Letter to Tireragan
Knockvologan, 20th August 2020
Tireragan, Land of Angry Waves - Prologue to a letter
Flooded mountains full of hovering, floating, flying, diving, spiraling, propelling, drilling and crawling esprits. Near the coast clear permeable water encounters growth of stems and strands, flows into kelp forest. A dashing dark green border that demarcates the south side. When the tide drops, a crackling moonscape of draped bladder wrack emerges. Laver stretches tightly over the rocks. Just above, tidal pools inhabited by anemones, limpets and mussels. Birds act against further loss of the once tall mountains. The crests are topped with hummocks; dome shaped grass covered mounds, built for look-outs. Injected by the bird’s nitrogen they grow faster than the hills flatten. Tireragan arose from harsh granite. It has become an archive of dead and living species, some elements are 414 million years old, some just seconds.
We imagine a letter to introduce ourselves. We are regulars, but not sure if we have been noticed. We may not matter. Individual deer aren’t seen either; it is the continuous deer-presence that has impact. Robins trail gardeners and in forests they follow wild boar. It is the boar-acting that the robin appreciates in the gardener. They are much alike.
Writing a letter to a non-human entity comes with difficulties and writing to an entire biotope is even more complex. Whom to address? The tortuous oak? The glacial striations? Or shall we speak to the details trusting that the message will be passed on. Every time we plod through Tireragan so many questions pop up which none of our field guides could answer. As whom or what do we relate and write to Tireragan?
Tussocks of purple moor grass. Like numerous apple cores lined up, their crowns form an almost closed canopy under which slow streams of water meander. Voles shoot through tunnels of dead leaf matter. A subterranean world with a rainwater induced tidal range of its own. In open bits, soggy sphagnum moss slows up water flow. Remains of a moth amongst glistening hair-like tendrils of the round-leaved sundew. An adder basks in the sun. Its zig-zag pattern is disfigured by a swallowed something. When groaning ankles approach, it slithers off inaudibly. A tired foot slips off a bulging pillar and pokes deep into the squelchy mass. As the other foot finds stable ground, the sunken one works its way up. Tightened toes, calf and shin prevent the boot from staying behind. The sound of suction.
Drizzle peppers branches, becomes down-ding that rolls along and clings to the tips of twigs. In every drop the forest dangles upside down. Too much water slides from the stems and soaks into the mossy spatterdashes that all trees seem to wear. Rain collects itself, searches for fine grooves, grinds out existing channels, more water flows down the slope via paths, four waterfalls meander side by side along the rowan blown over by the storm. Its root ball slowly crumbles. The surface veined by white clotted water coming from everywhere, breaking silence with its expressive applause while roaring coastward. We cannot cross here. The waves coloured by peat capsize in the sea. The river protrudes like a rectangular volume, the ocean and peat water mix way beyond the surf. At the edge of the cliff a cormorant spreads its wings, as if the sun shines.
A bit overwhelmed by the amount of rain we enter the Luna Park, recalibrating our legs, one high up - one down, crosswise, backwards on sliding soil, grabbing brittle branches. Suddenly we find ourselves in the middle of a dense hazel wood and for a second it seems dry. The many slender stems arising from the rootstock are mottled with mosaics. Script lichen have engraved their braille language on the smooth bark; we try to read the elongated, sinuous, contorted scribbles but our fingertips don’t understand. When we look back through the scrub, we see that we’ve ploughed a trail, our presence captured for days alongside other hoof prints.
A crack. Someone else in front of us in a hurry, the move of something heavy, we see just the pale butt, still in summer coat, it jumped, we smell its strong odor. We follow and there it stands, motionless. We look each other in the eye; startled, surprised, equally curious. Bright colours are hidden under a spacious upholstery. Violet red, yellow ochre, Persian blue and white. Fragrance floating up from foxglove, orchid, primrose, honeysuckle, bluebell, bramble, bedstraw and parnassia. We challenge our nostrils to distinguish the subtle scents that roam around the omnipresent perfume of the damp soil that spreads a dark sweetness, newborn and rotten at the same time. When the sun appears after a few days of rain, water filled underground towers push their caps up rapidly. They never rise alone but form duo’s, groups, circles. They stay ibidem but incessantly underneath our sight. We foraged a hat full of chanterelles and ate them with the mackerel and a few new potatoes from the garden while bickering about the hole of the woodcock where we installed the camera trap and only captured a dwarf mouse at nighttime that looked in the lens and winked.
Zooming in on our high res satellite map one can just about distinguish the typical patterns of lazy beds. Parallel lines positioned perpendicular to drainage ditches. Once you see a patch you start to notice many. Remains of arable land. People around open fires in black-houses. It took many hands to build a roof. The bracken, which has now confiscated the worked soil, was pliant enough for thatching just a little while. Too few hands and things fall apart. No human lives here now. Inside the round cornered ruins live foxgloves and elderberry trees emerge from the dry-stone walls. With some ruins the door joist is still in place. With most these have crumbled down and sank back into the earth. In between some overgrown stones we found a knife and bottle carefully tucked away.
Quivering fibrous edge. No sloping bank. The water is black and deep right away. A backswimmer approaches and continues underneath us. Where we stand is no ground. The floating peat moss web is just rigid enough to hold our weight. The pool is the closing eye of a giant water bubble suspended above a dramatic pink-granite topography and held in place by millennia of peat-moss built up. Wrong place to be for a large mammal. This water saturated land is carnivorous. A sheep’s carcass in a grazing position is half way gone. Puddles of red water form around every footstep. The friction of the land makes us wonder if we can live here, or if we will remain guests. The call of the cuckoo omnipresent. Skylark above. We are neither.
The days and nights we’ve spent in Tireragan feel like catching up; tapping into lost knowledge, lost habits, becoming familiar, becoming regulars, natives maybe. The land here makes us do what many have done before. We find overgrown trails dictated by the hills and bogs and have conversations that were held centuries ago. This ancient land looks inviolable, but things aren’t the same. Our knowledge has shifted. We know more and less. We don’t fit as seamlessly as we once did.
Sitting on a rocky outcrop, granite crumbles mixed with crottle imprint our buttocks. We’ve escaped from the midges in the forest. Deer move to exposed places when the wind drops too. Midges influence grazing patterns. They are also the cause of underexposed photographs. We could not sit through the entire six minutes’ exposure time and wrapped up a little too early.
Rutger Emmelkamp & Miek Zwamborn
