The House at Coolanlough

This was created as part of the ‘Cultural Afterlife of Ruins’ project organised by the Nerve Centre, Queen’s University Belfast and the National Museums of Northern Ireland in early 2021.

Cottage at Coolanlough. Built Heritage at Risk Register # HB 05/04/016 D

Photograph by Mary Hill, Mary Hill Photography

Photograph HARNI website

Photograph by Andrew McClelland, BHARNI website

Painting by Bridgeen Butler, Bridgeen Butler Irish Art

The House at Coolanlough

This is the last place the world was ever safe, where all was and would be well.

My mother came here not to die, but to live fiercely, squeeze every drop out of every day and to hide the pain until the very last. When Berna was being born, we came so Mummy could mind everyone. We marched along the road singing loudly, Bridgeen and Peter in the pushchair. We walked over to Craigfad or sometimes down to Carey to get messages at Pat McVeigh’s. Sometimes we lit candles in the chapel.

When they brought the baby home, the grown-ups pulled chairs out into the sunshine to laugh and laugh, china teacups rang, bees droned, and the white sheets spread out on the whins near blinded you. Small feet stepped from the hot flat stones onto thick cool springy grass and ran to the lough. The silky soft mud squeezed between toes and the water got colder and colder as you waded out. Chickens hopped on the half door and peered into the dark kitchen. The grown-ups shooed this years’ pet lambs back outside and their little hooves clicked and slipped on the flags.

Then, back in London, suddenly she was gone. Someone handed me to a BEA stewardess at Heathrow with a scary red mouth. At Aldergrove it was night and the wind blew hard and cold across the runway; here was another auntie and a big car, gates and hedges rushing past and past, until it was the gates and hedges that I knew. More teacup noise and I was bustled into flannel ‘jamas warm from the range and dispatched to the back bedroom to squeeze in between cousins in a big bed. They were warm and smelled like hay and puppies and the salt wind that rolled up and over the clifftop and blew through their hair. Hold on very tight.

This townland is called ‘Cross’, it goes all the way up to the crest of Fair Head. Once there were three churches here and before that a penitential route was prescribed around the cliff edge, punctuated by huge crosses. What might one have done to be sent to the furthest one, over at Doon? The silence speaks eloquently of the transcendent, the sublime, the ineffable, the divine. The Parish is called Culfeightrin: ‘the place of the stranger’. Ptolemy wrote about foreign tribes who were encamped here in the second century, when Phoenician sailors passed this way. Full well they knew this majestic headland, Rathlin Island beyond and the treacherous strait between them. It seems this place always was at the edge of the world and at the centre of the world all at once, like it is in my heart.

 Farmers hereabout have the same names as those who lived here in the 1700s, names on registers of rents paid to Mr Boyd, agent to Lord Antrim. Every house in this clachan is listed, even those humble ones with no chimney, just a sod to pull across the hole in the thatch when the rain lashed.

Farmers hereabout still have a rundale sensibility, are something more than neighbours to each other and adhere to ancient laws that go without saying. Farmers hereabout are a bit thran, ‘cute in business and would surprise you with their mysticism and generosity if they didn’t take such care to hide all that so well. You learn a lot at wakes.

The land is all rock and bog, gorse and rushes. At least as far back as the 10th century, in those so-called Dark Ages and through the turbulent years of the Dalriada, countless sons and daughters left this place for the Isles, for Scotland, for England and far beyond. Those left behind fashioned stone, sewed, spun, hammered metals, fished and farmed, wove and wiped tears and found a thousand ways to survive. Uncle Sean showed me a squarish hollow, like a wicked wee sheough designed to twist an ankle, an old ‘ret’ he said. “For the linen, you know.” He showed me the precious springs all around, sparkling puddles and trickles in the grass.

The lough has a crannog, for us the focus of high endeavour as we bravely swam out to it, noses high, arms spreading wide. On the other side of it is an underwater causeway, so you might also walk out to it if you could stand up on the slimy stones. Beyond the lough is a little pointy hill and they tell us it was once an iron age fort and then a Norman castle, not just the tumble of stones down a slope that it is now.  Buried here are the new-born children the church would not claim and Doon has the lonely melancholy of all such places. Our house would have known such tragedies. Who made the sad trek around the waters as evening fell with a small bundle locked in their arms? Fevers and pestilences and the eternal consequences of poverty stole more loved ones. Even so, on winter nights, the little windows glowed golden yellow, turf and pipe smoke curled, neighbours crowded in and song and music and laughter echoed up the hillside.

When I returned after long years, I found the little house like this. The roof was in, the door hung loose on one rusted hinge, the black range was torn away from the wall and left in the middle of the floor, standing in a spotlight of sun powering through where the slates were gone. The wallpaper with the blowsy roses was hanging in coiled strips, faded to grey.  “It breaks my heart to see it like that,” said Auntie Bernie, “I loved that wee house”.

I have no power to save it, so I call in help. I bring small polished crystals, scraps of bright ribbon sewn with tiny bells and pearl buttons, little scrolls with pictures and spells wound about with red thread and I hide them about the place. I splash milk in the hollows on the drystone walls and in the crooks of trees just as my mother taught me and summon them. I ask that they ensure it never quite falls and whoever lives here will love it as we do.

Out back are two big black rocks. To the geologists these are ‘glacial erratics’; they are to us forever ‘the horses’. Without doubt, these rocks have been horses for centuries. No one lets children run wild as we did though, not anymore.  Scrambling and sliding up and down the Grey Man’s Path; finding our treasure of green glass fishing floats in the caves at the bottom of the cliff. We were sure as goats on the Boulder Field, seeing if we or the tide would blink first.

I have dreamed of living here, finishing my days with “a wall of books against the cold” as Kieran put it, hearing the lapping of the lough, the kitten cries of buzzards above, the settling of turf in the stove. I doubt it will come to pass.  I travelled too long, shapeshifted into too many other lives, returned a shady prodigal who has forfeited her right to belong anywhere, not even in the Place of the Stranger.