Everywhere Stories- Nigel Quinlan guest post
All places have stories. You just have to ask, and listen. There’s a hill where I grew up called Lisavoora. Translated from the slightly mangled Gaelic, it means ‘the fort of the giant.’ There’s a bridge with the same name near the foot of the hill made of red sandstone. Wind and rain have shaped the tops of the stones into a rough surface of bumps and hollows. Somewhere in all those bumps and hollows is said to be the handprint of the giant, left there after he came out of the fort and vaulted over the bridge. You can run your hand along the stone, searching for the handprint. You can even find it a few times in a few different places. The giant himself is buried under the hill, and they say he will wake before the end of the world, though they don’t say why.
There’s a place next to where my grandparents used to live, a long, narrow valley with steep sides covered in dripping undergrowth, a stream gurgling and splashing through it, and a strange spot halfway down called the Mass Rock. The valley is called Glenstal, ‘the glen of the stallion,’ because someone once released their horse there rather than be forced to sell it cheap. The Mass Rock is where Catholics heard Mass during the dark days of the Penal Laws. My Dad tells me there was a Belgian monk from the nearby monastery who saw something evil in the woods around there and fled back to Belgium. There’s an artificial lake within a mile or so that drained once when the dam holding its waters in broke, and people wandered the muddy flats and picked up fish from the ground and put them in bags and took them home to eat.
Every place has stories. When you grow up listening to these stories, hearing the names of these places and remembering the stories that lie behind them, then place and story become impossible to separate. Every place must have a story. Every story must have a place.
Even if that place is a phone box.
There aren’t many phone boxes left now, and there’s a whole other story in that. There used to be plenty of them, everywhere you went. They were so ordinary and boring you wouldn’t have thought they needed a story. Handy places to make phone calls, you’d have thought, until someone comes along to invent the mobile phone. Can’t even take pictures with them.
Nowadays, if you were driving down a lonesome road in the heart of the Irish countryside and you saw one on the side of the road in front of an old farmhouse being run as a B&B, you might wonder how it got there, and why. You might wonder who runs the B&B. You might ask yourself if they have children and if those children play on the wooded hill across the road. You wouldn’t be able to see the lake or the farm on the other side of the hill, but even if you did, you wouldn’t assume there was any connection between them and the phone box.
If you decided to stop for the night at the B&B, you could ask the Maloneys, all five of them, these questions. And because places have stories and people like to tell stories, they would tell you all about it.
They might not tell you the real stories, though.
About why they call the phone box the Weatherbox. About the magical dawn ceremony that takes place in the Weatherbox four times a year. About the ancient fort that used to stand where that lake is now, and why it’s a lake, and why the farm is no longer theirs. About the vast and terrible entities that live in the sky and how they are kept in check by the Weatherman, and why.
When you live in place all your life and you know the stories by heart, you start to take them for granted. You don’t think about them, and when you do, you don’t think they’re special or interesting. Until the day comes when something happens and you have to remember the stories and think about them, because there’s a new chapter happening to that story right now that will change everything, and that everything depends on you. Sometimes when you associate stories with places you forget that they happen in places, but to people. And now those people are you.
Liz and Neil know the amazing story of the Weatherbox.
Now they have to tell us what happened next.
