Those Odd Places in the Center of the World

Here is the description of Gurteen stone circle that I read on Megalithomania:

Every so often you come across a site that is perfect and this is one of those. What a beautiful stone circle this is. Of the eleven stones that make up the circle just one has fallen. ... The more you look at this one the more amazing it gets. ... What a beautiful place. The views are amazing and being so remote there isn't a sound in the air to disturb you.

Who wouldn't want to visit that spot? And it is only just near Kilgarvin! We go through that town on our way to Cork all the time. Shouldn't be too hard to find. 

I've written before about how when I look for stone circles and other places described my worn copy of Sacred Ireland I get into a state of incompetency. 

I have a good sense of direction and nearly always know where I am, how to interpret directions, and how to find home again. All that ability drains from me like strength from Super Man as I bounce along country lanes paved with Irish kryptonite. 

Last month, Artemis and I took a drive out that way, but couldn't find Gurteen stone circle. I thought I had coordinates saved to my phone, but they weren't there when we arrived in the neighborhood. We found the turn-off, near a stone barn, but nothing was visible from the road, as I had remembered incorrectly, and I felt all muddled and the phones had no signal. It was long, long lane, too narrow for a u-turn. Had fun anyway. 

A few weeks later, when two friends from California visited, we looked for it. When we got to Kilgarvin, I stopped and asked about Gurteen stone circle at a pub. The usual old guy was there, and he gave me directions as far as going past the Motor Museum and MacCaura’s Grave and the turn-off from the main road. He suggested once we got there to ask someone else for more directions. We went down the road, and asked for directions from someone who told us to go past the Motor Museum.


But that's ok, because I had the latitude and longitude from Megalithomania. I hadn't bothered to put them into my phone before we left. When I did, google maps sent us to somewhere in Germany. I later figured out that I entered them backwards, but didn't think to reverse them in the moment because muddled. 

So we gave up and continued down the main road toward Ballylicky. Five minutes later we stopped to take photos of gorgeousness, and I chatted with a sheep farmer. We talked about California, and Trump, and how he was there to meet a guy who would put a value on some sheep he had inherited, and then it was ok to ask if he knew where Gurteen stone circle was. He said he hadn't been there in twenty years, but could tell me how to find it. 

"Go back down the road until you get to the stone barn there, do you know it? " 

"Yes, I saw that on the way here."  

"Turn left up the hill, and continue until you come to a fork in the road, I guess you would call it a t-junction, and take the one that goes up hill. Then go around and around, there are some houses there, keep on, you're going up the hill, do you see? and then just there, that's where you will find it."

We never found it. Giving up, we drove south through two of the most beautiful valleys in Ireland I have ever seen, and I'm not even sure what their names are. Later that day we visited Kealkil and Bonane stone circles, and will remember that day forever. 

Actually, I'm pretty sure this is the valley of the Slaheny River. Looking north toward Kilgarvin.

 

View from the same spot as the previous picture, other direction. There's a yoni waterfall.  See the post called Pareidolia if this phenomenon is new to you. 

Last week, I learned how to put latitude and longitude into my phone properly, and Artemis and I found Gurteen stone circle, no trouble. That's a photo of it at the top of this page. 

Such a quiet, lovely spot, with views of the Paps of Anu to the north, and so many peaks all around. Like many stone circles, it's built a high spot, but low between hills. The proportions of the circle are human sized, not set across a lawn like at Kenmare, or in a tight five-stone circle like Kealkil or Uragh. Just right. I wonder what would happen if I slept inside it. Better ask the fairies for permission, Goldilocks. 

Given how hard it was to find it, the circle seems remote—until you arrive. Once found, the circle is the center of its own place, and the feeling of muddlement fades away. 

I stayed with this circle for a good long while and started to think about the passage of time, and the apparent permanence of stone circles. A circle of stones resting on this mountainside while languages and empires rose and fell. While people in this neighborhood fell in love, shared secrets, held grudges, wondered about god, worried about cheese, raised their children and pigs, and then died, over and over and over for thousands of years. 

In contrast to the enclosing abbeys where men contemplated foreign texts, these circles are fantastically large cathedral observatories. Beyond granite walls, under the hayfields and forestries, outside the lines of stone fences and bouncy lanes, the circles bring us back to an earlier landscape, an Ireland of, as the phrase goes: land, sea, and sky.

All clarity without certainty. 

Pareidolia

The other day Artemis and I ventured out beyond the Iveragh Peninsula (Ring of Kerry) where we are staying this summer, and explored a bit of the Beara Peninsula to the south.




We started with a stone circle. It may be a little hard to see, but near the center of that photo is the Uragh stone circle.

The stone circles in Ireland are found on low hillsides surrounded beauty and sky. They are tucked away on the corners of landscapes. Almost all of them are on privately-held land, and the landowners have varying degrees of tolerance for visitors. Most of them are cool with it.

This stone circle is on a narrow isthmus between lakes.

I get so muddled when looking for them on my own. I actually have come to recognize the state of confusion that arises when searching for a stone circle even with a solid latitude and longitude reference and still not finding it. So it was a relief to see the familiar brown heritage signs on the road.

You find robust navigational aids like these for circles where the land owner is keen to have visitors, like this one, in Gleninchaquin Park. They ask €4 per person. They aren't demanding, like. Just a collection box with a coin-sized slot in it. So worth it. For less than the cost of pint you can experience this:

Near this park is another stone circle that I haven't yet visited, somewhere up that hill.




See those little purple mountains on the horizon on the lower right? Those would be Knocknagantee, Comavanniha, or maybe Knockmoyle peak, behind Sneem, our village.

Here is a better view of Uragh stone circle. All these good photos are by Artemis.




Everyone wants to visit a stone circle alone. They are temples that invite awe, contemplation, and all the different techniques of Seeing, Sensing, and Knowing that you may have been developing all your life. That's why it is such a bummer to hike up to this stone circle and find an energetic five-year-old bouncing around on the stones while the poor mother tries to get in a little spirituality of her own.

When those two finally left, up walked a woman of around our age, with that familiar look about her of a woman who wanted to be at the stone circle by herself. So Artemis and I walked back down the path, and faced the opposite direction toward Cloonee Loughs, and the mountains of the Iveragh. I settled in against her knee, and we made this view our "waiting room."




I could have stayed there all afternoon.

Artemis also took this picture of the cutest mushroom in Ireland.




When the woman left the circle, she walked by and thanked us for making way for her. We chatted a bit about where we were from, discussed various "energies" of the stone circles we knew, and whatnot.

Finally, we were able to hang out at the circle alone.

I have been making sketches of the places we visit not because I am any good at it, but because it is one of the ways that a logo-centric person like me can drop into a different reality and See.

One doesn't need to be in an art trance to notice that Ireland looks like a woman. Waterfalls that look like vulvas are found all over the world, but Ireland sure has its share of vulva rivers and breast mountains.

There is another waterfall near us, behind Sneem, between those mountains visible in our "waiting room" at Gleninchaquin. If there is a sunny day after rain, it looks like this.




That waterfall and the one at Gleninchaquin look exactly like an open vulva, with hills like open thighs surrounding her. There's no mistaking it. I'm sure our ancestors were as susceptible to pareidolia as we are.

And more, the two waterfalls at Gleninchaquin and Sneem face each other across the fiord of Kenmare river, like two exhausted lovers falling on their backs after mutual orgasm. That's what I see, anyway.

Predicting the Eclipses

I am loving living in Ireland, and except for missing my friends, I'm not homesick.

But I am so bummed to be missing the eclipse. I am one of those people who would have arranged the transport and lodging a year in advance to see a total eclipse. I missed the totality in 1979, because I was only 17 and living in Fresno, and traveling to Washington State was impossible. At that time, I had only been to San Francisco once, and never to Los Angeles.

I could have predicted I'd feel this way.

This weekend the whole world is looking toward the eclipse, where the moon will eat the sun, and bring down the ridiculous King.

*crossing fingers*

The desire to predict the eclipses is an ancient preoccupation, and the tools devised are the earliest computers we know of, like the Antikythera mechanism, that Bronze Age thingamajig that predicts eclipses and the motion of planets. It's a portable version of what our ancestors had laid out with stones 3000 years before. Some of those stones are in Ireland, just down the road from me.

The little that modern astronomers and archaeologists have been able to reverse engineer from Irish stone circles is so tantalizing. When you visit a stone circle, you can use your compass to see how mountain peaks and distant cairns line up with various stones, BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN? WHY DID IT MATTER? Gaah. Ravenclaws like me demand to know!

I wrote about a stone circle, Kealkil, in that earlier post about Summer Solstice, and mentioned the radial cairn. It's a flatish circle of stones, and along the edge are 18 taller stones, standing up like teeth.

You can see an edge of it in this picture I took on solstice, but you can find many more on the web taken under sunny skies, and diagrams of the circle and its orientation to the sun, moon, and mountains.



There is a better photo of this in the Roaringwater Journal post about this circle and a few other lovely places in West Cork.

And now, in esoterica you should know: the 18th Major Arcana card in tarot is The Moon, and the 19th is The Sun.




I've been told that this is because there is an 19-year Sun cycle and an 18-year Moon cycle. The 19 years come from a 19-year cycle of inserting a 13th month into a lunar year to keep a lunar calendar in sync with a solar year and its seasons. An extra month is inserted into years 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, and 19, and then the cycle repeats. The Jewish practice of inserting this extra month into their lunar calendar is why Jewish holidays don't migrate around the Gregorian calendar like Muslim holidays do. (See Metonic Cycle).

So: The 19-year cycle keeps the moon synched up with seasons, which are solar.

The 18-year cycle predicts the eclipses, where the moon appears to cover the sun (solar eclipses), or the earth's shadow covers the moon (lunar eclipses). If you observe one eclipse, then 18 years later another eclipse will occur, roughly in the same place in the sky. We don't get them every month because the moon's orbit is not on the same plane as the earth's around the sun, and there is a complicated dance through lunar maximums and minimums above the horizon that you can read about elsewhere.

So: The 18-year cycle predicts eclipses, which are lunar.

Ancient Irish people who built the circles and the stones were definitely into the business of predicting solar eclipses. There is an image of an eclipse 5000 years ago chipped into the stone at Loughcrew.

Is the 18-stone radial cairn at Kealkil an eclipse predictor? Why wouldn't it be? I guess scientists would say we don't know for sure, but total solar eclipses are so emotionally moving that predicting them has preoccupied the brainiest nerds in every civilization for at least 5000 years.

Here's part of great article reprinted from a book, in Wired, "A Total Solar Eclipse Feels Really, Really Weird."

Actually, seeing an almost total eclipse is no better than almost falling in love or almost visiting the Grand Canyon. Only full totality produces the astonishing and absolutely singular phenomenon that resembles nothing else in our lives, on our planet, or in the known universe. ...
Then a minute or two before totality, shimmering dark lines suddenly wiggle over all white surfaces, such as sand or a sheet spread on the ground. These are called shadow bands, and they can’t be photographed! If you try, your video or still images will show the white substance or object without any wavy bands at all. The rather anticlimactic reason for this is simply that shadow bands have extremely low contrast. Because they shimmer, the eye readily picks them out. But they lie below the contrast required to show up in a photographic image. ...
Then comes totality, which can last anywhere between one second and around seven minutes. Now you take off your welding goggles and look at the sun directly. The bright stars come out. The sun’s corona leaps across the sky, much farther than you expected. ...
It’s an experience that does not seem of this life or this world. “The home of my soul” is how one eclipse watcher described it to me. But why? What has really happened? It’s obviously not simply a matter of the sun’s visible light being blocked. Its invisible rays are extinguished, too. ... Solar ultra-violet energy drops to zero. So does infrared radiation, whose absence starts to be felt long before totality arrives. With the drop in infrared energy, clouds, rocks, and the air just above the ground are suddenly cooled. This chill creates a pressure difference that manifests itself as a haunting eclipse wind. Moreover, the decreasing temperature as the sun is steadily blocked can shrink the gap between the temperature and the dew point, allowing clouds to suddenly form.

Imagine the rising reputation of nerds through the ages as they predict that sort of thing decades in advance! Building a stone computer on the top of a hill is the least Kings would do for you.

On Monday, I'll be in Dublin, where we can see just a tiny bite of the sun eaten away. I won't be experiencing totality, but I will be in Ireland, and that's a long way from Fresno.

An Ounce of Precaution is Worth a Pound of Cure

I haven't been updating in a few weeks because I've been writing on another project, because we had some visitors, and because I walked away from my computer at An Post in Kenmare. 

Yes, I can't believe I did that. I was doing extreme paperwork required by our visa application and patting myself on the back for how great I am at it, and then I walked away from my computer after looking up some obscure identification number in it. 

In most Irish post offices, the person who found the computer on that "address your postcard" table would have turned it in there, or to the Gardai, but in Kenmare, there is a high probability it wasn't found by an Irish person. Since it hasn't appeared on the net yet, I assume it has been wiped and resold for nowhere near its massive retail value of $200. 

While I wasn't able to write properly for a week, I'm not devastated because I back up my computer, I don't store passwords on it, and I can afford a replacement. My lovely wife found a refurbished two-year old Air in the UK and it was sent to me within days.

If you need another reason to back up your laptop or tablet, please remember this story daily until you do. I use 1Password to store passwords, I backup important files to gdrive, and everything else to iCloud. I also backed up everything to a physical drive before I left Santa Cruz. 

And now back to more stories of holy wells, stone circles, and how I'm the luckiest person I've ever met.