The Ballykillduff Timeslip

It was a wet Tuesday when Brendan McGlynn set out walking the old Curran’s Lane, that overgrown boreen between the bog and the barley fields. The rain had stopped, but the air still smelled of thunder and turf smoke. Brendan had grown up in Ballykillduff, but he’d been away nearly twenty years—London first, then Canada. Now, back to sort through his late uncle’s cottage, he fancied a ramble to clear his head.

He barely recognised the place. The hedgerows seemed taller, the lane narrower. And wasn’t there once a turnoff by the Hawthorn Tree? It was gone now. Or maybe he had it wrong. Memory plays tricks, doesn’t it?

About halfway along, he saw the girl.

She wore a red shawl, barefoot on the muddy track. Her eyes, dark and solemn, watched him as if he’d stepped out of a dream.

“Are you lost, mister?” she asked, her voice like the wind through barley.

“I might be,” Brendan admitted. “I thought this led down to Lough Anleen.”

The girl frowned. “It does. But the soldiers are about. You oughtn’t be here.”

“Soldiers?” Brendan laughed. “No army around here anymore.”

But her face remained grave. “They came up from Wexford. Burned the O’Shaughnessy barn last night. Shot poor Paddy McCloon, they did. We’re hiding out till they go back to the fort.”

Brendan’s smile faltered. “You mean… British soldiers?”

She nodded, suddenly wary. “You’re not one of them, are you?”

“Of course not. What year is it?”

She blinked. “Year of Our Lord 1798, sir.”

Brendan’s stomach lurched. “I’m sorry?”

But she had already turned and fled, vanishing between the hedges.

In a daze, Brendan stumbled on. A flash of lightning cracked overhead—and the world snapped like an old bedsheet.

He was standing by the Hawthorn Tree.

Only now, it was there—big and gnarled, just like he remembered. A new housing estate sprawled in the field to his right, and the barley field was gone, replaced by a rusting shed and bales of silage wrapped in black plastic.

He checked his watch. Half an hour had passed. His boots were dry. No mud, no rain.

He walked home slowly, feeling strange.

Back at the cottage, he pulled an old book from the shelf—his uncle’s local history of Ballykillduff. There, in a yellowed page from the rebellion records, was a name:
“Aoife O’Rourke, age 11. Vanished 3rd July, 1798. Last seen near Curran’s Lane.”

Underneath it, someone—his uncle, he supposed—had scribbled a note:
“They say the past walks here. Sometimes it notices you.”

The Ballykillduff Timeslip

I walked where the hedges swallowed the sky,
Where nettles hummed lullabies nobody knew,
And the lane was a ribbon through barley and bog,
Threading yesterday’s mist with tomorrow’s dew.

A clock in the clouds began ticking in reverse,
While the trees bent backward, whispering names.
The stones in the walls hummed Jacobite hymns,
And puddles held echoes of musket flames.

She stood in the track like a thought half-formed,
A barefoot girl in a blood-red shawl.
Her eyes held winters that hadn’t yet come—
And summers that never had happened at all.

“Are you lost?” she asked, though I’d barely arrived.
And her voice was a wind from two hundred years.
“The soldiers are near,” she said, “stay low.”
Then melted away with the scent of old tears.

The road curved left but my steps turned right,
Into a time that refused to be told.
Where the rain fell up and the birds sang Latin,
And my breath turned silver, and my hands felt old.

I passed a cow chewing smoke like tobacco,
A scarecrow that bowed with a crown on its head,
And a ghost of myself with a map made of feathers,
Who said, “To go forward, first walk with the dead.”

At the Hawthorn Tree, time hiccupped and stilled.
The world snapped shut like a rusted tin lid.
I awoke with dry boots and a watch that was wrong,
And no one believed what I said that I did.

But I’ve seen the past wink. I have heard it cough.
It’s not gone—it’s coiled in the roots and the mud.
In Ballykillduff, where the timelines blur,
And the stones still bleed with rebellion blood.