I’ve recently returned from a richly inspiring trip to Ireland and will be posting pictures and thoughts. Here’s the first.
Through a screen of leaves—ash and hazel and alder and others, including berries whose name I don’t know—I peer out at Brúgh na Bóinne.
The waters flow along in this river that transcends time, taking us back millennia to when early farmers first settled here and raised huge passage tombs and mounds and woodhenges. The leaves whisper of even earlier peoples, the hunter-gatherer-fishers of the Mesolithic who found rich forage here when the valley was all forested. As I gaze the waters meander onward toward the sea past the nearby town of Drogheda where we are staying. Into an uncertain future.
In the lore Waters take us into the liminal. By the water is a place of revelation, of eicse, which can mean inspiration, divination or the art and science of poetry. As Nede demonstrates in the beginning of The Colloquy of the Two Sages (Immacallam in dá Thúarad) when he goes to the shore and learns of his father’s death from the waves.
The sound of the waters do their liminal work—there seems to be a rapid just upstream, I think it’s probably a weir. A feminine voice gives a healing message in this spot of healing plants and ancient spirits. Is this Bóinn (or Boann), her waters ever flowing? She is the Boyne, right? Maybe she is a deep ancestor of this land, of this river valley, but one who flows in the sky too.
The presence of Nechtan also resounds, the waters mythologically flow from his well far upstream near the present day village of Carbury. Of course this was the well where his wife Bóinn transgressed walking tuathal, against the sun, violating the taboo of its only being able to be approached by her husband and his cupbearers. Bóinn, the river itself, and the river in the sky, the Milky Way. The lore tells us in this creation of the river, she was carried out to sea with her small lapdog, named Dabilla. Dabilla was turned into a rock off the coast, the small islets known today as Rockabill.
Below is a mythologically interesting (if not aesthetically) painting in the Millmount museum in Drogheda.
Was Bóinn already a goddess (presumably with a different name) long before the Celts when the great monuments were raised here? For a very insightful take on this and Bóinn in general there is Anthony Murphy’s (he of Mythical Ireland) book Bóinn: the Goddess of the River Boyne and the Milky Way. https://mythicalireland.com/purchase/mythical-ireland-monograph-no2-binn-goddess-of-the-boyne-and-milky-way/
He states, “The intent of this monograph is to present a comprehensive portrayal of Bóinn from all the manuscript sources about her, and to depict her as a deity in her own right who has immense significance to the early mythological history of the Boyne valley.” I think he succeeds—a recommended read.
The waters flow on, a beautiful music, flowing for millennia with its salmon and trout hopefully far into the future.
Finnchuill's Mast 
That’s great you were able to go and visit! 🙂
I’ll never forget the first time I saw the Boyne. It was in September of 2000, so more or less twenty-one years ago. My archaeology summer course had just ended, and I went up to Dublin to visit someone I had met in Manchester just before coming to Ireland. She asked what I’d like to do, and as she worked in Trim, Co. Meath, I went to work with her one day, I toured around the town while she was at work, and then we went to Brúgh na Bóinne after she was off work (she had never been!) and toured both Knowth and Newgrange.
As I was going over the little footbridge to wait for the buses to the various mound complexes, I paused on the river. On the river itself, several white swans. Just past the bridge, in the fields nearby, a large white cow. There are no coincidences…!?!
A large white cow! Just an accident, I’m sure. 😉
Trim seems like an interesting town with that big castle. We didn’t have time to stop but passed through the outskirts.
I will be posting photos from Knowth in a few days. Sadly in both mounds the interiors were closed off due to pandemic restrictions.
We didn’t get to go in Knowth, either, when I was there…and Dowth was also not accessible, and one wasn’t even allowed to tour around the outside of it yet. We did get to do Newgrange, though, which was pretty cool, though I have to say I enjoyed the outside of it a bit more, as the interior felt like it should be experienced alone, or with maybe two other people, rather than 20 or more, and with a better explanation of why it had the effect it does on the interior at the Winter Solstice.
It would have been even better if there had been a big brown and a big white bull there, but I will happily take a white cow on the Boyne any day…and not in the cattle-raid sense! 😉