Full of bull

Sometimes you have to get out of the car and walk. Leave the road and wander a wild hill. A few years ago, I was telling stories from An Tain, Ireland’s Old Testament. About Queen Meadhbh and war, death crows and Cu Chulainn. I drove the route that follows the story of the cattle raid of Cooley, where Meadhbh has her eye on a brown bull that she wants to steal. Not any aul’ bull, this. No, a leviathan. A god. The story starts in Rathcroghan in Co Roscommon and winds it way to Louth and back again, through Ardee and Mullingar.

There’s a field at the beginning of the route where you’re told that he fought the White Bull and killed him. Another god. The largest creatures in the country at the time, the White and the Brown. They say the Earth shook when they hit each other. Go to the field, I swear you can feel it. You’re standing in a place where you know something happened; you know it in your bones.

Uaigh na gCat is there, too. An underground cave; the entrance to hell, some say. You slither in on your back — ’tis narrow enough — and then the space opens up beneath you. Down you go, into the darkness. Meadhbh used to send young men into it; she’d fill them full of magic mushrooms and bid them go down there for three days, and if they emerged psychologically intact, then they were fit to fight for her.

Going back to the hotel, I was covered in muck and there was a young lad doing a bit of painting in the foyer. Splattered white, he was. “What happened to ya?” he says. “I went down Uaigh na gCat.” He stopped. I’d shocked him. He didn’t like it. This was bad news. As straight as an arrow, he says to me: “You shouldn’t have gone down there.” I smiled, but he was serious. “We’re not supposed to go there.” “We?” “Catholics.” I turned to go to me room. “It’s alright for others, but not us,” he said. He wasn’t messing. I drove on the next day, following the trail.

I wasn’t doing a great job on the stories themselves. I couldn’t get a grasp of them at all. It was as if I knew what had happened, but I didn’t know what they were about. It felt like I was trying to describe something from eight or nine points of view at the same time.

I got to Louth and decided to walk. From Ravensdale to Carlingford, and I stopped into Lumpers bar to get tea. A man walked in, and says: “They call me The Fog.”

“Why do they call you The Fog ?” I says.

“I don’t know, was it after a football match?” he says.

I think they called him that ’cos when you were near him, you got confused. You lost your bearings; things you were sure of turned to smoke. I left and got as far as The Pats. A hollow between the hills. A fella jumped out of a hedge at me. “Are you Tommy Tiernan?” “I am.” “If you’re not, then you’re some phucker that looks like ya.”

A girl comes up to me and asks to be put on the guestlist that night for the show in Carlingford. She’d like three tickets.

“No problem,” I says, “What names will I put down?”

She pauses and says: “Two psycho bitches and a tall fucker.”

I got a little lost and asked a man for directions.

“Go down there till you get to the bridge and go left. Keep going till you pass the ostrich.” “The ostrich?” “Aye. Madonna.” “Why d’ya call her that ?” “She’s some neck on her. Then you’ll come to the bottom of the hill, and after that you just walk skyways.”

I’d spent so long thinking about the Brown Bull of Cooley and trying to tell the story of him and following the Trail, that me eyes and me mind were looking for signs of him. I sat down on a bench outside Carlingford. There’s a small statue of him there that doesn’t really do him justice.

I looked across the water to Greencastle, to Ulster, blood country. And as sure as I’m sitting here typing this, I saw him. In the hills — he was the hills, the shape of him; asleep or dead, I don’t know, but I swear to you, he’s there. Huge, brooding, dangerous, worthy of an epic.

I was on the bench looking over, but I wasn’t able for it. The idea of him was fine, but the reality of this was too much for me. I kept turning away from it. My mind and heart weren’t big enough. He was a god, and humans don’t survive encounters with the divine. I had to get up and walk.

I got as far as Omeath and followed a county council footpath, opened a county council gate and into a county council grotto. There was life-sized statue of Jesus, man-made, and all the stations of the cross. No problem. An alabaster Christ? I could handle that. But the other lad, in the hill? That’s a different story altogether.