into the misty

(fog songs)

Van Morrison is singing about a foghorn as I drive the coast road, following the Wild Atlantic Way around Ireland’s Beara Peninsula. Moondance, my mum tells me from the passenger seat, was an album she first played on vinyl as a sixth former in the Devon seaside town where she grew up, shortly before leaving home to spend three months volunteering in Belfast. This song, so familiar from my own childhood, is called ‘Into The Mystic’. Now, the mystic brings to my mind a storyteller sleeping on a foggy Welsh mountain, but somehow, in all the times I heard this song, I had missed the foghorn. Listening again, I realise that this fog-focused song contains layers of meaning and that its foghorn signifies not danger and fear, but love and home: the lyrics describe a sailor returning to his girl, and the foghorn is a sound he longs to hear. The song’s original title was ‘Into The Misty’, which is where we too hope to go.

It is a fair October day and the twisting road takes us past blanket bog and standing stone, skirting the base of Cork’s Slieve Miskish Mountains and following a line of coloured vertical prayer flags to a Buddhist meditation centre on the clifftop. I have come to this remote, rugged, breathtaking part of the world in search of mist, with my focus on the sense of intuition: the sixth sense.

We are staying in a square cottage built of grey stone and sandwiched neatly between two outcrops of rock. It sits below the mountains, on the edge of a network of emerald fields in which sheep graze. On the far hillside, a handful of white houses below clumps of fir trees. In the distance, the sea. ‘You’re lucky you weren’t here last week!’ exclaims the farmer who owns (and built) the cottage. ‘We had rain, and so much fecking fog. Oh, the fecking fog!’ I decide not to explain that it was in fact the fog I came here for, only agreeing that the narrow, steep roads of the peninsula must be perilous in thick fog.

But even on a sunny day the Beara Peninsula’s high incidence of damp weather and fog is evident – this is a landscape saturated with water. Bog stretches between the mountains and the sea, scattered with boulders, heads of bog cotton (now going to seed), orange bog asphodel flowers and pools of tranquil water. Drystone walls are speckled with moss and lichen; roadside grass squelches. The peninsula also has an incredibly high incidence of ancient sites, and the map is liberally dotted with Bronze Age remains: wedge tombs, standing stones, stone circles and more. Beara is rich with history and sacred significance; this is an ageless landscape where fog has been before and where fog will be again.

{This is an edited extract from my upcoming book Chasing Fog, which will be published by Simon & Schuster on 29th August 2024}

You can hear Into the Mystic as part of this short fog-themed playlist that I compiled and listened to whilst writing Chasing Fog:

Thank you for reading,

Laura

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Layla O'Mara

's Beauty & Bone, where I’m talking about fog as a liminal space…