A Folk-Tale of Love, War, and the Waiting Heart

Copyright 2025 Ashleigh McSidhe

There was a time, long ago, when the hills of Connemara still whispered in the old tongue, and the stones remembered every footstep. In a cottage of whitewashed stone and thatch, nestled where the green hills met the sea, lived a girl named Máire—red-haired, dark-eyed, with a voice like a river in spring. Her mother said the banshee would weep if ever Máire sang of sorrow.

And her sorrow would come.

From childhood, she was promised to no one, but her heart had long chosen Liam Ó Catháin, son of a blacksmith, born with the smoke of the forge in his breath and the sun in his smile. They were inseparable—chasing gulls on the shore, climbing the stone fences of sheep pastures, dancing to fiddles beneath moonlight. By the time she was seventeen, their hands fit together like woven reeds.

But the land was cruel that year. Rain fell too long, and the crops drowned. The English landlord raised rents again, and Liam’s father—proud and stubborn—refused to yield. The red-coated agents came with ledgers and muskets, and the Ó Catháin forge was seized.

What could a boy do against the weight of empire?

He could take the king’s shilling.

He did not tell Máire until the morning he was to leave. She found him at the well beneath the hawthorn tree, fastening a frayed leather strap over a worn satchel. The dawn mist curled around them like a veil.

“You’re going,” she said, not asking.

“For a time,” he said, his voice thick. “To Flanders, they say. I’ll send money. Buy back the forge. Then I’ll come home—to you.”

“And if you don’t?”

He took her hand and placed something in her palm. A locket, made by his father’s own hand. Inside, a lock of his hair and a pressed clover.

“I will,” he said. “I swear it on the old gods and the new.”

She kissed him once, and her tears tasted of salt and iron.

As he walked the long road toward Galway Port, she called out after him, words carried on the wind:

“Siúil, a rún, go socair,

Siúil go ciúin, mo chroí…”

(Go, my love, walk softly. Walk quietly, my heart…)

Máire did not grow old in years, but grief and waiting aged her soul.

She sent money when she could—a silver cross, a linen gown, even her grandmother’s wedding ring—to pay the postmaster to pass on what little she had to the Irish soldiers abroad. She heard tales from travelers and sailors: of battles in the Low Countries, of boys dying nameless in muddy fields, of regiments vanishing beneath cannon smoke.

Still, no word came.

And still she sang.

“I wish I were on yonder hill,

’Tis there I’d sit and cry my fill,

And every tear would turn a mill—

Is go dté tú mo mhuirnín slán…”

(May you go safely, my darling.)

Villagers whispered she was fey-touched, a bean feasa, a woman who could not be rid of love. Some said she’d lost her mind, others that she’d been promised to a ghost. Only the old ones, who remembered the power in names and song, nodded solemnly.

“The heart,” they said, “is stronger than time.”

It was the winter of the seventh year when the crows flew inland and the sea turned silver with frost. Máire had gone to the hawthorn well to fetch water, as she always did, when she saw him.

Limping. Gaunt. The red of his uniform faded to rust.

Liam.

He looked older than his years—haunted, perhaps, by what he had seen. But his eyes, when they met hers, still held that golden spark.

She dropped her bucket, her hands trembling. “You came back.”

“I would walk through death itself to come home to you,” he whispered.

And so he had.

The following spring, beneath the very tree where he’d once left her, Máire and Liam were wed. She wore no fine dress, only a wreath of rowan and wild heather. He brought no dowry, only a sword he never wished to lift again.

Old Brigid Ní Flannery, the wise woman of the glen, bound their hands with a red ribbon and blessed them in Irish and in silence.

And as the fiddlers played, Máire sang once more—this time not in mourning, but in joy:

“Siúil, siúil, siúil a rún,

Siúil go socair agus siúil go ciúin,

Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom,

Is go dté tú mo mhuirnín slán.”

(Go, go, go, my love,

Walk softly, walk quietly,

Walk to the door and slip away with me,

May you return safe, my darling.)

They say that when their children sang, the very birds quieted to listen. And that Máire’s songs healed hearts the way herbs could heal flesh.

And when Liam finally passed, many years later, she sang him to sleep beneath the stars, her voice never breaking, even as the tears fell. She laid his locket on his chest and whispered, “Siúil, a rún,” one final time.

And some say, on the nights when the mist comes down from the sea, you can still hear her voice in the hills—calling love home, across time and war and death itself.