We Are The Land: Ireland

By Leslie Lee

We Are The Land is an exploration of Ireland—its ancient history, DNA, and culture through the adventurous search of four sisters for their Irish ancestry. The author's interest in how ancient languages evolved and migrated leads readers through the heart of Ireland to the modern revolution of the ancestral DNA of t

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leslie Lee Publisher
• Release date: Feb 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9780991502257

Leslie Lee

Interested in all literature, in all good story telling no matter the format. Living in Los Angeles, favorite city. Having fun, it's a good thing.

Book preview

Most Americans come home from Ireland with a tweedy cap, a shawl or shillelagh, tales of kissing the Blarney Stone and pub crawls in Dublin; or talk of the priest in the Burren whose earlobes or bald head put ye in mind of your late Uncle Jimmy. Leslie Lee embarks with a scholar’s curiosity about attachments and connections, origins and destinations and returns with a deeper understanding of herself, her sisters, her far flung, extended family and the species at large, of the way history and anthropology, geography and genealogy, fantasy, and myth comingle to bring the larger human narrative to bear on we Irish and Americans, we humans, one and all, each and every. Well worth the journey, well worth the read!

—THOMAS LYNCH

OTHER BOOKS BY LESLIE LEE

Backcountry Ranger

in Glacier National Park,

1910-1913:

The Diaries and Photographs

of Norton Pearl

Published 1994

Sacred Space: Pine Hollow

Published 2014

Text © 2019 Leslie Lee

Illustrations © 2019 Leslie Lee

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by

Leslie Lee Publisher

Traverse City, Michigan

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lee, Leslie.

We are the land : Ireland / Leslie Lee. – Traverse City, MI : Leslie Lee Publisher, 2019.

p. ; cm.

ISBN13: 978-0-9915022-4-0

ISBN13: 978-0-9915022-5-7 (e-book)

1. Ireland--History--Pictorial works. 2. Ireland--Description and travel--Pictorial works.

3. Anthropology--Ireland. 4. Ireland--Genealogy. 5. DNA. 6. Heredity--Ireland. I. Title.

DA910.L44 2019

941.5--dc23 2019900580

Illustrations by Leslie Lee

Photography by Elizabeth Evans, Jennifer Hebert, Josephine Ellison

Interior design and layout by Gail Dennis and Leslie Lee

Edited by Jennifer Carroll and Leslie Lee

First edition: March 2019

Printed in the United States of America

23 22 21 20 19 • 5 4 3 2 1

For Josie, Jenni, and Liz

We are the three that is one and the one is the land. We are the spirit of the place, the essence of the earth and the water, the forests, the lakes, the cliffs, and the bogs. We are the land.

Banba, Fódla, Ériu

Three Irish Goddesses

PROVINCES OF IRELAND

CONTENTS

All charts, maps, and illustrations were created by Leslie Lee. Her maps of Ireland are based on an original antique map by Johann Baptist Homann, 1712.

LIST OF ILUSTRATIONS

The Barn at The Flax Cottage

The Cliffs of Moher

Loop Head

Overheard at the Atlantic Hotel

The Natural Rock Stack at the Cliffs of Moher Looking to America

The Blue Door of Longueville House

Josie and Jenni at Dinner in the Conservatory

Glouthane Standing Stone

Glouthane Standing Stone/West Outside of Mill Street

Fireplace Mount Detail

Ladbroke’s Jacket at The Speakeasy Pub in Killarney

E.J. Morrisey Box

Loch Derravaragh at Mornington House in Westmeath

Ann and Liz Looking Over the Map of Wales

The Entrance to Newgrange

Left Chamber at Newgrange

Central Chamber at Newgrange

Right Chamber at Newgrange

Calendar Stones at Knowth

Northwest Knowth Stone

Two Hawthorns on the Hill of Tara

The Lia Fail on the Hill of Tara

The Fireplace at Bushmills Inn Hotel

Harry’s Bar in Dublin, an Excerpt from My Journal on 23 April

Lamps at the Inn in Castlewellan

The Door at Delphi Lodge

Yearling Salmon Release at Delphi Lodge

Turin Castle

Fiddler’s Traditional Irish Music Shop in Ballyvaughan

Christy Berry and Michael Kelleher at O’Connor’s Pub in Doolin

Christy Berry, Michael Kelleher, Colin Nea, Fellow Musicians Thomas, Dave

Colin Nea, Christy Berry’s Hands, and Patrick on the Violin

Swan on Lake Michigan

LIST OF MAPS AND CHARTS

Provinces of Ireland

Full Route Driving Map

Early Roads

Tomb Types

The Steppes Grassland and Ice Age Refuges

Principal Male and Female DNA Lines of Ireland

Territories, Population Groups, and DNA Circa AD 1000

Prehistoric Timeline

Driving Map 11 April

Driving Times and Tips

Driving Map 13 April

Southwest Cork and the Blackwater River Valley

Driving Map 15 April, Around the Beara Peninsula

Driving Map 18 April

Map of Boyne Valley Megaliths

Driving Map 22 April

Driving Map 23 April

Driving Map 26 April

Driving Map, The Complete Trip

Counties of Ireland

FULL ROUTE DRIVING MAP

PREFACE

IN SEARCH OF WHO WE ARE

I’m not a geneticist, a historian, a teacher, or a dendrochronologist. I wasn’t born or raised in Ireland though my direct maternal ancestry is Irish. However, I am a student of many and varied subjects. I’m intensely interested in the deep history of my people. This is a story about four sisters returning to their homeland in search of their ancestors, of their introduction to the land and people of Ireland, and of finding each other.

Before we left on our trip, I studied so I would better appreciate my short time there and so we would have pertinent information at our fingertips. I wrote and drew the maps and charts for a pocket size spiral bound hand-written study guide for each of us. It embodied our itineraries, handy data, maps, and charts that we could carry everywhere. Map and chart making takes longer than one might think since a good deal of research goes into their development. But that’s what I enjoy. The art accompanying the journal entries in this book was drawn and painted on site, often in the few minutes available before I clambered back behind the wheel of the van. I painted the maps and charts later.

At the last minute before We Are the Land was to be published, my editor and I decided to add stanzas of poetry I wrote for my 2014 book titled, Sacred Space: Pine Hollow. They seem to work perfectly together as each describes a deep sense of connection and lineage to the land and devotion to the natural world.

I wrote the text for We Are the Land at night or in the mornings over coffee, adding to the story when I recalled events back home. Details paint a broad picture for me. Not having the benefit of narrow scholarship in a single field means I’m open to the connections between them, and the criticism of experts as well. Often I’ve wished to take up a study in depth but there simply isn’t enough time in one life. I’d miss the excitement of broad understanding, significance, and insight between genres.

The study guides proved to be so useful on our trip I’ve incorporated updated versions in this book. I plan to produce a separate pocket version of the study guide because we took them everywhere and wanted to have one on hand during the trip.

Whatever small amount I’ve learned vastly improved my experience in Ireland. I’m still learning. Let me apologize for any mistakes, they’re all mine. I’ve done my best to include correct dates for prehistoric events. Rather than use the words approximately, about, sort of, some of, I’ve taken the liberty to simply state the date I thought was best. I welcome referenced corrections through my website LeeStudioTC.com.

As a person I’m a point on a long line. In Ireland my point found its place in the continuum of deep time. Side by side, my sisters and I shared ourselves with each other in experiences that shaped us into the future. To be on Irish soil felt like finding our mother, the mother of all life, Earth. We journeyed into the past, into the future, and found each other. To all the Irish I’ve met on my visits who are the land, who have opened their doors, their hearts, and shared their spirit, Go raibh maith agut. Thank you.

INTRODUCTION

THE JOURNEY HOME BEGINS

An ancient soul united with this sacred place beneath the stars, inside the wind, within the lake. The voices of my childhood songs and stories form the fundamental chord of this bequeathed refrain with harmonies to echo on a thousand years.

~Leslie Lee, Sacred Space: Pine Hollow, 2014

Snow scattershot against the windows. I looked up. Alone. I listened to flames futter between pieces of wood and a rising surf thud along the distant shore. How did I get here? How will I find my way home? I raised my children here, but this was not the home of my people. I rested my head back and dreamed of Ireland.

It was the first time in twenty-two years I was without children at home. For sixteen of them, I lived in this turn-of-the-century cottage in a small village on the Lake Michigan shore. I wanted to feel the freedom to leave. Plans of a glorious trip hatched in my mind. First I would host a week with friends, then a week with my two sisters, Liz and Jenni, and our cousin Josie. The trip would be my treat to them and a gift of shared memories to myself. Why Ireland? I’d been to England and Scotland, the land of my ancestors, on earlier trips with my children. Yet family lore was we were English, Scots, and Scotch-Irish. Were we native Irish as well? I was unsure if we would find the lovely Irish family of our dreams, or if we would find that our family were horse thieves. Would we sisters get along with each other?

Josie’s mother was Aunt Mommy to me. She was my mother’s identical twin, making us biologically half-sisters. More telling, we were the youngest cousins of eleven who summered together all of our lives on our family’s northern Michigan homestead. Eating the dust of nine bigger kids has a way of bonding the youngest two. Later as a young mother, the winter I hurt my back in Chicago, Josie helped with my children while her husband was in cooking school in New York. Since, she and I traveled thousands of miles together with the kids. Josie’s a terrific navigator, and I’m a good enough driver, having started driving on the left side of the road when I was younger in the United Kingdom and the Caribbean. Still, the roads of Ireland proved to be difficult, narrow, twisting, and bordered by intruding rock walls of variable sizes and shapes, or harrowing cliffs.

Josie, Jenni, Liz, Leslie

Perhaps it’s odd to travel so far in order to get closer. This trip was a first with my two sisters as a way to share good times. In the past we shared some not-so-good ones. Our religious upbringing dominated my childhood until they each went off to college before me. They were believers and I was not. I left home precipitously at age seventeen, an unbeliever, desperate to get away. This gulf separated us for twenty years despite raising our children during the summers at the same family group of cottages. Over time their religious beliefs evolved to become their own. Even though the healing balm of time helped, unresolved conflicts and mistrust still underlay my relationships with them. This trip seemed risky given the uncertainties and confinement inherent in travel. Still I hoped our shared discoveries and minor adventures would bond