by Wendy Hawkin | Jul 6, 2017 | journal, writing and publishing
In anticipation of a visit to Trim Castle, and thereabouts, in County Meath, Ireland, I am watching Braveheart again. The battle scenes at the English town of York were actually filmed northwest of Dublin at the castle ruin.
Trim Castle
Another nearby ruin in the Boyne Valley, Bective Abbey provided dungeons and courtyard for the English terror, Longshanks. If you’ve ever seen the movie, you must agree that Edward 1, the Hammer of the Scots, was a terror. Mel Gibson made it so.
megalithicireland.com
I’ve only ever watched the final scene once. It’s just too much. When things start to go south (literally) for William Wallace, I have to switch it off. The soundtrack alone brings tears. And the pressed thistle that symbolizes love of family and country? Heartbreaking.
How historically accurate is Mel Gibson’s Braveheart? It’s not, although it’s one gorgeous story; beautifully scripted, filmed, and acted.
To read just how historically inaccurate it is, click the link.
via BraveHeart – The 10 historical inaccuracies you need to know before watching the movie | Hande’s Blog
by Wendy Hawkin | Jul 4, 2017 | journal, writing and publishing
I just read this memoir/travel piece in the June 2017 Ireland Newsletter and want to share it. Irish storytelling is lauded world over and there’s a reason for that. The descriptions, the details, the enthusiasm, just captured me. Also, I’ve been to Clew Bay and Louisburgh, and climbed Croagh Patrick. It’s a slice of west coast heaven. Many thanks to author Michael Collins for writing and to Michael Green for sharing.
Clew Bay from Croagh Patrick
ASTONISHING CLARE
by Michael Collins
We’d missed the boat to Clare. I didn’t think we would, because we were within the time limits stated. What we’d failed to realise, Pat and myself, was the clocks had stopped at the last small town we had passed through. We had even had time to pause on the way, at the top of the last rise before the land fell away to the shore, to admire the panorama. ‘See Naples and die’ they say. Pat had turned to me as we gazed: ‘See Clew Bay and die’ was his comment.
It was spread out before us, a semi-circular stretch of the Atlantic, girdled by mountains and dotted with islets – ‘One for every day of the year,’ Pat had remarked – with the large hump of our destination plugging the gap to the open sea like a huge whale floating patiently on the surface: Clare Island, five miles out to sea, five miles long by two miles wide, rising from sea level at its eastern end to nine hundred feet at its western extremity, where high cliffs took the buffeting of the restless ocean. And in among all those islands and islets was a small sand bar that the Beatles had bought. It had been taken over by hippies who were attempting to raise cabbages there.
But we’d missed the boat. Not our fault. You couldn’t book your passage so there was no passenger list. But we had been assured that there would be a boat at 3.30 in the afternoon. Now, at 3 o’clock, we could see our boat as a speck on the water, drawing away from us towards our intended destination. There was nothing for it but to return the five miles to Louisburgh and phone from there. A frantic phone call – from a phone booth where first you had to pick up the receiver and wind a handle to get the operator and only then insert your two pennies – provided us with the information that no further ‘official’ boat was expected to sail that day but it was thought that a fishing boat would be making the crossing to Roonagh Quay and back at around 7.30. The only thing we could do was to go and get a pub meal and a pint or two and wait. I made sure we were back at the landing stage by 6.30.
When the boat, with its two-man crew, arrived to deposit a passenger and return to the island before nightfall, the tide was at its lowest ebb. We had to scramble thirty feet down an iron ladder, maneuvering our rucksacks, into the well of a boat that looked frighteningly small and smelt like a fishmonger’s shop on a bad day. I had thought I was accustomed to boats, having crossed the English Channel and the Irish Sea up to fifty times. This was different. The large steamers I was used to ploughed through the waves: the tiny craft we were now sailing in sat on top of them like a cork. The waves rolled in from the stern, higher than the mast, and the boat was eased up the hills of water, to slide down the far side into the trough like a roller coaster. I did not feel confident, but the crew seemed to regard it all with the dispassionate attitude of experts.
Then Clare loomed up out of drizzly mist, all grey and green, dotted with the white squares of cottages. It was dead calm in the lee of the island, enabling me to lean over the side. The sight was astonishing. The water was a crystal-clear, pale bluish-green and the bright sandy bottom was clearly visible, with small flatfish cruising around like aeroplanes.
The boat docked at 8 o’clock and once again we set about heaving and hauling to get our baggage on shore. We walked along the top of the harbour wall, in the curve of which nestled a ridiculously tiny castle, proceeded another fifty yards and entered the pub. I say ‘pub’: it was everything – post office, grocery store, pub and private dwelling all rolled into one. Pints were pulled. Around 11.30 supper was called, a vast fry-up of sausages, eggs, bacon, black pudding. And more pints. It was like a hefty breakfast and a night out on the town all rolled into one.
At around 1 a.m. I wandered down to the tiny beach to clear my head and got strangely excited about finding a small dead dogfish stranded on the sand.
Our three-week holiday started the next day. Our time was spent working on the ‘roads’ – a euphemism for tracks made of compacted gravel and clay. Spare time was spent in the pub, wandering over the island, fishing for mackerel from a boat and for cod from the shore. The weather changed the first day: we could have been somewhere on the Mediterranean. A heat wave in the West of Ireland!
The watch on my wrist soon became redundant. I was used to a life regulated down to the nearest minute. The islanders lived much more according to the rhythms of daylight, darkness and weather. Not even the pub had real opening times: generally the first customers would trickle in around 9 p.m., the bar staying open until the last drinker left in the wee small hours or as the sun was coming up.
The result was that I was rewarded by sights that are not usually granted to the clock-watcher. One morning, after a particularly fine night of story-telling and singing, two of us emerged into the fresh air just as rosy-fingered dawn was painting the sky. Rather than going home to bed we decided to climb to a point high above the track to watch the sun come up. We sat in the shelter of a tumbledown dry-stone wall and watched the sun rise above Croagh Patrick, the sacred mountain of Ireland’s patron saint that stands on the far mainland shore looking, from our vantage point, rather like a resting volcano. The sunlight shone on a grassy plateau some thirty feet beneath us, a plateau dotted with wild flowers. And as the cold air warmed we smelt the wild thyme and saw the hares emerging from their nighttime hiding places to jump and gambol like children just released from school.
Another early-morning exploit found me with two islanders in a curragh, a traditional rowing boat made of tarred sacking stretched over thin laths, dropping a handline weighted with a stone and bearing six hooks baited with bits of silver paper. I could feel the mackerel thudding into the hooks as the line became steadily heavier. We hauled the fish aboard six at a time. Ninety mackerel in half an hour. Fishing from the shoreline was different. The bait was limpet, knocked from the rocks, the prey small codlings or wrasse. Not sport: they were strictly for the pot.
Then there was the day that we decided to take the long walk to the west of the island, a steady five-mile slog as the land slowly rose from sea level to cliff height. We lay on our bellies on grass cropped by that most efficient of lawn mowers, the sheep, and watched the gulls wheel and scream along the cliff walls, hearing the dull boom of the ocean as it gently pummeled the rocks below. A curragh came into view, rounding a headland to our left, and bobbed about like a toy boat as its occupants hauled in lobster pots. We knew the men, but there was no point in greeting them: a wave of the hand would have gone unnoticed and any shouting would have been drowned by the ocean’s deep bass voice.
I fear that this was an experience I can never repeat. Tourism and commercial interests have changed the nature of Clare. The pub has closed. There is mains electricity and a helicopter pad. But the visitor to Clare Island will still be able to savor something of what I felt when I first landed there. In June 1971.
© 2013 Michael J. Collins
Clew Bay
by Wendy Hawkin | Jul 3, 2017 | journal, writing and publishing
Just do your best to keep yourself in balance. One of the first things that causes Energy misalignment, is asking or demanding too much of yourself in terms of time and effort. In other words, you just cannot burn the candle at both ends, so that you are physically tired, and then expect yourself to have a cheerful attitude. So, the rule of thumb has to be: “I’m going to be very, very, very happy, and then do everything I have time to do after that.” ~Abraham (Law of Attraction)
Abraham always sends me the right message at the right moment. I’ve been in a dark place the last few weeks. Writing an intense sequel (book three) that explores some serious and edgy themes: grief and loss and evil. And also, vampires–those venomous creatures intent on sucking you dry of life force. At the same time, I rewatched four seasons of Being Human, UK. I adore Mitchell (Aidan Turner). But…I’ve reached a point where I just can’t handle any more darkness. I need to crawl out of the tomb, so to speak.
Cloistering myself with my laptop, digging into death and emotional pain, does not come without a price. Ironically, I’m feeling tension in my throat and neck, the vampiric space. I know it’s emotional: a symptom of anxiety. I also know it dissipates with the light–when I laugh, meditate, socialize, go out walking in the woods, get happy. I’m not physically tired: I’m emotionally drained. Sometimes, I forget that when I turn off the screen or close the book, the story lives on in my head and manifests in my body. And then the rest of the world seeps in and I’ve got nothing left. Last week, all I wanted to do was crawl into a cave in the forest; this week I know I can’t do that.
I need to pivot…to raise the energy. How do my witches do that? They dance, they sing, they laugh, they conjure fire to illuminate the dark.
Does this happen to you? Do you respond physically to what you are reading or watching? Do you cry? Get a stomach ache? Lose your voice? Does tragedy cut you off at the knees? How do you keep yourself balanced? How do you resurrect happy?
P.S.
by Wendy Hawkin | Jun 24, 2017 | journal, writing and publishing
via The Horned Helmet Of Henry VIII With Its Capricious Bearing
Henry at 29
Fascinating photographs and video about the helmet gifted to Henry VIII by Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian I, in 1514 AD.
Just to put it into context, Henry was still young (only 23), still tied to Rome, still married to Catherine of Aragon, and still trying for sons and heirs.
Several horned gods thrive from pagan times. Most, like Cernunnos and Jupiter Ammon, are associated with fertility. It makes me wonder where and when Henry donned his helmet.
Thanks to Realm of History for this post and all the fascinating bits they unearth.
by Wendy Hawkin | May 9, 2017 | journal, writing and publishing
I had a great opportunity for some research and hands-on experience today when my friend invited me out to Mosquito Creek in North Vancouver to help scrub up her sailboat. This lively and welcoming marina is owned and operated by the Squamish Nation. Her sailboat, the Seven-n-Half % is a well-loved 27′ beauty built in California in the 1980s.
My job was to scrub the winter soot off the white cockpit (without tripping over the tiller). I climbed the ladder and worked up top while she and her grandson prepped and painted the hull. I managed to climb out to the bow (without falling off) and scrub down part of the starboard deck before it was time to load her in a sling for transport. This is how boats are moved from “the hard” back into the water.
After she settled, we boarded, and my friend manoeuvred her under power through the marina, then backed into a tight docking space using the tiller. I can only imagine what she can do with masts and sails and a good wind on open water.
In To Sleep with Stones, Michael Stryker sails through Desolation Sound, then up past Johnston Strait into the Broughton Archipelago near the north tip of Vancouver Island. I spent some time working at light stations a few years ago, and have a feel for the marine landscape in and around Vancouver Island, but the actual plotting of that journey required lots of research. How far can you sail in a day? What are the hazards? What can happen out on the sea during a gale?
In book three, which I am writing now–working title, To Render a Raven–Estrada and his crew are forced to retake that journey, and many of the scenes occur on or around the boat. They won’t be taking a sailboat this time, though. Their power yacht will look more like this:
Who can resist a flybridge? I spent hours and hours searching online ads for boats until I found the perfect yacht. One of the perks of being a writer is that you can create wealthy 
characters with unlimited funds: white leather couches, full bar, a master cabin with ensuite…
Now I get to work out who is in this crew, what shenanigans will occur, and what misery will befall them. This was a most inspiring day.
by Wendy Hawkin | Apr 28, 2017 | history, journal, memoire, writing and publishing
April 28th was an important day for some men, historically-speaking. In 1770, James Cook, British captain of the Endeavour landed at Botany Bay in Australia. In 1789, the mutiny against Captain William Bligh of the Bounty erupted, led by Fletcher Christian. And in 1905, E.A. VanSickler completed this piece of calligraphy:
I stare at this piece every day. Ernest Albert VanSickler is my maternal grandfather. And, this is the only thing I have that once belonged to him. It’s a treasure. Imagine the hours he spent perfecting this calligraphy; the intensity of detail, the focus of eye, brain, and hand, the discipline to avoid a smudge and perfect each stroke. His energy and his DNA are both trapped behind the glass; though the man is something of a mystery to me. He was born November 7, 1889 in Toronto, Ontario; which means that Ernie was sixteen years old when he completed this work. I wonder: did he ever want to become an artist or a writer or a monk?
Ernie was twenty-two when he married my grandmother, and twenty-seven when he signed up to fight in the First World War on Spring Equinox 1916. He is listed as a roofer-contractor on his attestation papers.
So much for the pen being mightier than the sword.
I don’t think it was entirely his idea. According to my aunt, Ernie and his father went off and got drunk that night and both signed up together. My grandmother was furious. In the five years they’d been married, they’d created four children: Jim, Grace (my mother), and Ernest and Arthur, a pair of delicate twin boys. His namesake Ernest Albert, actually died less than two months later on May 11, 1916. Had he shipped out already? And Arthur (who we called Tiny Tim) was forever sweet and fragile.
I can’t imagine what it must have been like for my grandmother, a twenty-five-year-old woman left with four children to tend while her husband went off to war. Cora was strong. I remember that. And she had her mother-in-law, tiny Annie, who kept her husband in line with an iron skillet; a trick she must have learned during her ten years of maid service (14-24) in England.
Ernie & Cora
We know that Ernie’s father was a drinker, and somewhat tricksy. On his attestation papers, James VanSickler claims his birthdate is August 20, 1871. He was actually born in 1862, but had he attested to the truth–that he was 54–he likely would have been rejected. And the thought of war abroad was too great an adventure to risk that.
James is described as being 5’11”, dark complexion, dark brown hair, and blue eyes. His mother was Tuscarora (the sixth Iroquois nation); his father a Dutchman from a colony in New York. The family homesteaded in Michigan for several years. It was the frontier; a wild, dangerous place. When he was only ten, James’s father was killed in a bar fight. When his mother remarried his killer, James and his younger siblings ended up living with their grandmother back in Ontario.
374 Dupont Street @Brunswick Avenue in Toronto
Later, the VanSicklers, father and son, ran one of the first gas stations in Toronto. They had an auto body and paint shop, and grew mushrooms in the basement. My mother refused to eat mushrooms ever after. The VanSicklers held dances for their customers.
Here they are throwing a party for the returning war heroes. It’s remarkable these two came home unscathed.
I would have loved to live in this house–sleep in that turreted tower. What stories are trapped beneath those shingles?
The pen is mightier than the sword.
These words were first spoken in Richelieu, a historical play written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839. Richelieu says: “The pen is mightier than the sword… Take away the sword; states can be saved without it!”
I think I understand why sixteen-year-old Ernie would choose this adage. I see him as a warm, sweet, sensitive, happy-go-lucky guy–quite unlike his father. I see it in the twirling fronds, in the passionate precision he uses to highlight:
Surely, this was a man of the arts, not of the gas station. Could he have painted something other than cars? Still, country and family come first. I wish I had known him better. Wish I could remember more. I was just a kid when he passed away. But, perhaps he is with me still, whispering in my ear, breathing through his pen.
With Grandpa Van
“
