Deirdre Remembers A Scottish Glen

Glen of fruit and fish and pools, its peaked hills of loveliest wheat,
it is distressful for me to think of it
- glen of bees, of long-horned wild oxen. 
 

Glen of cuckoos and thrushes and blackbirds, precious in its cover to every fox; 

glen of wild garlic and watercress, of woods, 

of shamrock and flowers, leafy and twisting-crested. 

Sweet are the cries of the brown-backed dappled deer under 

the oak-wood above the bare hill-tops, 

gentle hinds that are timid lying hidden in the great-treed glen. 

 

Glen of the rowans with scarlet berries, 

with fruit fit for every flock of birds;

a slumbrous paradise for the badgers in their quiet burrows with their young. 

Glen of the blue-eyed vigorous hawks, glen abounding in every harvest, 

glen of the ridged and pointed peaks,
glen of blackberries and sloes and apples. 

Glen of the sleek brown round-faced otters that are pleasant and active in fishing; 

many are the white-winged stately swans,
and salmon breeding along the rocky brink. 

Glen of the tangled branching yews, dewy glen with level lawn of kine; 

chalk-white starry sunny glen, 

glen of graceful pearl-like high-bred women. 

Irish, possibly 14th century

from The Celtic Miscellany ed. Kenneth Hurldstone Jackson