Home, part 1.

December 2023: I’m writing a piece about what ‘home’ is and I came across this piece from 2020, when I’d come home from America and had been in Roscommon a few months. Back when I’d never seen Inis Meáin. I must’ve taken the piece down to submit it to some competitiom or something, but the years to come and the years behind warrant its reposting.

In this COVID year, I have spent more time at home than I have since the summer of my Leaving Cert. I am like a tourist here, taking long walks, finding out whose that house is, cycling roads just to see where they come out. The more time spent here, the more I realise how much of this place is a part of me.

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This house – my grandparents’ house – sits halfway up a hill. It is well over a hundred years old and surrounded by trees as old, and older again. It’s a cottage I suppose, with a front gate and a concrete path running up to the front door. To stand at that front door in the morning, tea in hand, savoring the view, is bliss itself.

From this height I can see for miles. All land lies before me; the neat rectangles of newly reclaimed fields – intensely green – mearn brown land only sometimes good for anything, and forestry so dense it blurs into a grey haze.

The neighbouring church, built nearly two centuries ago on a height so as to be seen, is directly opposite me. My grandfather’s people are buried there, the parish’s best views shared by the living and the dead.

There were green fingers here once, and I remember vivid coloured flowers growing around the gate. Years passed and the people went, and the striking flowers are gone, but every year the daffodils doggedly return.

This is an old place and me a footnote in its story. Sophisticated sheds and pristine fields point to a prosperous future, just as crumbling gable walls point to a hard past. Twenty houses were up this road once, and now just one is occupied full-time. But there are children in it, and they’ll write new chapters.

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Whatever we lacked in the past in west Roscommon, it certainly wasn’t rocks and stones. There are piles of rocks in back fields, picked by hand a century and more ago to make fields where stock might thrive. The pickers are long gone; they emigrated, they died, their farms were consolidated to make today’s farms – and so the story keeps on going. Fields bear their names but otherwise those names, families and households are present now only in the 1901 census.

Here, 1901 is recent. Further up the hill there’s an old ring fort, and fairy trees. From near the fort is visible a crannóg on Lake O’Flynn, inhabited until the first or second centuries AD. Five counties can be seen from the hill’s peak. On a clear day can be seen Knocknarea in Sligo, and atop it the grave of Maeve, Queen of Connacht. To the east, the hills at Rathcroghan, from where she ruled long before St. Patrick ever came around the place. Hop a few walls, walk a bit and you’ll see Croagh Patrick where he fasted for forty days and forty nights.

And it’s all visible from up the back of the house, as if an invisible road joins them and a crossroads is here.

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This place has moulded me in many ways. My environmentalist instincts come from here. The ringfort above could well be sixteen hundred years old, and countless generations have farmed that land since. They minded it for us, they took care of it, and we must and will do the same for those coming after us.

It seems creativity was born here too. I played here a lot on my own when I was younger. At one stage or another, I played, wrote and produced every possible story and scenario that never happened; Olympics Roscommon 1992, several wars of independence, battles, singing competitions and soap operas.

From this place too came an appreciation of history, from its old stories and the hints of history in every field. I know this place well enough to spot the incongruous and wonder, how did that get there? Who put that there or why? It’s where I knew my first people who died, where I realised how much is lost when they pass on. It is for that reason I write what I see.

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And I will continue to write, to record. For, if nothing else, this crisis has granted me the gift of spending time in the village that raised me. Time to observe, to note, to appreciate. Time to learn that the phrase ‘home is where the heart is’ isn’t necessarily correct. Home is where a part of the heart is, and always will be, even when the body finds other happiness elsewhere.

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