High on the shoulder of Trostan, where the mountain reaches toward the sky and the Glen opens like a long green book, there stands a bridge no longer belonging to men. It is a remnant of iron days, when wagons groaned with ore from Cloughcorr and rattled down to the sea at Waterfoot. That age has passed; the rails are long since dissolved into moss and memory. Yet the bridge remains, steadfast as a cairn, weathering storm and silence, its arch set firm above the river’s birth.
The Glenariff River, dark with peat drawn from the boggy summit, tumbles through that arch with a voice of its own. First a song of murmurs, then a sudden shout as it plunges a hundred feet to carve its way toward the waiting sea. It has no need of men now, nor their cargo, nor their noise. The river keeps only the company of wild things: the darting pine marten, the hunting buzzard, the restless small birds that quicken the forest with their voices. Around it all the land has grown close again, folding the bridge in green, as if to reclaim what was borrowed and return it to myth.
I walk there two or three times a year, climbing Trostan or Slieveanora, and I always pause upon this threshold. It feels less like a ruin and more like a doorway, one foot in the past, one in the living present. To sit with coffee in hand, looking down the long sweep of Glenariff, is to feel the old pulse of the land pressing close. The glen spills outward to the sea, and beyond the glittering line of water the hills of Scotland rise, near enough that they seem to lean forward, like kin waiting to be greeted.
Here the world folds in upon itself, mountain and glen, river and sea, past and present, all gathered into one small arch of stone. Time does not run in a straight line at this place; it circles, like the buzzard above, returning again and again. The bridge remembers the men who built it, the ore that rattled across its spine, the fires and furnaces far below. Yet it also remembers what came before: the silence of the bog, the freedom of the river, the first cry of birds when the world was younger.
To linger here is to feel those layers shifting, to know that nothing is ever truly gone. The industry has faded, but the land endures. The bridge still holds its place, the river still runs to the sea, and in their company, I too feel folded into that greater pattern. For a time, as the coffee warms my hand and the windHigh on the shoulder of Trostan, where the mountain reaches toward the sky and the Glen opens like a long green book, there stands a bridge no longer belonging to men. It is a remnant of iron days, when wagons groaned with ore from Cloughcorr and rattled down to the sea at Waterfoot. That age has passed; the rails are long since dissolved into moss and memory. Yet the bridge remains, steadfast as a cairn, weathering storm and silence, its arch set firm above the river’s birth.
The Glenariff River, dark with peat drawn from the boggy summit, tumbles through that arch with a voice of its own. First a song of murmurs, then a sudden shout as it plunges a hundred feet to carve its way toward the waiting sea. It has no need of men now, nor their cargo, nor their noise. The river keeps only the company of wild things: the darting pine marten, the hunting buzzard, the restless small birds that quicken the forest with their voices. Around it all the land has grown close again, folding the bridge in green, as if to reclaim what was borrowed and return it to myth.
I walk there two or three times a year, climbing Trostan or Slieveanora, and I always pause upon this threshold. It feels less like a ruin and more like a doorway, one foot in the past, one in the living present. To sit with coffee in hand, looking down the long sweep of Glenariff, is to feel the old pulse of the land pressing close. The glen spills outward to the sea, and beyond the glittering line of water the hills of Scotland rise, near enough that they seem to lean forward, like kin waiting to be greeted.
Here the world folds in upon itself, mountain and glen, river and sea, past and present, all gathered into one small arch of stone. Time does not run in a straight line at this place; it circles, like the buzzard above, returning again and again. The bridge remembers the men who built it, the ore that rattled across its spine, the fires and furnaces far below. Yet it also remembers what came before: the silence of the bog, the freedom of the river, the first cry of birds when the world was younger.
To linger here is to feel those layers shifting, to know that nothing is ever truly gone. The industry has faded, but the land endures. The bridge still holds its place, the river still runs to the sea, and in their company, I too feel folded into that greater pattern. For a time, as the coffee warms my hand and the wind lifts my face, the world is smaller, closer, and strangely eternal. lifts my face, the world is smaller, closer, and strangely eternal.