My thoughts are of my Dad, he had grown up below these hills, within the scent of ocean and sight of these islands.We were never here together, but I have been able to plant the stories he told me of his boyhood into the fields and lanes and streams of which he spoke. His earliest memory was a story of his father, Jimmy Jack Ferry, taking him on a horse cart up the road toward Muckish Mountain. The cart was loaded with potatoes his Dad had grown and was delivering the other side of Muckish Gap, in payment to Jack Baird, the shepherd that looked after my grandfather’s sheep in their winter graze upon the mountain. The old horse with heavy load was unable for the steep grade of the mountain gap. My father remembered being left upon half a heap of potatoes, crying, time not moving forward at all, his last sight his father, the horse and lightened cart, passing over the Bridge of Sorrows, going on through the gap. Not much later, an eternity my father felt, the sight of his father, horse and empty cart, coming back over the mountain, returning for him and the rest of the spuds. Droichead Chaointe - the Bridge of Tears
is said to be called that because for so many, like my father,
it was across this bridge that they disappeared from Cloghaneely.
Many, most would not ever be back. My father, a young man in his twenties, in the summer of 1929, did go from here. Twenty-eight years would pass before he was able to return, his father in the grave by then. I am aware as I walk the rise of Cnoc na Naomh (‘hill of the saints’ - the good men we were before and might become), Muckish Gap on my eastern horizon, Inis Bo Finne across the sound, I am the return of my dad, buried so far from here, to the place he came before.
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Tenebrae.org ~~~ copyright by J Ferry ~~~ Contact |
Island
of the Bones 
Families
accompanied the emigrants to that bridge, and then like
my father’s first memory, watched while piece of who
they were vanished over the gap.
Joe
Ferry