The Glen River Diaries

I have been slowly returning to the Glen these days of Mí na Marbh. The river water has been consistently brown

It is strange and beautiful and I know its bad for the river to carry such a load. I know it must be coming from the housing developments upstream. This is my fourth evening in the Glen since the beginning of the month and every time I’m here the water has been the colour of earth.

One of those dusk walks I am greeted by a bat flittering in the deep blue sky space between the silhouettes of the trees.

In the same patch and on another deepening dark I disturb a blackbird underfoot, who also startles me, flurrying up from the ground in my direction and then up and around, crown hopping, calling out and criss crossing overhead, chasing me Westerways with wild song, past the yellow bench to the yellow bridges. I turn away South bound for my gate and whisper an apology and a wish to sleep well.

Another day on the other side, as I am just among the deep red heads of the swamp cypresses I hear a strange call – a single repeated note – a note with an odd slight echo. I get out my phone and make a recording, checking it on the birdcall app – I repeat the recording – once – twice – three times – each time getting the same result …Greater Spotted Woodpecker it reads. I save the recordings without verifying.

Saturday morning I’m back and the water isn’t brown, it’s running clear. Below the surface I can see the river bed where there is a film of red silt covering all of the bigger black stones and all of the the spaces between. There is no sign of life anywhere in the river, enlivened only by its own steady movement, the light on the sinewing, stranding, twining, purposeful water as it flushes ever westwards. The paths on either side are busy with humans in ones and twos bare legs heading for the Yin Yang gathering, and the Saturday morning park run.

At home on Saturday night I listen back to the recording from the week that I have labled “woodpecker (?)” I send it in a text to my contact in Birdwatch Ireland/Cork – he texts back: “100% correct” and asks “When was this recorded please?” – “It was 13th November 5 pm-ish” I return, and then realise it is the small hours of Sunday morning and apologise. “I can’t sleep either” comes the reply.

The gaps between walks stretch and collapse these days and today the winds shimmy in song and ripple ~ summoning and releasing invisible presences in air, on water, through the winter valley

The whisper touch of living and dying, honed branches and fallen leaves speak in shapes shifted from puddles, on the gravel, at the well

birds disappear from the branches, song making presence in their spaces

ivy fern leaf litter humifying nettle forming oak giving hart’s tongue licking undergrowth at the well

we are nearly at the shortest day

There is a synching of things, tracings and happenings in the Glen

the surfaces and spaces tuning to one another

the brown bronze of the swollen river

drifts and swellings

the movement across surfaces

the metallic surface of the burnings and drownings their interlockings

So much happens all day every day – then there is a deluge – the river runs fast and with an urgency cutting through the Glen – filling spaces and gouging out where there is no channel to support its course, brown red brown opaque liquid clay fills the glen, swarming about trees, filling the mouths of the stone bridges, pouring over the concrete platforms of others – the element is water, and furious flow: matter resists, or is carried, then left, in the water’s wake – the Glen is thoroughly rinsed and combed, made orderly in the only direction the river knows,

there are castings and leavings as the waters subside – a pile of twigs on the hatch, riverine foot-prints of oak leaf litter pile by the benches – forming a transient re-enactment, echo and fleeting memory of the physical landscape left by The Great Ice. This present place of aftermath now already tidied efficiently up by diligent workers in hi-vis following their call.

I see the emergence of a lost pillar, an arrowhead into the past – for a moment revealed – and then erased again, here reburied in that place of forgetting – beneath the surface. I was witness this time (whatever will come of that) I know the Alder too watches on.

I find the words, humming the base (bass) line, mouthing Laurie Anderson’s voice, deadpanning: … this is the time, and this is the record …of the time…

A drowned mouse that mammalian vibration in amongst the the ravages of elemental force and plant resilience and crumbling human endeavour

entering beneath the lines in Sunday mists ….dew lingering every where it can

I am back in the Glen in the early morning, its a time of a coming new moon and transition… dead dry docs are stalking through the still lush grass …rowan fruiting vermillion, chestnuts spiking up and the Chicken of the Woods returns to the womb of the hollowed poplar stump making a basket of itself, a broken branch in one of the Swamp Cyprus augurs the fall while its sibling tree harbours in her skirts a world of ripenings and the Miller is at it again growing and clutching all that falls in into its fruiting body

and all the while the river flows on by…..

I find some strange feathered script messaging my path and I dance back with it …hatching

I am overjoyed to see the mugwort re-emerge, last year it was squashed and demolished by tractor activity, it seems the tractor not only failed to kill the plant but carried some seed heads in its tracks and redeposited them in its wake…way hay for the mugwort

https://www.outdoorapothecary.com/mugwort/: Tuesday 15 August 2023

As I pass the well there is a downy fall of small white feathers

It’s raining a cold March rain as I stand at the Snake awaiting the arrival of A, who is searching for her red wellies… my gaze meanders over the familiar patchwork; circles squares texts and textures…the musical notes, the yinyang, always landing on Vincey Long is a Legend… I remember V the child, back in 2005 carving his clay, a solid kid dense with his own living gravity and lifted by a light humour, I hear he has his own kids now.

It’s a while before I see the crumpled shape of the bin, door swinging and bare metal, the remains of molten matter leaking out and a fresh black bag inside… pushing the door closed I see it is beyond easy repair, it needs a panel beater to get it back in shape, how long? It had a good stretch, it’s been 3 years since the beginning of the pandemic lock down Friday 13 of 2020.

I have been away from my old extraordinary routine. A arrives and we cast off West, unusually. Catching up on our bits and business we barely notice the park go by, meeting J, the dog fosterer, with her 3 legged black spotted lurcher, her doe eyed brindle, and a judgy chiwawa under her arm, she is with another familiar face, and dogs. It’s only as we mount the high ground that we land in the park, walking into our shadows in the evening sun, the weather has cleared and we see the burnings have started, the black scars on the surface bring us home to the rhythms of the Glen. Sadly we move along looking out for surviving trees one sapling rises, with its livid red trunk, more of a stem, we can’t tell if its taken on the colour of the fire, there’s not really enough for us to identify it, there seem to be surviving buds on its skinny branches..looking down we see an abandoned bicycled in the council dumping place, A says she needs a bike, and retracts, her tiny home won’t take another piece, and who would lift this anyway as we know it’s not been left by itself.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zNcYa8WSS3aklhoBFL9lkW9UhwgG51HV/view?usp=sharing

Passing more burned patches we see many rising saplings that may have survived among the strong oak babies that have weathered years of the pattern. A takes to the swing, swinging high over everything, gently back and forth in the evening light , her detached shadow rhyming out across the heath, unloosed from her foothold on the ground. we linger a while me leaning up against the mother oak, among her family.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1slbIYSZjkw56_NCKkHQt-btGtSvz90XA/view?usp=share_link

Back down through the gothic zone elders and thorny trees are growing up where the old Golum stump rots down, past the well and onto the path. The mallards show us their rumps as we pass, we see the pretty lilac colour that becomes a sack of poo snagged on the briars and dripping in the evening light.

Passing a couple of Magpies we stop at the bench with its new grafitti, Farsi I fancy, Sri Lankan A offers, knowing we are both wrong, it’s fluid lines red as A’s boots. stop to spend some time with a blackbird its black shape and golden beak so deeply exotic in the bare branches looking back, hungry I imagine, birdsong fills the air. We both stop at the witchy willow, eyes seeking the remains of the young fox in its resting ground, there is nothing obvious, no scent, A sees something under the water but we both know its from the searching the vision comes, gone fox. Into the Fleischmann place A spots a yellow glimmering, daffodils in the woods and as we move towards them there is a lifting and white wing tips, we have disturbed a buzzard, I feel the familiar blessing and all is well. Back along Rope walk we see the other bin has survived a burning, its front face still bears a coat of paint and the lock still holds firm the door.

We are on the home stretch and glide on up the hill full of our experience in the glen and once more lost in mundane conversation until we arrive at the corner and kiss our cheeks goodbye

Another gap, plenty of water under the bridge. flowing flowing

Back to the Glen

I stand over the river facing the disappearing waters as they flow under me away from me

this is the direction for the turning of the year, watching the waters wash westwards the low sun rising at my back we are attuned to the same direction, the tilt and spin and rounding of the year. There is a red embering through the mossy wickers, the deep breast of a robin, who alights in the branches at the riverside, I have barely moved in a timeless length from this standing, we whisper to one another our breaths disappearing outwards into the air about us as the water flows on and on.

Later I see a strange thing near the Willow a slant and bald presence in the boggy wetland and something shaggy beside it I can’t quite make out… oh ’tis a fox , a cub in a silent trajectory tail and snout in one sleek line, breathless, motionless, stilled.

The pool by the Alder spirals, gathers rain drops dials in and spins out on course liquid light fluid motion

It is the time of suspension and falling and the glimmering colours before the quiet release …the most gentle sweep to sustain into the dead still of the Cailleach’s grip.

hawthorn and sorbus berries, scarlet and vermillion – October CRUSH – golden stars of maple and sycamore, fallen acorns hatching pink seekers all rain-swept in growth or in decay or in offering. I play hide and seek in the long grass, picking up small handfuls of vibrant matter, five or six berries at a time,

crossing my path is a stone holding down the five limbed star of a field maple, pinned somehow purposefully there by wind, or weather, or dog , or child. Another leaf dwindles and turns in the nave of arcing branches amid the falling surrender of leaves

Each day the same way in, the way down promises clouds and skies – the swirling shifts of weather even in this small crucible of the Glen

beckoning

and the small oak by the well is still yielding an abundance of acorns into the ground where the mowers will one day come – I arrive and pocket on successive days the small oak beings, some still in their caps, some knocked out of them, so ready to become earthed in, already sending energetic feelers for the deep, my dress and coat bulging with new prospects; some for sowing with Trees Please, and some for throwing on the highlands, a good enough ritual for Samhain on the cusp of a new year.

And the next day I stand sheltering under another mother oak, before more i do more castings of baby oaks brought from the valley floor

This third day of gathering I find a seedling has begun rooting where it fell, here under the crown of mama tree, so I must pull, more than pluck it from the ground, these babies will take their chances on the steep hard slopes of the valley’s walls, must find a resting place among the bracken skin, which has taken over from the gorse, whose skeletons remain withered now and blackened from successive spring burnings … I am praying the wind and rain will drive these little time capsules into the ground where they will take root out of reach of next year’s fires and the next and the next…until strong enough to spread roots and oak arm in oak arm can shoulder more.