This week
I’m going to the Historical Novel Society Conference in St. Petersburg,
Florida, where I’ll meet writer friends and mentors, some of whom I already
know, and agents and editors I’d like to know.
Squeal!!!
The excitement
for this conference has been building with stories from various authors of how
they got inspiration and gave birth to their novels spanning all historical
time periods. If you’d like to take a
look at some of those interesting stories, they are here:
And this is
the story of the birth of my manuscript . . .
THE
MYSERIOUS ISLAND
My home is
on Lough Corrib, the largest lake in the Republic of Ireland. Sir William Wilde (Oscar Wilde’s dad), wrote
a book about the place in 1867, Wilde’s Lough Corrib, in which he
claimed the lake (lough) has 365 islands.
God only knows how he counted them all.
The largest of these lake islands is Inchagoill (meaning Isle of the
Foreigner or Isle of the Stranger), so called because when the
Christians first came to this island in the 5th Century, they were
foreigners, and definitely strange.
Inchagoill is remote, beautiful, achingly peaceful. Regularly shrouded in mist like a Japanese
painting, this island is a forest with huge, old trees, hanging vines, ferns
and moss-covered rocks. Though no humans
live here, there is a mysterious, ‘busy’ energy about the place . . . A place
where, ‘earth and air resound with the music of invisible people.’ This is where my story, THE PATH THROUGH
THE MIST takes place.
On
Inchagoill, a clearing in the forest marks the spot of the original 5th
Century Christian settlement. There are also
ruins of two tiny temples from the 9th and 12th
centuries.
A stone with ancient Ogham-like hieroglyphs marks the 5th Century grave of Lugna, St. Patrick’s
nephew, who brought the first Christian monks to this island.
While these are interesting things to see,
the true beauty of the island lies beyond these remains. If you venture into the forest and walk
around the island to the other side, you find that the land rises and becomes
an unnatural, seemingly man-made hill, with a shallow ditch around it, in just
the way the ancient Celts used to build duns or hill forts.
On my first
visit to the island, I stood upon this hill, looked out over much of the
enormous lake and
felt more than thought, “This was a non-Christian
settlement.”
Images and sounds came to
me of robed and hooded figures round a fire, drum beats, chanting.
It felt like I was standing in an ancient,
holy place and I stayed on the island a long time, listening to the sounds of
the invisible.
HISTORICAL
C.S.I.
Once the
idea for a story came to me, I began the long, involved process of researching
a time before things were written down. Every
historical and geologic source I consulted claimed that Christian monks
were ‘banished’ to this island by the local people. Some said they were banished by Druids. But that made no sense. Druids frequently lived apart from local
tribes or clans. They would have preferred
to live on the island, near water -- especially surrounded by it -- for water
would have been considered a gateway between this world and the next. The dun fort would have been indicative of a
native (non-Christian) tribe of people inhabiting the opposite side of the
island from the Christians. It
seemed to me that all the evidence pointed to Druids living on this island
first, before the Christians took over.
Interviewing
local historians, I found they had two things in common: They were all male and all well over the age
of 50. All were Catholic with the
exception of one Protestant Archdeacon who’d written a book on early monastic
sites. Without exception, each historian
said they did not know about the hill fort on the island, or they passed it off
as ‘the natural lay of the land.’
I couldn’t
help wondering if all these historians had a revisionist view of ancient
history inspired by their religious up-bringing. Maybe I was crazy – just imagining Druids
there because it would make a good story.
That prodded me to keep investigating.
Finally,
the author of a book on local history recommended I go see ‘Joe.’ “He’s a crazy, old guy, now, he might
frighten ye. But he can certainly offer
ye another point of view,” the author told me.
Friends told me I shouldn’t go visit Joe. “He’s a recluse, a frightening lunatic. Best mind yerself, now.” There was never any mention of why, exactly,
he was thought of in such a negative way.
It took
some work, but I located Joe and drove through impenetrable fog to his
house. He looked to be about
80-something and described himself as a ‘Devout Pagan’ and ‘Reformed
Catholic.’ His face was creased with a
perpetual frown, but he invited me in to his smelly, old house and we sat in a
tiny room that was wall-to-wall books.
There, we huddled next to the radiator, along with his Winnebago-sized German
Shepherd. Like a man who’s been alone
for too long, Joe talked and talked. He
told me the history of the area and of his family. He said things like, ‘local holy wells were
sacred long before the word ‘holy’ came to this country,’ ‘ley lines cross this
whole area like spider webs.’ He even offered to teach me how to douse. When I asked him about the hill fort on
Inchagoill and if maybe there were Druids on that island before the Christians
came, he fell silent. Glaring at me from
under his bushy eyebrows, he resembled that ‘lunatic’ people had warned me
about. But then a slow grin spread
across his face. “Yer the first person’s
ever said that to me. Sure the Druids
were the first. We all know it, don’t
we. Just most of ‘em’s round here won’t
say it. Cowards.”
“But why?” I asked. "Why won't anyone say it?"
Joe
twitched his head. “The
church has always covered up these t’ings, ye see. They’ve ruined this country, the
Catholics. Besides, if we’re right about
this, that wouldn’t serve their purpose a’tall, now would it?”
Of course,
Joe’s declarations don’t completely confirm my intuition, but his beliefs did
make me feel a little less alone. Best
of all, his input gave me the courage to finish writing this manuscript, and he
is now a character (renamed, of course) in that story.
