When I said Erna was back I didn’t realise how much she meant it!
Last night while scrolling I came across this BBC Archive footage of Irish poet Seamus Heaney. As most Irish writers he was often treading the space between the old gods and the new. The pagan god he meets on Boa Island, Ulster looks so much like the Ballachulish figure (who I wrote about here) that I was a little in shock and it took a few watches and reading the text underneath to realise that Boa Island is in Lough Erne. Erne.
"When you take a boat out on the Erne waters, you voyage into time. The islands lie, like stepping stones, in the long river of our past," Heaney narrates.
“Christian missionaries landed in Ireland in the 5th Century and moved inland challenging the power of the Druids. They toppled statues like the one on Boa and buried them underground. Turned men’s minds from the Earth to the Heavens. They startled the nature gods and put them to flight.”
Pull up a map of the Ireland near Donegal and you’ll find Erna everywhere! River Erne crosses the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and runs out into Donegal Bay. Lower and Upper Lough Erne are enormous lakes filled with islands and castle ruins. One of the islands is Devenish Island where St Molaisse, one of the 12 Apostles of Ireland, built his very successful monastery. Here he counselled St Columba to leave Ireland after creating a war that killed thousands because he had copied a manuscript without permission. Columba went to Iona in Argyll where our story is set.
I couldn’t make this up!
I hear you Erna. I hear you.