An Amazing Four Weeks at Cill Rialaig, Ireland

spectacular light on Cill Rialaig

It is wild.  It has all been wild.  The weather is tempestuous and volatile, changing quickly from a sunny bright blue day to brooding glowering storms and to dense heavy grey fog that submerge the land into nothing, all in one day and all within hours.  The ground is sodden and covered in bright orange bracken or bold bright green grass, soft and lush for the sheep with their coats of several painted colours.  There are many sheep in these craggy hilltops. They merge with the rocks, once the colour of liver, now white with old lichen.  Collected over the centuries, the never ending supply of rocks have partly become a lacework of walls flowing organically over the hillsides and down onto the cliff edges of the sea, containing a vivid patchwork of green and orange lit by turbulent skies.

heavy mist

sheep in the mist

a stroke of blue

bolus Head

rock walls like lace

It has been amazing here.  I think you need the full month to get the full benefit from this experience.  We could have left many times earlier.  We got ‘over’ it, thought we had already ‘got’ it, but here we were, everyday clambering the same hills, thinking we had already ‘done’ this, and yet another revelation would come, another strange connectness to nature and the ancient past and an opening of the creative spirit to discover new doorways for our art.  It is at first hard to appreciate the lack of distractions as at first you actually miss them.  Long nights reading or writing or playing a game or talking when normally you might watch a movie or work on the internet or socialize.  The change of habits has been great for our art as we only seem to talk about our art or this strange land we are immersed in. Hours are spent investigating, imagining ancient peoples, reinventing how they saw the world and in those imaginings, days have disappeared without once thinking about our normal living.

hay collected infront of Cill Rialaig

ancient monk’s cemetery

Noelle Campbell-Sharpe is a larger than life character who, famous in Ireland for her entrepreneurship and her wildish ways, has devoted the last twenty years to saving this small patch of coastline for artists to come and retreat from life.  In amongst the ruins of cottages over the centuries are the ruins of the monks who came here after they left the skelligs around 1000 AD, their bones buried in the much older megalithic round houses or forts.  Noelle has bought all the ruined cottages in the more recent pre-famine Cill Rialaig village and is in the process of transforming them into accommodation for artists creating a trust and protecting the area from the ruinous stamp of tourism and growth.

ring fort Waterville

standing stones Waterville

foundation to old beehive house

We read some great books while we were here, The Chalice and the Blade, written by Riane Eisler and The Megalithic Empire, co written by M. J. Harper and H.L. Vered.  They were so appropriate for this part of remote farmland almost untouched by modern civilization at lands edge.  The scars and marks of megalithic society are still here, and one senses the great mother of the neolithic societies still in the round forts and farmers homes, the little dome houses surrounded by their round protective walls and the sweeping curves of the entrances, even the ancient stone fences add another ring to the spiral, womblike.  We found standing stones at the entrance to the ancient village above us on the hill, all the homes round, rings of foundation stones everywhere.  We read that the neolithic society who lived here were traders so it made sense that there were ley lines reaching from these villages on the sea, from the Skelligs Michael, small islands near us where monks retreated in 500 AD., to Mount Carmel near Jerusalem passing through Mont Saint Michel in France and Monte Gargano in southern Italy (from where the knights Templar departed for the holy land).  The ancients mined copper and gold and maybe even trained and traded crows!  Crows are said to have been trained to fly in a straight line and for this they were used on the pre christian celtic trading ships, kept in the ‘crows nest’ .  The crows were set free when the sailors thought they were near land, noting the direction the birds flew in, and if they returned, there was no land…

Ley line from the skelligs – photo from http://www.megalithmania.co.uk

The Skelligs Michael as seen from Valencia Island

I’m afraid this time around our art was not influenced by sheep or crows, worthy though they are. But perhaps because we were so engaged in the neolithic world we saw ourselves in, our art had to capture some of the philosophy of those people.  As we walked in this landscape on the edge of the great sea, the elements of wind and rain and sun our constant companions, we began to feel the oneness of it all.  We did not feel more or less than nature, just part of it.  There was a great feeling of impartiality, that nothing was greater than life itself.  There was a great sense of reverence for life and the dearest wish to protect the earth and preserve it from greed and senseless consumerism. The wish to make life grow, in the same way of those neolithic people with their wisdom of the earth, their home.

sheep on a rock

walks in the hills

tomb or ancient doorway to ring fort

last sunset at Cill Rialaig

Us!