Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry by Annie Caulfield

Author:Annie Caulfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141935911
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2008-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

Our anniversary journey through County Tyrone didn’t take in a diversion to walk the Giant’s Causeway coastal path.

‘That’s one I’ll have to admit old age has cancelled out for me,’ my uncle said. ‘Although when we did it before, you in your innocence didn’t realize you were walking miles with a man who’d just had a heart operation.’

‘I did know. I just thought as you’d said you wanted to do the walk, that walking must be good for you.’

He laughed. ‘At that stage in my life, telling a young niece a stroll on a coastal path was beyond my abilities wasn’t part of a habit of life I’d got used to. I still liked to see myself as a fellow just past middle age and of heroic disposition.’

‘It was pretty heroic, I was exhausted.’

‘It stands out as a heroic piece of walking in my memory.’

We’d walked the steep path slowly and made stops to look at seabird nests, or ships on the horizon – really rest stops for both of us. Reaching the end, it seemed we’d have to turn round and walk all the way back – but I spotted what I thought might be a short cut across the fields to the car park.

‘What if it wasn’t?’ my uncle had said. ‘What if it was some way that actually turned out to take longer, wouldn’t you just die?’

I don’t know if we’d have died, but we might have had to sit down in the fields and weep until rescued.

There wasn’t just my uncle’s better adjustment to the constraints of age making him less enthusiastic about another trip to Giant’s Causeway. According to him, Giant’s Causeway and the Antrim coast were sights all visitors to Northern Ireland should see once, but they became a bit less exciting every time. Unlike the Sperrins – an enduring joy, because the Sperrins were changeable: gaunt and full of secrets in winter shadows; exquisitely pretty in the sunlight. They had no well-trodden paths or gift shops. They had the sort of unoccupied ancientness people expected of the Irish landscape but found less and less.

Not that the bizarre basalt columns of Giant’s Causeway were a bad thing, they just got all the attention.

The honeycomb rock pavement was created by volcanic rock shrinking and splitting as it cooled, forming a platform of 40,000 stepping stones that disappeared into the sea. The basalt columns were a natural feature that looked too geometrical to have just happened, but apparently they did. There were many legends to explain them away, the most well known concerning local warrior and giant, Finn McCool. Finn McCool was supposed to have constructed the causeway to bring over a lady giant from Scotland to be his bride.

There were similar rock formations on the facing Scottish coast, so if we clever modern types didn’t know about volcanic rocks…

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