John MacKenna

As we grew up, raths or fairy forts were places to be avoided.

There was something about them, a stillness, a history, an inkling of something dark and deep, something not to be disturbed.

We were warned time and again that these precious circles of earth and grass and thorn trees were the homes of the little people.

We were cautioned that any interference with them could bring only misfortune and heaven knew what else.

And so, crossing fields, we skirted them for the most part.

And if one of our gang did venture into the sacred place, he, and it was always a boy, would be called back and reprimanded for his foolishness.

And then, one morning in the summer of my 18th year, I was walking home from a dance in Carlow.

I had missed my lift and dawn was breaking.

The soft mist rising slowly from the fields, hanging like the remnants of ghosts around gateways beyond which the crops were slowly ripening.

On a long straight stretch of roadway I saw a cyclist in the distance pedalling slowly towards me.

As we passed we bade each other a good morning.

It was only then that I noticed the spade tied along the bar of his bike and the small cardboard box bound securely to the carrier.

It was my father who gave the explanation later that day, telling me that the man was taking a stillborn child to be buried in a rath not far from the road where we'd met.

It's what some people do, he said.

on account of their not being allowed to bury the unbaptised child in consecrated ground, and some people buried the children in the ruins of old churches.

What he didn't say, and what I wouldn't know for a further seven years, was that he had buried our stillborn siblings in the wild patch at the end of our garden.

It was something he would talk about only once, and then with the proviso that it never be spoken of again.

Decades later, my sister Dolores would tell me of how our mother had cried bitterly when we left that house in 1958 and moved one field away to a newer and bigger house.

She was leaving more than a house and a garden behind.

And now, when I pass the Rath near our home in South Carlow, I think of the other little people.