Landscape and Memory

Vincent Creelan over on his Eclectic Tardis Blog has a contemplative post describing a walk through a local landscape and his life.

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If only we could be Dr Who

Yesterday was a marvellous day, bright sunshine, fresh breeze, a real sense of spring …and summer to come. The Cherry blossums are already fading and the Elder flower and Hawthorne blooms are showing. I went for a long…ish walk with my partner and his sister Claire around Scrabo Country Park at the top of the Ards peninsular. This is an area that has been inhabited for thousands of years, on the hill where Scrabo tower now stands, iron age mounds can be seen scattered around (what is now a golf course) and when they dug the foundations for the tower they found a hoard of coins from the Roman times. Also from that vantage point you can see right down the lough and could imagine the times when the Viking long boats appeared when they sacked the Abbeys along the coast from Portaferry right up to Greyabbey 12 centuries ago. The tower itself..a folly..was erected in 1856 in memory of a local  titled Aristocrat who met an untimely death, built in his memory by friends and faithfull tennants…well nearly, lol, those were poor times(potato famine etc) and the grand design had to be somewhat tailored to  meet the budget. Nonetheless it is an imposing structure which sits high on a hill visible for many miles, from its tower you can see to Belfast on one side, the Mourne Mountains on another and across to Scotland too.

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His description of the landscape reminded me very much of walking on the Isle of Man – all the echoes of previous societies and lives being etched in the lie of the land. And it might very well have been that the Viking long boats that he mentions came from the Isle of Man. It was in a strategic position in the middle of the Irish Sea. From there, the Vikings were very well-positioned to carry out rape and pillage on Ireland, Scotland Wales and England.

He goes on to reflect on the choices we make in life. He wonders what it would be like if he were able to go back and make different choices – the choices that he would make with the benefit of hindsight.

Well, I wonder – I have a very strong feeling that if I were able to do that, the "me" that is here now would not be the same "me" if I had made those different choices. While on one level I have the sense that I am still the person I was when I was 20 – just older and greyer – I wonder if that is really true. We are surely shaped by the decisions and experiences that we undergo all the time – and the individual that has resulted in me would be very different had I taken a different path through life. It’s like identical twins – they may start out as genetically identical specimens, but they end up as two distinct individuals as a result of their life experiences.