Three stones standing in a field, a boggy field, across the street from a Catholic church and graveyard. We followed a sign, as often happens, not really knowing what to expect. We were on the road from Beleek, going across Lough Erne to Kesh, in County Fermanagh to rejoin the main road to Enniskillan. We had taken a detour to see the famous two-faced figure in Caldragh Cemetery on Boa Island. About a mile from the crossroads we passed an Orange Hall with its defiant British flag. A plaque above the door said it was the Tubrid Orange Hall built in 1924. I wondered if Tubrid was an Anglicization of “Tobar Bríd” or Saint Bridget’s Holy Well. Barely a hundred metres further up the road we found the church and the field with the standing stones. These two places, the Catholic church and the Orange hall, were like the standing stones: forever linked but standing apart, their meaning only possible when read as a unit, if any meaning can ever be read from the history of conflict that we have suffered during the civil war of the last 35 years.
No comments:
Post a Comment