Corcu Móinraige
the seed of the bog

We do not name ourselves for a king, or a fort, or a father’s father. We name ourselves for the ground.

I am of the Corcu Móinraige — the seed of the bog, the folk of the wet earth. If you asked me where I am from, I would not point to a hall or a wall. I would mean the bog. I would mean the water. I would mean the whole living breadth of it, because here the land and the people wear a single name. I am a bog-daughter before I am anything else, and long before I am anyone’s wife.

Let me show you my country.

It runs down from the grey stone of the mountains in the north to the sea in the west. The rain gathers on the high ground and comes to us as a river, and the river is the oldest named thing we have — older than the men who bleed for its banks, older than the law that sets a price on everything it can hold. Stone forgets. Water remembers, and carries all that is lived. My mother taught me that. I think the water taught it to her.

Follow the land west and it ends without apology — cliffs, then the drop, then the ocean going on past the edge of anywhere I have ever walked. The seabirds nest in the black rock, and their eggs are up there for the taking if you are brave enough, and light enough, and quick on the stone. I am all three. No one has told me yet that I am not allowed.

Down in the valley we keep our cattle and our weddings, our quarrels and our reckonings. This is where a life is measured — in beasts, in honor, in whose name stays clean. I have not yet learned that mine is a small measure.

And east of everything, the bog. Bog cotton nodding white on the wind — I gather it in fistfuls and it comes away like nothing at all. Moss deep enough to lie down in, and I do. Dark water lying still over ground that keeps whatever it is given. The bog does not rot what it takes; it holds. It remembers in its own slow way. I have always loved it, and I have never been afraid of it, and I could not yet tell you why I should be.

Everything here can be counted. The cattle can be counted, and the fighting men, and the years of a marriage, and the worth of a face. Only the water keeps no ledger. It cannot be owned, or married, or put aside. It goes where it likes and remembers what it likes, and it was moving over this ground long before my name was spoken, and it will be moving still when my name is forgotten.

I am Bréaca, of the seed of the bog.

But it is the water I want to be.