Our theme for the month of October is “haunt.”
Tig Coílí is the pub at the top of Quay Street in Galway where the road branches like a wishbone.
By the time the music starts on a Sunday afternoon, the narrow bar is packed. I think you can judge a true Irish pub by its seating situation—the sparser the chairs, the better the craic (music and merrymaking).
But say you go to Tig Coílí and find a corner to stand that’s not really out of the way at all (but you tried), and you watch the musicians on their bench of honor under the misted panes of the wide front window. Over the shoulder of the accordion player, his fingers quick over keys he never has to even glance at, you can see The Kings Head across the street.
The Kings Head is the pub offered to Cromwell’s henchman in exchange for relieving King Charles I of everything north of his spinal column, hence the name “King’s Head.” Or so the story goes. Today, the 400-year-old bar lives into its gory “history” with a dimly lit interior decorated in a style I would call “Tudor-Gothic.” But the cheery, toll-booth-sized Tig Coílí is much more a “haunt” in every sense of the word.
The musicians haunt Tig Coílí, in a way. They don’t perform, per se. In their corner, behind a low railing, they seem to be almost in their own little world. You can watch, if you are awake and aware and answer the invitation, but—like the northern lights or a procession of spirits or fairies—but it is not done for you. Maybe the musicians play for each other. They lock eyes across their instruments like sailors steering by a lighthouse. Maybe they play for the joy of it.
Then the jigs and reels stop. For a moment, conversation crashes forward from the back of the bar like surf. Then everything goes still as a man, perhaps one of the regulars who also haunt Tig Coílí, crosses from the bar to the stage and begins to sing:
“By a lonely prison wall, I heard a young man calling…”
Everyone knows the words, but no one sings. The crowded bar somehow makes room for the song. The melody is haunting; even in the tight confines, it sounds like it has been carried to us across the Burren.
Say you drove a bit outside Galway to the Burren, a rugged country that turns chestnut and wine-purple in autumn. Now and then a low gray stone wall cuts straight up the steep slope toward the sky. These walls go nowhere and divide nothing from nothing. They are built relatively far from houses. What boundary do they mark?
These are famine walls.
In the mid-1800s, Ireland under British rule was inhabited predominantly by tenant farmers and laborers. Most of the cash crops were paid to British landlords as rent and taxes. The farmers survived on potatoes. When the potato crop failed across Ireland, the people starved, not because there was no food, but because the Irish farmers did not own their fields or the food that grew there.
Famine “relief” was provided, but was managed, at least in the region around Galway, by a British noble, Lord Trevelyan. He believed the Irish people were lazy and the country he governed overpopulated. In order to receive meager food assistance, Lord Trevelyan required starving people to work ten and twelve-hour days to build roads that went nowhere and walls up steep hills that served no purpose. Some people died where they stood.
The million dead are remembered in songs like “The Fields of Athenry,” which the lone singer sings in Tig Coílí. The famine walls, and abandoned famine cottages, have been left as a testament to the dead. In almost two hundred years, their stones have not been carried off to build barns or bridges. Often, trees grow inside famine cottages, their branches laden with gold and ruby-red in October. I wonder if they are hawthorn trees.
On the other side of Ireland, hawthorn trees stand in the middle of fields with huge boulders piled around their trunks. These are called “fairy trees.” The boulders are placed like that to protect the tree’s roots from being damaged by plows. And high on a hill you can see from the highway, a mound, possibly the remains of an ancient ring fort, is crowned with a lone proud hawthorn tree—a fairy fort. In Irish folk tradition, fairy forts and fairy trees are revered as fairy dwellings and possible portals between worlds.
Ireland is full of stone ghosts—famine walls and ring forts—marked by sacred trees. One wonders if they are more than monuments. Perhaps the walls mark the meeting of worlds. Unlike gravestones, which are erected by the living to honor the dead, these stones were laid by the dead. In a way, as long as the stones stand, those past people remain present. And it seems the present-day Irish people welcome the haunting.
Samhain, the origin of Halloween, celebrates the meeting of worlds. The Irish culture is full of thin spaces, literal, physical, sacred spaces. Because while ghosts are famously non-corporeal, hauntings are physical, they require space—a tree, a wall, a hushed pub.
In “The Fields of Athenry,” a young man convicted of stealing food to feed starving children bids farewell to his love through a prison wall. Though physically separated, the two young lovers, along with all the song’s singers and listeners through the years, are connected in a moment and in a powerful love and hunger for justice. In the song, as at the famine walls and fairy trees, we haunt together, sharing a human feeling that is both intimate and transcendent.
Say you went to the places of the stone ghosts like they do on the Green Isle, what might they say to you?
Emily Stroble is a writer of bits and pieces and is distractedly pursuing lots of novel ideas and nonfiction projects as inspiration strikes. As an editorial assistant at Zondervan, she helps put the pieces of children’s books and Bibles together. A lover of the ridiculous, inexplicable, and wondrous as well as stories of all kinds, Emily enjoys getting lost in museums, movies old and new, making art, the mountains of Colorado, and the unsalted oceans near Grand Rapids. Her movie reviews also appear in the Mixed Media section of The Banner and her strange little stories of the fantastic are on the Calvin alumni fiction blog Presticogitation. Her big dream is to dig her hands deep into the soil of making children’s books as an editor…and to finally finish her children’s novel.
Enchanting.