So there's a man called Erik who came all the way from Norway to walk the bog roads of Clare. On foot. For a week. In OCTOBER.
I'll let that settle for a second.
I don't mean he flew into Shannon, did the Cliffs, bought a jumper, and went home. I mean he got a small map, a pair of those proper hiking boots that cost more than my first car, and he walked. Corofin, Tubber, the back roads out past Boston (the Clare one, lads, not the American one — though that confuses everyone the first time). He walked the wet quiet stretches where there's nothing but the gorse and the bog cotton and the odd sheep looking at you like you owe it money.
And the whole time, he was singing the song to himself.
I should explain who Erik is, because some of you will already know the name. He's Erik Lindgren, the folklore researcher from Oslo who emailed me about the Norwegian song — the cumulative marsh song that's the spit of our own Rattlin' Bog. We'd been writing back and forth for a while. Phone calls. The man knows more about cumulative folk structures than anyone I've ever spoken to, and he says it all so calmly, in this lovely even English, like he's reading you the weather.
Anyway. He decided he wanted to SEE the boglands the song came out of. Not study them from a desk in Oslo. Walk them. Feel the ground under his boots.
And he did. And he sent me the photos when he got home, a whole folder of them, with little notes typed under each one, because of course he labelled them, he's a researcher, the man labels everything.
I've been going through them all week.
There's one of the road out past Lough Bunny in that flat grey light you only get in the west in autumn, the kind of light my nan used to call "a soft day" even when it wasn't raining yet. There's one of a stone wall with the moss gone gold on top. There's one — and this is the one that got me — of his own boots, muddy to the laces, with the caption "I sang the flea verse here. Three times. No one heard." Erik. ERIK. The man walked a Clare bog road singing the flea verse to the sheep and then APOLOGISED for it in a photo caption. I nearly cried into my tea.
(For the newcomers: the flea verse is the CLIMAX of the whole song. If you don't know why, go read the lyrics and then come back and we'll talk.)
He told me on the phone he'd memorised the English verses on the plane over. Said he wanted to be singing the right song in the right place. I asked him did he get any odd looks and he said — dead serious — "Seamus, there was no one to look. That is the point of a bog." Fair, Erik. Fair.
Now. There was one note in the folder I keep coming back to, and I'll mention it because I said I'd be honest on this site.
One of the photos is just a patch of ground. Nothing in it really. Some flattened reeds, a bit of standing water. And the caption underneath says: "Warmer here than the air. October. I checked twice. Probably nothing — peat holds heat. Beautiful spot though."
Probably nothing. Peat holds heat. He's right, of course — boggy ground does odd things with temperature, anyone who's grown up near it could tell you that. I'm not going to make a meal of it. I get enough emails about the warm ground as it is (and yes, I know, I KNOW, some of you are already typing). Erik mentioned it the way you'd mention a nice view. A man on a walk, noticing a thing, moving on.
I love that he noticed and didn't make it a thing. That's the difference between Erik and the internet, God love it.
What I actually want to say is this. A man flew from Norway and walked our wet quiet roads for a week because a SONG made him want to stand where it came from. He didn't want anything from it. He wasn't filming it for anyone. He just wanted to be in the place and sing the verses out loud where they belong, in the soft grey light, with the sheep for an audience and nobody else.
That's the whole thing, isn't it. That's the entire reason this scruffy old website exists.
When he sent the last photo — the one of the road heading off into the mist, no caption at all, just the road — I sat there a long while. Then I went and made another tea and read it all again from the start.
Thank you, Erik. Come back in the summer and I'll walk a few of them with you myself. I'll even let you pick the verse.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin' has been sitting ON the photo folder. Not near it. ON the laptop, directly on top of the open folder, every time I go to look. I'm sure it's the warm screen. Cats love a warm thing. That's all it is.