Fear at Murlough Bay
Alone in a parked car at midnight on the Causeway Coast, waiting for the Milky Way to rise — and discovering why being the only lit thing in the dark triggers something older than reason.
Murlough Bay, Causeway Coast — the dream composition
Murlough Bay - a top 3 on my list of favourite Causeway Coast locations - pure isolated beauty. A great location to visit along the coast if you are looking for a quieter spot, far from the madness that can envelop around other places like Giant's Causeway. Despite my love for this place, I found myself struggling on my most recent visit to capture the beauty of the Milky Way on a cold, cloudless night.
I drove down the single-track road as evening light fell, spinning around the hairpin bends during my descent to the end of the road to park up and wait for full darkness. I took a short walk along the coast, listening to the waves and checking what elevation I needed to achieve my desired composition. I glanced across to Scotland, now a dark smudge on the horizon as the last of the twilight faded away.
Not long after I got back in the car, I felt it - that creeping discomfort. Not fear exactly. Something older. The dark outside the windows had a weight to it.
I had just walked along the same bay alone and felt nothing but peace that personifies this quiet corner of Ireland. Outside, in the dark, I was fine. Inside, surrounded by it, I had just slipped myself into my own mud flecked coffin.
The Psychology of the Lit Room
It turns out, this isn't irrational as I felt at the time. It's a precise psychological response with roots that go back further than any of us. When you are in a lit space at night the visibility asymmetry is total - anything or anyone can see you perfectly; you can see nothing. Your unconscious mind registers this - you are currently exposed and blind - a terrible position to occupy. Your brain fills the invisible space beyond the glass with threat - the common Irish axe murderer for example - because that is the correct thing to do for survival.
The little light you do have calms you in one instance, but that same light broadcasts your presence into the darkness you cannot read. Outside, you are part of the darkness, with more awareness and the ability to sprint away from the threat. Inside, you are a lighthouse in the void.
What Murlough Bay adds to this equation is a landscape that has been generating exactly that feeling - that sense of being watched from the dark - for hundreds of years. This remote bay has history, and once that history is known it gives that feeling in the dark a very specific texture.
The Grey Man
Now this is where I am glad that I was was hamstrung with no network connection, as if we completed this same research, sitting alone in my metal coffin, I would have been home in bed by the time the stars started shining.
There is a path that runs from those now dark foreboding cliffs of Fair Head to Murlough Bay where I sat now. That path is called the Grey Man's Path. It is named for something, someone, specific. Above the cliffs sits Black Lough which is said to be haunted by a devil-horse that lives beneath its waters. When darkness falls - the creature rises and takes the form of an old grey man who wanders in the dark, hoping to meet some hapless person on the lonely path. If the spirit gets close enough, it will lure them to the lough and pull them in.
Thankfully for myself that night, no grey man, nor devil-horse approached me.
The Grey Man figure- Far Liath in Irish - appears throughout folklore of both Irish and Scottish coastal areas - controlling the mists and fog. Merely seeing him during his travels is believed to bring misfortune. He travels in the twilight - that specific light where there is enough visibility to see shapes, but not enough to make out details.
Now, a couple of weeks from then, what strikes me now - is that the Grey Man is essentially a perfect folk warning for that feeling I had waiting in the darkness. Beware the half-light. Beware being the visible thing in the dark landscape. Whoever named the path after the legend had the same instinct I had - they just gave it a shape.
The Results
Good news however, I survived my night and even got a couple restless hours of sleep in the car while the camera worked hard in the field.
My dream composition of the Milky Way starting to rotate above the lone tree by the church ruins turned out nicely after some worrying early clouds had cleared.
While I was there it would be rude not to take a shot of the full Milky Way arch just before the dawn light began to rise. Unfortunately the southern cliffs towards Torr Head block some of the arch by now, but we would run into some light pollution issues along the horizon regardless.
So, that, I think, is what Fair Head and Murlough Bay teaches you - if you stay long enough after dark. With that invisible cliff above. The path above that, winding past a black lough where something old has apparently been waiting long before the church you stand near was built. It isn't the dark you need to fear. Fear being seen in it.
Further reading
The psychology of being visible in the dark
The Grey Man
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