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>> Rent << (graced with the bleeding heads of his enemies...)

You could be swimming in pressing heat on one side of the Atlantic but on the other side, on the island home of the once king, Brian Boru, a walk in the northwestern mountains could be downright bracing. Life is rugged and simple there. It is a good place to get lost. It's a long and energetic walk, on the Casan na Naomh between Brandon Mountain and Kilmachedor church. This path of the saints was certainly well trodden by druids over the horizon of history. Hercules, in the course of his labors, walked this route, according to oral tradition, through the very same bogs and over these very same hills. Jupiter's son - conceived in godly lust of his mother, the beautiful Alcmena - must have felt a close presence of his Jove-pater whose heavenly seat was so intoxicatingly observed from this rise. The heavens were framed below, then as now ever unchanging in magnificence, by the lower great wet dominion of Neptune who, too, was in his glory here. It is an enchanted place encircled by misted fairy lands with sprites and pixies whose presences are palpable, even if, by some, unseen. This is a land of mystery, beauty and debts. Seafaring raiders from the north way and Jutland once were here to sack monasteries, another we versus them. Yet, some of their own self was consumed here, payment of their debt to history, as an ever lingering mix of bloodlines. No mere hit and run, they are still here, trapped in the lineage of the local inhabitants. An ancient church owes some of its elegance to twelfth century Roman masons whose craft carved and lifted brawny stone into tall triangular peaks seeking a new God, the one God, the only God, the Creator. In one place, so many echoes of ancient cravings for spiritual assurances, beyond the human realm. Pilgrims behold here, too, distant shadows of