Y'dig?

In the late 1980′s, I was living in London, stressed, depressed and in need of a break. I had always wanted to visit Iona, the island off the coast of Scotland where Irish Christian monks lived in the 6^th Century, notably St. Columbus, one of those who first brought Christianity to Britain.

When I arrived at Heathrow airport, on a whim, instead of taking the shuttle to Glasgow, and on from there to Iona, without any solid reason for doing so, I decided to fly to Belfast instead and to make my way up the Antrim Coast and to take a boat over to Rathlin Island. Rathlin is where Robert the Bruce allegedly hid after his army was defeated by the English and a story is told of how he took refuge in a cave and watched a spider try many times build a web. It kept failing but in the end it was successful. Inspired by this, he again raised an army and this time was victorious over the English. The story apparently has no foundation in truth but that of course takes nothing from its power.

Back then, because of the Troubles, there was a security zone around Belfast airport and I had to take a taxi from the airport to near the town of Larne and from there I hitchhiked and walked my way up the beautiful Antrim Coast road. Msy is a special time of year and new life, vitality and resurgence were in the air. One night I stopped at the town of Cushendun and checked into the local Youth Hostel. The place was empty apart from an Englishman and his wife who ran the place, and a lone German postman who was cycling up the coast. That night, in a pub in the town, a chance conversation with a local man resulted in him telling me that there was ‘a holy mountain’ nearby. He explained that it was holy in pre-Christian Ireland and went on to say that it was called Tievebulliagh. On it there was a ‘Neolithic axe factory’, an outcrop of blue granite and if one looked in the scree, (the countless small stones that littered the mountain face), one can find broken shards of axeheads discarded back in the Stone Age

He told me too that there was a grave nearby that of Oisin, a 6^th Century warrior/poet/king who famously, by the way the Christians subsequently told it, refused before St. Patrick, to convert to Christianity, because he said he had been to the land of Tir na Nog, the land of the ever young. The land of the ever young is the present, the here and now, and only already evolved souls can be there for long. Hence Christianity would have had little appeal or attraction for him.

I found the grave the next morning, some way out of the town and in farmland, and there was a heavy sea mist, with visibility down to about 40 meters. However, beside the grave was a plaque that said that whereas local legend said it was the grave of Oisin, carbon dating proved that the grave was  some 4500 years old so whoever was buried there was definitely not him.

I walked past the grave through heavy mire and mud and began my ascent of the mountain. The atmosphere was eerie with the watery mist hanging suspended in the air. I passed cattle on the lower slopes and as I commenced the climb, it was relatively easy going but I wasn’t very fit and was soon out of breath. I found the scree and much as I searched, I picked up no stone that looked like it had been fashioned by human hand.

At this point the going became difficult for as I climbed up the scree, I would slide back to almost where I’d started from. This problem was solved by walking up at an angle, criss-crossing my way up in the manner I’d seen skiers move up a slope.

As I reached the summit, something strange and wonderful happened. I was quite out of breath, bent double with the effort and as I lifted my head, in that instant, the mist evaporated (which I’d read that sea mists do). The fact that I knew it could and did happen did nothing to take away the magic of what ensued. Suddenly the sky was clear, cloudless and filled with sunshine. Looking across the sea I could see the low gray hills of south-west Scotland in the far distance and up the coast, headlands receding, one after another, progressively turning from purple to gray.

I was immediately transported to the present and was in a state of pure bliss where I was totally at one with all around, earth, sea and sky. I’d read of this state, but never before remotely experienced it and here it was, joyful and uplifting, life changing even. A big black bird kept swooping in low over my head which I thought meant that most likely it had a nest with some young nearby and it was trying to scare me off.

I had no sense of time and had no desire to leave the mountaintop.

Eventually, as I started my descent, I came down another way following a small stream passing trees bursting in newly emerging leaves, and hedgerows full of wild flowers of great profusion and vigor. It occurred to me that since those Neolithic times, not too many humans had gone where I had, maybe a few thousand at most. This was never a populated area and even for those who were here, unless they knew of the special nature of Tievebulliagh there was no great reason for climbing it. That night I wrote an account of what had happened to me on my return to the Youth Hostel.

It had been a truly remarkable experience, a connection beyond my wildest dreams and the first time I had ever experienced anything that could be even vaguely regarded as spiritual.

Some eight years later, I took my new wife and son to the place. To my astonishment, what I had written down that very same day and experienced could not possibly have happened as I described it. In the pleasant spring sunshine, there was no mountain remotely near the grave and a map hastily consulted, revealed that Tievebulliagh was some 8 kms away, a distance I certainly never walked.