About

Evie Connolly is a freelance writer and equine therapist. She has had poetry and short stories published in literary journals, magazines and anthologies, including Beatdom Literary Journal, Decanto Magazine, CUT UP! Oneiros Books, O Ecuador das Coisas, Network Ireland Magazine, Eat my Words (Gumbo Press), Scraps : A Collection of Flash Fictions (Gumbo Press) and Elsewhere Literary Journal. Her poem, 'The Elephant is Contagious' was adapted into a short film.

Monday 6 February 2017

Chalybeate


from a visit to Gorthaclode

Do truths find their way home? Are there imprints left behind from centuries before, when smoke and steel drove paths beneath amaranthine skies, through rolling forests ablaze with oranges and golds? The spa well spills its secrets into the pools of colour collecting in the millrace and along the weir and in the trout streams.

In the shadow of a blasting furnace, iron water was collected by the bucketload and pilgrims soaked in the chalybeate spring. The Gorthaclode Spa was hailed as miraculous before events and circumstance dissolved a ritual into history and stories were hidden in the rivers and streams. 

Does a landscape summon its stories home? Does an element return to its source over and over?

Sitting along a pathway at Gorthaclode are wagons loaded with steel shackles waiting patiently for an old railroad to return to life. Sharing a history with the crystalline rock birthed in the soil and pulled home by the lodestone buried in the hills, is this celestial metal merely finding its way home and are we merely the transporters?



© 2017 Cartophile's Log


©2017 Cartophile's Log

A lodestone is a wonderful thing...one of its remarkable virtues is that the ancients considered it to be a living soul in the sky, in the globes, in the stars, in the sun and in the moon.
(William Gilbert)
 
More than the diamond Koh-i-noor, which glitters among their crown jewels, they prize the dull pebble which is wiser than a man, whose poles turn themselves to the poles of the world, and whose axis is parallel to the axis of the world. Now, their toys are steam and galvanism. 
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)



© 2017 Evie Connolly

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