House on the Borderland

Re the feature about William Hodgson’s book House on the Borderland and how landscape can inspire stories and their setting [FT385:38-43]: I was very interested to find out Hodgson had stayed in the village of Ardrahan, Co. Galway. For those interested in the faery faith, Ard rath translates as High Fort – high not in elevation, but in magic. Once many years ago I visited the fort looking for a fogou. It was a clear blue sky December day with a blanket of heavy snow everywhere. Eventually underneath a hawthorn tree I found a lintelled opening with wisps of mist curling from the exit. With lit candle I entered a long curved chamber and meditated. As I was exiting into the bright light, a strong smell of roses enchanted me. In the book, Hodgson describes visiting the “pit” or abyss, which triggered a memory from my childhood.

My father, an antiquarian, took my brother and me to the “devil’s punchbowl”, a place hidden in the woods where a river disappears underground through a big sinkhole. We were only five or six at the time and my father spent most of the time warning us not to go too near the edge. There are many sinkhole-disappearing rivers in those limestone counties in the west of Ireland, but my instinct tells me this is the dramatic pit that inspired Hodgson’s book. The “wasteland” he talks about could be the region called the Burren in Co. Clare, a place of which Cromwell, on his “liberating” march through Ireland, once said: “No tree to hang a man... water to drown him or earth to bury him.” The rectory is still standing