By Jim Bloch
TRIM, IRELAND. Happy Halloween from Ireland, the country where the end-of-October celebration began 2,000 years ago. I’m on the patio of my hotel room in Trim, 45 minutes north of Dublin, looking at one of the stone towers of Trim Castle, which began as a timber fort built under the direction of Hugh de Lacy in 1172. That’s a cool 853 years ago. It’s an hour before dawn and the castle is glowing green, the skin tone we associate with Frankenstein’s monster.
Mel Gibson, who directed and starred in the 1995 movie Braveheart, transformed the ruins of Trim Castle into the 13th Century city of York and the castle’s keep became the Tower of London.
A village on Achill Island abandoned during the Great Famine.
Everything in Ireland now is costumed for Halloween – hotels, bars, restaurants, gas stations, chemists, bookstores, grocery stores, cafes, private homes, community centers. It appears that Halloween gatherings will be held everywhere.
The graveyard at Corcomroe Abbey.
Ireland is the perfect country in which to mark the most ghostly day on the calendar. It abounds with castles dating back hundreds of years that easily could have hosted Dr. Frankenstein: Dublin Castle, 1204; Kilkenny Castle, also 13th Century; King John’s Castle in Limerick, 1210; Kildownat Castle on Achill Island, once owned by the Pirate Queen Grace O’Malley, and built circa 1429 – and literally thousands more, most in some state of collapse. There are the unearthly ruins of abbeys rising from the landscape, such as the Corcomroe Abbey, the foundation of which was laid in 1182 in County Clare, the abbey at Trim, the cathedral at Glendalough, parts of which may date from the 900s, and hundreds of others. There are abandoned forts such as the maze-like star-shaped Charles Fort in Kinsale, built in 1682.
A portal tomb in The Burren.
The roots of Halloween date back even further, to the pagan rites of Samhain about 2,000 years ago. Samhain celebrated the end of the summer harvest and the turning of the warm, sun-flecked days of autumn into the cold, dark days of winter. Daily life was largely determined by the vicissitudes of nature and the weather. Samhain marked the midpoint between the bounty of the autumn equinox and frigidity of the winter solstice. Paralleling the crop cycles, the Celts believed Samhain was a time during which the fabric separating the worlds of living people and the spirits of the dead frayed and thinned.
The Cliffs of Moher.
To keep the bad spirits at bay, people lit bonfires and wore masks made of animal skulls and costumes fashioned from skins. The fires kept the darkness away. The costumes camouflaged the wearers and served to spook the spirits. By the early 19th century, people carved scary faces into hollowed-out turnips and placed an ember of coal inside to frighten away the evil dead.
The Great Famine began in 1845 when a fungus decimated Ireland’s potato crop, which accounted for a third of the country’s agriculture, and lasted seven years. Perhaps a million people died of starvation and hunger-related illnesses. During that time, nearly a million Irish citizens emigrated to the U.S., bringing their Samhain-steeped October traditions with them.
The Brownshill dolmen
On Achill Island, visitors can behold a village deserted during the famine, rising eerily from the hillside. Many of the village’s residents ended up in the Triangle district of Cleveland, which is twinned with Achill.
The immigrants discovered the pumpkin, native to the Americas, and easier to carve, giving birth to jack-o-lanterns.
A mural in an alley in Dingle.
More than five times older than the country’s abandoned castles and abbeys are the gravesites that dot the landscape, such as the portal grave at Brownshill, south of Dublin, with its 150-ton capstone, believed to be erected by farmers before 3,000 BC. Or the Carrowmore neolithic cemetery in County Sligo, with its 60 stone circles, portal graves and dolmens, where the oldest tomb dates from 3,700 B.C.
All these potentially unnerving structures mark a craggy landscape full of wind-twisted trees, plunging cliffs and lashing rain, all of it enwrapped in waves of spectral fog.
Ireland is the perfect country for Halloween.
The Abbey at Trim
Jim Bloch is a freelance writer based in St. Clair, Michigan. Contact him at bloch.jim@gmail.com.
