When I turned the final page of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, I wanted to crawl back inside. While the books are overly-descriptive for some people, I found the details of Middle Earth so fascinating that I couldn’t get enough of them. I wanted to visit Middle Earth, follow the Road of adventure as Bilbo sang about it:
The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
This song inspired me so much that eventually I became a traveller myself – sadly without wizards, trolls, Ents, dragons, or any other of the wonderful and sometimes terrifying creatures in Tolkien’s books. And three years ago I published the first book in my Chaos Roads urban fantasy series, also about Roads that can take you to exciting places.
My hubby and I often do road trips, whether at home in North America or in far-flung countries. If you’re up to the driving, sometimes on the other side of the road, it’s really the best way to see most places. You can plan your own route, see things that aren’t on standard tour itineraries, spend as much time as you want in interesting locations without having to adhere to a pre-defined schedule.
A few years ago we even did a road trip in New Zealand, and of course one of the places we visited was the film set of Hobbiton, which luckily has been preserved by the family who owns the land and turned into the most popular attraction in the entire country.
But today’s about St. Patrick’s Day, and travel to Ireland. I think I may surprise you with my inspiration for some of the sightseeing we did there. Although we did enjoy the Dracula’s Castle illusion show (sadly, no longer available), and see Oscar Wilde’s statue in Dublin, among other literary things, the series of novels that immersed me in the Irish landscape and culture was the Fever series by Karen Marie Moning.
Now, you may see them listed under the Romance category, but they’re really brilliantly-written Urban Fantasy – funny, gut-wrenching, sexy, frightening. When I first picked up the starting book, Darkfever, my initial reaction was: oh, another book about the Fae and a human with special abilities, blah, blah, blah. But I gave it a try anyway, and found the writing so engaging and the mythology so inventive that it’s become my favourite urban fantasy series.
Here’s the general beginning of the story: MacKayla Lane, a happy, carefree young woman in Georgia, is devastated to learn one day that her beloved sister, who’s been attending university in Dublin, Ireland, has been brutally murdered. MacKayla (Mac) and her parents can’t get satisfaction from the Irish police from our side of the Pond, so Mac decides to go to Dublin and do some investigating herself, much against her parents’ wishes.
Once she arrives, she begins to have strange experiences, and, without giving too much away, learns that she is descended from a long line of Sidhe-Seers – those who can see the not-very-nice Sidhe (aka Fae) who typically wander through humanity invisibly preying on us in various forms. Of course, this gets her into a lot of trouble, but, finding herself lost one day in an eerie, deserted section of Dublin whose existence everyone seems to have forgotten, she meets a man named Jericho Barrons. He offers his protection, for a price: he’s searching for a dreadful ancient artifact and wants to use her special abilities to find it.
That’s all I’m going to say – I’ll let you have the fun of experiencing this magical, thrilling series for yourself. When we visited Ireland in person, of course we spent some time in Dublin, especially Temple Bar, which features in the books quite a bit, but I had a long list of things to see once we picked up our rental car. Most of them weren’t in the Fever novels, but one place that was, and that had really taken up residence in my head, was a strange piece of geology on Ireland’s west coast called The Burren.
In the books, at one point Mac is kidnapped and trapped beneath the layers of the Burren’s rocks, where she’s tortured for a time. The locale sounded so interesting, AND there’s a famous portal tomb there, Poulnabrone, that we killed two birds with one stone, as it were, and braved an extremely narrow, one-lane road, to find it.
God bless my patient hubby, who had to navigate Irish roads. If another car had come along in the opposite direction while we were partway to Poulnabrone, one of us would have had to back up for over a mile. Madness, but it was worth it.
The Burren is a geological formation largely in County Clare, although it even extends out into Galway Bay. Its boundaries are loosely defined, and it ranges anywhere from around 250 to over 500 square kilometres, depending on who you talk to. It has a bed of limestone up to 800 metres (2,624 feet) thick in places, and while I’m not claustrophobic, author Moning’s description of Mac’s sensations being captive under all of that rock is vivid.
The Burren’s landscape looks like something not-of-this-earth. It’s called “glacio-karst: glaciers around 16,000 years ago scraped down the limestone rock, and fissures called ‘grikes’ formed as rainwater then dissolved thin veins within the rock. It’s so strange to walk on, like a crazed netting of cracks and holes, through which small, scrubby vegetation has taken hold.
We were there on a chilly, grey day, blending the real world with something imaginary. You can’t miss the Poulnabrone Dolmen – it sits like a weird stone house not far from the parking lot.
Poulnabrone is a phonetic transcription from the Irish Poll na Brón – meaning”Hole (or Pool) of the Quernstone, or, “Hole of Sorrows”.
Dolmens, or portal tombs, are essentially two massive upright pieces of stone, forming the ‘portal’, and covered with an even larger capstone. The two ends are open to the air. These tombs are believed to have ritual purposes, to send the deceased onward to their deserved afterlife. Remnants of bodies have been found beneath them, and they’re not unique to Ireland by a long shot. Strolling around it, you can’t help but wonder why this particular design, and how on earth the builders managed to get the incredibly heavy pieces of rock into place.
It was a fantastically eerie place to visit, with only a handful of other people around, treading carefully in the chill breeze. And years later, when I began featuring strange portals to other places in my novels, I look back on these photos with special fondness.
I’m not sure how long we spent there, but on the way out there was a very wizardly-looking fellow selling handmade Celtic-style jewellery, from whom I bought a lovely pendant. By that point, we needed two things: a bathroom, and some hot tea. Luckily, just down the road we found a farm that had both. There’s nothing like a stiff cup of Irish tea (they make it much stronger than we do in Canada) and some pastries to raise your flagging energy levels. Then we were off on the next leg of the trip, but our sojourn at the Burren was unforgettable.
The area isn’t on most preplanned tours of Ireland that I’ve seen, although we did spy the odd narrow bus testing itself on the slender roads. (Seriously, on some of them I could have stuck my hand out my window and touched the stone walls along the periphery. There’s no shoulder to speak of, ever.) If you’re lucky enough to find such a tour, don’t miss the opportunity – an incredible opportunity to visit a very ancient part of the country. Otherwise, you’ll have to rent a vehicle, steel yourself for some nerve-wracking driving, and pray for the luck of the Irish!