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    The Summer Visitor, a tale of Beara by Eibhlís Carcione

    LEN EditorBy LEN EditorJuly 14, 2025Updated:July 14, 2025 Top News Stories No Comments7 Mins Read
    The Summer Visitor, a tale of Beara by Eibhlís Carcione

    The Beara peninsula provides the setting for The Summer Visitor, by Eibhlís Carcione.

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    The road to Lochabhán was a shoelace under a web of willow and hawthorn. The summer sun was low in the red sky. Mackerel clouds streaked the horizon, always the threat of rain and the faint beginnings of a crescent moon hanging like a charm above the church steeple. 

    Bere Island was a washed-up whale in the harbour. Behind me, Hungry Hill hunkered like a heather-covered wolf.

    Gran was at the front door of the farmhouse but I couldn’t keep my eyes off the flannel blanket blowing on the line. Through the curtainless front window, the table was laid in white lace. There was a blue Citroen, the mouse-sized vintage kind, parked in the yard with clothes scattered on the back seat with chocolate bar wrappings, a large yellow torch, scuffed clogs and a woolly beanie hat.

    We had a summer visitor.

    “Hello dear,” Gran whispered. Her breath was hot on my ear. “We have a guest. It’s Imelda Harrington. She’s one of the Harringtons of Faill Dearg. Her father was young when the family left.” 

    Of course I remembered – and for a few seconds I was seven years old again, my ear glued to the blue sliding door. Everyone was having tea and fruitcake, murmuring in low voices about the Harringtons of Faill Dearg. There was always talk about the Harringtons – dark whispers and worried glances.

    The Harringtons had built their house on the path to the lios or fairyfort. They would wake in the morning to find briars and nettles in the bed sheets, dishes and cutlery all over the floor. The furniture would move. 

    Furze bushes and rocks were thrown in the windows. They often woke in the middle of the night with unseen hands on their foreheads, or fingers tugging their hair. One day the youngest child who was playing alone in the attic came down with bite marks on her arm and the next day the Harringtons drove out of town and never returned. Only one of the children married. The others became priests and nuns. 

    On the other side of the blue, sliding door, I heard the forbidden word: daoine maithe, the good people. But there was nothing good about them. Horseshoes, rowan twigs, bags of salt or garlands of primroses on the front door didn’t help the Harringtons keep the fairies away.

    And now after all these years, here was Imelda Harrington, the granddaughter, a young woman with short pixie-style blonde hair and green penetrating eyes, dressed in jeans and a brown polo neck. She must be sweltering I thought but people who live with secrets or those who are hungry to solve old secrets probably feel the cold more than the rest of us.

    We drank our tea in chipped cups. The silence was heavy like summer clouds. Gran slurped the last of her tea and said: “Of course, Imelda. It would be lovely for you to see the old house at Faill Dearg. My bones ache but my granddaughter can go with you. There is nowhere as beautiful as Beara in summer, but you’d best be going before you lose the light.” 

    Eibhlís Carcione.

    We left with the taste of bitter tea on our lips. The wind whistled through the bramble and fuchsia hedges. We walked in silence up the stony boreen. Imelda never looked at me. It was like I wasn’t even there. We passed old Famine ruins, rusty zinc-roofed sheds and houses long abandoned. 

    The empty houses in this town always make me sad. I much prefer to walk around the old graveyard in August when the paths are on fire with montbretia and the ferns are shoulder-high and a summery green.

    When we reached the old Harrington farmhouse, Imelda was crying. We stared at the crumbling gables with cracks where dandelions and moss grew, and the inside of the house which was now a mound of blazing gorse and piles of stone. Some broken delph and an old yellow and red spinning top stuck out of the grassy mud. Shards of blue glass from an old milk of magnesia bottle and the severed head of a porcelain doll littered the grass.

    A bale of green mist rolled down from the mountain and when it disappeared a tall man sat on the stonewall. He was dressed in black trousers tied with twine and a white shirt like Beara men wore when they saved the hay in summers long ago and went to the pub. He had hair as dark as a raven, oatmeal-coloured skin and lips as red as bilberry. 

    His eyes were the blue of the forget-me-not flowers in every ditch. His black boots were splattered with dried dirt and bits of ragwort.

    The man smiled and his tongue was black, his teeth buttercup-yellow. Imelda was lost in his eyes. The man was talking but I couldn’t hear his words on the gorse-lit wind. Imelda kept nodding until a gust of wind came through the old ruin and the dark-haired man went with it. I heard a flutter like clothes on the old line, starlings in the bushes. 

    I heard a thousand voices all at once. I heard children running up and down stairs, the whistle of an old kettle. The clink of the best china. I heard my heart banging like the old doors of the Harrington house.

    Imelda dried her tears, her face as white as graveyard lilies. “We shouldn’t be here,” she said. “We’re intruders.” I grabbed her arm and we pelted down the narrow road around the darkening bends, the branches hiding the moon.

    We returned to Gran’s, breathless and wondering, and Imelda left without saying goodbye. Gran was convinced she saw someone in the passenger seat as the car pulled out of the yard. She made the sign of the cross on her frayed cream cardigan.

    “Beware the dark-haired man,” she muttered.

    I asked her what she meant but she claimed she didn’t say anything.

    Strange things happen in summer, especially when the gorse bushes are being burnt on the hills, when people part the curtains in their windows and stare out at summer visitors. Rooks and jackdaws shuffle across the main street of town, pecking at takeaway wrapping from the chipper. Their beaks are shiny-red and their eyes are blue and fierce like the fairy man’s.

    They say on full moon nights between May and Samhain the large rock in Faill Dearg opens and the fairies pour out in a ghostly procession. They sing songs of summer about primroses and foxgloves, honeysuckle and fuchsia. 

    They dance to jigs and reels at the moon-drenched crossroads. They drink wild berry mead and eat honey cakes. They recite poems about old kings and queens from underground palaces. Their white-haired musicians play fiddles and harps through the summer nights.

    Afterwards they wander up and down the roads. They stare in windows and enter houses. They even steal human children and replace them with a changeling. Not even the parents can tell the difference, even though the changelings have hearts colder than a sack of potatoes.

    By next summer Gran was gone and I stayed in the city. The summers in the city were hot, and full of rain. Blue bellflowers blossomed from cracks in the walls up and down Gardiner’s Hill, but I missed the summers in Beara. The scent of gorse, the salty wind, the endless sea, and the glowing tufts of flowers on the ditches.

    One day, I saw Imelda Harrington standing on Patrick’s Bridge, where a blue sky was submerged in the river Lee. She was laughing, hand in hand with a dark-haired man. He looked at me and I saw starlings in thornbushes and moonlight dripping on old stone. My blood froze in the summer heat. I called out to her, but she was obviously in a hurry. 

    She didn’t even stop to say hello.

    • Eibhlís Carcione is an Irish-language poet and children’s book author based in Cork. Her most recent children’s books are The Midnight House and Black Gables
    • For more stories in our Laethanta Saoire series, see the relevant section of our website www.irishexaminer.com 

    News Source : Irish Examiner

    Beara byEibhlís Carcione summer tale Visitor
    LEN Editor
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