The Celtic Riddle

I was afraid that clue was lost to us, but then Rob saved the day, although he didn't know it. He'd stopped to admire a vase full of roses in the entrance-way of the Inn with the words, "quite the most beautiful of flowers, don't you think?" and I was off to Rose Cottage moments later. It was a bit of a trek because I was determined not to cross the Byrne property and went overland from the main road. It was worth the scratches from the wild berry bushes and the scrapes from the rocks: once I got there, the clue was quickly located, wedged behind the door frame.

The next clues took us farther afield and had been quite a bit harder to find. The Dingle is a peninsula only about thirty miles long, and is often described as a finger that juts out into the sea, the farthest point west in Ireland. To me, though, the Dingle is not so much of a finger jutting out from a hand, but a primordial creature, mountains for its spine, its undulating torso slipping into the sea so that only the tip can be seen as the Blaskett Islands off shore, its head way down in the depths. In reality, it has four mountain areas, the Slieve Mish Mountains where the finger joins the hand, as it were, the Stradbally Mountains, Mount Brandon on the north side, and Mount Eagle to the southwest. In between are fabulously beautiful but isolated valleys, rocky gorges, and breathtaking vistas. Roads through the mountain passes rise up steep inclines, then drop precipitously to the coast, where there are dozens of little towns and hundreds of ancient sites. In other words, there were a lot of places to search.

Nonetheless, we were making progress. I wouldn't go so far as to say we'd fanned out across the countryside with military precision or anything, but while Rob cooperated with the Irish police in the murder investigation-at least that's what he called it-the rest of us, with a copy of the poem Alex had dug out of the local library, and Malachy and Kevin's knowledge of the area, had set out to find the rest of the clues.

Kevin, who turned out to be rather good at all this, figured out the hawk above the cliff. "Has to be Mount Eagle," he said. "Hawk, bird of prey, eagle. Cliff, mountain. Not perfect, but where else could it be?" Mount Eagle turned out to be a rather big place, a mountain that ran down to the edge of the sea near Slea Head. Kevin lead our little ragtag bunch on a merry chase over the hilly terrain. We clambered over stone fences, dodging sheep and their poop and slogging through the mud, stopping whenever we came to the remains of some ancient structure. Dotted over the landscape were ruins of tiny stone beehive-shaped huts, where centuries ago people had not so much lived as taken shelter, "clochans" Malachy called them. Many were just heaps of rubble, but others still stood as little masterpieces of engineering, carefully placed stones fitted together and angling up to a peak without benefit of mortar to form stone huts that had withstood centuries of weather, and various invasions.

"Eamon Byrne liked old places," Kevin said, as we looked about us, "so I think we should search them." We checked as many of them as we could, dodging through the low stone doorways and scanning the interior walls for any sign of a clue. We found nothing, but Malachy wouldn't give up. Eventually, we came upon the remains of an ancient stone fort right in the middle of a field. It was there, a tiny roll of paper wrapped in plastic and wedged between two stones. Malachy and Kevin were ecstatic.

Jennifer was an able assistant as well. She'd realized right away that ogham was read from right to left, or bottom to top, and saved us a lot of time. Who'd have thought that her thinking-outside-the-box class, and its rather irritating lessons on how to talk backwards, would have had such practical application?

She found one of the clues by herself. From the vantage point of her sailing lessons out on the bay, she'd spied a CD store on shore called Music of the Sea. As soon as she'd hit dry land again, she'd climbed up a fire escape to get level with the sign, and found the clue taped to its underside.

The clue at the Boar's Head Arms disturbed me a little. Seven clues had been handed out, for Alex, Michael, Margaret, Eithne, Fionuala, and Breeta Byrne, as well as Padraig Gilhooly. The Boar's Head clue was the eighth line of the poem. Either that meant that every line did not lead to a clue-and since we only had our own, we didn't know-or that we were expected to figure out the clues were from Amairgen's Song and look then for every line of the poem.