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I spent last weekend at a writers' retreat thinking about folklore collection, memory and what exactly I might inherit from my granda as I embark on picking his brain for yarns.

Hot Topics and Cold Corpses

The bricks and mortar may be the most honest informants in this house. Would granda, the horse dealer from tight-lipped South Armagh, let me in to nosey about in his memories?

Would he still see his little shadow, who needed her stirrups looped three times to be short enough to reach her bedazzled chaps and barely-worn leather riding boots? Would he give me the 'granddaughter friendly' version of a story, the bawdy truth then lost not to time, but pure neglect.

Or would he edit his stories, change a name, drop a detail because I am too close? Maybe unbiased distance is what makes accurate, scientific folklore collection.

The Hole Story

But I suppose, there is folklore in the gaps made and left. A Swiss cheese, if you will. Which would be a humble cheddar without its holes.

Following an uncomfortable task to sincerely express my experience through the senses, I went in search of the highest vantage point I could think of to try conjure up something from my sense of sight. I took myself up to Castle Roche (great views, terrible parking), a medieval fortress overlooking the route into Ulster. It sat on the edge of the Pale — the old boundary between English-controlled territory and the lands beyond.

I wrote down some wishy-washy 'green fields, gentle breeze' that my heart wasn't really in and thought, "that'll do, that'll keep Emily and her sensory writing exercises happy".

Then the tears came. Like a video where the audio was slightly lagging, it took me a minute to figure out why.

Caesars and Snipers

I saw rolling green fields. I saw clear-ish skies. I saw sheep ambushing me for my Caesar, a white-tailed rabbit scarpering at the rustling of my bag as I searched for my fork. I heard a pheasant flapping to the cover of a hedge, a tractor humming along the road far too small to fit it and another car down it. A peaceful, serene backdrop. I smelt and felt the slightly soggy grass beneath me.

What I did not see were army lookout posts, nor snipers scouting the landscape. I could not smell the pigs being smuggled over and back the border that ran along the road below.

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To this day, my da will still get drowsy the second the electric fan is turned on. He is transported back to his childhood bedroom in Forkhill where the army would, Guantanamo Bay-style, leave their helicopters running all night to torture the locals into sleep deprivation. In my da's little act of rebellion, it became his lullaby.

When I sat at Castle Roche, I could not hear the helicopters.

It has made me reframe the feeling of helplessness I have been experiencing around collecting from my granda. It is possible all I may inherit is absence. I can accept this now better than I had before, for the emptiness is as great an informant as any.

Special thanks

This piece grew out of a writers' retreat in South Armagh. Many thanks to the Nerve Centre and PRONI, Kevin Murphy from Cuimhneamh, and Tí Chulainn for creating the space. And to Emily for encouraging us to write, even if she did make me cry a little.