Ancient Secrets: Poems from the landscape of South Armagh
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By Martin Cromie
Going up the long loanen or boreen it seemed to me that the great bulk of Slieve Gullion was really supporting the star-jewelled sky. Again, it seemed as if the mountain whispered ancient secrets to gliding mists which caressed the heathered slopes.
Michael J. Murphy At Slieve Gullion’s Foot. 1941
Abandoned House
…the days of traditional buildings are numbered.
Those that survive are already out of time with the
times…and stand condemned. E. Estyn Evans,
Ulster Folklife 1955
My father’s big hands raise me by the oxters
pitching me across the pad-locked gate
to where the rut-scarred lane is barely seen
between the unkempt walls of gorse and fern.
Eight years old, lamb-light, I sprite across
the bullrush clumps and lumps of stone
sown into lush, plump, mossy ground.
Striding side-by-side, he holds my hand.
We step inside a door-less porch and part
the drapes of fuchsia hanging in a tangle
from the slate-shorn roof. Shafts of sunlight
highlight swarms of dust motes floating free
like speckles shaken in a glass snow globe.
And from the prolapsed flue a pot-hook
beckons with a crooked finger, calls him to the
hearth where stories of our history were told.
He gazes at the absent fire, his lapis eyes arouse
a zoetrope of lives: his aproned mother dealing spuds
and cabbage from the pot; a full-moon soda griddled
over flames; while from the yard the sound of his own
father hauling ice-cold water from the well. Then
suddenly your chubby grandchild fingers chug
my hand and I look down, your toddler smile
and bright, bright eyes reflect in mine, and once more,
for a moment, I am eight-years-old, and standing
hand-in-hand beside my father sixty years ago.
Ballymacdermot Court Cairn
…has seen many changes of land ownership and survived
Frequent attacks from greedy treasure-seekers. Against all
Odds, it still stands today, watching over this unique
Landscape. Protected surely by the ‘little people’.
Cunningham & Mc Ginn The Gap of The North. 2001
At the entrance to the graves a troop of rough
Honed megaliths stands watch, a curve of stones
Assembled in an honour-guard like fossils
Stilled in amber at the moment of their deaths.
No accident the Neolithics picked this site
To venerate their dead, to set a court and tomb
Aligned by stars, in line with Newgrange forty miles
due south and cairns atop Slieve Gullion to the west.
Plumb-line tall when first installed these pillared
Sentinels incline like old men stooped and cloaked
In coats of sombre grey who gather at a wake house door,
Their shoulders rounded over time, their sharp-jawed
Faces smoothed by needle rain and rasping winds.
Liver-spots of lichen blotch their once unblemished
Skin and dull the mica, quartz and feldspar crystals
Pulsing in the granite core. And here and there
A gap – as stark as missing teeth – appears:
A five-foot obelisk extracted
For a lintel in a peasant farmer’s home;
The corbelled roof imploded
When a Yankee tank was on the look
For suspect traffic crossing from The State
In ’42; the sacred grave itself bereft
Of doorway-blocking rock removed by Bell
& Seaver, leisured landlords looting
Holy sites for sport two centuries ago.
Preserved as monuments, these sculpted tors
Stand proud of ground once cloaked in groves
Of ancient oak and yew now manicured
With tidy fields and neat-stacked boulder walls.
Interred below, our predecessors’ artefacts and bones
Repose, eternally protected by the stones.
Field Trip
‘During this meeting the party of twenty-eight members motored around
the inner side of the Tertiary Ring complex of the Slieve Gullion district
and examined exposures of its typical rocks.’ Proceedings of the Geologists
Association Summer Field Meeting, August 1935
According to ‘Proceedings’, J.E. Richey Sc.D. conducts
the party—twenty-eight geologists in gentry tweeds—around
Slieve Gullion’s ring complex examining the rocks exposed
on weathered slopes and scooped-out quarry walls.
Field notes penned in blue-black ink record investigations
of the fractured strata buckled out of synch, contorted,
moulded, sculpted by four-hundred million years of seismic
shifts, volcanic fire and mile-thick grinding ice.
And chiaroscuro sketches capture landscape features,
accurately captioned with their proper annotations:
— biotite & basalt, and dykes of lamphophyre,
breccias of granite, and vent agglomorates,
porphyritic felsite, and felspar phenocrysts,
xenoliths & gabbro, and olivine & quartz.
They pause along the Keggal Road to marvel
at the wrench fault where the ring-dyke has been split,
and one half’s shifted one full mile, creating space
for Camlough Lake. I wonder, did they see my father
standing in the quarry, sledge in hand, amidst the rocks
they’ve catalogued and studied in a language all their own?
Barely twenty, rarely schooled, he calls them stones
and sees them with a mason’s eye and knows
exactly where to crack them open with a hammer,
how to split them with a plug and feather,
sheer off headstone slabs or lumps for walls
to separate the fields, or well-faced blocks
to build another room or cattle byre against
the gable of a mountain farmer’s home.
If Stones Could Talk
The Kilnasaggart Pillar Stone is the oldest dateable Christian stone monument in Ireland…ca. 700 A.D.
Thirteen crosses scar
the Pillar Stone
a crucifix for every
hundred years it’s stood
in Kilnasaggart.
Sacred verses scribed
in Gaelic and in Latin,
grant full title of this place
to Ternoc, son of Ciaran.
Cryptic lines of Ogham
cut into the pillar base
are hacked beyond translation
—early Christians anxious
it would seem to exorcise
unholy Pagan rites
and Druid sorcery.
Still it stands upright
in full sight
in the borderlands
a symbol full of symbols
open to interpretation.
Martin Cromie is from Newry in Northern Ireland. Martin retired early from Education Administration and returned to full-time study at Queens University Belfast’s Seamus Heaney Centre, where he completed an MA (2012) and PhD (2016) in Creative Writing. His essays, poems and short stories have appeared in various publications including the Bristol Short Story Anthology, 2013 ‘Stop Press’ (Shortlisted for Short Story Competition); Brain of Forgetting (Cork University) 2015 ‘Granite Voices’; Causeway/Cabhsair, (University of Aberdeen) 2015 ‘Stones, Bones and DNA’; On The Grass When I Arrive: An Anthology of Place Writing Guild Hall Press 2016 ‘The Spirit of the Stone’.