I am from the Beara Peninsula, Co. Cork on the South West coast of Ireland, which is a very remote area well known for its scenic beauty, history, folklore, mythology and archaeology. The Beara landscape is dominated by mountains and the Atlantic sea.The Irish word for peninsula is leithinis, meaning literally ‘half an island’, and even though Beara is on the mainland, it can feel very much like being on an island.Living and growing up in Beara there is a feeling of being removed and isolated, which is not necessarily unpleasant, but it creates a sustained sense of place and sense of home. It is a place where, with a population of 7000 people, everyone know everyone else. The main town, Castletownbere (Baile Caisleán Bhéarra) has one supermarket, one school and many pubs! In terms of the people, there are only a few main surnames - Harrington, Murphy and O’Sullivan, although O’Sullivan is the name most associated with County Cork. The Irish form of the name, Suilleabháin, means literally ‘one-eyed‘, and because there are so many O’Sullivan families on the Beara Peninsula each one is given a nickname. For example, my family name is O’Sullivan Seer (from the Irish saor adhmaid, meaning carpenter). There are other accounts told to us by our headmaster (known as the Master), about how some locals acquired their nicknames:an old butcher who used keep a few rams in one of the rooms upstairs in his house was known to all as Tady the Ram. Another man had very big, bushy eyebrows and, when he blinked, they looked like two sheep's fleeces, which gave rise to his nickname, The Woolwagger. Another had a large moustache, and he was fond of drinking porter. He was known as Cur. Cur is the froth that you would see on the top of a wave when it is "breaking" over a rock. Every time that Cur put his mouth into the pint of porter, his moustache came up out of it covered with "froth," hence his nickname.I went to a school which now only has twenty-six students attending; the people who taught me also taught my father, and we learned through storytelling, walking and exploring what was around us. This was where I grew up and fell in love with the rhythms of the land and the seasons, where those rhythms entered my mind as poetry. It is where I am able to sit in our old farmhouse and write in the stillness.I grew up on a dairy farm, the second oldest of two boys and five girls, in a townland called Gorth, meaning ‘meadow‘, five miles away from our nearest village, Eyeries. Like many other families, my family has been farming in Beara for generations. Besides farming the other main source of income is fishing. Castletownbere, located on one of the deepest natural harbours in Ireland, is the country’s second largest fishing port. There has always been a great reverence and fear of the sea, and because of this there is an even greater sense of community and concern for your neighbours and a respect for the work that they do.In Beara there is the sea and the land. Much of the land is mountainous, rocky and rugged and
provides much inspiration for writers and artists who come to the area: the colourful houses, the roads that wind up the hills and mountains, the rich foliage and subtropical humidity of summer, the hidden cascades of rivers and streams, the dramatic winter weather, the diverse community of people, the strange mix of traditions that still survive on this ’half island’ makes it an ideal place for me to write.In 2005, a year after my first collection of poetry was published, after many months of feeling anxious about not writing because I could not find a topic on which I wanted to write, I decided to write a poem about An Cailleach Bhéarra, the Hag of Beara.An Cailleach is a wise woman figure embedded in the mental and physical landscape of Ireland and Scotland, particularly in the Beara Peninsula. Her roots lie in pre-Christian Ireland, and stories of her relationship with that rugged landscape and culture still abound. A large stone rests on the ridge overlooking Ballycrovane Harbour which is said to be the petrified remains of the Cailleach. She is also said to have several lives, beginning each life turning from stone into a woman, and then returning to stone at the end. The supernatural and superhuman feature strongly in traditional stories of the Cailleach - feats such as her creating mountains or leaping vast distances. She was an earth goddess, and is said to have carried huge rocks in her apron and set them down in piles along the coast, and those are now the mountains that form the spine of the peninsula. There are two islands that she looks out to - Duibhinis and Scairbh - which she supposedly hauled in herself with two lengths of rope. These were stories that I grew up with, and that seemed to be believed, not just by the children but by the adults too!I was particularly drawn to a love story between An Cailleach, the wise-woman, and a God of the Sea. However, coming from Beara I was eager to explore and communicate these stories in a way that people could relate to, so I decided to write a full collection about a love story between a local woman and a fisherman. In my poems the Cailleach still forms the landscape, but at the same time is intrinsically part of it, living in a community. While I was writing these poems I thought of my own mother, grandmother and how, in my mind, they too formed the Beara terrain. These stories are based on my years of listening to the men and women of Beara, our storytellers, parents and grandparents. As I wrote these poems I realised again and again the intense power and feeling in the landscape. It is a place of great beauty, but also a place of loneliness and survival. I would like to read one of the poems from the collection called ‘Sister’ which is about a fight the Cailleach had with another woman. In the poem they decide to settle the argument by throwing rocks back and forth at each other from two opposite mountains. SisterIt wasn’t my calf she killed that screamed its absencebut the green viciousness in her eye, explodinglike water over coals as she tasted the blood.No sooner she slaughtered than she ran, smiling, and I after herup the soft slopes, my skirts chiming against the grass. Sister bitch. She was always a cocky thing, but slow.Honestly, I preferred her dead, her black teethchilling in the mud like an afterbirth.
So we planned a war for morning, after breakfast.
When the houses began to yawn their shadows
I dressed warmly, climbed the mountain and piled rocks
by my ankles - size, weight and number, a stone for her side.
Hissing, she stood on an opposite hill flinging her stones,
missing me one by one. The sun couldn’t throw such fires.
I hit back at her cat-calls, her blood, her startled face
as her slim feet began to stumble on the ledge.
Every rock I threw tunnelled through the air
and drowned her ears with their dullness.
I charmed her tongue to such sweetness then.
She cried reason, so I reasoned with that, seeing her look down
where the grey rocks open like the rageless mouths of rooks.
I admit she held her fists until the end, her arms spinning
and spinning in the wind’s loom. Just as she staggered
to the edge I readied my smile and flung my last
– a breath, a clear breath sister, to help when your balance snaps.
Beara does not see as many tourists as other parts of Ireland due to smaller roads and its distance from other towns and cities, and maintains instead the best of both traditional rural Ireland as well as interesting artistic communities (such as Anam Cara Writer’s and Artist’s Retreat and numerous artists studios). If offers a range of artistic and culinary delights, alongside spectacular and haunting landscape. It’s wonderful that we now have a link between China and Cork, through this Writer’s Programme and strengthened also by UCC’s Institute of Chinese Studies. Although it’s a long way away, perhaps one day you will make a visit to Ireland, and if you do please do come to the place which most tourists don’t reach - the Beara Peninsula.
