Bog Myrtle & Peat

Beyond the bridge, there isn’t much at Annagassen. You’d never know that Vikings had been here, and it’s hard to imagine that the place rivalled Dublin’s significance more than a thousand years ago. But a sign explains that Áth na gCasán was once a significant place on the coast of County Louth; it was used as a depot where longboats could be built and repaired. There was a similar site at Tarskavaig on Skye, and a pattern of comparable workshops all around the Atlantic edges. Annagassen might’ve been a capital city, but it was too wet and constricted by the muddy river Glyde. There wasn’t enough land to build a town on, so Dublin gained an ascendency and the Vikings’ attention was drawn there instead. The place was abandoned, and beyond the occasional antler comb which is sometimes found when the modern harbour is dredged, there’s nothing much to see of the original Viking inhabitants.

Stories have proved to be a more enduring reminder of the past. Monastic records explain that the Vikings who came here were particularly rough and violent. Unlike those who settled elsewhere around the Irish Sea, these boys were out for plunder and the glory of war. They roasted the local Abbot on a griddle pan, and they fought amongst themselves in terrible battles on land and sea. On a list of ten Abbeys in the area, every single one was pulled down or burnt at some stage during the days of Annagassen’s height. It’s said that when the Vikings left, a giant stayed behind and lived alongside the recovering locals for many years. They called him “The Bear”, and the story has been sugared by the tourist board, who have begun to call him “Bjorn the Bear”.

I was grateful for the stories provided by a sign at Annagassen. Without it, the village is just a line of houses on the edge of an unremarkable beach. It’s like every stretch of coast around the Irish Sea, where the land slips uneasily into the water and low tide reveals a plain of mud and curlews. At the harbour where the Glyde opens out into the sea, four little boats were being served by a manitou – but the engines were off and there was nobody around. A bank of creels had been stacked on the harbour wall, but they looked old and on the edge of disuse. As I sat, two men went out on canoes, and a seal watched them from a nearby channel. They laughed, and birds rose away from them in the rising tide. Then it began to rain, and while I’m told there are fine views out to Mourne and the Cooleys on a good day, there was little more than a drab pattern of headlands which receded into flatness towards Dundalk.

I walked on the beach, finding the sand was a mix of mud and grit, as if somebody had poured water into the bag of a hoover. I’m making it sound unlovely, but it’s the same sea I knew growing up on the Solway, and I prefer it to the green heaving mounds of the open ocean. The real Atlantic is frightening, and the sand at Annagassen reminded me of home. So I looked for bright shells and oddly shaped stones, discovering a mess of small details in the strandline. I found the footprints of birds, and stones in every stage of rolled perfection. Some of these were round as cherries, and the best were streaked with veins of quartz. Wet and newly arrived from offshore banks, they shone in the rain and glowed like treasure in the weed. 

I should resist the urge to collect pebbles from the beach, but this childish habit is hard to unpick. They’re almost edible things in the surge of urgent water, and I dive into them with loud expressions of delight. But they die when they dry, and they’re lost without their context. Tucked inside my trouser pockets, they’re soon forgotten – and later when I find them clanking in the washing machine, I wonder why my eye was ever drawn to gather such unremarkable things. 

Refusing the stones, I came away from Annagassen beneath a rumble of thunder. And the same seal watched me from the channel of the Glyde as I left, dripping water from his moustache and blinking sadly. He’d a marbled creamy swirl on his throat, but his head was slate-grey and his whiskers were the colour of beeswax candles. I stood and watched him bob, drying his head from the sea as mine began to soak in the downpour. Then he rolled and was gone for almost a minute. I leaned on the rocks, waiting for him to reemerge. When he came up, he’d a mullet held head-first in his throat. There was spark of excitement in his wide, bewildered eyes and he chewed briefly before swallowing the remnants whole. Black-headed gulls came to see if there was anything to gather from the slick of scales and saliva, then he rolled and was gone again.

That image is what I take from Annagassen, in all its weightless, shapeless brightness. There are no combs or pebbles to mark the moment, and I didn’t even take a photograph to spark some future recollection. The seal, the rain, the fish and the tide have gone, leaving nothing to show for themselves but a small and fragile story.