29.07.2025

On our mapped adventure around Ireland – a year ago today, we were approaching the midpoint of the journey so we started to slow down a bit; refuel, take stock, break up our journey, send some emails, do some organising, go for a walk, have a picnic, peruse some bookshops.

At Trinity Rare Books in Carrick – On- Shannon, Liliane found a copy of The Otherworld; Music and Song from Irish Tradition’, the book is a collection of music, folklore, and photographs from the National Folklore Collection. I found Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The title Roadside Picnic refers to detritus that might be left behind after setting up camp for a few hours, the scattered debris one may leave behind at an insignificant stop off point before moving on to a more consequential destination.

The rubbish left by these travelling extra terrestrials is quarantined in areas known as ‘Zones’; Stalkers venture into zones, gathering the items - alien rubbish left there. This otherworldly detritus has strange powers on earth but it’s challenging to stay in the zone; temporal and spatial limits are in constant flux.

Both books we found that day, The Otherworld and Roadside Picnic incorporate narratives where a significant amount of time has elapsed after the protagonist has tarried in a fairy or zone realm. Where the protagonist returns, only to find that their friends and relatives have died or grown old and that their home place has changed considerably under the ravages of time. This is an enduring belief and fascination in the Irish imaginary, exemplified in the story of Oisín returning after one year from Tír na n-Óg only to find that 300 years have passed in Ireland in the interim. In Roadside Picnic, protagonist Redrick ‘Red’ Schuart notes the slippage and contortions of time according to journeying within the bounds of the zone, ‘I take my watch and look at it-my lord, we were in the zone for more than five hours! Five hours. I shudder, Yes my friends, there is no such thing as time in the zone’.

It was often said of gifted musicians in Ireland that they were given their gift by the fairies, some were given enchanted objects, musical instruments. These stories circulated widely up until the 1960s. Similarly, stalkers like Red Schuart who navigate the zones of Roadside Picnic are rewarded with highly valuable. objects. It's unclear whether or not they are dangerous. One character in Roadside Picnic, Richard Noonan, spends his time superstitiously returning objects to the zone. He doesn’t want to see them displaced. Noonan is of the opinion that everything from the zone should remain in the zone. In fairy lore too there is a common motif of objects from within the fairy realm having dubious or unpredictable manifestations for those who procure them or take them out of the fairy realm.

For example, one Irish migratory legend, Midwife to the Fairies tells the tale of a young girl who is carried away on horseback in order to act as midwife to a fairy in the throes of childbirth. She’s rewarded with a fine silk belt but on her return to the human world, she is warned not to wear it and instead tie the belt around a nearby tree and to ‘be quick about it!’ When she ties the belt around the trunk, it immediately contracts causing the tree to break in two. The midwife was about to bear the brunt of a fairy grudge. She had unwittingly insulted it by joking about its protruding belly while it hopped past a well in the form of a frog.

Objects taken from the fairy realm can be imbued with certain powers and characteristics that at first seem positive; in this instance being silk and associated with grandeur, though they are actually dangerous, like this belt that would have killed her. The objects gathered in the zone, or brought from the otherworldly realms have yet to be understood in their entirety, they are ambiguous and often their value dissolves or erodes when they are removed from the zone or their otherworldly context.

We often referred to these two books in researching and planning tour de force but it seemed fortuitous to find them here and to be able to peruse them while we unpacked mementos, treasures of our journey so far; objects gathered along the way; deciding what to bring with us into the second part of the tour and what to leave behind.