Felicity Hayes-McCoy's Blog, page 5

The Wearing of The Green

It's that time of year again. 


Time to go green.

                                                                                                    
Green shoots force their way through the debris of winter storms.

Sunlight freckles on green growth in the ditches.
And here in the westernmost mainland parish in Ireland, the St Patrick's Day celebrations crackle with energy and excitement, amalgamating the triumph of the Christian saint over the druids with the triumph of the Good Goddess over darkness, and the joyous return of life to the land.

However, St. Patrick's personal association with the colour green and the dear little shamrock isn't altogether straightforward. In fact, wearing red, not green, for St. Patrick's day has a time-honoured heritage in Ireland. It was recorded in 1681 that 'the poorer people' in Ireland wore shamrock on St. Patrick's Day. But others, we're told, wore crosses - and the first reference, in 1628, describes Irish soldiers wearing St. Patrick's Day crosses made of red ribbon 'after their country manner'. As soon as the Irish state was set up, it became fashionable to insist that the diagonal red cross on a white ground, known as St. Patrick's cross, was a despised colonial invention of the 1800s. But the arms of Trinity College, Dublin, known to have been used at least as early as 1612, include St. Patrick's diagonal red cross on a white ground, representing Ireland.

So, although it's easy to see why the world now goes green on St. Patrick's Day...
... it's worth remembering how recently green became Ireland's national colour.
It wasn't till the eighteenth century that waving a green flag - with or without a gold harp - became a recognised way to define yourself as Irish.  As late as 1798, contemporary commentators were writing about the revolutionaries' green flags 'adopted ... in imitation of the shamrock' as if the colour choice was unexpected. In fact, a flag with a harp on a green field  had been flown at the masthead of his frigate by Owen Roe O'Neill more than a century before that, in 1642. But the idea that the the wearing of the green embodies the essence of Irishness is essentially Victorian, and the story that St. Patrick himself carried a green banner is a romantic nineteenth century invention. 
Actually, the earliest references to Irish flags are much more colourful. In a twelfth century manuscript description of a battle fought more than a thousand years earlier - in Cuchulainn's time - the 'variegated banners of all the chieftains of Erin' are 'flowered, white cloth, new-bordered, particoloured ... of streaked satin, streaming, floating, star-bright ..'. Though, to be fair, green does crop up in that story as well. One warrior, called Congal, strides among the heroes under his personal standard of  a leoman buidhe i srol uaine 'a yellow lion on green satin'. Which sounds rather dashing
 I may adopt it myself at this year's parade in Ballyferriter.

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The Irish Feast of St. Gobnait

This trip to London was literally a case of my whole life passing before my eyes. In three days, working with a brilliant company called Crimson Cats, I’ve just recorded an unabridged audiobook of my memoir The House on an Irish Hillside. I loved it. Loved working with Michael Bartlett and Dee Palmer. Loved the fact that Wilf provided incidental music on concertina. Love the look of the classy design, and the response of readers and booksellers when they hear about it. 

Now I can’t wait to hear the final edit.Tomorrow, February 11th, we fly back to Corca Dhuibhne. The significance of that date only hit me last week as I sat at the microphone in my sound booth. February 11th is Lá ‘le Gobnait – the feast day of St. Gobnait. Which means that as we’re sitting on a plane somewhere over the Irish Sea, high on a western clifftop, whipped by the Atlantic wind, the people of Dún Chaoin will be taking part in an ancient rite that’s survived there for thousands of years.

I don’t know if the realisation of that fact coloured my reading of the following paragraphs. You could hardly blame me if it did, considering what I’ll be missing. 

“On St Gobnait’s day, for as long as anyone can remember, people have gathered at the well on the cliff above the ocean to perform a ritual that has roots older than Christianity.
The parish church in Dún Chaoin is dedicated to St Gobnait. She’s associated with bees, who fertilise trees and plants, and with healing. There are stories here about how she protected the people. In one she drives out invaders by turning her beehive into a bronze helmet and her bees into soldiers. In others she’s one of three sisters, all powerful healers. I remember the sense of recognition I felt the first time I realised that the stories about those three sister saints, and the dates of their feast days, are all echoes of Danú, the Good Goddess. Gobnait’s day is celebrated at the beginning of the Celts’ season of Imbolc. Her sisters’ feast days are in May, the season of Bealtaine, and at the end of July, which is the beginning of Lughnasa. Thousands of years before Christianity came to Corca Dhuibhne people imagined Danú as a goddess of three aspects; she was the maiden, the mother and the crone, images of the three stages of fertility. The maiden represented springtime. The mother was ripeness and harvest. And the crone was an image of withering, before the darkness of winter and the patient wait for the return of light in spring. There are memories of nine boatloads of people rowing from the Great Blasket island on Gobnait’s feast day, and of crowds of people climbing from the landing place to the clifftop. Rituals associated with holy wells all echo each other. People circle the well, usually three, five, seven, nine or nineteen times, praying. They move in the direction of the sun. They kneel and pray. Then they bend lower to reach the water, and drink three, or seven, or nine drinks from their bare hands. Then the circling may begin again, each round marked by touching a stone or throwing a pebble in the water. Before leaving the well, something’s always left behind, a flower, a feather, a pin, a rag or a coin. They’re gifts to the saint to remind her of the people’s prayers. Then the people go home and wait to be answered.” 

In Dún Chaoin tomorrow, our neighbours will pray in St. Gobnait’s church and then climb the path to circle the well that once belonged to the Goddess. There’s a cross cut into a flat slab above it now and. just above the water, is a carved female head with wide eyes looking out towards the ocean. The ancient Celts carved no images of Danú. Instead they imagined her as present in the water in the form of a fish. In their shamanistic world view, the guardian spirits of sacred places often took the form of fish, birds or animals.
I remembered that last week as I read on through the chapter, towards my next coffee break, and came to this final paragraph. 

“When I bent over Gobnait’s well to look at the tribute of wildflowers, I saw something else had been left there. Down at the level of the water, the pointed quill of a seagull’s feather was wedged between two stones. Held by the fixed quill, the feather itself reached out like a bridge. Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement in the shadow under the stones. Then a tiny shrew ran out onto the feather. She had sleek ash-coloured fur, delicate, five-clawed feet, and eyes like black pin heads in her narrow face. Her ears were like translucent pink petals. Balanced in time, her weight balanced on the quill held by the stone, she looked at me. Then the feather trembled, its shadow flickered on the water, and she ran back into the dark.”

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Waste Not Want Not

December was a month for festive food.


There was chutney made from vegetables grown when the garden was basking in summer heat. There were oranges, cloves and pomegranates, cranberries, spices and pineapples. 
There were dates in long, thin boxes, and figs preserved in syrup.                                                                                                                                         
                                                                                                      

There was rich, dark Christmas cake full of currants and cherries and nuts. There was vanilla fudge layered with almond and chocolate brittle.



In December everything was shining and gold-wrapped, silver, scarlet and green.
 
There was always room for one more chocolate reindeer.


January's different.  
January's a month for long walks on beaches, slitty-eyed against hailstones or stunned by sunlight on snow. January smells of seaweed and salt.
In January reindeer no longer resonate.

Still, as one season turns towards the next one, nothing need ever go to waste.

 Pineapple upside down cake by the fire today after a shining beach walk.
                                                                                                                      


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The Wran's Day in Corca Dhuibhne

The Wran’s Day, which happens on 26 December, just after the winter solstice, is as much a part of the holiday season in Corca Dhuibhne as Christmas Day itself. Its name’s a corruption of the English word ‘wren’, and in Irish it’s Lá an Dreoilín. 

There’s endless research on the Wran’s Day, and suggestions that dreoilín, the word for wren, comes from draoi-éan, ‘druid’s bird’. It’s linked to ancient midwinter festivals and shamanism, when a shared web of ideas and information was accessed like a form of internet powered by human energy, and to later folk traditions like Straw Boys and Guisers. 
Its rituals belong to a dream state beyond stories, or even words, when there were just images and rhythms.
But if you turn up in Dingle on 26 December, what you’ll see is one big party. Basically, the town gets taken over by musicians and dancers. In the past, the boys back west used to dress up in rags and old coats turned inside out. They’d smear soot on their faces, or wear masks, and go from house to house, playing music and asking for pennies ‘to bury the wran’. Then they’d use the money to buy food and drink and throw a dance. Earlier still, live wrens used to be hunted and killed and carried in procession. Earlier than that, at huge ritual gatherings, kings offered themselves to be killed at the turn of the year, in an extreme version of sacrificing the best you’ve got in times of scarcity. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centu­ries, the Church did its best to suppress the Wran’s Day. But it never succeeded; and its ancient, wordless rhythms are still felt here every year. 
Some kids still walk the roads in costumes here back west, and turn up at their neighbours’ houses to dance in the kitchen. Each separate group’s called a ‘wran’. You hear the creak of the gate and the rattle of a drum outside the window. Then tattered figures with masked and painted faces crowd into the house, disguised in their granny’s aprons, padded with rolled-up socks; or their dad’s pyjamas, tied with rope and stuffed into wellingtons. As they come into the room, accordion players pull their masks down over their faces and whistle players push them onto their foreheads; the smaller figures giggle and shuffle. Then someone gives a note and the little group breaks into a jig or a polka.
Traditionally, each householder gave them a few coins and the money collected during the day paid for a party in the evening. But these days most people head for Dingle instead and join the rival parades that march and dance through the streets playing music and collecting for charity. We have a neighbour who blames it on the carpets. ‘The real Wran went out the door the day the carpets came into the houses.’ She says. ‘No one wants mud on the floors nowadays. That’s why they all go in to Dingle!’ 
 Text extracted from The House on an Irish Hillside by Felicity HayesMcCoy

Christmas Eve in Ireland

The old people believed that animals celebrated the birth of Christ and that beasts in the sheds and sheep on the hills went down on their knees at midnight. 


Here in Corca Dhuibhne lighted candles still shine in each window as a sign of  welcome to Mary and Joseph, travelling the night in search of shelter. Traditionally, the candle should be lit by the youngest member of the household and only be blown out by a girl whose name is ‘Mary'.  
In the past, house doors were left unlatched so that Mary and Joseph, or any wandering traveller, could come in. A loaf of bread left out on the table for the passing stranger was said to ensure bread in the house for the hungry months ahead. And a bowl of water left by the hearth to be blessed by the travellers was carefully saved by the woman of the house on Christmas morning, to be used for cures throughout the coming year.



People said that blackthorn branches flowered at midnight on Christmas Eve, and that bees woke from their deep winter sleep and hummed a song of praise to Christ.
It was said that all animals would turn to each other that night and speak to each other like humans.
  But it was bad luck to try and listen to them.
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Received Wisdom

This is Tomás Ó Criomhthain. He was born on The Great Blasket Island off the westernmost end of Ireland's Dingle Peninsula. The island's an isolated place, hard to access and often cut off from the mainland for weeks by fierce Atlantic storms. There's a story that its people took refuge there from invasion and land grabbing on the mainland. The community they built believed that it preserved a cultural inheritance that held lessons for the world.

The photo was taken sometime in the mid 1930s and the book in Tomás's hand was written by himself. Writing was not a part of the Blasket islanders' culture. In their oral tradition the knowledge, skills and beliefs that made up their worldview were passed from generation to generation by word of mouth. They were farmers and fishermen, musicians and storytellers, whose community depended for survival on a deep, shared understanding of their environment and a vivid sense of spiritual awareness of their own place within it.

By the time the photo was taken, the community was in the process of dying. The lure of an easier life in America and elsewhere, combined with lack of government support and respect for their way of life, had begun to draw the young and the strong away from their island home. As the number of households on the island dwindled, members of the older generation, like Tomás, came to terms with a fact that, to them, must have been fraught with irony. It became clear that the only way to continue to pass on their worldview to future generations was to turn away from the oral tradition that had preserved it for so long.

And so, with the help of English academics who had come to the Great Blasket to study the Irish language, the Blasket islanders produced a series of books. Without that decision, consciously made by men and women who saw it as their duty to pass on the knowledge, values and traditions they'd inherited, the Irish people might well have lost touch with a cultural inheritance that had been preserved by their ancestors across thousands of years.





This is Mama Shibulata. He's a respected elder among the Kogi, an indigenous people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Columbia. The Kogi are descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization which flourished in Columbia at the time of the Spanish Invasion. For hundreds of years they've lived in isolation at the top of the highest coastal mountain in the world, having fled from the invaders whom they refer to as 'Columbus'.

For generations the Kogi's worldview has been handed down in an oral culture which relies on the power of memory, meditation, shared awareness of their environment, and a profound sense of the place of human beings in a living, interconnected universe.

Writing is not part of their culture. Nor is film-making. But, like the Blasket islanders at the beginning of the twentieth century, they believe it to be their duty to come to terms with the imperatives of the times they live in.

Over twenty years ago, Alan Ereira, an English documentary film maker made contact with the Kogi and, with their cooperation, produced The Heart of The World, a film which delivered a chilling warning.

The Kogi's motivation was simple. They were afraid. They say that the developed world is precipitating a major ecological crisis which threatens Earth’s survival. They believe that we must be made to see and understand what we're doing, and to assume responsibility. Otherwise, the world will die.

Now, more than twenty years later, The Heart of The World continues to be shown worldwide, some thirty times last year in the US alone. Yet the steady destruction of the earth’s ecosystems continues.

So now the Kogi have spoken again. A new film, called Aluna, has been made. It's been produced by Ereira and this time controlled by the Kogi themselves, from concept to production schedule, content and final edit. The photo of Mama Shibulata that you see here is a still issued by the film's production company.

Tomorrow night Aluna will have its Irish premiere in The Blasket Centre, a heritage centre at the end of the Dingle peninsula which looks out at The Great Blasket Island. Ereira, who’s flying from London for the occasion, believes it’s the perfect venue. Though life on the island became unsustainable for its dwindling community in the 1950s, the Irish-language speaking people of Ireland's western seabord still retain a sense of communal memory and respect for oral tradition. To Ereira that heritage is important. He says it’s also important that fishermen and farmers, young and old, will be part of the Blasket Centre’s invited audience, and that their voices should be listened to as carefully in the ensuing discussion as those of the environmentalists, politicians and policy makers.

The Kogi are afraid, more so than they've ever been. But they’re also hopeful. They believe that it's not too late for us to hear their warning, and to learn what they can teach us. I hope they're right.



http://www.alunathemovie.com/en/

Barnbrack or Barmbrack?

I grew up with Barnbrack. Or brack, for short. It's a fruity bread loaf served at Hallowe'en in Ireland, cut in slices - always, in our house, by my sister Mary - and thickly buttered so's to conceal which slice contains the ring. Actually, the fact that Mary was the one who cut and buttered in our house may explain why, year after year, to groans of disappointment from the rest of us, the ring would always emerge from her slice. But that's another story.

The point is that we called it Barnbrack. Not Barmbrack. Now barm is the foam, or scum, formed on the top of fermented alcoholic beverages and used as a raising agent in bread. And it's perfectly true that a brack requires a raising agent. But it's name is Barnbrack, not Barmbrack. Besides, we always used yeast.   

I first heard Barnbrack called Barmbrack in England, shortly after I arrived there in the 1970s. But it was clear that the English hadn't a clue about Hallowe'en. They kept announcing that it was American, and I could never find brack, monkeynuts, breadsoda or buttermilk in their shops. (They call breadsoda Bicarb, by the way. Techically accurate, I suppose, but weird nonetheless.) Anyway, faced with their ignorance of the basic facts about, and requirements for, Hallowe'en, I dismissed the whole Barmbrack thing as absurd.

But then, in the silent watches of the night, I began to worry. Barmbrack came with a convincing etymology. What exactly did Barnbrack mean? There was no problem with the brack bit. Breac is the Irish for 'speckled'. Digging surreptitiously about in a dictionary, I came up with the bairín, a word I've never knowingly used myself but, apparently, is Irish for 'a loaf'. So, there you go, 'a speckled loaf' - which pretty much describes Barnbrack. 

I rest my case. 



This, by the way, is Brack And Butter Pudding. Slices of stale buttered brack in a buttered dish. Pour on egg custard and bake in a moderate oven under a thick grating of nutmeg. 

It's far from that I was reared, of course. We just fried our stale brack in salted butter and had it for breakfast with rashers.

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Winding down towards Winter

Light hits the world at a different angle. The focus changes and everything seems closer. Folds in the mountains. Foam on the waves. Shadows on the sand, and the work to be done before winter contains us.


Freckled sunlight catches the last splashes of colour in the garden.


Then colour shifts to monochrome and clouds herald storms. Down by the strand, grass melts from the fields where cows wait for the sileage.





Back at the house, work goes on with one eye on the weather.


And, between sunshine and showers, we gather in our own winter fodder.


The last of the beans and greens from the garden, the blight free spuds, mustard and a couple of Jerry Kennedy's sausages.


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Arbitrary Autumn Baking.

I love these autumn days when you bundle green beans, or garlic, or apples, into newspaper and take them round to a neighbour. And then come home to find somebody else has done the same thing for you.

It's the time of year when baking's completely arbitrary. A walk produces blackberries, so suddenly there's a pie. Or, if a pie's too complicated, it's three ounces of butter rubbed into eight of self-raising flour, three tablespoons of buttermilk and a beaten egg mixed in by hand, an extra sprinkle of flour to keep the ball of dough from sticking on the work surface, pat it flat and cut yourself nine rounds. Then ten minutes in the oven at 200c (make the tea while you're waiting) and there I am with my feet up by the fire, squashing dark, juicy blackberries onto hot, buttered scones.

But, to get back to that  gift on the doorstep, here's an arbitrary upside down cake.

As far as I can remember, this one was rhubarb and apple - probably more apple than rhubarb - chopped small into a well buttered eight inch cake tin and sprinked with brown sugar - or maybe drizzled with some honey - and covered by a basic sponge mix.( I'd say I might have chopped some crystallised ginger in with the apple and rhubarb as well.) 

Anyway, once it was baked, I turned it out onto a wire tray and sprinkled it with dark brown sugar which melted into the apple and rhubarb a bit as the cake cooled.... I use several different sponge mixes but I'm fairly sure this one was the simplest - four ounces each of self raising flour; soft margarine (or beaten butter) at room temp; caster sugar (or soft brown sugar). Two large eggs. I tspn baking powder. You sift the flour and baking powder into a large bowl, holding the sieve high to incorporate as much air as possible. Add the rest and whisk.

Bake for half and hour or so at about 180c .... and that's about it. Only you'd probably want to serve it with cream. And more tea.

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Layers of Memory

There's a family story that it was made as a wedding present. I don't if it's true.

I know that it once stood in my grandfather's home in Galway, in a room above his barber's shop in Eyre Square. I know that, when the shop was sold after his death, it came to Dublin with my grandmother, a charming, angry woman, who took to her bed on arrival and stayed there, in a temper, till she died.

I know that when I was born, my father shortened the legs so my mother could use it as a nursing chair.

I remember kneeling in front of it when I was five, playing house; I put a pastry board across the arms as a roof, and tucked my teddy to sleep on the seat.

As I work down through the layers of paint, the memories blur. The top layer's white. That was put on by my brother after my mother's death. Beneath it, there's a layer of Wedgewood blue. That went on when my father died. I remember my mother, alone in the home they'd made together, afraid that even to change the colour of a chair was somehow to betray his memory.


The next layer's brown. It's the hardest to shift. Underneath it, a creamy undercoat clings to the spindles and seat and needs digging out of the legs. The chisel's best to begin with, interspersed with blasts of a wire brush on the electric drill. Then we switch to wire wool and sandpaper. A nylon brush whisks away flakes and dust, revealing the knots and scratches, the marks of other, older tools, and the colours and grains of the different woods chosen by the man who made it.

After my mother died, my brother took it from Dublin to Enniscorthy. Weeks ago, when we drove to Enniscorthy for a reading of The House on an Irish Hillside, we collected it and brought it to Corca Dhuibhne. Wilf and I have no children. Where will it go when we're gone?

Under the steady, repeated gestures of chipping and sanding, turning and dusting, my mind plays with ideas for a new book. Then a sideways twist of the chisel takes me down to the wood, revealing two letters chiselled into the thickness of the back of the seat.  



They're the initals of the man who made it. I don't know his name.

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