Riots in Northern Ireland

So, there are riots in Northern Ireland again, but this time the Catholics and Protestants are on the same side. Is that progress?

Alistair Moffat, "The Sea Peoples: the History of Celtic Britain and Ireland"

Medieval Monastery on Skellig Michael, Ireland

From my old web site:

“This is a history,” Alistair Moffat tells us, “of whispers and forgetfulness, a story of how the memories and understandings of the Celtic peoples of Britain and Ireland almost faded into inconsequence.” Right away Moffat impresses us with the beauty of his language, the power of his love for his homeland, and the imprecision of his thinking. What is a history of forgetfulness, anyway? But it is a lovely phrase and it serves as well as any other to introduce Moffat’s delightful and unusual little book. Not really a history, The Sea Peoples (2002) might be better described as an exploration across time and space. Moffat wanders the Celtic lands of Britain and Ireland, especially Wales, Cornwall, the Hebrides, and the Isle of Man, talking to people, describing what he sees, and relating the odd historical anecdote. The historical stories come without concern for chronology, touching on whatever catches Moffat’s interest. We get a little on the pre-Roman Britons and the pagan Irish, a little more on medieval monks, a nice chapter on the arrival of the Vikings and the formation of the half Scottish, half Viking Kingdom of the Isles, and a fair amount on the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The stories are fascinating and Moffat tells them well. I learned much, especially about the revival of the Welsh language in the nineteenth century, based on dissenting chapels and hymn singing, and the history of the Scottish borders. I enjoyed almost every page, and I heartily recommend Moffat’s book.

Moffat occasionally goes in for what strikes me as excessive anti-English ranting, but without ever lying or exaggerating – given how many horrible things the English have done to the Welsh and the Irish, he hardly has to – and he also describes a few of the atrocities the Welsh and Irish have inflicted in return. He dwells in particular on the many ways lowland Scots brutalized their highland countrymen, and King James VI and I is one of the story’s worst villains. Among other sundry oppressions he punished a few rebellious clans by banning their surnames. It became a capital crime to use the name MacGregor, and several MacGregors were executed for the offense of going by their own name. Mainly, though, Moffat celebrates the land and people of Britain’s western shores. He visits a builder of traditional Irish boats, hikes the Welsh mountains while reliving the struggle against Edward I, peruses ancient crosses on the Isle of Man. He goes to Padstow to see the famous ‘Obby ‘Oss, where drunk Cornishmen tell him to get the fuck out of their town. Moffat, not the least daunted, regards this behavior as typically Celtic, and he seems pleased that the Padstow men are determined to keep their ancient festival their own.

Moffat is himself a lowland Scot with roots in the border country, and he makes his living as a producer for Scottish television. By way of a midlife crisis he has thrown himelf into Celtic nationalism, learning Gaelic and producing a series of documentaries about the Celtic lands. The book is, as I said, delightful, but I find this sort of small-country nationalism to be a deeply puzzling thing. Alistair Moffat is a citizen of the world, a resident of multi-cultural metropolis, a master of high technology and contemporary art. What, exactly, is he doing in the Hebrides, mucking around in tweed and learning a language that none of his ancestors spoke? (The Celtic element of border culture was Welsh, not Gaelic, as Moffat himself explains.) Why is he associating himself with a history of defeat and oppression, instead of celebrating the Scottish Enlightenment or the charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo? I don’t get it. I realize, though, that many of my fellow humans feel this sort of pull toward a small world that they can claim as their own. So I read books like Moffat’s with interest, and wonder what his obsession means.

What, exactly, is Celtic about the western fringe of Britain? Moffat devotes a lot of attention to language, and learning Gaelic has been part of his personal quest. But, as he explains, Gaelic is dying out, and he believes Irish is not far behind it on the road to extinction. Moffat spends a lot of time in Cornwall and on the Isle of Man, where the ancient languages have no more native speakers and are maintained only by a few hobbyists. Only in Wales, he says, does the native language have real strength. So while Celtic is a linguistic term, it is hard to see how language defines the culture of the region. There is history, to be sure, but what do these regions have in common historically but opposition to, and oppression by, English-speaking lowlanders? Moffat has a go at defining a Celtic view of the world, but the only things he comes up with are a love of heavy drinking, a delight in music, a fondness for flowery oratory, a tolerance for bland food, and greater-than-normal interest in sex. On such things we found our personal identities. Over them we fight wars and stage revolutions.

Everything else Moffat finds to say about “Celtic” culture seems to me to be more about pre-modern, peasant culture than anything particularly Celtic. Take, for example, Moffat’s words on how the Celts measured time:

The Celtic way of reckoning time was very different from our modern method of dividing the year into months, days, and hours. The Celtic year was arranged around four quarter-day festivals which took their cue not from the date on the calendar, but from the weather, the landscape and the behavior of animals. (31) 

Which is pretty much the way everyone in pre-modern Europe reckoned time. All Moffat says about how much the Celts love the landscape of their homes, how strongly they have clung to their tiny farms in the face of huge pressure to leave, how deeply they distrust city-based power, and so on, applies equally well to peasants just about everywhere else in the world. I often observe this about nationalists of various kinds. When pressed to name the special characteristics of their homelands, they can do no better than to describe humanity. Small country nationalism is an assertion of difference. I am not like everyone else, says the proud Welshman, Breton, Basque, or Quebecois. But the differences they point to strike me as insignificant, especially compared to the gulf that separates a modern man like Moffat from any of his ancestors born before 1850. In what sense is Alistair Moffat more like Owen Glendower than he is like me?

I think the interest of modern metropolitans in the rural nations of their ancestors grows out of dissatisfaction with the lives we live. Even for successful TV producers, the planet-wide sameness of modern society, the sterility of air-conditioned towers that separate us from the soil and the weather, and the pointlessness of so much that we do batter our souls and full us with emptiness. We are safe from disease and hunger, even tooth pain, but instead of contentment we feel loss. Surrounded by people, we feel alone. We have trouble feeling that any of the greatness around us is our own. We are strangers in the metropolis and our most pressing question is, who am I? The response of many people is to turn their backs on the broader world and immerse themselves in something small. The very smallness of these identities, their hopelessness backwardness, their legacies of defeats and conquests, makes them beacons of meaning in a world that values only celebrity and success. I am a Celt, Alistiar Moffat says to the mirror, and this answer gives him a place to stand amidst the whirl of post-industrial civilization. It is not place I can belong to, or much want to belong to, but his marvelous book gives an outsider some idea of why so many people place their hearts in this quasi-imaginary land.

October 24, 2009 

The Lough Kinale Book Shrine

This amazing artifact was found in an Irish lake back in 1986, and was conserved very carefully over the next 39 years. It is now on display at the Irish National Museum. Incidentally a "book shrine" is just a fancy cover for a religious book, what others would call a treasure binding.

It likely dates to the 9th century. How it ended up on the bottom of a smallish lake is anybody's guess.

Fintan O'Toole on Ireland's Discontented Golden Age

Ireland's economy is the envy of much of the world. Thanks to massive investment by US-based multinationals, unemployment is low and corporate taxes have made the government so flush that they have been able to cut taxes, raise social spending, and reduce the debt at the same time.

But as in the US, the big numbers don't seem to be reflected in the lives of many Irish people:

Envious readers might wonder why Ireland needs to have an election at all. Can’t the politicians who have delivered these wonders simply be returned to office by acclamation? But the truth is that Ireland does not feel like a very happy place. Part of this is the frustration of fulfilled desires. Ireland has the two things its patriots dreamed of for centuries: political independence and economic prosperity. For a long time, we were an “if only” society — if only the English had not colonized us, if only we were not so poor, if only the church had not become so overweeningly powerful. Those six little letters covered a multitude of failings. They don’t anymore. Ireland’s problems today stem from the collective choices it has freely made for itself.

For just as the country acts as a showpiece for the upsides of extreme globalization, it also demonstrates the downsides. Ireland’s public services and infrastructure significantly lag its warp-speed economy, creating a place that feels somehow both overdeveloped and underdeveloped. And on its own, the globalized market economy does not produce the public goods necessary for a decent quality of life. Ireland may be awash with money, but its young people can no longer afford to buy homes; sky-high rents are making it impossible for many to live in the main cities of Dublin, Cork and Galway; homelessness and child poverty have risen; access to health care is uneven and uncertain; public transport and public schools are often overcrowded; physical infrastructure is seriously inadequate; and the pace of transition to a carbon-free economy has been painfully slow.

Then there is the issue of immigration; long an exporter of people, Ireland has become a migrant destination, notably for people from Ukraine.

For years the handling of this immigration — especially of a large influx of refugees from Ukraine and asylum seekers from Asia and Africa — has been somewhat chaotic. The failure of successive governments to adequately expand housing, infrastructure and public services has created a political opening for the far right and allowed the slogan “Ireland is full,” to seem both absurd and credible. This is still one of the least densely populated countries in Western Europe, but it can seem badly congested.

Two things: for one, again as in the US, people are looking not at the overall economic situation but at their own issues, and if you can't afford an apartment in the city where you want to live you don't enjoy lectures on GDP growth. 

But for another, it seems ever more clear to me that we can't buy our way to happiness. Our political discourse is focused on the economy. This is partly because we believe that the government has a lot of power there, but maybe it is partly because our problems feel economic even when they are not. For example, in the widespread claims that people "can't afford" to have children. 

Every social change that many people longed for and celebrate – viz., breaking the power of the Irish church – is mourned by others.

Is is even possible for a society to be, on the whole, happy?

I have my doubts.

Patrick Radden Keefe, "Say Nothing"

Say Nothing is a remarkable book, fully deserving of its slot on the NY Times 100 best books of the century. It is both a general narrative of the Irish Troubles and a tale of one particular murder, the disappearance of Jean McConville in 1972. The story is mainly told from the IRA point of view with a focus on four people: Gerry Adams, Brendan Hughes, and sisters Marian and Dolours Price.

Many Irish people had never accepted the partition of the island, and there had been sporadic political violence in the north since 1916. But things were mostly pretty quiet in the 1950s and 1960s. What ignited the Troubles was an attempt by some young Catholics to organize a civil rights movement modeled on the one in the US. On October 5, 1968 a group of Catholic civil rights protesters tried to march through a Protestant neighborhood in Derry, and they were savagely attacked by loyalist paramilitaries while the police watched. This and other incidents led some members of the Irish Republican Army to call for a resumption of the "armed struggle" to drive out the British. Older IRA men were not eager for war, so a group of young radicals split away from the main faction and formed the Provisional IRA. It was the "Provos," as people called them, who carried out most of the bombings, shootings and so on over the next twenty years. Well, from the Catholic side, anyway; Protestant paramilitaries carried out plenty, and there were also atrocities committed by the police and the British army.

Two of the leaders of the Provos were Gerry Adams, who was more of a strategist, and Brendan Hughes, who was the operational leader of the Belfast Brigade. Marion and Dolours Price were two of their top soldiers. There is now a lot of oral history of these people, and they described these early days as dangerous and violent but also thrilling. Then they all went to prison. Marion and Dolours staged a famous hunger strike; one of the things I had forgotten about, until this book reminded me, was what a big deal IRA hunger strikes were. Gerry Adams seems to have done a lot of thinking during his prison stint, and to have decided – when is completely unclear – that violence would never drive out the British. So he shifted over from the IRA to become the head of its associated political party, Sinn Fein. His first major move was to have an imprisoned hunger striker, Bobby Sands, run for Parliament as a Sinn Fein candidate. (That was in 1981.) As Adams got more and more into politics and spent more time negotiating with various British, Irish, and American politicians, he began to say that he had never carried out violent acts and had in fact never been a member of the IRA.

One of the best parts of Say Nothing relates what happened to the aging soldiers of the IRA as the violence wound down and the peace process gathered momentum. They were a depressed, alcoholic, drug addicted bunch, and many of the former hunger strikers ended up anorexic. They were also furious with Gerry Adams, who had once ordered them to commit violent acts but now pretended he had never been involved. The old provos complained that they had carried out killings and bombings with one goal in mind: to drive the British out of Ireland. The mishmash compromise of the Good Friday Accords was not what they had in mind. Dolours Price said that this outcome could not justify any of what she had done, that the violence would only have been worth it if it had led to victory.

But there were plenty of other moral quandaries to go around. After peace was more or less established people began to talk and records began to slip out, and it turned out that some of the worst murderers in both the IRA and the loyalists were on the payroll of British intelligence. (One British agent said that two out of every five high-ranking IRA men were informers.) Some British newspapers were outraged; if the government knew about killings, shouldn't they be arresting the killers rather than paying them? In the US we had the same sort of confusion after 9-11; was the counter-terrorism operation more about military intelligence, or policing? Was it more important to prevent future attacks or to put people behind bars?

A book like this raises other questions. Keefe has done a lot of work to understand his IRA subjects, while limiting outrage over what they did. What should our attitude be? I find myself divided. The system in Northern Ireland was blatantly discriminatory, and the police worked in tandem with loyalist paramilitaries to keep Catholics down. The regime that resulted from the Good Friday Accords was much better for Catholics than what had come before. If the violence contributed to that end, it was in a sense beneficial.

But I don't think the violence did contribute very much. I think the main driver of peace in Ireland has been very broad social and economic changes. In 1968 Protestants in the north saw Catholic Ireland as a bunch of superstititious peasants barely out of the Middle Ages, and they wanted nothing to do with that priest-ridden state. To me, the biggest driver of peace has been the enormous economic and social change in Ireland, which has removed most of the issues that drove the conflict. Joining Ireland doesn't seem nearly as drastic or scary as it did in 1968. Meanwhile the economic situation in the north has deteriorated, and they are no longer significantly richer or better-educated than people in the rest of Ireland. As Keefe says, recent attempts by dissident IRA factions to restart the violence have been ignored by young people, who want nothing to do with violence that seems pointless to them.

That kind of progress warms my heart.

Ireland's Entry in the Suffering Sweepstakes

From a review of Fintan O’Toole's history of Ireland since his birth in 1958:

O’Toole was lucky enough to attend a relatively normal school run by the Christian Brothers, if normality can be stretched to accommodate unrestrained physical violence meted out with leather straps or bamboo canes, and much enforced propaganda; the Brothers published such texts as Courtesy for Boys and Girls and a Catechism of the History of Ireland, which asserted that “in the martyrology of history, among crucified nations, Ireland occupies the foremost place. The duration of her torture, and the ferocity of her executioner, are as revolting as the power of the victim is astonishing.” 

RIP Paddy Moloney

The Chieftains have been a phenomenon. For nearly 50 year they toured more, recorded more, and collaborated with more other musicians than any other band I can think of. In fact I often wondered what their lives were like, since they seemed to be so constantly on the move around the world. They did more to preserve and spread traditional Irish music than anyone else ever has. Paddy Moloney was their founder and guiding spirit, so I toast his memory.  Here are some of the tracts they recorded with famous collaborators:

The Long Black Veil with Mick Jagger

Have I Told You Lately with Van Morrison

Mo Ghile Mear with Sting

The Foggy Dew with Sinead O'Connor (that's Moloney on the pipes)

Raglan Road with Joan Osborne

Down the Old Plank Road with John Hiatt

Dark as a Dungeon with Vince Gill

Lily of the West with Mark Knopfler

Lukey's Boat with Great Big Sea. (If you compare this version to one Great Big Sea recorded on their own, you see what The Chieftains brought to their collaborators: this one is ten times more lively, fun, and beautiful)

And an instrumental number, O'Sullivan's March

Will Ireland be Reunited?

One of the issues raised by Brexit was what to do about the boundary between Northern Ireland and the rest of the island. During the Troubles, the IRA constantly attacked border posts, which became armed fortresses, and one of the most beautiful signs of the peace that followed the Good Friday Accords was the dismantling of those grim, concrete and barbed wire monstrosities. But the open border between the UK and the Irish Republic depended on both being in the EU. So when Britain announced it was leaving, many (including me) wondered, what would happen to that suddenly relevant border?

Last summer Boris Johnson announced a solution: rather than rebuilding the border between the two Irish nations, a new customs and trade boundary would be established between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. This caused so much disruption that much of it had to be suspended on an "emergency" basis, and nobody thinks it is working very well, but the symbolic message was clear: Britain was ready and willing to jettison Northern Ireland if that was the price of its independence from the EU.

This has Susan McKay wondering how much longer Northern Ireland will endure:

Northern Ireland, created in 1921 when Britain carved six counties out of Ireland’s northeast, is not enjoying its centenary. Its most ardent upholders, the unionists who believe that the place they call “our wee country” is and must forever remain an intrinsic part of the United Kingdom, are in utter disarray. Their largest party has ousted two leaders within a matter of weeks, while an angry minority has taken to the streets waving flags and threatening violence. And the British government, in resolving Brexit, placed a new border in the Irish Sea. . . .

The writing is on the wall. While the process by which Ireland could become unified is complicated and fraught, one thing seems certain: There isn’t going to be a second centenary for Northern Ireland. It might not even last another decade. . . .

Northern Ireland now has borders with Britain and Ireland — and it is no longer a majority-Protestant state. The last census, in 2011, showed that the Protestant population had declined to 48 percent and the Catholic minority had risen to 45 percent. The Protestant community is aging, too: In 2011, only among those over 60 did it have a significant majority, and among schoolchildren, Catholics were the larger group. The results of a census to be published next year may well show an overall Catholic majority.

Nor can unionists count on the votes of Protestants. As a society, Northern Ireland has become more secular, more tolerant of diversity, less insular. People who reject conservative social policies have other voting options, and many young people do not vote at all. Some put their energy into global movements like climate justice and feminism — and plenty neither know nor care about the religious background of their friends. 

From the 1920s to the 1990s, Unionism in the North was fed by the huge economic, educational and social disparities between the industrialized, Protestant area around Belfast and the vast stretches of rural poverty across Catholic Ireland. But like most old manufacturing cities, Belfast has fallen on hard times, while Ireland has both boomed economically and become much less conservatively Catholic. So, as McKay says, some of the disparities on which Unionist sentiment was founded have faded away, and many young people just don't understand what all the fuss was about.

When I was younger I believed that the arrangement of nations I saw on the map was permanent, and I scoffed at the notion that Germany would ever be reunited. The division of Ireland is no more permanent than the Berlin Wall turned out to be, and I would also not be surprised to see it disappear in my lifetime.

Tim Robinson, “Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage”

Tim Robinson’s 1986 book about Aran has been perfect for me in this crazy time: calm, soothing, richly interesting, rather sad but in a slow, reflective, elegiac way. Aran is the largest of three limestone islands off Ireland’s west coast, long fabled as the most unspoiled bit of old Erin. When Robinson, an English writer, arrived at Aran in 1972 the place was already becoming what it is today, a tourist spot for those who really want to get away from it all. But Robinson spoke Irish and had a knack for getting old men to talk to him, so he was able to record a hoard of stories about Aran’s past that delightfully enriches his account of walking the island’s stony shores.

Robinson actually wrote two books about Aran, of which Pilgrimage is the first. Pilgrimage traces the circumference of the island, an imagined walk all the way around its shores. Labyrinth, the second volume, explores the interior, and since I’ve already ordered it I imagine I’ll be reviewing it later. Aran (or Inishmore, as it is called by people who apply the name Aran to the whole island chain) is a long, narrow island with essentially two sides. The southern side faces the Atlantic and is exposed to its fearful storms; nobody lives there, and much of the coast is daunting cliffs as much as 300 feet (90 m) tall. Everyone lives on the northern, protected side where the coast is a series of bays, headlands, and shingle beaches. So the book is divided into two parts, one that describes the unpeopled cliffs and the other the harbors and seaweed beds of the settled side. 

As Robinson walks his readers around the island he tells us about the geology of this limestone rock, and then the names of each feature, and then the stories behind the names. Every few hundred yards he has a longer story about some particular bay, cliff, or beach, or some fascinating bit of island history. He starts at the east end of the island and almost immediately we get this:

In the last century emigrant ships sailing out of Galway for America used to come through Sunda Ghriora [the strait east of Aran] and sometimes had to wait for days for a favourable wind. Then if there were Aran people on board their relatives and friends who had already said goodbye to them and may even have held a wake for them, knowing that in most cases the parting was forever, were given another sight of them by this chance that was perhaps more cruel than kind, but at a distance that must have made it an unreal, wordless and ghostly reappearance. The way by which the bereaved came down to the shore to wave and weep is a little valley called Gleann na nDeor. This phrase is the Irish equivalent of the old preachers’ platitude for this world as a place of sorrow, the “vale of tears.” (33)

Then around to the southern shore of the island and the great cliffs. As Robinson writes, an ordinary map all but ignores a cliff, making it a mere line between land and sea, but the cliffs of Aran have their own geography, and their own history, too. The cliff face “was a wide province of the islanders’ mental landscape, a theatre of anecdote, tradition, boast and dream ” (63).

These cliffs have ledges in them, because the thick layers of limestone that make them up are separated by thin layers of softer clay-stone that erode more quickly, creating slots in the cliff face. In late spring those ledges are covered with seabird nests, which the locals used to raid for feathers, eggs, and meat. This was done by lowering the "cliff man" 100 or 200 feet down on a dodgy rope – in the dark, because the nests had to be raided at night – until he found the ledge. He would then crawl along the ledge feeling for nests, trying to catch the birds sleeping and strangle them before they could cry out and warn the others. The birds and eggs were stuffed into sacks, and when the cliff man could carry no more he would tug on the rope and be pulled up. Nobody knows how old this practice was, but it was first recorded by outsiders in the famine years, and it died out during World War II. The cliff men were local heroes, and in the 1970s people still remembered the most famous ones well and knew many stories about their heroics and their phlegmatic attitude toward danger.

Some of the bays along this shore have names related to wrecking, like Bay of the Timber or Bay of the Pine Boards:

Many of the old homes of the islands have rafters cut from beams washed ashore and carried off and hidden before the coastguards or the landlords’ agent got wind of them, and even today islanders keep an eye out for such prizes. Recently an elderly and, as I had thought, frail couple, neighbours of ours in the west of the island, managed to drag a thick tree trunk eighteen feet long up a steep shingle bank to where they could bring a cart for it. When I made some remark about this feat the old lady replied, “Ni raibh ann ach pleisiur!” — “It was nothing but a pleasure!” (40)

The most famous feature of Aran’s coast is the great fort known as Dun Oengus. Alas, nobody really knows how old this is, who lived here, or why it was built, and Robinson makes even the tentative dates and theories I have seen elsewhere seem like pure guesswork. Robinson does dismiss the notion that the fort was once round but lost half its structure to the sea; such a great fall of rock, he says, would still be piled around the base of the cliff, since it would have taken 10,000 years for the waves to wash it away, and since there is no such pile there has been no major collapse of this cliff since the Ice Age. Besides there are two other forts in these islands that back up against the sea, although both of the others are on peninsulas. Robinson fills out his chapter on the fort by regaling the reader with all the theories that have been advanced by every sort of historian and madman over the years, especially those concerning the Fir Bolgs. The traditional history of Ireland, as written down by medieval monks, tells of a series of invasions by people who each displaced the previous inhabitants. The Irish, ancestors of the current inhabitants, appear in this narrative as the Milesians, and the people they drove out were called the Fir Bolgs. Nineteenth-century antiquarians decided that Aran must have been the last refuge of the Fir Bolgs, and Dun Oengus their last stronghold, their backs up against the cliffs of the sea.

I could go on and on, but I have to limit myself, so as to leave you reasons to pick up this book yourself. So we go around the island to the north, inhabited side.

Aran's economy, such as it was, depended on three things: fishing, raising potatoes in soil made out of sand and seaweed, and kelping. Kelping meant the gathering of seaweed to burn for the ash, which lasted on Aran from the early 1700s to 1948. Kelp ash was a valuable commodity as a feed stock for Britain's developing chemical industry, which consumed thousands of tons of ash every year for making soap, gunpower, and a hundred other things. Kelping therefore became a major industry on all of Britain's rocky shores but especially in the Scottish highlands and the west of Ireland. 

Fishing and nest raiding were both masculine pursuits, but kelping was done by whole families, so it was a big part of the Aran experience. It was backbreaking labor, cutting the seaweed in waist deep water, carrying it up to the shore, a race because it could only be done at low tide three or four days a month. Then it had to dry, and rain at the wrong time could ruin it. Then it was burned in hand-built rock kilns, a process that took 36 hours of constant tending. Then it was sold to an agent who tested it for its iodine content and, the islanders thought, regularly cheated them. Robinson passes on a little rhyme sung for him by an old woman, which he translates; the place names are all rocky points where kelp was gathered and burned:

Dun an Ni broke my heart;
Beal a Chalaidh took my life;
Leic Mhor put me under the earth.

Now all of that is over, and the locals live half off subsidies and half off tourists; not that they don't still fish and raise potatoes in gardens they build out of sand and seaweed, but that is no longer the economic center. They have health care, and schools, and they don't have to worry about starving. And they are mostly just like everyone else.

If you want to get away from our sad and crazy nation, but not to someplace too exciting or disturbing, and I cannot recommend any journey more than following Tim Robinson to Aran.

Robinson's wonderful map of the island is here. In 1934 Robert Flaherty (whose first film was Nanook of the North) made a film about life on Aran called Man of Aran that is still quite famous; you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.

Which Trees Can I Burn?

Old Irish poem from Egerton 1782, a famous manuscript written around 1517 that includes much ancient material. Here the King of the Little People explains to Fergus which trees should be burned:

The pliant honeysuckle if thou burn, wailings for misfortune will abound,
Dire extremity at weapons’ points or drowning in great waves will follow.

Burn not the precious apple tree of spreading and low-sweeping bough;
Tree ever decked in bloom of white, against whose fair head all men put forth the hand.

The surly blackthorn is a wanderer, a wood that the artificer burns not;
Throughout his body, though it be scanty, birds in their flocks warble.

The noble willow burn not, a tree sacred to poems;
Within his blooms bees are a-sucking, all love the little cage.

The graceful tree with the berries, the wizard’s tree, the rowan burn;
But spare the limber tree; burn not the slender hazel.

Dark is the colour of ash; timber that makes the wheels to go;
Rods he furnishes for horsemen’s hands, his form turns battle into flight.

Tenterhook among woods the spiteful briar is, burn him that is so keen and green;
He cuts, he flays the foot, him that would advance he forcibly drags backward.

Fiercest heat-giver of all timber is green oak, from him non may escape unhurt;
By partiality for him the head is set on aching, and by his acrid embers the eye is made sore.

Alder, very battle-witch of all woods, tree that is hottest in the fight–
Undoubtedly burn at thy discretion both the alder and whitethorn.

Holly, burn it green; holly, burn it dry;
Of all trees whatsoever the critically best is holly.

Elder that hath tough bark, tree that in truth hurts sore;
Him that furnishes horses to the armies from the sidh (fairies) burn so that he be charred.

The birch as well, if he be laid low, promises abiding fortune;
Burn up most sure and certainly the stakes that bear the constant pods.

Put on the hearth if it so please thee, the russet aspen to come headlong down;
Burn, be it late or early, the tree with the palsied branch.

Patriarch of long-lasting woods is the yew sacred to feasts as it is well known;
Of him now build ye dark-red vats of goodly size.

–Translated from Irish by Standish O’Grady

Anna Burns, "Milkman"

Anna Burns' Milkman (2018) is a remarkable book, and I loved it. I think it is my favorite book I have read this year. Not because it is perfect or has anything of perfection about it; on the contrary it takes many, many risks, in both style and subject matter, and some of them fall flat. But enough work wonderfully to make it a sheer delight. I listened to the version narrated by Brid Brennan, whose wonderful Irish accent may have contributed a lot to my pleasure.

The narrator of Milkman is an 18-year-old woman living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. We never learn her name; in fact we never learn anyone's name, knowing all the characters by titles like ma and eldest sister and maybe-boyfriend. She is Catholic and her neighborhood is a bastion of the IRA, the sort of place where the police would never go without a convoy of armored cars; members of her own family and those of most of her neighbors have died in the fighting. (Actually the IRA is not named either, but referred to as the renouncers of the state, or just the renouncers.) The most impressive thing about the book is how Burns creates the atmosphere of this place and shows how it weighs on the mind of a bookish, imaginative teenager who wants nothing to do with either religion or war. This is a tight-knit, working class neighborhood with a chip on its shoulder, the sort of place where you would never admit to admiring a sunset lest you be mocked as a sissy and maybe stuck with the nickname Sunsets for the rest of your life. (See the cover of the book above.) To this already closed-in world is added the war, which means that any nonconforming behavior might be interpreted, not just as oddness, but as treason. Everything can be political:

The right butter. The wrong butter. The tea of allegiance. The tea of betrayal.

Burns, 56, grew up in just such a neighborhood, and although she denies that the narrator is her you have to imagine that she felt some of what the narrator feels; certainly she recreates it with remarkable power and precision.

The neighborhood is of course a great place for gossip, again, adding the already rampant rumor-mongering of a tight-knit small community to the obsessive atmosphere of the secret war. It is rumor that drives the plot forward. As the narrator walks down the street, her nose in a book, a van pulls up beside her and an older man starts talking to her. Over the following days and weeks he stalks her, letting her know that he knows everything about her and her family. This is seen, of course, and gossip has her in a hot affair with this man before she has even convinced herself that anything is happening. This man, she learns, is a notorious IRA operative known only as milkman, and this becomes more fodder for the mill: other young women involved with IRA men take her aside and talk to her about the joys and sorrows of being a warrior's woman, her mother warns her that she she will end up either at her husband's funeral or monitoring his hunger strike, etc., nobody paying any attention to her protestations that nothing is happening between her and this man.

The plot and the setting create a lot of interest, but the wonder of the book is the narrator's voice. Here she is on what her mother calls "black days:"

She meant depressions, for da had had them: big, massive, scudding, whopping, black-cloud, infectious, crow, raven, jackdaw, coffin-upon-coffin, catacomb-upon-catacomb, skeletons-upon-skulls-upon-bones crawling along the ground to the grave type of depressions.

Sometimes the words pile up to a baffling degree, but mostly I found them to be an irresistible torrent that I was happy to have sweep me away.

Nan O’Toole of the Claddagh

Nan (Anne) O’Toole of the Claddagh, Galway city was an Irish fishmonger and herbalist born in 1877:

For infants suffering with bowel problems Nan prescribed holy water mixed with burnt turf dust, which was then fed to the child. Babies born prematurely were hung in a fishing net over a basin of hot warm water, as this was said to replicate the womb, providing the greatest comfort to the child. She was also renowned for her cure for eye infections, which involved Nan licking the eye.

Photo is from 1913.

Brexit in Ireland

As my readers know I am ambivalent about the EU, which I consider an elite system designed to thwart democracy, and thus I can understand why some British people voted for Leave. Except for one thing: the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. Peace has been achieved in Ireland partly by the effective erasure of that border, allowing Irish people to cross back and forth whenever they feel like. Brexit will put an end to that, and it might lead to a return of violence to Erin:

The most important of these risks can be swiftly spelled out. Focus is often placed on the sheer difficulty of policing the 310-mile border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland because there are at least 300 major and minor crossing points. But the real problem is not geographic or military but political and demographic because almost all the border runs through country where Catholics greatly outnumber Protestants. The Catholics will not accept, and are in a position to prevent, a hard border unless it is defended permanently by several thousand British troops in fortified positions.

The threat to peace is often seen as coming from dissident Republicans, a small and fragmented band with little support, who might shoot a policeman or a customs’ official. But this is not the greatest danger, or at least not yet, because it is much more likely that spontaneous but sustained protests would prevent any attempt to recreate an international frontier between Northern Ireland and the Republic that wasn’t backed by overwhelming armed force.

It is unrealistic to the point of absurdity to imagine that technical means on the border could substitute for customs personnel because cameras and other devices would be immediately destroyed by local people. A new border would have to be manned by customs officials, but these would not go there unless they were protected by police and the police could not operate without British Army protection. Protesters would be killed or injured and we would spiral back into violence.

We are not looking at a worst-case scenario but an inevitability if a hard border returns as it will, if there is a full Brexit. The EU could never agree to a deal – and would be signing its own death warrant if it did – in which the customs union and the single market have a large unguarded hole in their tariff and regulatory walls.

Maybe things aren't that bad, but to have embarked on Brexit without some plan for handing the fragile situation in Ireland was very, very foolish.

Maurice Walsh, "Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World"

Maurice Walsh's 2015 book is the best I have read about the Irish revolution of 1919-1924. It purports to be different from others on the same topic by placing Ireland in the world context of the time: after all, this was the era of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Versailles Treaty, the rebirth of Poland and Lithuania, and so on. Walsh does this to some extent, and at times the global perspective adds insight, but mostly this is just a very well written narrative of the revolutionary years.  What I especially admired was how Walsh makes everything seem uncertain and contingent. In Walsh's view neither the guerrilla war of 1919-1921, the civil war that followed, nor the partition of the island was inevitable, and he shows in detail how each step unfolded.

Walsh also has a fabulous eye for anecdotes that capture the mood of the nation. Describing the decline of Ireland's Protestant gentry, many of whom were financially ruined but still owned famous houses, Walsh finds an account of a party in a Norman castle where

All of us were in full evening dress. After dinner we ascended the great staircase leading to the drawing room. Unfortunately it started to rain, and like many things in Ireland, the roof was leaky, so we ascended, each gentleman holding an umbrella over his lady. 

When the first curfew was imposed on Dublin in January 1920, teenagers delighted in racing home by midnight or sneaking back after, a journey that, according to one diarist, provided "endless opportunities to hide in gardens, taking cover lying on the grass locked in each other's arms and stifling one's giggles with a kiss." Walsh has dozens of these little stories, and they made reading Bitter Freedom a real pleasure despite the often grim subject matter.

The crisis began with the election of December, 1918, when the Sinn Fein party won 73 of Ireland's 105 seats in the British Parliament. Sinn Fein had promised that rather than journey to Westminster they would stay in Ireland and set up their own, independent parliament. They did so. As the British government argued over how to respond, Sinn Fein set about organizing a shadow government in Ireland, with its own court system and taxation. They also began assembling an army, bringing together volunteers for drill and weapons practice right out in the open; these became known as the Irish Republican Army. Eventually the British did begin to crack down on the Sinn Fein regime, declaring its activities illegal and arresting some of its leaders. The debates over Irish affairs in Parliament and the cabinet were as much about the rest of the world as they were about Ireland: some saw Sinn Fein as the local arm of international communism, while others were worried that if independence were allowed for Ireland this would only encourage nationalists in India, Egypt, and other imperial possessions.

Meanwhile certain people in Ireland began plotting their own response to the arrests of Sinn Fein leaders. A small radical IRA faction, without seeking approval from the leadership, decided to assassinate a policeman. The response to this attack was almost all negative; the Irish church was especially harsh, and orders went down from the bishops that every priest denounce violence from the pulpit. So the radicals rethought their actions and came up with a better plan: assassinate a notoriously bad policeman. They chose a man who was both an overweening ass despised by his neighbors and heavily involved in harassing the Sinn Fein government. This time the response was much more muted, with even many priests saying that Sinn Fein had to defend itself against such characters. The circle of violence spiraled out from there: Sinn Fein killed some policemen, mostly detectives on the special squads assigned to putting down Sinn Fein and the IRA. The government fought back, arresting more Sinn Fein leaders, breaking up their arbitration courts, and assigning more police to the problem. Sinn Fein killed more policemen. The government came to fear that the Irish police were cowed and unable to deal with the problem, so they turned to other weapons. They sent dozens of army intelligence officers to Ireland to help, and some regular troops to guard key points. They also set up a force called the Auxiliaries, now known to us by their nickname, the Black and Tans.

The Auxiliaries were recruited from soldiers who had been demobilized in 1918 but had not found steady work. They were especially recruited from out of work officers. And these out of work officers were largely men who had not come from the upper or upper middle classes that had traditionally supplied Britain's leadership. Under the stress of the Great War there simply were not enough such men to fill all the needed posts, so the army made thousands of men from the lower middle class into lieutenants, captains, and majors. After the war these men faced a torrent of class prejudice; "they think a few months as an officer made them into gentlemen, har har" was the refrain. These men, pissed at the world, were recruited by the hundreds, sent to Ireland where they were given a two-week crash course in policing, and turned loose to fight the IRA. They did not even have proper uniforms, so they ended up with mix and match bits of black police garb and army khaki, which is how they got their nickname.

The result was, predictably, another escalation of violence. IRA men had been operating openly in Dublin and other cities, counting on the protection of the civilians around them, but the Black and Tans didn't care; they would open fire on crowded streets or even in crowded train cars, civilian casualties be damned. They cultivated a reputation for freewheeling violence. In one of Walsh' s anecdotes, the Black and Tans have boarded a train to arrest some IRA men they think are on board. As they charge through the train, pointing their guns in random faces, a Protestant gentleman says to one, "Young man, stop waving that pistol around, it might go off." He responds, "It's alright old man, I can reload pretty quick."

A war ensued between the Auxiliaries, backed by the army when need be, and special IRA units known as "flying columns" who kept moving around the countryside to avoid capture. When the IRA managed to ambush a Black and Tan force and kill some of its members, they enacted savage retaliations, including once burning most of downtown Cork. In England the government was roundly attacked for these abuses and adopted a two-faced response: we never ordered retaliation but we understand why men under such stress do it.

Militarily, the British were winning; the IRA simply could not face down the might of the empire. Politically, the Westminster government was losing. In the south of Ireland they had only minimal support left, and in Britain the press gave full attention to every government atrocity. They were also losing support in the arena that at that moment meant the most to them, within the leadership of the empire. In 1920 the imperial leadership was bent on recasting the British Empire as a worldwide association of nations within which all white men (South Africans, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, and God willing Americans) would unite to make the world safe for civilization. The ongoing white-on-white violence in Ireland, so well covered by the international press, was undermining the whole program. South African General Jan Smuts told the British cabinet that every month the Irish situation dragged on raised the risk of native revolts in Africa and Asia. So both sides had an incentive to seek peace on whatever terms were available.

It was at this moment that Ireland was partitioned, one of those acts taken with little thought in the midst of a crisis that reverberates for decades. Knowing that they had lost control of the south, the government decided to create a separate parliament for six counties in the northeast that had a Protestant majority. This was done without much fanfare, everyone understanding that it was an emergency measure that might soon be undone, once peace was established.

And so it goes.

At the British government's invitation, three Irish peace commissioners, led by IRA commander Michael Collins, went to Westminster to talk peace. None of the Irishmen had any diplomatic experience when they sat down to face the leaders of the British empire, nor did they have any clear instructions from home; indeed, the Irish Parliament had not even been able to meet for six months. It turned out that the British were quite willing to concede home rule to Ireland, but with two major conditions, one constitutional and one practical. The practical consideration was that Ireland never allow itself to be used as a base by Britain's enemies, and never develop a military capable of threatening England; this was somewhat galling but everyone understood its practical importance, and it was not ultimately controversial in Ireland. The second, constitutional demand was that Ireland remain a British dominion with the King as theoretical sovereign, every legislator taking an oath of allegiance to the crown.

This demand divided Ireland, leading ultimately to civil war. To many Irish rebels, throwing off allegiance to the crown was the whole point; for more than a century their demand had been for a Republic, free from monarchs. Others thought that was airy nonsense; if Ireland could achieve its effective independence, and peace, what was the use of quibbling about God Save the King? Michael Collins and his colleagues decided to accept the British terms, and Ireland remained part of the Commonwealth down to 1949.

But when Collins returned home and the terms of the treaty were announced, Ireland exploded. So far as can be judged, most of the people supported the peace terms, and a majority of the parliament voted for them, but most of the IRA did not. It took a year of fighting for the Irish government to put down the anti-treaty rebels, using methods as brutal as any used by the British. Toward the end of the fighting Michael Collins, the country's most effective and widely admired leader, was killed in an ambush. What remained of the economy after years of rebellion was wrecked, and the Protestant leaders in the north were confirmed in their inclination to have nothing to do with the rest of the island. To get the firm support of the Catholic church the Irish government made the deal with them that has lately so haunted the country, placing education, care of orphans, oversight of women pregnant out of wedlock, and many other matters under complete church control.

The great hopes of the 1918 election were mostly dashed, and the stage was set for decades of economic stagnation, mass emigration (half the children born in Ireland in the 1950s left the country), petty politics, and the moral tyranny of an empowered church. The island was divided and violence sputtered on in the north. Independence was achieved, yes, and centuries of abuse heaped on Catholic Irish was halted. But the cost was very, very high.

The Short, Hungry Life of the Moneen Cave Boy

Back in 2011 a skeleton was found in a cave near the village of Ballyvaughan in County Clare, Ireland. The burial was intensely studied and the results have now been published. The skeleton was so short, a hair over 4 feet, that the excavators thought it was a young child. Analysis of the teeth, however, showed that it was a teenager of 14 to 16. This was short even for the time, a size more typical for an 11-year-old. A close look at the bones revealed that this child had suffered from severe malnutrition and repeated bouts of near starvation. DNA analysis showed that this was a boy. Radiocarbon dating pointed to a time of death between 1520 and 1670; the excavators think he might have died during the Commonwealth, 1640-1660, when Clare was the scene of repeated fighting and several recorded famines.

Study leader Dr. Marion Dowd:

We found the remains within a small rectangular niche in the wall of the cave. It was a small space, just about big enough for a teenager to crawl into. The position of the bones suggests the boy curled up in this small space and died there, alone in the cold. There is no evidence that this was a murder victim or a corpse that had been hastily disposed of in the cave. It seems likely, based on the present evidence, that the boy was sheltering in the cave. He may have been crossing Moneen mountain; he may have been fleeing a battle or attack; or he may have been herding sheep in the uplands. Whatever the case, it seems he dropped through the narrow opening in the cave roof, crawled into the niche in the cave wall, and died there unbeknownst to his family or community. All in all, the excavation provided a very poignant insight into a life that was harsh and ended tragically for this boy in the not too distant past.

Irish Henge Revealed by Drought

Archaeologists love droughts. Because once people have disturbed the soil by digging pits, that soil holds water a little better than the undisturbed soil around it. The difference is not enough to show during most years, but in a drought that severely stresses the plants, the old pits just may show up as spots where the crops are healthier. And in evening or morning light, an aerial photograph just might show you things never seen before. Like this Neolithic henge in Ireland, just found using a drone. It's in the Brú na Bóinne archaeological landscape around Newgrange, a place with many Neolithic monuments, once probably the spiritual center for one of Ireland's tribes.

Irish Genes

Ross Byrne et al. have just posted the pre-print of a new article on Irish genes, based on studies of the modern population. They find, first of all, that the Irish are clearly distinguishable, genetically, from the rest of Britain; the biggest division in their dataset is between the two islands. The Xes in the diagram above are representations of individual genomes arranged according to variation; the colors represent groupings in the data. You can see that the distance between the genomes, by variation, roughly maps out the British Isles. Note that while southern Britain is a long way from southern Ireland, northern Ireland and western Scotland overlap.

Close-up of northern Britain and Northern Ireland, with marks for two genetic types that were found in both region. This clearly shows mixing of these populations. It does not show, however, when the mixing took place. Some could be early medieval migration from Ireland to Scotland, some from the Scots migration to Ireland in the 16th century (the Ulster plantations), and some from the economic migration of Irish people to Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries. In this study they used the genomes of people who lived in the same district as their grandparents, to exclude recent mobility, but that doesn't reach far enough back to catch people whose ancestors relocated in 1800 or 1848.

Cladogram showing how the various populations are related to each other. The authors think their data shows a strong "east-west cline," that is, the farther you get from London, the more different people's genes are from those of the bright red Anglo-Saxon heartland.

Note that Orkney is a serious outlier, quite different from England, Scotland, or Ireland. And this is not just because of the Vikings; even excluding their genes, Orkney still stands out.

The authors also found a lot of variation within Ireland. They knew that some of the difference between Dublin and Ulster and the rest of the island would be because of British immigration in recent centuries, so they worked to exclude that contribution from their calculations. The result is a map of variation that, once again, roughly maps out the island. Even more remarkable, it seems to map out the ancient division of Ireland into five kingdoms known as "fifths." So if you exclude Vikings, Ulstermen from Scotland and English who settled Dublin and Waterford, it looks like many families of rural Ireland have been in the same districts for 1,500 years.

Jeremy Irons at Kilcoe Castle

In 1997, Jeremy Irons was bored:

A few years earlier, he and his wife, the actress Sinéad Cusack, had bought a modest getaway cottage that sits along the river Ilen, which winds through the western part of Ireland’s County Cork. They fixed up the cottage and named it Teach Iasc, Irish for Fish House. (The couple make their main home in Oxfordshire, England.) With their two young sons, Sam and Max, they spent many a day exploring nearby islands and waterways by boat. The ruin of Kilcoe, about 10 minutes away, became a favorite picnicking spot, where Irons and the boys enjoyed scampering up the walls to view the bay from perilous heights.

Around 1997 the thought occurred to him that he might look into buying Kilcoe and bringing it back to life. Doing so would present precisely the sort of challenge that he craved. Furthermore, he had just completed Lolita, Adrian Lyne’s film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s ever radioactive novel of a teacher’s affair with a pubescent girl, “so,” Irons dryly told me, “I knew things would be slower.”

So he went ahead and bought it.

Kilcoe Castle is on an islet in Roaringwater Bay, south east of the village of Ballydehob in County Cork in Ireland. It was built in the 1450s by the Clan of Dermod MacCarthy. For the next century it led a peaceable existence, but in the intense fighting of Elizabeth I's reign it was besieged three times. The last time, in 1603, it was taken and sacked by the infamous Captain George Flower. (Who reported of this expedition, "We burned all those parts, and had the killing of many of their churls and poor people, and left them not any one grain of corn within ten miles of our way.") After that attack the castle was mostly abandoned and slowly moldered away.

It took ten years for Irons to make the place livable. He won't say what he spent but it must have been millions.

Irons comes across in interviews as an aristocrat with antisocial tendencies, disdainful of public opinion because he is so certain of his own identity and worth. Some locals protested when Irons had the tower painted that peachy gold color, but Irons of course ignored them. (Originally the castle would have been whitewashed, like most Irish tower houses in that period. Think about how garish that would seem now.)

More opinions, from the Independent's 2008 piece on the castle:

On abortion: "It's evil."
On the Catholic Church: "I love its intransigence."
On the gender of his castle: "It's feminine. I felt hugged by it when I arrived last night."
On 30 years of marriage: "I take it a day at a time."
On modern Ireland: "I'm saddened by how everyone is chasing worldly goods and the churches are empty."

The restoration is not supposed to be authentic; Irons says "It's a jazz riff on the medieval." Above, the Great Room.

The lord and lady's bedchamber.

More. What an amazing place. More pictures at Vanity Fair.

Staigue Stone Fort

In Kerry, near the southwestern tip of Ireland, not far from the village of Sneem, at the head of a lovely valley running down to the sea, is the Iron Age stone fort of Staigue.

It was built between 300 and 400 CE and occupied through the glory days of pagan Ireland, the lost age of kings and druids, of chariot-riding heroes and famous lovers, of cattle raids and the bards who sang of them.

The stone walls are 4 m (13 ft) thick at the bottom and rise up to 5.5 m (18 ft) high in places; the interior of the enclosure is 27.4 m (90 ft) in diameter. Outside the wall is a ditch that is now 8 m (25 ft) wide and up to 1.8 m (5 ft) deep. There is only one entrance. Archaeologists turned up rather little when they investigated the interior, but they did find evidence of copper smelting.

Reconstruction of the fort that appears on the interpretive sign nearby. In places like this lived the famous kings of ancient Erin.

In 1815 it was being used as a cattle pen when the property was purchased by a certain F.C. Bland, who fell in love with it and may have made some repairs:

When the traveller…first approaches it, he experiences a sensation of disappointment…But when he enters it, he is struck with astonishment; and his imagination almost instantly transports him to distant ages lost in remote antiquity. He vainly endeavours to figure, in his ‘mind’s eye,’ the beings who erected it, their manners, habits, and costume; until, ‘lost and bewildered in the fruitless search,’ his mind returns to sober investigation, again to lapse into conjecture. This effect is not lost by familiarity—I have visited it a hundred times, and have always experienced the same sensation. 

Print by Robert O'Callaghan Newenham, 1830, part of a series on the ancient monuments of Ireland.

The place has long been the subject of folk tales. And it remains so, which I pass along because I regularly read that the Irish oral tradition is dying out, and it is not:

Recounting a folktale from the Caherciveen area, writer Sigerson Clifford described a football match between the fairies of Staigue and their counterparts in the similar stone fort of Cahergal.

“In the White Strand west of Cahergal the Good People used to play football matches in the bright moonlit nights of olden times…there was a man called Coneen Dannihy who heard the ree-raw and the roola-boola and the whistling one night when he was going home late from fishing, and off he marched to take a peep at them. It was a match between the Fairies of Cahergal and the Little People from Staigue Fort in Caherdonal, and Cahergal were two goals behind and it only wanting five minutes to full-time.”

As the story plays out, Coneen is recruited to play for the Cahergal team, and becomes the hero of the match for the fairies. But when his mother, fearful of the powers of the “little people,” conspired to make him late for the next match, he was struck mad by the fairies, “and stayed in the middle of the blankets for nine months, in spite of priest, midwife and doctor.” 

The Forest Cross

This interesting work of art in County Donegal, Ireland, was created by forester Liam Emmery, who mixed two different species of pines in a tree plantation. It has of course been there for years, but it became famous this autumn because dry conditions accentuated the difference in coloring between the trees.