The Season of Lughnasa
AND, BUOYED ON RIPPLES OF BENIGN bliss (certainly our bliss), autumn finally came—day by gloriously long golden day celebrating Lugh—the pagan god of sun and light. All leading to the great fall harvests with more pagan-tinged festivities and dances and the smell of fresh-cut hay and the game-season hunting for pheasant, snipe, mallard, and deer and fly-fishing for fat trout and salmon in the dark, peaty-edged loughs, ready to be roasted on the spot over bog wood fires and washed down with fiery “gargles” of potent potato-distilled poteen. And yes—still all this in these days when the homogenizing influences of contemporary changes and the new EU-accelerated wealth of this Celtic Tiger run rampant throughout so much of Ireland.
This is the time for seanachais to tell their tales in the pubs by warming peat fires (alas, a declining tradition); for the gatherers to plunder the pastures and woods for mushrooms, hazelnuts, acorns, sweet chestnuts, windfall apples, haws and sloes; for the frolic and froth of Halloween; for allowing the lazy lassitude of the season and the pooled warmth of golden evenings to buoy you up through to the coming chilly times.
The irony here is that springs and summers in Beara are notoriously fickle, but invariably this “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” often offers some of the finest weather of the year—even deep into November. Keats, with his glorious “To Autumn,” reminds us:
Where are the songs of spring? Aye, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too…
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
Much as I admire Keats’s ability to conjure autumnal moods with their silky sensual ghostings of silvered mists, so magically, I also pay homage to Cork author Damien Enright’s fine descriptive gifts, particularly in his enticingly evocative book: A Place Near Heaven. Here, for example, he offers a true “sense of place” word-song:
Walking abroad these [mid-October] evenings…flights of curlews rise from the fields with lonely cries and mixed groups of oystercatchers and godwits fly in small squadrons over the sea…Later a soft mist rises from the fields, hazing out the distance. Sounds hang in the air. The bay is mirror-calm, with white birds and bright boats set in the stillness. Smoke rises straight from the village chimneys, blue against the tall dark trees.
And that just about captures it all…