At this weekend's Le Chéile festival in Oldcastle, Co Meath, MICHAEL HARDINGdiscovers what festivals are really all about: love, hope and heartbreak
I WENT TO Oldcastle on Thursday evening, because the library was hosting a talk by Malachy Hand about Loughcrew, as part of the Le Chéile Festival. Loughcrew is the nearby megalithic burial ground dating back more than 3,000 years.
Inside the library, children were reading books with their mammies.
Upstairs in the gallery space, there was a delightful exhibition of watercolours depicting the stones of Loughcrew with delicate restraint, and about 30 ladies and gentlemen were sipping wine, admiring the pictures, and waiting for the lecture to begin.
The speaker was introduced, and the talk commenced. He focused particularly on Sliabh na Caillighe, or The Mountain of Witches, where, according to legend, thousands of years ago, a woman was made leap from hill to hill with an apron of stones. She tried hard, but failed. The stones always fell from her apron, and finally she broke her neck and is buried on the slopes of that place now known as Sliabh na Caillighe.
The story is perhaps a folk memory of how matriarchal power was broken by the early Christians, but the narrative also implies that her power is still hidden in the same hills. Until the last century, the hill was still covered with quartz stones, brought from Wicklow, possibly by sea and then up the river Boyne, and records suggest that the light of a full moon on the white stones was utterly magnificent. When stone crushers were invented, the quartz began to be stripped off the hills for use in graveyards.
I had a sense that the folks sitting around the walls, listening intently, were all from the local area, and that they already knew a considerable amount about Loughcrew.
They asked detailed questions regarding one cairn or another, referring to markings on the stones, or the manner in which the light enters the chambers on certain days of the year.
The ancient architecture of Loughcrew is as wonderful as any cathedral, but in another sense, those hills are like the contours of a mother’s body.
I felt I was at a palm reading. The creases and shapes and grooves in the earth were being read and interpreted as reverently and carefully as if we were dealing with the markings of our own mother’s hand.
I realised I was experiencing the ancient art of Dinnseanchas, an Irish tradition existing from early times whereby people asked questions about the earth: What does that hill mean? Why is that river called by such a name? How long have those stones been there? And it wasn’t for scientific reasons that they had gathered. There was a palpable sense of reverence for the earth in the way people listened to the story of the land, and asked questions about the stones.
The following day, Le Cheile festival continued. Oldcastle is an elegant town to wander in, for an afternoon. The houses form a cluster of pretty facades around the market square, and down the lanes that once led to coach houses or stable yards, the wilderness and the lush countryside encroaches; lilac and dog rose, nettle and foxglove vie for attention on ditches and around old rusting sheds.
Le Cheile festival had a variety of workshops on offer, from Fire Dancing to Peruvian Vessel Blowing, but nightlife was essentially a series of music gigs in two or three venues. There was a small marquee behind Crean’s Bar for the weekend, where technicians were checking sound levels on Friday afternoon, for the evening gig. And upstairs in Caffreys, another pub, Mick Flannery’s band was doing a sound check.
The drummer was on stage belting it out. Someone was looking for painkillers, and Karen Doherty, the fiddle player was tuning up.
Later in the night, young people would come to both venues and drink, dance and flirt, and perhaps go home with each other. Hearts would be broken, friendships commenced, betrayed or renewed. That’s what festivals are about; love and hope.
But young people think it all happens accidentally. They come to dance and drink and even make love, without worrying about what work went into the technical stuff, that makes the music flow, or makes the smoke machine pour ghostly vapours around the room, to be pierced by shafts of coloured light like lasers in a distant galaxy.
Driving home on Friday evening, I took the road past Loughcrew as the light faded in the west. The oak trees had not yet turned yellow but there was just a hint of autumn in the shortening day. I half wished I could have stayed at the festival all night, bopping around in the strobe light, with a carefree heart, but I have grown old and I realise that as life passes, our human passions dissolve, and eventually we fall in love with the earth itself.