An Port. Annie McGinley’s Rabbit Pie

Late. Huddled together at the last gasp of Donegal, the very edge of the world, where humanity peters out into shards, sea and sky. No electricity, no past, no present. Just the ceaseless tending of the fire. One of those evenings when the booze bottoms out, tongues thicken, and the crew of our tiny coracle, buffeted like driftwood against the cliffs, stoops to slurring paragraphs from whichever paperback they once believed they would spend their nights devouring here by candlelight. Two of us are on Iris Murdoch: one Elizabeth Bowen: one Anaïs Nin: one sagely ploughs the furrows of some of-the-moment Natural History meets Found Food affair, with whole chapters on which windward facing rocks offer the best terroir for edible lichens. Harold, fortified by poitín from the boot of a car of a man in Killybegs, risks cloddishness by declaiming aloud something he actually cares about. Yeats. In Ireland. I avert my eyes. Alone, a few hours later, the Irish dark above me tattooed only by the mouse’s tiptoe scuttle, I recall the curdling in the stomach, wince at the naked sincerity of his solemn recitation; the childlike loneliness of him straining toward joy through a hole in the collarbone of a hare.

Mary, diminutive as a wren, chatters like a budgerigar as we shuffle to her barn to fetch three bags of turf for a few days’ burning, past corners furtive-sentried by sheepdogs that have known rain, mud, but never burr of carpet or lick of hearth. In natty blue trainers and no teeth Mary recounts every sighting of us from O’Donnell’s to the Texaco, but mainly Roarty’s, where Jonah the Shepherd spends the bright hours between feedings nursing a lazy susan of pints of Harp. Me, I stretch breakfast like a noodle into lunch, visibly invisible, sucking down the daily sing-song of Charlie’s West End in Ardara. Full Irish, tea, bread like cake and the Guardian, two holes cut out for eyes. In the flaneur tradition of Rockwell Kent, Dylan Thomas and Bonnie Prince Charlie, some Donegal stuff can only be carried out single spies, not in battalions.

Back in Port for an afternoon of napping, Heaney and a snifter of Green Spot, I’m surprised by the early return of the others, on foot from Glencolumbkille with two Teelin rabbits. I suggest we rustle up a pie before making our way along the glen to Meenaneary, to O’Donnell’s Bar and the crack at Saturday Quiz Night with Dierdre, in from Ardara with her sister-in-law Dierdre.

Later, I batten down in my Jumbly sieve alongside the ghost of Annie McGinley, who slept where I sleep a century ago. Muse and crush of artist Rockwell Kent, who, roaming Western Donegal on foot in 1926, took a cow byre for a home from Dan and Rosie Ward, sole occupants of the lost valley of Glenlough. No road in, no road out. Nine years later Dylan Thomas followed, walked ten miles over the peat bog once a week to O’Donnells’, ten miles back. Sat on the shore of this ghostly loch with Geoffrey Grigson and shouted ‘We are the dead!’ after John McCrae. Today it was us. In over the cliffs to the broken homestead, the now-kneeling barn that birthed ‘Altarwise by Owl Light’; three hours out over bog, fell and heather, all the while communing with scant ghosts of this vanished, silent place. To this rainy night, this last huddled vestige of a place long abandoned, and pie by candlelight with kindly, long dead Annie McGinley.

ANIE MCGINLEY’S RABBIT PIE

Bake until crust is golden brown, about an hour. Serve with mash.

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