‘It is a frightful pass of a quarter of a mile’ so begins a 17th century description of this place in the Glenties district of Donegal. The gloomy, tentative travel writer continues; ‘the descent of the road being steep, the mountain rising over it to a vast height and often dropping down rocks from its abrupt precipices and the no less frightful lake below, sure to swallow up the traveller if he makes the least false step.’ Although I don’t recognise the tone of dismal horror, the descriptors of ‘vast height, abrupt precipices, lake below’ are both familiar and fleeting. Memories flash like the scudding clouds above my mother’s resting place amongst the whipping grass, high above the depth of dark water below.
Although I knew that my grandfather Manus was born at the end of the nineteenth century near Dungloe or thereabouts, when I recently began the search for his birth certificate, I was looking for the usual form of familiar townland name in the area - Meenacross perhaps, or Tully, Cruit or Craghyboyle. Getting nowhere, I was mystified - surely our silent ceremonies, taking place over the years and decades, scattering ashes through the air and falling to the earth, occasionally whirling in the wind - couldn’t have been in the wrong place? My turquoise-eyed, gentle grandfather spoke very little about his early life, silent mostly about his origins, except finally, in his wish to return. Over time, we also brought his daughter - my mother Isabella, her brother Peter and lastly, his own wife, Hannah, from Newhaven on the edge of Leith, to this place.
Scrolling through townland variations and genealogy sites, exasperated, all of a sudden a townland with a sub-title caught my eye - ‘this townland is known as Lough Salt’. Not only had I found the right place, but the homeplace itself was named for this body of water, these cliffs, steep-sided and rising sheer from the waters below. Incredibly, it seemed to me, my grandfather’s birthplace, in his mother and father’s home, was here certified, written in a looping, copperplate hand as ‘Lough Salt’.
Lough Salt road, graphite drawing from polaroid, 2021 © Mhairi Sutherland