Odd to think that less than 16 kilometres south of the centre of the city of Dublin are hills, lanes and fields. They straddle the borders of Wicklow and Dublin in an area that used to be known by its ecclesiastical boundary as Rathdown. It's an area dotted with megalithic portal tombs, stones and crosses from before the Vikings, ruined churches. Briars swell out from the ditches with half-buried drystone walls behind. Furze and gorse, heather and ferns take over in season; blackberries abound; foxes were common.
I start my walks in Cabinteely, just off the busiest road in Ireland, the N7, and head up the narrow roads and lanes to Tully church. In ruins for more than 300 years, Tully is recorded as having been a sanctuary. A half-hour passes in minutes, sitting by the gate in sight of its romanesque arch. Then it's over the hill into Heronsford and up the long lane, then the track, to the hill of Carrickologan, called locally Katty Gallagher. At 275 odd metres, maybe a kilometre and a half directly inland from the sea, it's a few metres shy of officially being a mountain.
You need to go through the woods to begin the ascent, woods that usually sing and groan with the winds in off the Irish Sea, about a kilometre to the east and hundreds of metres below. It's a steep enough climb, with shale and loose rock all about. The reward is a view for over 100 kilometres to the Mourne mountains to the north. That's if the air over Dublin city lets you see through. To the east, on a good day, you'll see Mt. Snowden in Wales. To the inland side of the hill is the Enniskerry Valley, full green patchwork of farmland stretching south toward the beginnings of the Glencree valley, the Sugar Loaf and the foothills of the Wicklow mountains. Across the valley are the Wicklow mountains proper, sombre and brooding, with clouds rolling in from the west.
I sit on the lee side of a spine of rock pushing through the grass and keep an eye on things. It's often been an afternoon, and I've dozed off. I've been here for sunrises. Once with a bottle of whisky and company. After a funeral. In love. After a departure of brother, sister, friend abroad. In pouring rain. After fallings-out. Brought the kids here, started to point out places from the summit, then fell silent. Watched them racing down the sides of the hill, playing in the woods afterwards.
There's exhilaration here, especially in the thin light of an October evening, say, a sense that the world sheds its distinctions hereabout. Something so familiar and yet so very remote and lasting -- and quite out of reach, to be sure -- with the hills themselves slipping into the dark by the minute. On the downward trek, rounding the hill to the south brings the lights of Bray into view. The steady dark beyond the lights at Killiney can only be the sea. Then it's the reliable inanity of the suburbs, domestic comfort and routines, and a glimpse of the hill in the moonlight when you draw the curtains that night.
These fields and valleys around Katty Gallagher are border country, liminal.
This is where the wild Wicklow men harried and rebelled at the edges of the Pale for centuries. Over the hill is fibre-optic, roaring Dublin city, but inland and to the south are the hedges and quiet fields, the lanes and forgotten stones, the mountains waiting. But really a portal for me, and I've learned late enough, for others. My father cycled up here alone 70 years ago. Beckett, I learned, spent many days tramping here. For me, it was solvitur ambulando begun as a kid with a bike and a vague feeling of being unreconciled to things. It's where the empire of childhood declared itself and still holds fast. It remains outside of time, eternally recurring. Its cartography is secret, its sovereignty implicit, invincible. It's also a place that necessarily means, requires, exile.
Such is the grip of those fields and hills and hedges that they have often made me dependably unfit for human company. Made me careless and even scornful of things I am supposed to care about. It's the only place I know where geography and past don't stand apart, a place where the dead weight of things -- of self even -- ease.
It returns to me in dreams more lately, especially if I am anxious in sleep, or if there's been bad news. When I go there in July, I'll wait until evening before setting out on the path to Katty Gallagher. I am curious to see it. Keen to put my back to that stone wall and listen to the wind again.
For information: phone the Irish Tourist Board at (800) 223-6470, or visit the Web site http://www.irelandvacations.com.
John Brady is the author of the Minogue series of mystery novels. Minogue number six, A Carra King, was published last fall by McArthur & Co. He was born in Dublin and lives near Toronto with his family.
Join the Discussion: