The Enchanted Music of Knockma

On Knockma in County Galway the wind keeps old tunes in its pockets. Seamus the fiddler climbed there one evening with a loaf, a wedge of cheese, and the sort of confidence that comes from being the best bow in three parishes. He sat by a hawthorn and played until dusk made a cup of the hill.

Lights like bees rose from the grass. A door opened where there had only been moss. A small man with a king’s hat and a polite smile stepped through. “Finvarra,” thought Seamus, and kept his face as still as a good note.

“Play us a reel,” said the small king. “Play us a lament. Play us the tune that makes feet remember what hearts forget.”

Seamus played. The night turned on his bow. He learned a slip jig that made rain laugh and a lament that dried tears before they fell. When he stopped, the east was the colour of milk and the hawthorn had a blossom he swore had not been there.

He ran home with new tunes bulging his pockets and found the milk sour in the pail and the calendar a year older. His mother wept, then hugged him, then wept again because that is the right order for such things.

From then, Seamus played kinder. He let the tune finish speaking before he tried to be clever. When someone asked where he had learned a certain turn, he said, “On a hill that keeps time different,” and toasted the Fair Folk with a drop of fresh water poured on the ground.

Sometimes, on summer nights, small lights gather on Knockma. If you go, bring bread and respect and leave with whatever the hill gives: a melody, a memory, or a sudden understanding that time is not to be bullied.