Tony Bailie

  “This is a short novel of subtle gear changes, where the seemingly obvious plot becomes a distraction to the true narrative that builds and builds and accelerates through a shifting geographical and psychological landscape.” When an Argentinian writer sets off on a day trip from Bueno Aires to neighboring Uruguay to collect $15,000 in cash and meet a young woman who he had a brief liaison with the previous year the reader has a fair idea of what is coming. You know this is not going to end well. But although you might guess what is coming down the line it is not through poor plotting by Pedro Mairal. He deliberately sets up the inevitable disaster that is about befall his narrator Lucas Pereyra from the very start. The real storytelling here is the story behind the story The narrative reads as if it is a written confession by Lucas to his wife Cata. He suspects that she is having an affair because she often returns to their apartment long after her work hours are over. He reveals...

The jagged rocks poking out of the Irish Sea have a scaly look about them, as if they are the encrusted remains of an ancient giant lizard. The sea crashes on to them about 30 metres below where I stand on a grassy pathway which looks inland towards some of the best-known landmarks in Co Down. This spot was once the shore on to which the sea would have washed but over the past 10,000 years has risen to is present elevation. Before that, for around 20,000 years, this area and most of the rest of Ireland would have been buried beneath a massive ice sheet rising to at least 1km.  The sheer weight of this pushed down on the landmass but when it melted Ireland literally began to rise out of the sea again creating this coastal feature. It is believed that Ireland first became an island around 125,000 years ago when sea levels rose to pretty much similar to where they are today, but the landscape of that first version of Ireland as a separate entity from other land masses has changed dram...

 “If you climb to that ridge and keep walking south you will reach the Sahara Desert, but it will take you a week,” says the guide. Tempting as the thought is, I decide that a half bottle of tepid water and the apple in my rucksack won’t get me through such a trek and it would need a bit more planning. The guide instead leads the way up through a small cluster of Berber market stalls selling carpets, tagine dishes and the inevitable collection of beads and necklaces that seem to populate markets the world over. The temperature is in the mid-20s, but that is cool relief from the searing average of 32C in nearby Marrakech. Coming out of the city, the Atlas Mountains rise on the horizon as you approach and the road deteriorates as the car begins its ascent. It is a lush green landscape of willow, cherry and pine trees, with cactus plants scattered among them. From the village of Sti Fadma, set at around 1,500 metres above sea level, the trek is a brisk and sharp hike along well-trodde...

  The sound of a cuckoo wakes me in the morning after a night in a rain-battered tent on a hillside overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. It is a bird that is all too rarely heard these days and its call comes from a sprawling hazel forest close to the Burren in Co Clare. It is an area more famous for its rock-blistered limestone landscape, which despite its apparent barrenness is one of Ireland’s most diverse areas for flora. I have pitched my tent in a place where herbalist and forager Cearbhúil Ní Fhionnghusa has gone back to nature, growing organic vegetables and harvesting the rich resources that grow at our feet and which most people pass by. Cearbhúil walks me through her 3.5 acres of Burren land that lies outside Lisdoonvarna and from its highest point overlooks the Atlantic Ocean, the Twelve Ben mountains in Connemara, the Aran Islands and the Cliffs of Moher. Pointing to the herbs and healing plants we come across, she explains their properties and uses. “The purple flower of v...

According to the poet Robert Graves, the branches of ash trees were used by the druids to make theirwands. In his rich, esoteric, and often unfathomable, book The White Goddess, Graves equates a number of trees native to Europe with the Ogham alphabet. The ash symbolised the letter ‘N’ in the arcane script which can still be seen carved into standing stones throughout Ireland. Graves writes: “A descendant of the Sacred Tree of Creevna, also an ash, was still standing at Killura in the nineteenth century; its wood was a charm against drowning, and emigrants to America after the Potato Famine carried it away with them piecemeal.” The Irish name for ash is fionnseog and in Old Irish, uinnius. It can be found in townlands such as Ardunshin (Ard Uinseann – height of ash trees) in Clogher, Co Tyrone, and Altnahinch (Alt na hUisne - also height of the ash tree), in the parish of Loughguile in Co Antrim. The ash was often associated with holy wells and because of its flexibility ash w...