Sunday, mystic Sunday

Today's plan was for another Sunday walk, this one around the lakes in Co. Meath. But last night my normally eerily quiet upstairs neighbors decided to have what sounded like a karaoke party at 3:30am. This went on right above my bedroom, and lasted for about 45 minutes. I managed to get back to sleep, but I woke up tired and achy and in no mood for a 12-mile hike, even on relatively gentle terrain. Instead I made a good breakfast, read the Irish Times, hung out some wash on this first fine day in a week or more, then got in the car and headed for the Hill of Tara.

As I drove up to the Hill, which appears so suddenly and without fanfare that you could easily miss it if it weren't for the cars lining the small road, I saw on the left the last sign I imagined on this trip: The Old Bookshop. And there, sure enough, was a tiny shack of a place, with a large poster outside that said there were 5000 volumes about Ireland. I was delirious. Completely ignoring the landscape, I parked the Ford and headed straight into the place. 

For the next hour I inhaled deeply the distinctive musty smell that only a bookshop with a long pedigree of damp books can offer. Almost every book in the place had to do with Ireland, as promised. The old man who ran the place was busy tapping away on his laptop behind an unstable pile of new arrivals, meaning perhaps sometime in the last year. People came and went; only one person bought something, a book that I heard him say was €3, and that he would be glad to sign it. A poet, mostly likely. As for me, I picked up and rejected at least 20 books, settling finally on three gems of 1950s and 60s publications with plenty of photos. The owner thanked me so profusely I began to think he hadn't had a sale this big--€22, including a €2 discount offered without my prompting--in years. 

The books safely in the car, I finally turned to the main attraction. The ice age shaped this land into a series of shallow rolling hills; today they look like a gigantesque version of the soft folds in one of Lucien Freud's corpulent portraits.  During medieval times the Hill of Tara was the spiritual center of Celtic Ireland, but when Christianity moved into the neighborhood, somewhere around the eleventh century, the hill lost its importance as a place of worship. Just in case, a statue of St Patrick was added in modern times. In 1938 the IRA added a monument to the 1798 rebellion, finishing the historical trajectory of cultural markers.

Today the Hill of Tara is surely one of the most breathtaking spots in this breathtaking country. It is easy to imagine feeling holy in a place like this, where you swear you can see across the entirety of this small island in all directions from the top of one of the rolling hills, and maybe you can.

But this is also a place for the crystal crowd. While I was in the bookshop a woman came in with a long tale about attempting to find a fortune teller she had seen on TV but whose name she had not written down. The shop acknowledged the contemporary pilgrimages by shelving its Celtic and Mystical Ireland books closest to the door. At the entrance to the Hill a young man, American, alas, was holding forth with some Irish protestors about the fact that civilization began going to the dogs the day the goddess lost her power to patriarchy. I sidled right on by, keeping my accent to myself.

The protestors are there because there is a highway being built that is far too close to this special place. They have been active for years. One of the leaders has a vinyl banner across the top of her hood. If the car is parked you can look down on it and read the whole story in four columns of text.

After my walk I got back in the car, managing to reverse amid the traffic and haphazardly placed cars; on this skinny country road jammed with cars, families, and dogs, this might have been the main miracle of the day. I drove down the hill and headed for home. When I reached the village of Kilmessen I stopped at an unassuming pub. With the soccer match on the big screen in the background, I sat at a small table, drinking a mug of tea and reading my new books. A heavenly day.