The Mysterious Stone.

“ ’Tis a big yoke alright ” said Paddy,“ white and covered in circles, like someone’s taken a baked bean can to it.”

Paddy and the stone beneath a stump.

My neighbour was working for Coilte, the Forestry and his gang had cleared a section of coniferous trees up on the Slieve Bloom when Paddy came across a stone, the like of which he’d never seen. 

“Would you come and have a look?” he asked, so we agreed a day to meet.

Our destination was a small river valley lying between the shoulders of the hills. 

As we drove the landscape below stretched out as far as the Dublin mountains.

We climbed to Ballyhuppahaune and beyond. 

Past the last house and the old sheebeen.

Upwards until the road narrowed.

Ending in a forestry track, a silent place edged with mountain ash.

From there it was a hike across rough ground and islands of tree stumps until we reached the stone.

Composed of white sandstone, it was about half a metre wide, smooth and covered 

with perfect circles of of various sizes and depths. 

What was this ?

The day was warm, the valley peaceful, filled with birdsong and the murmuring Owenass River, 

so we sat and contemplated the boulder.

As my eyes wandered the designs, I saw cycles, suns, moons and carvings made by our ancestors. 

Excitement bubbled, ancient rock art in the Slieve Bloom!

But as I cleared pine needles and debris from the grooves I realised they were smooth, 

shouldn’t there be ‘pick marks’ made by tools? 

If not man made what were they? 

After a while Paddy asked what I thought and I admitted I was mystified. 

Later, I returned with friends and together we levered up the stone to peer beneath.

A few circles were marked on the underside.

We scrutinised it, we meditated on it.

Was it a bullaun stone? 

Was it rock art? 

Were those cup and ring marks?

We argued this way and that. 

After an hour or so we gave up and decided to seek the opinion of someone with more experience in rocks.

A length of white string was tied around the nearby tree stump as a marker, photographs were taken and still puzzled, we went home. 

***

The geologist, Dr. John Feehan, felt the stone was intriguing enough to make a site visit and a few days later he contacted me with his opinion: the circles were not hand carved but made by nature.

I was disappointed as my rock art theory went up in smoke, however John couldn’t say how the markings had been made.

As he sent his photographs and measurements to various geologists across the world to find the answer I eagerly awaited their conclusion, imagining huge bursting bubbles or some prehistoric creature leaving shapes in the sand.

But no answer came, the geologists were baffled too. 

Soon the stone was shrouded again in shadows and trees.

To this day the origin of The Mysterious Stone remains an enigma.

Perhaps Paddy was right. Maybe it was a man with a baked bean can after all.

Beneath the Hill of the Women

Cnoc na mBan, Knocknaman, The Hill of the Women

I recently deserted the studio and my current painting in favour of a landscape which guards ancient secrets.
I travelled west along the curving shoulder of the mountains and turned to wend my way beneath the Hill of the Women.

Rambling through the green shadowed glen and over a small stream I finally reached the
Old Munster Road.

Slí Dála is one of the five roadways which were said to originate from 

the Hill of Tara in the time of the High Kings. 

Along the way lies a holy well dedicated to St. Fionan Cam, known as a healer of the sick and injured around the 6th century. A saint who had a curious paternity.

The well of St. Fionan Cam, restored in 1988.

Legend informs us that he was conceived when his mother bathed in Lough Lein, Killarney, after sunset one evening and whilst doing so she was impregnated by a golden salmon.
She later gave birth to the saint. 

The head of the saint carved by a local man, Paddy Heaney.

From the well the road leads to Forelacka, a glen surrounded by hills and it is here, where the valley suddenly widens and the modern road ends, that a circular burial mound stands, a monument to the early inhabitants.

The passage tomb, similar in style to those in the Boyne Valley, is thought to date to 

the early Bronze Age. 

A stone once rested on this side of the mound indicating an entrance to the chamber.

Looking north from the mound to The Hill of the Women. 

The silhouette of a much larger passage tomb shrouded by forest can just be seen on the summit. 

In 1844, when the forest was being planted, this summit tomb was clearly visible surrounded by a
stone circle. Evidence of fire action was found on the stones with layers of ash discovered in the soil.
It is speculated that ritual fires were once lit on the top of the hill at Bealtaine to welcome
the summer and obtain the blessings of the Ever-Living Ones.

I turned and stood with my back to the passage grave and looked across to another hill, beyond
which sits a modern bungalow concealing a secret.

Dowsers at the Cumber Stones - photo by © Seán Gilmartin.

The Cumber Stones are two limestone pillars, weathered and shaped by time, which stand incongruously at the front entrance to a house.
Over the years dowsers have visited them in an attempt to decipher their meaning within the landscape.

Between the stones by © Seán Gilmartin.

I had a final visit to make on my journey that day so left the strange stones behind me and set out
for Glenafelly. In this quiet valley nestles the Fiddler's Rock, where the fairy fiddle player sits.

He was heard here one evening playing his lament, by two local farmers, now long gone.
More recently children's voices have been heard about the stone, in the glen were children no
longer play.

Although seemingly lost in a field it is the Fiddler's Rock which holds a clue to the beliefs 

of our distant ancestors.

The stone itself, a block of quartzite, is of a type not found elsewhere in the region 

and was probably erected in the Bronze Age.

Many years ago the geologist, John Feehan, made a fascinating discovery.
If you walk in a straight line from the rock you will pass directly between the Cumber pillar stones, descend into the valley beyond and arrive at the entrance to the burial mound near the foot of The Hill of the Women.
And that is not all.

Whilst out running near Glenafelly in the week before Christmas he observed:

"I was stopped in my tracks, awestruck at the great beam of sunlight that streamed through 

Cumber Gap across the Fiddler's Rock, whose long shadow pointed like a dark finger at Knocknaman, 

and all the way down the valley south of it."

Evening gathered as I turned to leave the Fiddler's Rock, my head filled with questions about
sunlight at Winter Solstice, alignments across the landscape and ancient beliefs.

I speculated aloud about the ancient people who once lived here.

Most importantly I asked about the Hill of the Women.
" Who were the women ? Were they warriors, mothers, healers, the wise ones ?

Did they light the fires on the Hill ? " 

But no answers came.

The Fiddler's Rock remained silent and the hills held their secrets.

'The Landscape of the Slieve Bloom - a study of its natural history and human heritage. '
By John Feehan has been republished and is available HERE

Perfect meeting of place, people & paintings.

Exhibition at Birr Library, Co. Offaly  3 July - 31 July 2012.

The 'Ever-Living Ones' was opened at Birr Library by Dr. John Feehan,
who recently retired from University College Dublin where he was a 
senior lecturer in the School of Biology and Environmental Science.
Dr. Feehan is a man whose erudition I greatly respect and his book 
'The Landscape of the Slieve Bloom' inspired in me an understanding and appreciation of the landscape around me as well as a fascination with geology and Irish peat bogs.
He kindly agreed to open the exhibition on 11 July and gave a wonderful 
speech which I have included below. 

My thanks go to John Feehan, the staff at Birr Library and our visitors
for making it so memorable.

Birr Library

John Feehan

"There are two things I have learned over the years at the opening of art exhibitions. One is that it is unlikely anyone will remember what you say and the longer you go on the less likely it becomes. For that reason I will keep this short.

The second is that what is on show does not often inspire me because when I am looking at new works of art I am asking myself two things: first of all 

does it reach far enough and deep enough to touch the banished soul of the world: 

and secondly, do I find in it an integrity that does not jar with my sensitivity as a scientist (and more particularly as a geologist).

Seamus Heaney wonderfully described geology and poetry in a lecture a few years ago as 'kindred ways of responding to the mystery and making of the planet.'

I think that is even more true of geology and painting.

I should say at the outset how wonderfully these paintings meet these criteria for me!

You see the way the upper half of each painting depicts the person of the God or Goddess while the lower half depicts the elements of landscape with which he or she is associated: along with representations of our human attempts to represent or celebrate them in landscape, ritual and craft.

And notice the way a receptacle - boat, bowl or cauldron, or cupped hands - is used as it were to transmit a distilled essence of the particular power or gift of land and

landscape that is being celebrated: the power that takes human form in the mythical 

figure of the God or Goddess we conjure up to relate to it and to think about the influence of that power or gift they represent in our lives.

Each picture begins at the bottom.

It is through our experience of what we see in the lower part of each picture that the imagery born of that experience comes into focus, takes on a human face as we attempt to relate it to us in a way that turns it in on itself using our eyes as it were, requiring that we direct our everyday gaze with new attentiveness, awareness, appreciation of the natural world and all its gifts and wonders.

The particular precious resources these figures represent - the figures in human form our imagination has framed to represent them: Mannanán mac Lír, Anu, Brighid, An Cailleach, An Mór Ríogháin, Eriú, Banba and Fótla, Aengus Óg, Boann, 

Dian Cécht, Goibnui, Donn, An Dagdha, Lugh - the particular precious resources these figures represent are those earth resources that sustain our life and all life; which are degraded and misused in a culture that knows no tutelary spirits such as these, but thinks the human soul can be nourished by the digital imagery of a computer screen: and has become so, so alienated from the reality of place and landscape, when our very future survival depends on the continuing nurturing of such relationship.

And there is the relevance for our own day.

No element of landscape perhaps shows the need more I think than the water that appears in nearly all of the pictures, and which in a time when these personifications of the powers and virtues of the natural world would have been as familiar as movie stars in ours, found a ritual focus in the springs and wells that carried it from the deep of the purifying earth into our lives.

The quality of that water in our day has deteriorated to such an extent that in nearly every case it is now undrinkable, and the natural landscape context that once framed these special wells and springs, and carried the thread of connection between landscape and the human mind, has - again in nearly every case - been anaesthetised by our attempts to impose ourselves upon it with superfluous infrastructure devoid of any aesthetic sensitivity that might act as a conduit for that thread of connection.

An all-encompassing agenda for environmental action to confront these issues might be built on an appreciation of these paintings; because they invite similar reflections on air quality, soil, and the richness and diversity of life on earth.

Apart from the power to inspire each painting has in itself, each could be - should be perhaps - the subject of a chapter in a book that treats of the cultural environmental legacy of the past (if I can call it that) in order to kindle the flame of awareness and concern in our present in the way that is absolutely necessary if we are to remain on as responsible custodians of the earth.

I hate to think this pantheon will be scattered…. "  

For more pictures from Birr please visit:

http://www.aheronsview.blogspot.ie/