|
On our sixth day in Ireland, we drove down a tiny winding lane on the Beara Peninsula in a fairly rickety red compact car. We parked the car as far on the shoulder of the road as we could, got out of the car, and walked through a gate. That picture tells you what we saw. Drombeg Stone Circle is older than anything we know here in our startlingly young country. It's older than anything we'd ever seen before. Older than anything we'd ever imagined or ever hoped to imagine. It's so old that no one understands it anymore - why it's there, what it was used for, how it's managed to remain standing after all these years. Decades. Centuries. What's amazing about this circle (and about most of Ireland) is that you can walk right up to it and touch it. You can walk through it, by it, around it. You can sit down on it. You can picnic next to it or in the middle of it, dance around it, sing a song to it. There's no historical commission employees staffing the site. There's no one. If there wasn't a sign, you wouldn't even know what it was. We walked right up to it on this gloriously sunny day. We walked right up to it and for about twenty minutes we were all alone with each other and the ancient stones and the sunny sky and the gloriousness of the Irish countryside. They really get it overseas: you should be able to be a part of history. You should be able to reach right out and touch it. You shouldn't have to view everything from behind glass; there shouldn't be park police swarming over everything. Everything doesn't need admission tickets and paid parking. History should be seen and touched and believed. It's impossible to not believe that these stones were once vital to a civilization when you can walk up and sit down next to them. When you can reach out and put your hand on one and imagine just for a moment that you can feel power pulsing through them. There are stone circles all over Ireland, but this is one that most tourists don't see. They don't allow tour buses on Beara, and a lot of tourists don't venture out of the well-trodden areas. Most people go to Dingle if they go to a southwestern peninsula - we probably would have too if it weren't for the wisdom of Selila, who gives most excellent travel advice and shared her beloved place with us. Beara is magic on earth. Drombeg is a small but important part of that magic, and our moments in the circle were some of the best of the whole trip.
|
