Wild Horses

Set alight by paradisiacal sunsets, the hamlet reached into the ocean, its wild meadows shaping New York’s most eastern tip.

Beneath the dunes, we learned to taste freedom as readily available as the fragrance of salt and pine, while following ancient trails worn down by Montaukett fishermen.

When winter burned into the windblown hamlet, horses were pulled in from the moors, while snow ploughs cut paths through the thick blanket that submerged the surrounding towns.

The train curled around the coast and under the rolling hills of the Paumanok Path, its trail markers pointing ever onwards. Gliding through the heartland, alongside half-timbered houses and villages bearing cryptic names, a ghostly whistle sliced the night before we barrelled through a tunnel and Long Island disappeared from sight.

The city stretched beneath us, a canvas of smudged neon lights slowly dimming to blackness as the plane climbed into the sky.

Suspended between worlds, we flew ever deeper into the darkness before the first amber rays warmed the sky and early risers watched the pale streaks of light cut through clouds, setting them ablaze.

Stories whistled in the morning breeze. I felt them sting my face as I walked through the crunching puddles.

The brook crept along the edge of the grove before hurtling over limestone rocks, while the farmyard emerged ghostlike from the mist, its outbuildings dutifully returning to life.

From behind haggart walls, cows stretched their heads over barn gates tied up with orange twine, and the chestnut mare that my grandmother said has wild eyes stared back at me from behind the ramshackle half door.

Evie Connolly © updated 2023

Leaving Nancy

Collaboration with John Joyce

 

Remembering the Lost

Collaboration with Silva Zanoyan Marjanian

 

Serenity

The Beautiful Mon River Trail 

 

Shades

                                                         Collaboration with Trian Kayhatu

Shades

Home

Collaboration with Silva Zanoyan Marjanian

The Escape

                                                        Collaboration with Trian Kayhatu

                                                                      The Escape

As a student, he learned to befriend the city, the sirens and traffic, the twisting iron carriages and steam flumes. The city horse became his companion. Together they navigated the concrete grid, traversing vibrating sidewalks and zebra crossings, exploring Central Park's looping bridle paths.

Over time, as obstinate dog walkers and vainglorious joggers seized the old wagon paths, the war horse came to be bred outside the city. 

Cartophiles Log © 2019

Solace

Through smudged paint and charcoal, he found safe haven within a city whose stories are dreamed up by runaways.

Later, they followed him into the shining firmament, and, between the glass towers and streams of traffic, found solace.

© 2019 Cartophile's Log

Early adventures were confined to the farmyard, where we'd gallop on sticks around the silage barn. The outbuildings with their ramshackle windows and half doors were street houses brimming with hustle and bustle, and the haggart, a market square that held us securely inside its crumbling walls.

As we grew, the river became a sea we'd cross with makeshift rafts to explore the wet splinter of woodland on the horizon. With rope strings, we'd swing into its heartland and make safe caves under fallen branches.

We ached for the intimacy of the city, where friends were just a skip and jump away instead of across fields and over barbed wire fences. We longed to blend into the milieu of sameness, where our country words and ways dissolved into the ether and we became just like everyone else.

image: Cartophiles Log ©

Cabinet of Curiosities

With their bright colours and smudged postmark portals, they were miniature works of art, whose albums we'd file meticulously on library shelves. They shared space with adventure novels and worn out encyclopedia personalised with crayon signatures. 

On the top shelf was an antique sewing box, its contents an assortment of postcards and letters stack tied with string. The faded ink with its neat curls contained stories we knew not to read.

in the long grass

image: Cartophiles Log ©

image: Cartophiles Log ©

new worlds arising with the sun

image: Cartophiles Log ©

the ancient urge of scavenging

rubies, emeralds and saphires at Rhineshark Bay

~ That ancient urge of scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war ~

Loren Eiseley

image: Cartophiles Log ©

make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came

The following is an excerpt from a poem by novelist, poet, environmental activist, cultural critic and farmer, Wendell Berry. It's titled, 'How To Be a Poet', but it could just as well be titled, "How To Be a Human Being'.

Ironically, I am sharing it through social media, so reading it depends on electric wire and screens - the very things Berry suggests we shun. The poem is so affecting, I think it escapes the irony.

image: Cartophiles Log ©

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came

Chalybeate

from a visit to Gorthaclode

Do truths find their way home? Are there imprints left behind from centuries before, when smoke and steel drove paths beneath amaranthine skies, through rolling forests ablaze with oranges and golds? The spa well spills its secrets into the pools of colour collecting in the millrace and along the weir and in the trout streams.

In the shadow of a blasting furnace, iron water was collected by the bucketload and pilgrims soaked in the chalybeate spring. The Gorthaclode Spa was hailed as miraculous before events and circumstance dissolved a ritual into history and stories were hidden in the rivers and streams. 

Does a landscape summon its stories home? Does an element return to its source over and over?

Sitting along a pathway at Gorthaclode are wagons loaded with steel shackles waiting patiently for an old railroad to return to life. Sharing a history with the crystalline rock birthed in the soil and pulled home by the lodestone buried in the hills, is this celestial metal merely finding its way home and are we merely the transporters?

© 2017 Cartophile's Log

©2017 Cartophile's Log

A lodestone is a wonderful thing...one of its remarkable virtues is that the ancients considered it to be a living soul in the sky, in the globes, in the stars, in the sun and in the moon.

(William Gilbert)
 

More than the diamond Koh-i-noor, which glitters among their crown jewels, they prize the dull pebble which is wiser than a man, whose poles turn themselves to the poles of the world, and whose axis is parallel to the axis of the world. Now, their toys are steam and galvanism. 

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

© 2017 Evie Connolly

Emergence

Journey between Viking ports
Ireland, February 2017


There is no univeral tick tock.

'The dividing line between past, present, and future is an illusion', according to Einstein.  There is a profound link between motion through space and the passage of time - the more we have of one, the less we have of another. Physics tells us that the atomic clock has the ability to record this difference.

'Time Portal'
Irish Film Institute, Temple Bar
 © Cartophile's Log

There is a certain emotional comfort associated with train travel - it takes us on a time recorded journey inside a capsule weaving its way from place to place. With greater opportunity for reflection, the internal film can be juxtaposed with external images and sounds. The framed landscape at our shoulder affords us the space to repaint and reframe the internal one.

between Heuston & Plunkett Stations
© Cartophile's Log

County Waterford
© Cartophile's Log

County Waterford
© Cartophile's Log

I am reminded of C. Wright Mills' reflections in The Sociolgical Imagination. He said if we are drawn towards a specific object, such as a make of car, we will begin to find it everywhere. We seem drawn towards finding and linking specific shapes, colours, numbers, patterns, etc. It doesn't make coincidences or experiences of synchronicity any less noteworthy. It means that we are tapping into perhaps infinite constellations of possiblities of being, a divine geometry whereby we are the magicians as well as the audience.

Irish Film Institute, Temple Bar
© Cartophile's Log

According to quantum mechanics and what is considered the most beautiful experiment, 'The Observer Effect', a light particle can travel through two individual apertures at the same time until we neglect to observe which aperture it passes through, whereby it appears to interfere with itself and behave as a wave by passing through both at once. In other words, a system exists in all possible states until we observe that it is only in one specific state! This gifts us the opportunity to explore many worlds and to paint many canvasses.

'canvas of fairlights encased in glass'
County Waterford
© Cartophile's Log

© 2017 Evie Connolly

Pennants

Wedged into burrows
across a blue shale
the hinged shell
hides its soft form

Fossilized
 © 2017 Cartophile's Log

As sailors lament
over selkie threads
on gold dusted shores

 © 2017 Cartophile's Log

An ocean's stories
are stored in its stone
in its shapes and shadows
in its pirates' lore

Pirate's Brew
 © 2017 Cartophile's Log

Shanties are woven
from rockweed
clinging to the shore
from brutal and brutish
the daggers and crosses
lying across its floor

 © 2017 Cartophile's Log

Nets are adrift
and sea whistle slips
between the desert cays

White Lace of the Moon
© 2017 Cartophile's Log

                                                                      
The compass is set
needle balanced on its pivot
now, to learn the points
and, on waking
to cast the sounding line

© 2017

Garlands

© 2017 Cartophile's Log

© 2017 Cartophile's Log

© Cartophile's Log

 © 2017 

The Sea Horse

Following a path back through time where horses once raced along its shoreline while echoes of an earlier tragedy reverbate across the rocks and dunes, we navigated the marshlands of the Cúl Trá at Rhineshark Bay.

© 2017 Cartophile's Log

In 1816, the Sea Horse transport ship carrying 260 soldiers and their families home from the Napoleonic wars floundered in nearby Tramore Bay. 363 men, women and children perished in the tragedy, one observed from the beach by a gathering crowd helpless to assist. January 30th marks the 201st anniversary of the Sea Horse tragedy.

© 2017 Cartophile's Log

In 1853, the old racecourse was built on 263 acres of reclaimed land at Rhineshark Bay; however, by 1911, it too had succumbed to the ravages of the sea, and meetings had to be abandoned for higher ground.

During low tide, the remains of the racecourse are visible as are the remains of the neighbouring old military barracks, which rises from the water and stretches like sharks' fins across the lagoon.

© 2017 Cartophile's Log

 
© 2017