The Sea Tors
The cottage in Waterville we rented each year, our escape from the pandemonium of city life; surrounded by fields in which the giorria stood like sentinels, as if waiting for the summer solstice and the druidocal rites they would surely bring, the eyes of each creature like golden florins, richly pagan in the otherworldly gaze they contained; the ocean waiting patiently at the bottom of the lane, a blue-green lens for the sea grass that lay below undulating in the glassy currents; in the distance across the water the Skellig Isles, sea-gates to the deeper fathoms beyond, above the steep precincts of the pelagic abyss; and in the town itself, the statute of the Little Tramp, as if marking the entrance to the Famine Road, the route so many took to that other monument across the ocean, bearing yet its imperishable lamp, standing in welcome to this very day, a sea beacon for the tired and the poor and the dispossessed…
