Through the portal

The tall woman with the fierce and solemn face touched the lichen-crusted stone with a finger, drew it gently over the rugous surface and felt the tingle of time. The first Viking converts had built this doorway from two standing stones and a kerbstone from an ancient burial mound. Now an empty portal, it had been the entrance to one of the first Christian chapels in a land where pagan deities walked the fields. The air must have fair crackled with anger. What did a mournful Levantine who died hung from a tree know of the brilliance and gaiety of the horse folk, the rain-drenched forests and the long silver strands beneath a sky of scudding cloud?

The chapel had skulked on the cliff top for a while, a few hundred years perhaps. The passionless words of its androgynous chanting and sexless singers had been caught by the wind and tossed into the waves. The green meadows had wanted none of it, deer bolted at the sound, and on the hill, the hares twitched velvet noses and cowered. The men of those times spent their lives on their knees, their heads bowed. They forgot the green of grass and the greys and blues of the sky. Their ears heard only muttered prayers and thought them more beautiful than the nightingale’s song. Small wonder everything they touched turned to corruption, that the skies emptied of birds and the seas filled with poison.

But all things pass in time. There was no chapel now. It was long gone, crumbled into dust like the dry prayers of the monks. They had gone, followed their po-faced Levantine into the darkness and left the hill to the hare and the gorse. The men who had followed them, those with no thoughts in their head but for their pleasure, had also gone. Though she harkened, she heard only silence and the mocking cry of the gulls.

The woman smiled and lifted her face to the fitful sun. She was Brigid, fire and wisdom, healing and strength. Buds opened as she passed, and the breeze blew warm with a soft sprinkling of rain. With brisk steps, she strode between and beneath the stone and into the blue misty air of a morning full of larksong, and in the distance, the sounds of horses neighing and laughter around a cooking fire.