Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home

by Kerri ní Dochartaigh

Overview

An Indie Next Selection for April 2022

An Indies Introduce Selection for Winter/Spring 2022

A Junior Library Guild Selection

Both a celebration of the natural world and a memoir of one family’s experience during the Troubles, Thin Places is a gorgeous braid of “two strands, one wondrous and elemental, the other violent and unsettling, sustained by vividly descriptive prose” (The Guardian).
Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry, on the border of the North and South of Ireland, at the very height of the Troubles. She was brought up on a council estate on the wrong side of town—although for her family, and many others, there was no right side. One parent was Catholic, the other was Protestant. In the space of one year, they were forced out of two homes. When she was eleven, a homemade bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. Terror was in the very fabric of the city, and for families like ní Dochartaigh’s, the ones who fell between the cracks of identity, it seemed there was no escape.

In Thin Places, a luminous blend of memoir, history, and nature writing, ní Dochartaigh explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal, how violence and poverty are never more than a stone’s throw from beauty and hope, and how we are, once again, allowing our borders to become hard and terror to creep back in. Ní Dochartaigh asks us to reclaim our landscape through language and study, and remember that the land we fight over is much more than lines on a map. It will always be ours, but—at the same time—it never really was.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571317698
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	08/10/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	228
Sales rank:	966,081
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Kerri ní Dochartaigh is the author of Thin Places. She has written for The Guardian, the Irish Times, the BBC, Winter Papers, and others. She is from the North West of Ireland but now lives in the middle, in an old railway cottage with her partner and dog.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue When I first see her she is as still as a found stone, in an ancient and hidden place. She stands out, a quiet caller of the eye – her markings blend in so delicately in this place, against the grasses and the thistle, the sand that marks the Atlantic Ocean from the land. I am at An tSrúibh – Shroove Beach – completely alone, miles across the border from my home in Derry, when we cross one another’s path.

She looks so calm, unstirring in spite of the winds that now set the tall grasses on the beach to dance. She is so beautiful – I may even call her celestial – that I almost feel I have no right to be here. In this moment, in this place, with this graceful wonder, what part can I play in her story, in the narrative of this ethereal offering of a creature? I begin to feel that I am not, in fact, even ‘seeing’ her. It is more an act of witness. There is so little action in the small part I play on this near-winter morning, at a part of the Inishowen Peninsula where Lough Foyle meets the wild Atlantic, at the edge-land of Donegal, in one of the most northerly places on the island of Ireland.

We have found ourselves in a state of turmoil here, in the North of Ireland, and all the other parts that make up the United Kingdom are caught up in the same storm. It is November 2019, and next month the first Christmas Election in decades will take place. The air has been charged for many months with worry and confusion but none of that seems real, here, amidst such silent serenity.

She dances. She is the centre of it all, the still point on the map, a heavenly and delicate thing, too sacred for words. I am only the beholder, here, and I am drinking it all in. I bathe in her silent, gossamer grace. I watch her for what feels like a hundred years – one hundred years and this one, solitary day. The winter sun is high enough above the lighthouse to make the reeds double on themselves. Their silhouettes now join her in shadow play; they seem as if they are weaving themselves together and dancing in time with her. I am on my own, on the outside, looking in at the reeds and the moth; as if I am on the other side of an ice-sculpted lake or a mirror. They are right here beside me yet they feel so completely out of reach.

I tiptoe around the edges, and I feel myself outside time, as well as place. Now I am in both and in neither all at once.

I gratefully wait on the threshold, holding my breath as the reeds dance, grass goddesses on the hushed dunes, beside an ethereal, exquisite leamhan.

A winter moth, in a weightless, willowy place.

I begin to dry myself. The water today was icy and the sea’s waves tall and white as snow, like mountains she had given birth to overnight. I am shivering, now, violently, on the wet November sand, but I feel like I have been made new, somehow. There is almost full silence. All that undoes it are the soft sounds of the dreoilín – a wren – and the water as it ebbs and flows out at the horizon.

Then, all out of nowhere a deep, melancholy cry rings out over the dunes. A call that speaks of wildness, of solitude, of survival and unimaginable beauty. Twelve curlews are in flight in the sky above my head, calling out over the edges of the eastern coast of the Inishowen Peninsula. They are the same colour as the dunes, the grasses and the other winged creature on the beach, that almost otherworldly moth. Their call is haunting – a siren song written long ago, and it drags me with it: out of myself, and back in again – out and in, like a wing-beat, or ebbing breath.

They have long held a place in our history as a marker, these folkloric birds: of the past, of the cruel and melancholy passing of time with all its irrevocable changes. The curlew’s cry has shape-shifted into mournful lament – an elegy for all that is lost. For centuries, it has been taken as a sign of unbidden sorrow yet to come; the cries of those whistlers is a sound steeped in foreboding. Those creatures of coast, marsh and bog carrying disaster and grief, carefully, in the fine curves of their bills. This beach on which I stand, shivering and silvered by the salt of the Atlantic Ocean, is a perfect place for them – open, empty and desolate, at first glance. This beach – Shroove, Stroove, or Strove, depending on where you grew up – has a quality to it, a stillness, which lets me almost float away. It allows me to see things differently. It is as if the veil between worlds has become as thin as moth-wing. The lines that are normally drawn for and by us – between here and there, between now and then – seem as though they have been washed away, on some days. I shiver again, pull my arms in around the curve of my body and wonder if it is the sea that has made ghosts of what we think we know here, in this wee nook at this most northerly tip on this divided, broken island.

This shipping lane has been used for hundreds of years by ships carrying Irish emigrants to land far from where I stand – England, America, Australia, Canada. This rugged coastline has not only transported people, it has stolen them, too. She is a hungry sea, this one I am drawn to – pulled towards, tidally. She has claimed hundreds of ships, taken innumerable lives; the body of water in front of me holds a story of deepest loss within her belly.

Now, through the lifting mist, Ballycastle – in the north of Ireland – comes into view, only just. One moment the coastline is there, and then it isn’t. It is a fleeting and flighty thing today, the outline of that other place across the sea – and border – from me. There are times at which, under certain conditions, Scotland can be seen from where I am standing, as clearly as if it were right there in front of you, as if you could hold it tenderly inside your own salty, shaky hands. Today is not one of those days. The only land that I can see from here is still in Ireland, across an invisible border, parts of both its sides are held in place by the ancient, changeable and wild Atlantic in front of me. This border – unseen, hand-drawn by man, and for him alone, too – has been the thread that has run through my life. A ghost vein on the map of my insides, it is a line that is political, physical, economical and geographical; yet it is a line I have never once set eyes upon. This invisible line – a border that skims the water I have just emerged from, as though it were a dragonfly – has been the cause of such sorrow and suffering, such trauma and loss, that I ran from its curves and coursing flow at the very first chance I got.

I was half the age I am now when I left my hometown. The year that I moved back, the UK voted to leave the EU. Despite the words about unity, solidarity and strength in togetherness, lots of people decided they wanted to choose a different path. Derry – my border town in the north-west of Ireland – known for being the place ‘the Troubles’ began, voted to remain. There is a very particular type of wisdom that is born out of witnessing unimaginable cruelty, out of the experience of dark, harrowing sorrow. I remember standing on this same beach just after that vote and weeping, memories surging through my insides like hidden tributaries. No more, no more, no more – we have all had enough already, enough for many lifetimes. That border has become a thread in the lives of so many more people between that day in 2016 and this one, three and a half years later.

The fog has lifted a little; to the right of me, its silky grey veil is still laid too low to allow the outline of Scotland to come into view. Now, just below the lighthouse, the crotach – the curlews – grace the middle part of the sky again. They are heading round the curve of the bay towards Greencastle, maybe even onwards yet. Maybe they are flying away from here, where Lough Foyle floods into the Atlantic Ocean, to follow the flow of the river across the border and into the North. Or maybe they will turn the other way, chart a path over fossil-traced bog-land, above gorse and ceannbhán – bog-cotton – where butterflies and moths have left fragments of their tissue wings. Maybe today they will choose to fly above estuary and stream, over the mountains of the Donegal Gaeltacht, their cries blending together with words in the native tongue of those they fly above, in the South. They nest all over this land, those of them that are left, on both sides of the border.

The season is turning; I felt it so fully in the water today. November’s full moon marks the birth of a new Celtic year, at the same time as symbolising an end, the death of the old year. It is known as the mourning moon in Pagan tradition. In many cultures, this full moon is intimately connected with death and loss, on both a literal and symbolic level. Some folk call it the snow or fog moon, and I can both feel and see why, today, as I shiver beneath sea fog that hides the sun away. There is a pale yellow-grey hue to it, and a softness that could easily bring the snow. My ancestors knew it as the reed moon. I watch as the giolcach – the reeds – move about in the icy breeze, and I imagine my ancestors watching too, from a place, like the full moon, that I cannot see.

To the Druids and the Celts, almost everything in the natural world was tied in some way to the greater being – the spirit – of the earth. For our ancestors, our role in it all as guardians was one of unshakeable magnitude. In Ogham – ancient writing on stone – the letters are named for trees, an alphabet of arboreal forms, only some of which are still known to us. The etymology of the word ‘ogham’ is not fully known but it may have roots in the Irish og úaim – ‘point-seam’ – the trace left over by the point of a sharp weapon, the midway mark. The stones on which the writings are carved are themselves a form of marker, too. And the places in which they are found are sometimes as thin as a reed.

The reeds are ready for cutting now, in November; their strong roots will still bind the soil along the banks together the whole year through, a delicate winter weaving. In ancient times, reeds were held as guardians. They are the botanical marker for the days around Samhain – when, it was believed, the veil between worlds lifts – until 24 November: the date, almost a year ago, when I decided to stop drinking. I had no idea about the significance of the date until now. The reed’s power, in Celtic tradition, is protection.

This gealach, this moon, the one I cannot see but that I know is there, is the last one before the winter solstice, and it is the last one I will stand beneath in this place; for how long, I am unsure. By the time the velvet darkness of the solstice has covered the winter land, I will already be far from these reeds and the moth, the lighthouse and the curlews. I will be far from Shroove, from Donegal, from Derry; I will be too far from here to be seen, no matter what the light is doing above the sea.

No more, enough already: the moment is here to leave. I have carried too much sorrow into this water for one lifetime. The tide is shifting; the moment in Derry – in the North – across the UK in general – is uncertain, and full of that same hidden violence I spent my childhood stepping over like delicate eggshells, just waiting for it to erupt. I cannot, and will not, live through it all again. I am making ready to leave the city in which I was born; I am leaving its feathery ghosts here – where its river meets the sea.

Enough already: this time I am able, and ready, to leave. The time spent here has changed everything, unravelled all the threads that had long been tangled up in messy, rotting knots; nothing feels how it did before, and for that I am fiercely grateful.

There are places – like this one – which are so thin that you meet yourself in the still point. Like the lifting of the silky veil on Samhain, you are held in the space in between. No matter the past, the present or what is yet to come. There is nothing you can do but listen for the gap in the silence, the change in the wind.

The right moment, when it comes, calls you up, up; calls you into a wind that lifts you. A wind that carries you with it, on its tails.

Watch.

First the curlews, next the moth, and now – you.

Table of Contents

Contents

Prologue

Part One: Blood and Bone
Chapter One: Leamhain Bhána – White Moths
Chapter Two: The Bridge of Sorrows
Chapter Three: Frozen River
Chapter Four: Snow Light
Chapter Five: Lost Things
Chapter Six: Delicate Ghosts
Chapter Seven: Frozen Bones

Part Two: Feather and Stone
Chapter Eight: Found Things
Chapter Nine: Echoing Grief
Chapter Ten: The Grove of Oaks
Chapter Eleven: Skull of a Shae
Chapter Twelve: Hollowing, Hallowing
Chapter Thirteen: Éin Bhána – White Birds

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

01/10/2022

In this nimble debut, Dochartaigh reflects on moving back to her native Ireland and the ways borders—constructed and natural, visible and unseen—shape life. Born in Derry in Northern Ireland during the Troubles in a divided household (her mother was Catholic, her father Protestant), the author vowed never to return after she moved “across the water” in her 20s in the mid-aughts. Yet 15 years later, Dochartaigh returned to find a nation fractured by Brexit (Derry, she writes, voted to remain). While reckoning with the unstable political landscape around her, Dochartaigh contends with another terrain: the “thin places” of refuge that she often finds in nature,where, according to Celtic mythology, heaven and earth are closer than usual. In writing that’s ethereal and elliptical, she laments Ireland’s collective “loss of connection with the natural world” and cleverly uses this “unwilding” as a warning about the threat of extinction faced by indigenous flora and fauna, and also as a lens through which to look at the toll of oppression and violence on humanity (“The echoes of the Troubles in Ireland have been, are being and will continue to be a coal-black crow that covers us with its wings”). By turns subtle and urgent, this offers a powerful and complex portrait of a land and its people. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Thin Places
"How does a person contend with coming from a place where suffering is part of its legacy? . . . It takes ní Dochartaigh many years to find her way back to the most important place of all: herself. Whether she's meditating on moths or birds or the vivid colors of her home country, it's her own perspective on the world around her that grounds her, soothes her, and offers solace."—Boston Globe

“A remarkable piece of writing. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book as open-hearted as this. It resists easy pieties of nature as a healing force, but nevertheless charts a recovery which could never have been achieved without landscape, wild creatures and ‘thin places.’ It is also flocked with luminous details (moths, birds, feathers, skulls, moving water). Kerri’s voice is utterly her own, rich and strange. I’ve folded down the corners of many pages, marking sentences and moments that glitter out at me. Wow.”—Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland

“Luminous . . . For the author, who has suffered from alcoholism, depression, and suicidal ideation, the wild places surrounding her hometown help release her anxieties and bring her unparalleled peace. They have become her thin places. A beautifully written tribute to the healing power of nature.”—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

"ní Dochartaigh's connection to the natural world [rises] every time her personal world seems about to sink. And it's in these moments where the writing is at its most revelatory."—Adroit Journal

"In writing that's ethereal and elliptical, [Dochartaigh] laments Ireland's collective 'loss of connection with the natural world' and cleverly uses this 'unwilding' as a warning about the threat of extinction faced by indigenous flora and fauna, and also as a lens through which to look at the toll of oppression and violence on humanity . . . By turns subtle and urgent, this offers a powerful and complex portrait of a land and its people." —Publishers Weekly 

“‘Where does the past cease?’ ní Dochartaigh writes on the eve of Brexit in this deeply personal memoir that takes place amid a resurgence of division, violence, and uncertainty in Northern Ireland . . . Ní Dochartaigh’s unique writing moves between a personal journey of healing, the fragility and importance of the environment, and a powerful call for peace.”—Booklist

“This raw and affecting work confronts a complicated inheritance with both grief and hope . . . With grace and a keen sense of history and the natural world, Thin Places pays complicated tribute to a troubled place and time.”—Foreword Reviews

“Luminous and achingly honest . . . The memoir’s evocative style is riveting, layering images of the natural places where the author finds solace with the urban spaces where she lives most of her life . . . What Thin Places ultimately leaves us with is the courage to speak the unspeakable, even if our voices shake.”—Gretchen Lida, Washington Independent Review of Books

“A beautiful and harrowing book about trauma, the potential to heal and the subtle magic of the wild. Kerri ní Dochartaigh offers us a fragile kind of redemption, full of truth and solace.”—Katherine May, author of Wintering

“Part hymn to nature, part Troubles memoir . . . the two strands, one wondrous and elemental, the other violent and unsettling, sustained by the vividly descriptive prose. . . . Unflinching in its intensity . . . Thin Places is at heart a survivor’s story located in the real and brutally Darwinian world of lived experience.”―The Guardian

"Reflective memoir and folkloric tales weave together in this haunting evocative story of a childhood unfolding during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Prose that reads, at times, more like poetry captures the burning desire to find balance and peace within the heart and soul of an ancient land and its modern inhabitants. Superbly beautiful, raw, heartbreaking writing that takes its places among the stars."—BJ Hegedus, Postalworks

"Moving effortlessly between the generational violence of the Troubles and the redemptive solace of the Irish landscape, Thin Places is at once a searing meditation on trauma and healing, a wild celebration of nature, and a wise reckoning with the complicated legacies of history, identity, and language. It is a beautiful and haunting memoir; it sings its way into your blood and your bones, takes you by the hand, and leads you across arbitrary borders to the gaps in our world. It leaves you changed, scoured clean, and ultimately, hopeful for the future."—Rebecca Speas, One More Page Books

"An absolute gem of a book. Part biography and part natural history, it's wonderfully told, giving one a palpable sense of place as well as the history of Ireland through a prism of the natural world. Fans of Robert Macfarlane and Aimee Nezhukumatathil will be right at home."—Cody Morrison, Square Books

"Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh is luminescent. Blending nature writing, memoir and history, Thin Places is a quietly vivid yet disturbing and wondrous book about national, generational and personal trauma. She describes her family's experience during the height of the Troubles in Ireland and the terror inflicted on her family—one parent was Catholic, the other Protestant. But it's also a book about healing and how the natural world helped her process grief and loss and reclaim her identity and sense of home." —Michelle Malonzo, Changing Hands

"A beautiful, heartbreaking, but ultimately hopeful book about how borders, real or imagined, can have devastating real life consequences. And how the body and mind, ravaged by trauma, can be healed by nature and place. Thin Places is both a memoir, and a tale of nature as a healing refuge, with the history of Ireland woven throughout." —Alana Haley, Schuler Books

"Beautiful, contemplative, and stirring. Kerri ní Dochartaigh's memoir is a gorgeous meditation on borders of all types—between north and south; Protestant and Catholic; the physical and the ephemeral; trauma and health. Thin Places is a must-read for anyone interested in either the lingering specter of The Troubles or the stunning nature writing at which so many Milkweed authors excel." —Emilie Sommer, East City Bookshop

"Raw, hollowed and in the end as Dochartaight says, hallowed—those are the descriptive words that first come to mind after reading this memoir of growing up during the Troubles in Derry Northern Ireland. Dochartaight is one of the most outspoken, brutally honest yet sensitive authors I've ever read. It is as beautiful as it is razor sharp and her descriptions of the 'thin places' within us as well as in nature will stay with you. The shadow crow that haunts her will visit your dream time. The beautiful descriptions of landscape and the nature that inhabits both this realm, the inner one, and the space between us and the healing that takes place when it is are breathtaking. Exquisite." —Maeve Noonan, Northshire

"Open-hearted and remarkable writing." —Mollie Mitchell, HearthFire Books

“Dochartaigh takes great solace in nature, and much of the book is a meditation on the beautiful landscapes and flora and fauna that surround her. . . . Passionate, moving and beautifully written, this is a remarkable account of trauma and ways to acknowledge and overcome it.”—Sunday Times (UK)
“Acutely personal . . . Wonderfully evocative . . . This heartfelt memoir, with its message on the saving grace of nature, may speak to an even wider audience than it first imagined.”―Daily Mail (UK)
“A powerful, bracing memoir that asks what happens when a child grows up in a city that isn’t safe . . . This is a book that will make you see the world differently.”―Irish Times
“Heady, bright and difficult to pin down. It is also redemptive. The Irish word for hope, we are told, is dòchas or dòigh, which holds, within its roots, glimmers of dóighiúil, the word for giving. Ní Dochartaigh takes that hope and gives it to us all.”―Big Issue
“What was Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s burden as a child—to exist in ‘the gaps between’ the Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland—has become her gift as a writer. She is sensitive to the legacies of loss and trauma and highly attuned to the gifts of the natural world and the possibilities of place. This is a special, beautiful, many-faceted book.”—Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun
“An eloquent, moving work of politics, geography and the self. Full of wisdom and deeply engaging.”—Sinéad Gleeson, author of Constellations
“It seems as if everything about life is contained within the covers of this astonishing book: politics, history, nature, language and of course, love. A profound and moving work of art. This is a really special book—certainly, I’ve never read one quite like it.”—Christine Dwyer Hickey, author of The Narrow Land

From the Publisher

★ 2022-01-12
A luminous memoir about growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

Born in 1983 (the “exact midway point” of the Troubles) in the border town of Derry, ní Dochartaigh was raised by a Protestant father and a Catholic mother. However, she writes, her family was “neither Protestant nor Catholic, and our parents had stayed together in a mixed marriage long enough to ensure that none of the essential parts of either of these camps could ever be instilled in us. At least not to the extent that we could claim either heritage.” Throughout, the author recounts memories of a childhood consumed by loss and violence. With raw emotion, she describes many of the harrowing experiences, including being driven out of their home when a bomb was thrown through the window, moving frequently to avoid threats, and the murder of a dear friend. The author also explores the unsettling feeling of limbo that the Brexit vote has caused to resurface. In her attempt to come to terms with the effects of her tumultuous childhood, ní Dochartaigh writes poetically about her search for “thin places…places that make us feel something larger than ourselves, as though we are held in a place between worlds, beyond experience.” Having left Ireland many years ago in an attempt to escape the pain, she describes the feeling of being called to return. “A call back to the land that made me, that wounded and broke me, the land that turned out to be the only place that held the power for me to heal,” she writes. “A call back to places that I know my grandfather sought out, and maybe his grandfather before him, too.” For the author, who has suffered from alcoholism, depression, and suicidal ideation, the wild places surrounding her hometown help release her anxieties and bring her unparalleled peace. They have become her thin places.

A beautifully written tribute to the healing power of nature.

Kirkus Reviews