "The townspeople said 'no, we're not having it. It belongs to all of us.'

"When things happen like the tsunami or 9-11, flowers and candy appear on this cross. People still sit on the base of an evening." She gestures to its former site, where the N3 and N52 intersect. "It might even come back when the bypass is put through," she says, hope tinting her voice.

Kells' three other high crosses are exposed to the elements as well: great limestone lumps of history, drooling into the ground. Acid rain and traffic tremors strip their medieval features.

Maybe it's for the best, though. Maybe these monuments, raised in defiance against the harsh, haunting landscape, should melt back into it, much like the Native Peoples' totems in British Columbia, Canada. Maybe they should pass into myth - Rankin's silver-tongued tales - and then beyond to Mae's wordless wisdom, as the sea spray once again cleans Ireland's slate, all better to let her heroics bloom again.