Inniskeen Road, December evening. The Beemers go by in twos and threes, there’s a dance of old souls in Billy Brennan’s barn tonight. The row over the Irish border at Europe’s highest levels this year brought Patrick Kavanagh’s ghost whispering to my mind.
He could never have believed his little townlands lurching against Armagh would actually find themselves, as he wrote ironically in his poem Epic, "important places, times When great events were decided, who owned That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land".
The parish of Inniskeen scrapes against the imaginary line we call the Border, a fiction that has led to violence and death and echoes still. There’s an official hiking trail along the frontier called the Monaghan Way. Its gorgeous collection of nettled ruins, toppling streams, foggy gripes and abandoned railways know nothing of their geopolitical significance.
The walk is usually quiet. It has no marketable views like Killarney, Moher or Connemara but its beauty lies in its lack of familiarity. It entrances with the unexpected. A derelict pheasant pen straining the wan sunlight of winter. A chandelier of roots at the opening to a badger’s sett. Superstitious hills and barren hedges prickling with secrets.
The trail ripples with history. The Inniskeen end follows a disused railway to the edge of Cullaville in Northern Ireland along the salmon-rich River Fane. From 1886 to 1958, the line carried throngs along its banks heading to far-flung places like Bundoran. The platform at Blackstaff remains, waiting for trains that will never come again. Last year a farmer cleared a section of the old track, revealing a lost railway bed of glinting granite. The gravel was likely quarried from Armagh with dynamite and spread on the Monaghan ground in a prophetic feat of cross-Border co-operation. Explosives scarred the landscape long before it got to souls.
A landowner’s refusal to grant public access to a stretch diverts walkers onto a laneway that leads to the late 1970s. Lonely plaques fixed to limestone rocks between whin bushes signal where three bodies of IRA “disappeared” victims were buried. Charles Armstrong, John McClory and Brian McKinney’s remains were hidden for decades. Another reminder of the nearby Border’s story. Tread softly along this part, because you tread on their nightmares.
Part of the Monaghan Way sways into Her Majesty’s land for two stout British miles. The River Fane itself forms the Border for several kilometres, to use EU parlance. The salmon do not carry passports. Yet. The Fane starts life in Lough Ross outside Crossmaglen, where the Border slices the lake in two, making smugglers of the trout within.
On its way to the Irish Sea, its British waters flow through Inniskeen. It was from here Kavanagh could see the mournful wee mountain of Slieve Gullion as he toiled in sleety fields like Shancoduff. “My black hills have never seen the sun rising, Eternally they look north towards Armagh,” he wrote, with a borderless vision.
Slieve Gullion forest park has an eight mile Poet’s Trail that starts in the Armagh village of Creggan, slopes down country lanes past Glassdrummond lake, over the Border by Roche Castle in Co Louth and back towards Creggan on its second international crossing. Were the flasks and hang sangiches of walkers on a country stroll discussed in Brussels in the context of customs unions and regulatory alignment? Of course not, that would just be silly. Although silly has a nasty habit of becoming reality.
To walk these hills was the ancient Pagan’s way of prayer, until a chap showed up one day and said they could only worship in a specific stone building. The Fane was also just a river until someone else showed up another day and said one bank was now part of a Monarchy and the other a Republic. Ridiculous, but a fiction shared among populations with real consequences. After all the hubbub from peers, buccaneers and Brexiteers, we’re now assured we’ll get an invisible Border. The locals will tell you that’s easily done. Most who’ve lived along the Border have felt invisible to governments for the last 95 years anyway.
Its people have rarely had a say on its history. Whether it’s to be affected by rules in Dublin, London or Brussels matters little. Its fate is always decided in a faraway place by people who will never smuggle soup across the Poet’s Trail.
The Fane doesn’t care, it hums its own anthem over stateless stones and between two banks that have never needed bailouts. Between trains and Troubles, the most we can hope for in 2018 is that the Border’s best and worst days are behind it.
Oliver Callan is a writer and satirist