02.08.2025
Cave, A Fiction
They tap into the collective consciousness, these narratives that allowed us to assimilate mysterious occurrences or strange phenomena. Will-o'-the-wisp, northern lights or bioluminescent plankton. Grief and tragedy too. Something that helped to organise all that was happening beyond the usual realm of experience. A common ground. People tarried there for different reasons: boredom, escapism, creativity, something to hold to during times of great emotional turbulence.
There was a distinctive way of retelling those stories after they became artefacts of oral history for the archives. They were often standardised according to motif, trope, archetype; and as a result, a lot of the texture was lost. Before that, the stories were probably much more vivacious. Buoyant. And people were adding all kinds of flourishes, turns of phrases, jokes and other idiosyncrasies.
Even quite recently, in the twentieth century, there was a woman, a cartographer who was intrigued by irregularities in the landscape of south west Donegal. On the maps she had seen clefts in a mountainous area, three large rocks forming the entrance to a cave with a well deep inside. And this story is as true as all that you see before you now; your hands, this screen; a light source that etches black and white noise on your closed eyelids if you stare too long.
Through a series of dreams and waking visions, she understood that she must locate this cave, that it would mean finding or restoring something in herself. She understood this intuitively and set about clearing briars from the path, her physical wrangling with the shrubbery becoming a kind of choreography, and she eked out a circle around the cave.
Moving closer and then further away she approached it. From above, this might appear as an eye with the well as its glinting pupil. She brought with her, to uncover the well, a secateurs and divining rods made from the branches of a hazel tree, which do grow in the valley. And while she searched for the entrance to the cave, she created a map. A map that grew simultaneously outwards and inwards, becoming both more complete and incomprehensible. She could sometimes see the opening of the cave from afar, but because it was elevated and jutting outward, like a mouth gaping in shock at the sky, she had no choice but to circle towards it. Even when she got closer and was mere metres away, she was looking over her shoulder at it.
Heather grew in tangled clumps like matted hair. Inside, the cave was temperate, even in winter, though she still shuddered when a clump of soil dropped on her neck or rolled down inside her shirt. She would wake to find herself lilting. Then she might continue spinning through the tune all day. Sometimes she heard the opening notes of a highland whistling with the gales through holes in broken copper buckets strewn beside the well. Or the blackbirds arrived with a mazurka she hadn’t heard in a while. Sometimes from inside the cave she heard a piper in the distance. Rusting melodies of her world, a single lonely voice searching out harmony or even discord, mesmerised, entranced with the repetition.
We know from her research that there were stories and tunes associated with the cave. A recording was discovered too and on it, her voice, wavering and teetering. You could hear it, then you couldn’t – the sound disappearing and returning cyclically as if she was on a fairground ride. She recounted a dream about a time of everything coming out of nothing. Everything is mud, she said. Light dances around us, even at night, even in a cave.
We don’t know for certain what prompted these words but it was charted in the archives that this particular cave was known to sparkle with phosphorescence.
I saw it on the beach too one night, she continued. I waded through the sloppy sand, dragging my feet through the slip and watching the sparks. I went down on the sand and crawled for a minute, and there was light all around me and on my hands. I lifted them to my face, I slapped the water and that lit too. Everything I touched was glowing. And when I jumped in, the water shimmered brightly for twice the length of me all around. Bioluminescent plankton on the beach, do you dream the same dreams as us? In a star shape I floated on the surface and shouted whatever I liked. There was no one around. Later, I lay awake in my room and when I looked out the window, I observed the moon escaping its stranglehold in the boughs of a tree, moving swiftly between clouds, making its way hastily across the night sky.
Later, the recording was transferred from a wax cylinder to a floppy disc after a brief spurt of funding during the Celtic Tiger era and today it’s part of a digital archive. The rest of the recordings were never digitised and some are still on wax cylinder, in frayed cardboard boxes with tapes and 48s. The floppy disks are stacked in plastic trays amidst piles of obsolete computers from the 2000s, in an office space with chord navy carpet and a sponge-tiled ceiling, rotted through. Crooked on the walls are the hand-painted posters for bygone festivals; warped by the damp, sits a gramophone that may have been the first ever to arrive into the area.
Photo credits: Brian Farrell
