Achill...

I travelled to the Island,

Over the sound of Achill,

A heady current gives 

Name to this town.

The road took me up

Bended Bog Mountains,

From mainland, I stopped

At the town-land of Keel,

Quenching my thirst,

At the outpost Minaun!

A weary person is always welcomed

Here. Slievemore beckons me 

To ramble its hard rock hills, 

Which look down on furrowed fields

Still showing the scars of bygone times.

Graveyard stones telling 

Forgotten stories of woe,

Where long lost loved ones rest

So peacefully now,

In my mind I wonder

How they lived their lives.

A deserted village

Of the Booley nomads,

Who came then vanished,

In a famished existence,

A hunger for life,

Now never to be known, as

They gathered their flocks

From this sheltered seasonal stop

Drifting into the mists,

Never to return again!

What happened here?

I ask myself as I wander.

Though the souls 

Of old are eager to show

How they once lived.

As I, once more wonder

Sitting on a worn down rock 

In this roofless ruin,

The walls are not talking,

But they speak their truths

Of centuries gone by,

The sorrow still showing, 

These crumbled dreams

Of yester-year,

That fell in this village of desertion,

Now the souls that do wander here,

Want their stories so desperately told.

The harsh landscape calls out

In desolated barren silence, 

Showing the scars of so long ago,

When famine existed,

For the ancestors of Achill

They had to leave this beloved land,

To the new world and yonder

So long ago, harshness did follow 

This story of old!