Scaldwoods

Ireland, Planning, Trees, swimming pools

My local swimming pool is beyond the woods, beside the school, surviving the 21st century.

Someone has defecated and neatly wrapped the result in black togs. It’s in the showers now, prone and glistening, it’s odour a fresh contrast to the scent of stale urine.

The mens’ changing room is often full of harassed women. They catch their little naked boys and rub them dry with big towels. They have no time to be embarrassed that they are here as I strip for the afternoon swim. I accept the presence of these fraying mothers in the way animals share watering holes. Besides, they seem close to collapse and I’m afraid of them.

I swim with old ladies under the absent eye of a fat lifeguard with an oiled perm. She is enormous and bored and she is eating from a huge bag of crisps. I wonder how she will save us. Perhaps she won’t. She will finish the bag of crisps and watch for bubbles.

On Fridays some boys come from the special school to thrash the chlorine-blue water. One old lady told me she doesn’t like them.

“They swim all over the place just like loonies,” she said.

“Erractically,” I replied.

“Like loonies,” she said.

That was before I saw them. One of them shouts “Fuck! Fuck!” and slams his hands palm down into the water. Another looks alarmed. He wades around the shallow end shouting things I can’t understand. Perhaps he has noticed the lifeguard eating from the huge bag of crisps.

I walk home through a strip of woodland, cleared of brush where a blackbird is hunting worms and two schoolgirls are smoking a joint. The hedgerow killer and the girls watch me warily. I hiss at the blackbird. My woods too.

The forests are all gone from here now; reduced to clumps of trees lining roads and sprouting as wind-breakers on housing estate greens. This is what is left of the Great Scaldwoods. A huge forest, first home of the Firbolgs, the mythical first settlers of Ireland. Elim king of Cnucha hunted through it’s clearings, and the last high king ran naked through these woods to escape the Normans. Now Ebay and Google live here and the Normans could hop on the 39.

The record is a silhouette. We know that in 1652 the local population were called out for a great wolf cull. The War of the Three Kingdoms was over. Gradually the landscape was tamed. When Wordsworth walked here in 1829 the woods were still wild. It possessed a melancholy he said. And a wildness peculiarly striking he said.

It is still melancholic I say. Where once I lay on a boulder in the sun, picked blackberries and counted skylarks, hollow apartment blocks grow green-black from mould behind gates. From the mud of greed sprouts progress, and it’s unrented.

Here, housing estates are landscape and the natural world a source of addresses. Roads are named after trees, and houses after famous roads, and in heavy rain and grey light one can see the last of the Mohicans attempt to overthrow it all. Big trees standing alone at dusk on a wild night, raging in the wind.

Most of the time though, they serve as places to hide. Places to climb into other worlds. The children have them. Those naked little boys have the time. There was a tree near me where I grew up and I thought a big python lived inside it. It’s still there. With it’s bulgy scarred trunk.

The poachers are gone from here as well. As a boy my father scaled the walls of the local grand estates in search of eels, pheasants, perch and trout. He sold rabbits poached in Luttrellstown to get money for pipe tobacco. The Luttrells who gave their name to the estate are remembered for the sins for which they eventually left.

One Henry Luttrell was a Jacobite turncoat who they say cost Sarsfield and St Ruth the Battle of Aughrim and who switched sides at the Siege of Limerick. He was shot dead in a sedan chair on Wolfetone Street in 1717 by those with long memories and a pistol.

It’s said that many years after his death his skull was dug up and smashed to outrage his descendant Henry Lawes Luttrell. A leading light in the burning purge of the 1798 rebellion he was so disliked he sold the estate and moved on. In 1811 the Dublin Post reported his death. Being alive Lawes Luttrell demanded a correction. It duly appeared in the paper under the heading ‘Public Disappointment’.

Two estate workers tried to kill Luttrell in 1797 but a man named Ferris gave them up. They were hanged. On the estate is a bridge called the hanging bridge, and here, my father and mother came courting before they were married. Here too it seems likely, the conspirators Dunne and Carthy met their ends.

Queen Victoria had tea in Luttrellstown, and that other Victoria, Posh Spice was married here. These days my parents aren’t up to scaling walls and the estate is a high-end golf course which the owners cannot make pay.

Soon they may seek to build houses. And perhaps the residential roads will be called Poachers Drive, Carthy Lane, Dunne Avenue, Hanging Bridge Road and even Beckham’s Woods.

The great Scaldwoods are gone, but wolves still roam. The new firbolg - Gaelic for ‘bagmen’ - are well settled in the barony of Castleknock.

Prowling, the populace has yet to be called for the cull.

admin @ April 17, 2009