There comes a place at the foot of the mountain when you stand on the threshhold of two worlds, neither in one nor the next.
One more step upwards, and you cross an invisible border into stillness and quiet. One step back towards the sea, and the sounds and tensions of the world fizz and bubble around you once again. Like a tide that can rise no higher, so just froths at the foot of the cliffs in surf and spray.
The quiet of the mountain is not the total silence of space – taking no heed of wind-song, sheep-bleat, crow-caw, nor the ever-present chuckle of water that streams from the ridge in myriad silver scribbles – which seem no different than the craggy stones that rear up from ancient circles to peer forward from the past.
Yet the mountain’s quiet is so tangible you can feel it. It lays on your heart like a calming hand, a gesture saying clearly, “Wait. Stay. Listen.”
You can see the sheep flecking the slopes of nearby Strickeen from so far away, they are mere dust motes in the sunshine. The shadowy folds and crags of the pinnacle ripple in haze.
On the way up to the mountain’s foot, fuchsia- and willow-topped walls edge the narrow lane that’s like a dry stream wiggling up the slope. The walls beneath the flowery banks are exposed in some places and gleam like fish scales, corbelled and mossed. Bright green shamrock peers from beneath the roots of tangled thorns holding back the sky.
Long grass lays over the banks between hedges like the shaggy pelt of the mountain sheep that flash like quartz pebbles as the sunshine sweep across them. The wind sighs through clumps of spruce like the sea.
Up, up, leaving the sounds of the lower lands behind; until you reach a plateau and turn to see the world laid out beneath you in waves of green and blue that roll out to the glinting light of Dingle Bay and the tissue-paper peaks of Iveragh beyond.
When you are here, it’s different from when you looked from below. As if you needed to be off the earth to look back at it and see it properly.
The country is not the same. You are not the same.
Here, within the mountain’s embrace, held in its quiet strength, you feel anything could happen. Anything is possible – the past flicking to the present in the blink of an eye; a breeze lifting you off your feet to float out over the world as if you were thistledown.
The quiet flows around you, soft, enveloping. You want to stay here always, drinking it all in.
But mountains live by their own rules, and a shadow falling over you warns of a storm bubbling up from the north, looking over the shoulder of Strickeen, now beginning to disappear behind cloud. Time to descend.
But I will go again, to that world of quiet and calm. It’s just a step across that invisible threshhold – but a whole world away from here.
From Chasing the Light: More Fragments of Nature & Place, Lynn Parr, 2021, Southwind Books (Ireland).