Well, I don’t feel that way, ambitious American alpha female that I am. “Violet, have you ever made a wish on the stone?”
Ye need to sit on the stone without touching the earth around it-every part of yer body. She says, “Ye must go to the wishing stone right here on the castle grounds by the lake. Ireland is a bastion of superstition and magical lore.
One blustery night at dinner, I ask Violet about sacred sites. During the famine they’d walk for days reaching the shore, where the boats were sailing to America only to die right there on the beach of hunger.” Her dense brogue unfurls the story of Ireland’s tragic past as she lays down plates piled high with her special boiled potatoes, roast lamb and aromatic mint sauce on the well-polished trestle table for our dinner at Crom Castle. Bodies of bones still jagging out of the rocky beaches at County Donegal which, Violette (our cook at Crom Castle) shares is, “just a wee drive to the West. All blended in with the mysteries and legends of their history. It wraps around the stories they love to lavish on visitors, stories and stories and stories piled up like strawberries on trifle. The Irish people’s thick accents slather around their words as rich as the dairy cream they pour on top of the delectable Irish coffees-as smooth and blankety as the dense foam on the head of a pint of Guinness.
“Forty Shades of Green” it is, this land of ancient stone cairns.