2nd June, 2003

I woke up early with a bubbling nervous stomach and silently jogged down the stairs suppressing a giggle in a big hurry to get into the kitchen first. Today was Henrike’s birthday, as well as our day off on the farm, and I wanted to surprise her with an omelette on toast.

I don’t know how to make an omelette. She got a heartfelt open faced scrambled egg sandwich from me instead.

But I had also bought some fine and fancy chocolate, which I now melted with the zest and some juice from an orange which I dipped strawberries, cherries, and bananas into.

Then I left immediately to go find the stone circle everyone told me about. No one knows when or why it was built. If you fall asleep in one, fairies will steal you away. They have energy. They were just for cows to scratch their asses on. They were simply calendars.

I am sure there were more guesses than that, but none of them mattered right now. I was walking up the road and on my own on a bright and quiet Monday. I climbed higher up the mountain* and got a good look at the flat green lands spreading to the South and West until they hid behind the hazed horizon’s curve.

This was one of those warm bright days with a big blue sky and many little clouds riding fast on the winds. Little thick clouds. Serious enough to blot out the sun for a time and cover the land in shadow, but small enough, their chill only lasted a few seconds before they left you under the warming light again.

I stood a while on the curve of this road, most of the way up the mountain, watching the tiny black shadows of the clouds racing across the flatlands- striking in their very smallness, or the appearance of smallness anyway, for I could feel their massive size and weight any time their shadow passed over me.

I stood watching a long while enjoying the chilly heat , what I imagine a hot Summer’s day at the foot of a glacier feels like. I started hearing my adventure song. I identify deeply with the searching beauty of this piece, and the strength of it. I sometimes remember it and hear parts of it again in my memory during times of natural beauty and wide views, as well as times of reflection immediately following hardship or conflict.

But this time, was truly for the beauty of the view and of the day itself. I didn’t feel heroic, not really (maybe like a beginner hero) but I felt the weather and the land wer heroic today.

I looked off towards the North a bit and saw a small settlement- perhaps Baltinglass. It’s hard to get my exact bearings up here. As I looked for other buildings and roads so I could verify whether I was seeing Baltinglass or not, I was struck again by how wholly unnatural this land was. All of the green and lovely miles I could see were totally tamed and boxed in by fences, walls or roads.

The wind picked up and the temperature dropped steeply. A cold hard rain started pelting me in the face with thick drops and then stopped again, all in the space of two minutes. All the meanwhile, there was a strong wind blowing towards the East (I had and still have some confusion about whether that meant is was an Easterly or a Westerly wind.) which suited me well as, regardless of any Irish colloquial blessings, I quite like the wind and rain to blow into my face and I like to walk into inclement weather head-on.**

I walked on then, drying quickly and feeling warm again, hardly thinking at all, but also still kind of listening to my adventure song and dreaming of Adventure and Heroism in Capital Letters.

In front of me, up the road some, there were black banners flying in the wind. This seemed strange to me and as I walked on, I saw they were tattered black banners hanging on the barbed wire. I wondered what kind of crazy farmer needed to make such a statement and wondered also if I should be more wary.

I walked on nonetheless. The banners were just strands of a torn garbage bag, stuck upon, not hung from, the barbed wire.

I journeyed on up the logging road towards the stone circle. Many smaller logging tracks crossed this main dirt road, so I decided to use the lines of the road as kind of a grid to help make sure I didn’t cover the same ground twice.

I came upon the far edge of the mountain, which opened up a view over a large forested valley with just one little town and the Wicklow Mountains proper. I could see a firetower off in the distance, overlooking the whole scene from the opposite side of the valley.

The road continued to curve around the mountain further away from the Kiltegan side, which was the one thing Denis warned me against- not to end up walking around the entire thing.

So I turned back into the woods.***

I saw a structure there. Walking through damp grass and nettles, I found an empty stone shed, 9 feet high, with one window and one door. Not really a window as such- more like a slit in a bunker or a battlement. It was locked and silent, and seemed wholly out of place here.

I walked on to explore the next section of land and came upon a field of stumps and brush. All harsh browns- both dark and light, and dead, dry brush choking up this field with sharp tangled deadfalls and other invisible obstacles.

At the end of this field of carnage, towards the bottom of what had undoubtedly been a pleasant gentle slope, I saw a red pitted metal roof. I wandered towards it and saw the remains of a stone house. Moss covered all the walls and vines made their way in over the broken walls and through old frames of windows. Nettles grew in a thick bunch in the part of the house I imagined to have once been a bedroom.

I walked to one of the windows and stood up on my toes to see the view only to notice I was four or so feet away from the road I’d come in on.

I walked back into shady woods and stepped, three different times, into a thorny vine which, because I was wearing sandals, left me with a thorn in my foot each time that I then had to sit and remove.

I found a moss covered rock wall there and laid down on it. So comfortable! The moss was thick and soft, and the stones were sloped so my head was elevated above my feet. It was great!

It was so great that I took a nap!

I tried to meditate, but I couldn’t silence my inner monologue or ignore it. I also was getting quite hungry. So I decided that even though I’d not yet seen the stone circle, I’d go back home.

But then, I thought, I didn’t come here to quit. I came here to see a stone circle. I wavered several time between continuing and giving up before finally deciding to continue. I walked  around past the next road I was using in my search grid. I got stung my nettles and sank into some mud all the way to my knee.

Finally, in a field of devastation, I saw the stone circle. Another clear cut field of stumps. They must have recently had the machines there though, because there wasn’t any brush laying about and there were methane scented mud puddles with the shimmer of petrochemical rainbows floating on them.

My intention had been to go and meditate there, but the field was bright and ugly, and I was getting very hungry now. And the stones were really very small anyway- hardly bigger than myself. I tried to pretend I was not disappointed. But I had imagined a rugged palisade of standing stones.

So I walked back back down the road towards Kiltegan and there on the road before me, I saw a graveyard. It was interesting to see two hundred year old graves of non-celebrities could still be so well maintained.

There were spots though where the graveyard had not been maintained. I fell times down one three foot hole covered by brambles or another that looked like it was just smooth- which made me laugh even as I was getting all scratched up.

I walked home then, and everything was quiet-normal. Henrike and Denis were resting, The house and cats were quiet.  Duncan beat me decisively at chess. A pretty normal night.

Notes-

*Mountain, of course, meaning high hill.

**Some blatant and obvious foreshadowing now that I think about it.

***forestry plantation- trees for harvest. Norwegian pines for paper pulp.