Streamstown Village
Friday 29th June, 2007
Sitting in the centre of the old court cairn, enjoying sun, clouds and gentle breeze I feel such a strong sense of the ancestors. Such a great connection that stretches far back, and gives me the sense of timelessness that I love.
Susan and I have come today with wool for felting, felt, fabric and thread.
We are visioning crane bags which the participants in Feminine Warrior 2 will make – bags to represent the energy of soul and soul skin. Bags to hold the special symbols that come when one engages with their soul work.
Today we also plan to begin to sew our symbols on the inner lining of our bag and prepare the outer case – the soul skin.
Susan has been teaching me felting and we have also planned to make felt pouches for our runes. I am however, sidetracking with making felt mats – one for each rune and one for each of the Irish Ogham – or tree runes. These mats just compel me and I make them intuitively – working with wool and colour and shape as I vision each one. Today I am making Algiz – rune of protection and feminine power, and Kenaz – rune of inner knowledge, inner light and creative fire.
Crane medicine
The crane was the sacred “shamanic” bird. Crane is also the keeper of the threshold, the doorway of birth and death (I wrote about Crane in the autumn 2006 newsletter). The spiritual guide, healer, etc always carried a crane skin bag – where they kept their medicine. The crane disappeared from Ireland in the 1700s but we have stories about the crane, one of which tells that the Ogham, the Irish tree alphabet (rather like the runes) is based on the movement and flight of the crane. Here, in this landscape I feel a great sense of peace. I am relaxing after an intense week in Denmark where I participated in a wonderful tarot festival. I ran mini workshops, gave readings and performed poetry to music in a wonderful concert that was the grand finale to the four days. I went on to several very full days of work including the program “Transformations” and then came back here, to Connemara, for a wonderful week of time out of time in my very special place in the west of Ireland. Here at Streamstown Village – in the area now known as Claddaghduff I am at home. We stay just down the bay during our October pilgrimage.
Streamstown Bay
The old village sits nestled in gentle hills poised above the Streamstown Bay which today is glistening in the sunshine. The tide is flowing out – the movement of the water is powerful, it literally streams – hence it’s name.
4,000bc
The site of the village is ancient. The court cairn where I sit is dated around 4,000bc. Court cairns are fascinating – they are among the oldest of the stone structures in Ireland. Typically they have 2 sections. The first part of the cairn is open by design. The second part is closed over with a stone roof – though mostly, as is the case here, they have fallen in. These places were used for many reasons – some lost to us in the mists of time. But we do know that the bodies of the dead were laid out in the open part for various lengths of time – sometimes to be picked clean by birds and animals. Of course the traditions varied from area to area – often the bodies would be placed high in tree tops or, as on Dingle Peninsula in Kerry, placed on the edge of the cliffs, for the same reasons. Then the bones would be taken apart and placed within the enclosed part of the cairn. At various times of celebration and ritual the bones would be brought out – so the ancestors could be part of these important occasions.Rites of passage
These cairns were the site of great gatherings for the community – places where rites of passage may have occurred, rituals, celebrations of the great cycles of the year, and, of course, were the place of the ancestors. It was natural that these places were burial, celebration and ritual places, they are portals where the ancestors show the way into the mysteries and the unknown. These sites are in significant places of power – usually aligned to other places significance often with alignments to stars, the passage of the moon, and times such as solstices. So they are places that carry the power of all that has happened. All the joys and sorrows, the focus of the communities that have lived there. Below the court cairn here is the old village – the stone walls of the cottages still standing though the thatch roofs have fallen in long ago. This village, like so many was abandoned during the terrible famine of the 1840s.
Bravery and strengths
Michael Gibbons, local archaeologist story teller and friend, told us the tragic and powerful story of some of the people from this community when he was out with us during our 2006 pilgrimage.When the times grew hard the people could not afford their rent – this grew increasingly worse during the famine. Increasingly more and more people were evicted from their land – the walls of their cottages pushed in, the thatched roofs set fire to. Men, women, children, even the elderly were thrown out usually with no where to go. During the famine the situation was acute for the people. But there was no mercy from the landlords. In fact it has come to light that the famine was a deliberate, calculated way to get the people off the land, to starve them, push them out to the edges of the country. Whilst the famine raged there were crops of grain that had been grown by the Irish for the landlords to export, which were rotting in storage. England wasn’t starving but one third of the Irish died or were driven in desperation to the distant shores of America and Australia. But some could not leave their land. To do this was far worse than death. And so, rather than be disposed of their country they chose to come inside, close the door and lay down on the floor and die. And so it was.
Singing the land
All this power of the strength of the spirit of these ancestors is what I feel as I sit here today. I feel their presence, just as the Aboriginal people at home on the coast where I live would say – they are walking, talking, singing the land. What a great sense that is.
And I give thanks as I sit here today – in this peaceful place, poised between the worlds, still connected to the past, and reaching into the future through a bravery and strength that I have come to know with in myself. A part that I know is the strength of these people of west Ireland who never gave up, who, against all odds, have kept their culture alive, who still speak their own language and whose spirit has lived on in their stories and music and who have never really submitted to the oppressors hand.
Sitting here felting and sewing with Susan I feel a great continuous thread with these ancestors as I work with these age old arts that also belong to them and have been handed down through the generations to us.