We laid my mother to rest on a beach near Moville, Donegal, in 2019. We knew that this had been her wish. When my father had died seven years earlier we had accompanied her to scatter his ashes on the very same beach, knowing then she was enacting what she wanted us to do for her later. My parents are together there, part of the wild unearthly coast of the Inishowen Peninsula.
As part of that trip to Ireland we stopped in Omagh, Tyrone, the birthplace of my father’s grandfather, and from where his family had emigrated more than 150 years ago.
Omagh is in Northern Ireland. When crossing from the Republic of Ireland into the UK there is no border and no change in landscape, but Irish language signage disappears and kilometers turn into miles. In 2019, we did not yet have the palpable sense of going back in time that the visitor has now, almost ten years after Brexit.
My family left Omagh in 1864. They left behind no people and no gravestones. There were several Maguires living in this town at the time my family left, but I cannot find evidence that we are related to any of them. We do know that my great-great grandfather John was a shopkeeper in Omagh before he emigrated.
I looked for the site of John’s shop, but the crooked streets led us in circles.
As we walked around, I was overcome with a clutching, clammy feeling. To this day, I cannot explain it, or even describe it well. Something like panic and dread. I felt cold and dizzy. A group of girls in school uniforms filed passed us on the street—school had just let out. It was the middle of a sunny spring afternoon, but I smelled damp night air.
I don’t traffic in the paranormal. I don’t believe in past lives, ghosts, or ESP. Déjà vu has been explained away by medical science as a glitch in neural processing, often brought on by fatigue or the stress of travel. But this feeling was none of those things.
I’d had a similar experience in Ireland once before, on another visit. Walking in Derry, I had a flash of something. A vision that came in as strong as a radio signal: coach house doors painted dark green against a grey stone wall, a cold morning, a stuffy nose, and gummy porridge. The quick scorching shame of being scolded. I have no idea what that was, and am still inclined to think it was just some kind of momentary misfiring of a jet-lagged brain. This time it was not so specific. It was instead a feeling of something terrible that I had not directly experienced but was being forced to relive.
“Let’s go,” I said. But my son had become enamored of Irish pubs and wanted to stop for a beer. We found a corner bar, the kind of local place that has dart games and quiz nights and open mics, its walls covered with peeling posters of local bands. There were a few men idling at the bar enjoying a pint. I relaxed.
The young bartender never had tourists in his place and asked us what we were doing in Omagh. His soft voice was missing the paint-stripping vowels of people from the north of Ireland. I told him I was doing the thing every American does— visiting my family’s hometown.
“When did they leave?” he asked.
“1864.”
He tried hard not to roll his eyes and went back to serving other customers. He chatted with a regular standing at the bar. Their voices were so lilting it sounded like singing. I understood this was the country accent of Tyrone. My family must have once spoken in the same gentle way.
The man leaned over to us. “Where are you from in America?”
“Just outside of New York.”
“New York. Is that where your family went?”
“No, they went to Canada. Do you know where I can find Market Street? They had a shop there.”
“Won’t find it there. It’s gone. Most of that street was blown up by the bomb twenty years ago.”
Omagh is a small town, but it was briefly famous around the world for a horrible bombing in 1998, shortly after the Good Friday Agreement brought peace to Northern Ireland. A group calling themselves “the Real IRA” opposed the peace plan and planted a bomb in the middle of town on a Saturday afternoon, as weekend shoppers crowded the streets. The blast was so great that it obliterated half of Market Street, tearing the roofs off buildings and ripping through concrete. The bomb killed 29 people and injured over 200 others. Pipes burst. Witnesses recall seeing the water run down the street and turn red from blood. It’s been said that everyone in town knows the perpetrators, who live among them even now and were never brought to justice.
That creeping feeling up the back of my neck was not a spectral visit from an ancestor. If I were to believe in the supernatural, I was tapping into someone else’s memory of that day in 1998 that perhaps still lingered over the streets of Omagh.
Some experts suggest that our brains have two types of consciousness, one focused on the world outside us and one focused on our inner mental state. When you're tired or distracted, you might mistake what you perceive as outer-focused consciousness what is a product of your inner-focused one. In other words, “paranormal” mind glitches are a manifestation of one consciousness jumping the rails onto the other.
Then, of course, there is what the Irish call “thin places.” According to Celtic folklore there are places where our two worlds —the ordinary world and the mystical otherworld—touch. These places are the “thin” spots between the two. Thin places can be sweeping vistas that fill the senses with a feeling of the divine, or they can be eerie portals into the spirit realm.
describes these places as:…where yet another sense, one we will never fully understand, is ignited, allowing us to be in the presence of something mystical, something beyond, something magical…It comes in a sweeping wave. There is no doubt. No ambiguity. No analysis. No thought. It’s the purest of emotion, encompassing all of you, every nerve and synapse.1
We have all been to these places.
Omagh was my thin place, not to experience the rush of the divine, but to feel the weight of history. We left the pub. After a good pint, a friendly chat, and then a walk back to the car in the sunshine, the feeling of doom had dissipated.
The only trace of the Maguires of Omagh, the only real proof they had lived there, were a few parish baptisms of their children and the shop on Market Street. I have no claim on Omagh. When my family went off to America they got a chance to start fresh, set free from old grievances and a grinding cycle of violence. The weight of history in this place was not my family’s story. We can hope that everyone in Ireland has now been set free.
When we travel we tap into memory. Not supernatural visions and past lives, but real history. These are thin places, with only a fragile membrane between past and present.
Ulster emigrant ships did not depart directly from Derry, but instead took passengers by boat up the river and across Lough Foyle to embark at Moville. The departing ships followed the shoreline to the tip of Inishowen to the open sea, and it was common for families of the emigrants to light bonfires along the beach, which could be seen from the ships.
None of us could possibly have known on the day in 2012 we set out from Derry, stopping at a small beach my mother liked, that my father was being brought back to the spot from where his family had left, the very last place in Ireland that had held their footsteps.
David’s Substack “The Abundance” has beautiful essays that cover the essential questions. This quote comes from his essay “Thin Places.”
The beautiful photo at the top of this post is the work of Liam McClean, a landscape photographer whose sublime images document the Irish countryside in all seasons. Follow him on Facebook and Instagram. You can also find more of his work and purchase a print here.
@Lisa, I've been fortunate enough to visit several "thin places" as I will now, thanks to you, forever remember them. This is a beautifully written and planned piece, and filled with all the good stuff of history - the distant past right up to the present moment's lived experience. It's good to remember we are part of it all.
"Thin places." I like this idea; where the fabric between this physical material realm and the one beyond, the sacred.