by Amanda Castleman

Diarmaid Rankin shows us castles and churches, tombs and monasteries and long-forgotten forts. As an aside, the 40-year-old chronicles his own ruins. "That was my father's ironyard," he points to a rusted and derelict wall midriver. "Here was my aunt's cottage. Her helper was a bit simple, but Mae just instictively knew when somone wanted something. No need for words."

Vines tug at the mortar chunks. The scene is forlorn: surely a home abandoned centuries - not years - ago? But the women lived right here in the Mourne Mountains, not three decades past.

Graves and the bell tower at the ruins of Mellifont Abbey

Such sweeping melancholy is typical of Ireland's eastern coast. Something's in the jagged North Sea spray, the granite-chunked crags and the heather that creeps in on little cat feet. And that something erodes and erases and exiles. Bones bleach into fable. Whiskey washes away fact. Then ivy muffles it all into mythology.

St Bronach's bell is the sound of this silence. A faint "Gong-gong; goooooo" tolled whenever storms swamped the harbor. Townsfolk decided that the local virgin saint was summoning them to aid shipwrecks. But no, a bronze bell - hidden during the Reformation - swayed in a tree, which slowly encased its shape. Cocooned in the branches, it slipped from history's stream, forgotten. Only the greatest gusts could produce a soft chime: misinterpreted as a sacred whispered warning.

One hundred years ago, a storm finally shattered the trunk - the bell was found, the legend lost. A church has sheltered it since; a rubber-headed mallet pokes past its brass security bars. "Go on, hit it," Rankin insists. "Everyone should hear history for themselves."

Like the landscape, the bell is sweet and strange. Wildness lingers in the overtones. But that's the way of this country, converted to Christianity by Saint Patrick in the fifth century, but still somehow pagan at its core.

The philosopher Henri Bergson once described humor as "something mechanical encrusted upon the living." Ireland is the somber inverse: something living encrusted upon the mechanical. Human conceits are mellowed by moss, undermined by roots, pushed to foreign shores by potato blight. Small wonder the Irish are such bold warriors and drinkers and Blarney-touched storytellers. Endeavor is their only weapon against erosion. (CONTINUE...)