This piece will have very few illustrations. That’s because I don’t have many. I left my home in the Wicklow Mountains long before I started a regular sketching habit. I include two sketches that are nearly the same, both done in Enniskerry Village, three miles from the clearing in the woods where I grew up. I hope you enjoy these simple memories that I share now.
| The first home I know is situated in a clearing on the side of a mountain. The mountain is called Maulin. It is in North Wicklow, the Garden of Ireland, one of the most beautiful parts of the already beautiful island of Ireland. |
| There’s a mountain near Maulin called the Sugarloaf. My earliest memory is of sliding down the side of the mountain on my rear. I am three years old and I am wearing dark green tartan trousers. I can see tiny beehives at the base of the trees in the clearing at the bottom of the slope. When I get to the bottom, I see that these are giant holes in the sides of the trees and not beehives. My mum must have read me a story with beehives in it. There is a hole in my trousers from sliding down on my rear. The clearing turns out to be the open area in front of Powerscourt Waterfall. The Waterfall is right beside my house, but you can’t see it because of trees. |
| My parents buy their site in the early 1960s from a man called Martin (first name? Surname? No idea) and so the house they build is called Martin’s Bank. It is pale pink pebbledash. It is a split-level bungalow, sprawling, to accommodate the millions of children my parents would rear, and it fits snugly onto the sloping side of Mount Maulin. The living areas are upstairs, the bedrooms are downstairs. One side of the bungalow follows the hill, and so there are steps from one living room down to another. The living room floors are polished teak or iroko. A low red brick wall between the two levels ends in a chimney stack, and a corner fireplace marks the heart of the rooms. The vista out of the huge picture windows looks out over our sloping lawn, and then the tree-covered hillside of the valley. (It is where I first learn that things in the distance are paler than things that are close.) Wood crackles in the grate as it burns; my parents always have friends over to indulge in their Robert Carrier dinner parties, and when they retire afterwards to the wonderful living room there’s plenty of booze in that 1970s way, and the smell of firewood mingled with spirits and coffee would probably make me cry if I smelled it now. My parents are obsessed with Mount Maulin. They’ve moved far from their families, and they’re going to make the most of this little piece of paradise. They hike up the mountain all the time at weekends. I find it very tiring because I am so young, and to my great surprise, when I am older I don’t find it tiring at all. One day I accompany my parents up the mountain on roller skates and they don’t object. I come back down the mountain with my roller-skated feet planted on the feet of one of my parents, and they still don’t object. To get to the summit, you must walk uphill along narrow paths through the trees, on and on, winding uphill through the gloom, tall trees looming up on either side, purple foxgloves the only occasional colour. After what always feels like hours and hours of struggle, but which is probably no more than 45 minutes of hiking, you see light at the top of one of the paths. The path levels out and veers sharply right: in front of you the path falls away into a vast glaciated valley, huge and empty, its steep flank lined with heather. At the far right of the valley, you can just about make out the white frothy trickle of Powerscourt Waterfall tumbling down the side of the mountain. It is 397ft tall, and it is a deafening deluge when you are perched on a huge high boulder next to it, screaming with abandon and getting drenched in spray – but it seems tame at this remove. You walk along the edge of the valley, high up in the clouds, and blueberry bushes are on either side of the narrow path. As a teenager, you go up alone and allow yourself to fall into the heather, like a mosh pit, because it is tremendously springy and you cannot hurt yourself doing this. On Mount Maulin you frequently hear a crashing sound through the furze bushes: I will never get used to the beauty of the sight of a deer running away through the trees. One time, we emerge from the gloomy winding path into the light, and a stag, standing stock-still, is silhouetted against the open sky of the valley, his magnificent antlers worn like a crown, proud and confident. In the eighties and nineties we have a beautiful red setter who startles, then runs after the deer, one sleek russet animal after another, neither seeming to make contact with the dried orange bracken underfoot. Keep walking uphill and the path opens out onto heath. Nothing but sky overhead. You can see the ghosts of lazy beds in rows in the heath, but all the houses that may once have been here are just stones, indistinguishable from the stones in the river that leads to the Waterfall. They planted potatoes up here? That is hard scrabble. Walk along the river and you enter trees again, and then you come to a mini-waterfall, a rehearsal for the main event a hundred metres downstream. This mini-waterfall opens onto a pool deep enough to swim in. A pool deep enough to swim! The holy grail for me and for my father, and perhaps for my brothers and sisters too, but the price to access it is high. Who wants to swim badly enough to climb a mountain? In the long hot summer of 1995 I do, going up there in the afternoons with my father when he comes home from work. My father and I are cut from the same cloth. I have just finished my geology degree, and when I tell him that waterfalls are a known place that gold deposits gather, he brings a snorkel and facemask up the mountain, but runs out of patience after about three forays into the gravel bed at the bottom of the pool. He tries to dam the river further upstream, but loses interest after one attempt to jam it with rocks. That day, I fill a plastic bottle with water from the river (more a stream at that altitude). It tastes so sweet and I cannot go home without bringing some back with me. I get home, and forget about it until the next day, by which time it tastes of normal water. Powrscourt Waterfall is connected to the public road by a long avenue, about a mile in length. If you dart off the avenue and duck up into the woods, you are soon invisible from the road: and if you keep walking uphill, you will probably come to my home on the hillside (as I said, it is sprawling). Hikers frequently stumble across our home on the way down from the top of the mountain. My father tells me that if I get lost in the woods, I must just walk downhill, and i will make it home; this applies equally to strangers, lost or otherwise. My parents are basically hippies. They have always seemed very loved-up, and this serenity and love has always extended to…everyone else. So they frequently take in lost souls, many of whom arrive via the woods. One day, one such young man arrives. It is 6.00am and he is from inner city Dublin. He has been camping in the mountains with his friends, but it appears they haven’t prepared adequately for an overnight in the woods. This young man has panicked and decided to run home (where?). So at 6.00am he appears in our clearing, with no shoes on, in a total state. He has hypothermia. Now, it just so happens that I have been doing a first aid course, and I know all the signs. Uncommunicative. (I cannot remember the other signs, other than shivering a lot.) My mother convinces him to have a hot bath, then she puts him on the sofa in our James Bond-esque split-level living room, under a pile of blankets. I pull up a chair and stare at him, right in his face, until my mother tells me there’s no need to do that anymore. I would like to tell you I am ten years old, but I am in my twenties when this happens. I know this because I am nominated to drive him to the Dart station, and I only learn to drive at 23. We have a long, tree-lined drive to our house: not as long as the avenue leading to the Waterfall, but long enough that anything could happen on the public road and we would not know about it. If you leave our house and turn right, you go steeply downhill, and in the 70s there is a crashed car with its crumpled nose stuck in the dry stone wall nearly every weekend. I suspect that might be down to the lax drink-driving laws at the time. The road is steep enough that none of us ever cycle up it: you would have to be a fitness fanatic to do that, and in the 1970s there aren’t any of those. We are under strict orders from our parents never to cycle down the hill – it is too steep to be safe. Once, my neighbour Siobhán and I defy this order, and cycle down the hill. We are about eight or ten years old. Siobhán goes over the handlebars and splits her chin open, and runs all the way home, screaming. She has a few little black stitches in her chin when next we meet. She is by far rhe prettiest girl of her sisters: I wonder does she still bear that scar? As I teenager, there are a lot of solo, thoughtful walks along the deserted country roads. In the late summer and autumn the air is redolent with honeysuckle. Fuschias hang like drops – God’s tears – deep magenta and purple. The dry stone walls are made of granite and are covered in ivy. Once I see a family of field mice running around the ivy. Pine, Honeysuckle. Sweet water. Sweet air. That is my homeland in the Wicklow Hills. Siobhán has two sisters of similar age to her: one older, one younger. They have an older brother called Paul. He is tall and thin, has red hair, is unattractive and is a great deal older than us. I am scared to go into the woods, as any normal person is, because it is dark and gloomy and unknowable. Paul tells me that they found a headless, armless, legless torso in the woods, and I am confirmed in my suspicions that the woods are a no-go area. One day I am in the woods on my own (must be years after scary Paul has left home). I pass a square well in a small clearing, made of brick. The water is black in the well, but all water is black anywhere in the mountains, or brown if it’s running, because of the peat. I stare into the water and I see a huge red frog with bugling black eyes. I am obsessed with wild animals and see far too few to satisfy my desire to see them. I watch the red frog swim about. I go back a day or two later but I never find the well again. I am far too young at the time to drink or use drugs so I wonder to this day whether I dreamt the whole thing. In winter we have deep snow in the mountains. This is a cause of bragging to our classmates, as no one else in the suburbs has snow. We ski using our Canadian mother’s skis, then we fill plastic feed bags from the surrounding farmers with straw to slide down the surrounding fields, all of which are as steep as the road outside our house. When I look out of the front door one night during a blizzard, I see a black night and white flurries of snow swirling around amongst the pine trees, and it takes my breath away. I look at the valleys, the trees, always around us, and I wonder how on earth I will capture the way they look in my art. I can’t imagine being able to do that. Enniskerry Village is three miles away. I can catch a bus into Dublin City there. In Enniskerry my dreamy life, my bubble, is burst. There are no wild animals, no hills, no dry stone walls; there are only groups of teenagers who aren’t my friends. Even though they may be friends of my brothers and sisters, they aren’t mine. Their mothers are nice but distant. I don’t know how to talk to the teenagers, or the mothers. Enniskerry Village underlines to me that I am a loner girl from the hills, and even my friend Orla who lives in the hills too, in another part of the valley, is surrounded by millions of cousins and doesn’t ever seem alone like I do. Sometimes a family member drives me into Enniskerry Village so that I can catch a bus into town, and sometimes I walk. One day I walk in snow so thick I can only wade, snow above my knees (now that’s tiring!) but there is a date in Dublin with a handsome boy of sixteen, like me, that must be kept. He looks like Tony Curtis. When I grow tired of him, a month later, and break it off over the phone, he starts to cry. He wails that he just “loves me sooo much”. Then he phones back a few minutes later, having regained his composure, and tells me he doesn’t know what came over him, and I am to forget the last call. I remember it now, 40 years later. Poor boy. Then I am eighteen, and I have been in art college for a year. My head is a complete tangle. From my mother’s bedroom next to the cool 1970s living room, looking out over the valley, I ring an ad for a bedsit in Rathmines. I move out. Things go thoroughly pear-shaped for the next five years, then I settle down and go to university, and a short ten years later, ten years of wild growing up, I meet a man who is as keen a lover of nature as I am, and I raise a tiny family of my own, but the dry stone walls are limestone now, and the hills could never be described as mountains. There is swimming to be had everywhere. Now I am back in Enniskerry Village once a week: the artist that I have become, hewn from these mountains, moulded by these hills, is back to pass on the passion for capturing nature through art. |
