thehaunted
The Haunted Bookshop
Looking for my middle name — 2 years ago
Worth visiting!
My middle name is Aran. I had to know what that meant. As I had only about thirty euro left, I walked to Connemara from Galway to catch the ferry, was too tired to duck the salt spray, and barely staggered down the road from the dock to the Tigh Fitz. Despite my bleary appearance, they were all kindness and gave me a quite posh room for the night, and I spend most of the evening in the attached pub, gratefully drinking whatever the locals were buying for me and genuinely enjoying the conversation of an ageing accordonist.
Next morning, I felt a little sore but up for a lookabout, and so I set off for the old ring fort at the top of the great island. It’s a strange place – half the fort appears to have fallen into the sea, and there’s no source of fresh water, so why did neolithic peoples carefully fit three rings of stone together up here again? I looked over the cliffs a while, watching waves crash up and through the stones below, then wandered on.
Can’t remember which of the fifty gazillion ruined churches it was that I found several hours later and found myself oddly at home there. No wood, no glass, no metal, no ornaments left save what was carved in the fitted stones themselves, which have probably been standing these twelve hundred years; but when I knelt down on the pebbled floor and looked out over a thin altar and through a tall and narrow window, I saw three things: a stone bearing a carving of a halved circle, a sweep of green beyond a low stone wall, and a horse, standing quite still. The sky was the royal blue of evening, except where some gilded clouds hovered low on the horizon. The horse tossed its head, and I felt for my notebook and pen, but not to draw it – to make a note to myself. Found. One name. I know what it means now.
Of course later things got silly, as they always do when I travel. I helped a group of islanders with a historical preservation project; somehow I ended up with a tweed cap; there was a bit with a blackberry bush and a London slogan that reduced four German students to helpless laughter; Tyrone won the all-Ireland cup, and since for some reason Irish people always think I’m from Tyrone (some fluke of my accent?) I was treated to a few pints, interrupted twice – while everyone else went to mass (I was invited, but not being Christian, I don’t feel I ought to go), and when a rough and wiry fellow took me out in his punt. You know, the usual.
But seriously – I would go back to Inis Mor in a heartbeat. I would live there if I could. It wasn’t just the call of my name, and it wasn’t just the sight of the stone and the horse on the green. I can’t rightly tell you what it was. But I can tell you that in the little ruined church, I put a folded bit of paper on the altar, even though the altar was once consecrated to someone else’s god. There were no words on the bit of paper – just a sketch of a spindly tree that looked as though it were trying to stick a root into rocky soil. It was a sort of portrait of myself, to commemorate the moment when the geographical center of my heart shifted six thousand miles.
Is there room on the island for a crazy bookseller? Tell me and I’ll go….
