Field notes
What Elaine found while walking, and what it turned into.
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Ritual Depressions | The multi bullaun stones of Castledermot
Leaving the Pipers Stones I traveled to Castledermot where the landscape holds a different kind of ancient memory. The ground here is complex with early monastic ruins and powerful multi bullaun stones providing a physical connection to deep ritual practices that defy linear time.
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The Frozen Revelry | The Pipers Stones on Broughal Hill
A circle of gray boulders frozen forever on the ridge of a wind swept hillock. Here the boundary between old music and sacred punishment is etched deep into the granite where the dancers remain trapped in stone for all eternity.
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The Punchestown Monolith | The Giants Finger
Rising from the earth below like a singular fossilized tooth of a long dead giant this stone is a pure assertion of presence. It is a vertical line drawn between the massive open sky of Kildare and the deep unyielding earth below.
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The Curragh Plains | The Great Void of the Fianna
A vast ocean of low grass where the horizon stretches without end and the earth feels completely hollowed out by ancient steps. To stand in the center of the Curragh is to enter a great plain of memory where the phantom armies of the Fianna still ride through the mist.
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The Sacred Threshold | The Goddess of the Tuatha Dé Danann
Here the sharp edge between the old faith and the new is blurred by the rising of constant water. Standing at this threshold I feel the seamless transition from the fiery Tuatha Dé Danann goddess to the calm healing saint where the sacred space has remained unbroken by centuries of change.
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The Shadow of Maistiu | Kilkea and the High Ridge of Mullamast
Where the River Greese slows behind the Anglo Norman stone of Kilkea the earth remembers an older shape. To walk from the castle bawn to the wind scoured ridge of Mullamast is to move backwards through time leaving the concrete definitions of medieval walls for the soft undulating earthworks of the prehistoric mind.
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The High Mound | Silliot Hill
Rising sharply from the plain Silliot Hill is a silent sentinel of the Curragh. Its grass covered mound holds a deep secret a connection between the living earth and the mythic dead.
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The Four True Druids | Cillian Cormac
A hidden island of gravel rising from the pastures near the River Greese where the deep past refuses to be buried. To step within these walls is to trace the very moment where the language of the Ogham scores met the letters of Rome and the memory of the druids became entangled with the saints.