10th October 2026

The oldest of the old follows behind us in our thinking, and yet it comes to meet us.  Martin Heidegger

I start with a book which ordered has now arrived.:  Which has been nagging at the back of my mind for ages.  I read it years ago and was taken somewhat with Louth Gur, a lake which nestled in a sacred landscape and one of the most important prehistoric sites in Ireland.  Dames spun a story around it with Aine as the goddess who protected it.  As a sun goddess she made the grey waters of the lake sparkle.

Trees often float by in my memories, the tree up on Bath Downs with the barbed wire used as fencing tied tightly round its trunk, The wire had grown deep into the bark, of an ash tree and I was never quite sure that trees felt pain.  It was an ash that had had the wire tied round it like the Norse  Yggdrasil Tree probably the tree that Odin hung on for nine days......

Brian Bates sees the Yggdrasil Tree as representing Sleipnir, the spirit horse of Odin, a great eight legged creature that takes him down to the otherworld. Bates works his way from the word Yggdrasil, Ygg being a nickname for Odin and drasil a word for horse. Odin of course famously hung from the tree for 9 days but it was during this time, a time of spiritual quest and dreaming that the tree transformed into Sleipnir. And Bates points out that the gallows in Anglo-Saxon times were also known as "a 'horse' upon which its victim rode to death"

But to get back to Louth Gur, it has the most beautiful circular stone circle in existence, and had I read that it had been done with a pole in the centre and a rope to get the evenness of a perfect circle.  You can see the gateway on the right, an invitation into what? what happened in this circle, surely not a market but a place where the priests watched the happenings of the sun, moon and stars.

Borrowed from the Louth Gur Holiday Cottages web site.

The other thing that I had remembered, half unconsciously, was the Stone of the Tree,  Cloch A Bile which was also nearby.  You can find it on The Modern Antiquarian  a strange beast of a stone with its moss and lichen. 

Louth Gur also has a' dead hunt' at night occasionally through the skies a bit like the Cw Annwn Hunt of Halloween Night.  But the person in the Dead Hunt is the hunted quarry  selected by the spirits of the underworld and who are chased from one world to the other.

Apparently there was also a 'silent coach' which belonged to Aine and the tale is told of how Sean O'Shea, a herdsmen, was summoned by Aine to play the bagpipes at a ball she was giving, a party of good food and wine. I bet he never returned.  The coach was called Coitose Bodhar and, according to Dames, was similar to the one that carried Nerthus in Denmark, Mother Earth of Northern Europe

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 Found this, a Seamus Heaney old video.  At one stage I collected his archaeological poems called 'North' from a book I found in Bath library.  The poems were so profound, imagining the prehistoric world.

It is strange how old myths build up through the stones.  Heaney whilst studying archaeology at Queen's University wrote this poetry.  He was inspired by Ted Hughes, how strange that things revolve in a circle and Hughes bleakness is somewhat captured in Heaney's writing.  I have written some of the poems down and they can be found through the blogs.