On the day he would otherwise have been waiting for AQE results, my 11-year-old fishes the Barmouth. Here, the River Bann is sluggish and the sea rushes to meet it. The Castlerock pier juts like a scolding finger into the sea and we play chicken with the waves until we taste salt on our lips. I tell my children about Tonn Tuaithe, one of three supernatural waves that, according to legend, defend the island of Ireland. I make a model in the sand of The Tuns, a three-mile offshore ridge that protects the shore but strikes fear in the heart of seamen. An ancient Irish storm god is said to be buried within the hard-packed sand bank. On wild nights, you can feel the vibrations of the wave. The children want to follow the coastline to Magilligan Strand so they can feel it for themselves.   

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Beating a Retreat

My introduction to the home education community was in the bleachers of a swimming pool. My son was five, my daughter, four, and my youngest son five-months-old. I pointed my oldest two in the direction of the pool; they stood pale and terrified in their goggles. The instructor invited them to join the splashing and my daughter slipped her hand into her brother’s and took four brave steps to the water. I turned and took four of the same towards the mums. I was desperate to ask them questions and am grateful for the women I met in that humid spectator bay. “Don’t worry,” they said. “Children want to learn. Take a step back and be kind to yourself.” I have been beating a retreat ever since.

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We watch a sparrowhawk hunt the sand dunes that run down to the river’s edge. It crosses the wide stretch of water like an arrow, sending a stew of oystercatchers skyward. While my son experiments with lures, floats and biltong-bait, I explore Lawson’s Jetty with the other two. This wooden railway relic once spanned the river to transport quarry stone for the construction of the piers. My little magpies find rusty screws in the sand and storm clouds gather overhead.

“Where does this river come from?” my daughter asks.

A spark ignites.

"Let's find out," I say.

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Two years into our weekly swimming lessons, the instructor pulled me aside.

“Look,” she said. “They don’t know their breaststroke from their butterfly but when they get into the water they move like nymphs.”

I hugged her.

Now, when I take them to the pool, they hurl themselves into the deep end before the lifeguards can intervene. I watch the youths in yellow t-shirts scramble from their chairs and call the children to the edge of the pool. The lifeguards quiz them on their proficiency and when they admit to having none of the relevant qualifications, the lifeguards make them swim lengths. My daughter turns otter: sleek, and speedy, surfacing for quick breaths then disappearing beneath the water. My son dives like a gannet, the force propelling him half the width of the pool. Satisfied that they will not drown, the children are left to the deep water. I do not intervene in these conversations; they need to give an account of the skills they have mastered that do not tick the boxes.

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Goddess

We travel to Hilltown that week and up the Kilkeel Road to Spelga Dam. There, we park in a layby and climb a stile to the foot of Slieve Muck. It is a calm, bright day with breaks in the scudding clouds for the sun to shine a spotlight on the mountains.

This is where we have traced the source of the River Bann. It is not so much a source as a seep; the entire mountain appears to be leaking. We walk through boggy puddles and marshland at the foot of the mountain and as we climb, we hear water. It comes from the granite wall that runs from the summit to the road, charting the steep contour of the mountain and concealing a stream within.

There are several false tops on the hike. On one, the children remove their shoes and decide to walk the spongey ground in bare feet. We reach a thick slab of protruding granite that forces groundwater to trickle in a hundred tiny streams over its edge. We open our mouths to taste An Bhanna, the River Bann.

“What does it mean?” my youngest asks, wrapping his tongue around the Gaelic.

“Goddess,” I reply.

My daughter jumps into the air like a brown trout leaping free of the lough. “That’s a great one, mum,” she tells me.

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With the AQE in my mind, I realise that soon I will have home educated my son through his primary years. I mostly find these markers irrelevant but this one represents a threshold that requires my participation. Whether I like it or not, there is a shift at this age that beckons us to new territory. It invites me to reflect on the last seven years and consider how we will best move forward with his, and eventually the other two’s, education. I watch my almost 11-year-old skip barefoot up Slieve Muck with his siblings and my overwhelming feeling is gratitude. He has had wide open space to become the marvellous young man that he is, and I have been there every step of the way.

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Dreaming the Sea

Standing at 2384ft, the top of Slieve Muck usually offers commanding views of Spelga Dam, Carlingford Lough and the other peaks of the Mournes. However, cloud hugs the mountains while we explore the soggy brackish water that has pooled below the summit. It is not the source we were expecting. The water oozes as if squeezed from a sponge, gathers in the dam where red deer once grazed and flows onward down the mountain as the Upper Bann. It travels through the countryside to Banbridge, Portadown and on into Lough Neagh. If you were to cross the lough you would find the start of the Lower Bann that meanders through places I have never been: Toomebridge, Lough Beg, Vow, Fish Loughan and into Coleraine before it reaches the sea at Castlerock.

My children stand ankle deep in the source of An Bhanna when the clouds part and warm spring sunshine floods the mountain. We talk about the journey the water will take from here, the fields through which it will course, the roads that close when it floods, the towns it dissects, the fish hooks that will trawl its depths and the things it will carry to the sea. I ask if I can read a poem, they roll their eyes and start a game of chasies instead. I take my book to the stone cairn at the summit and read alone:

River
Dreaming the sea that
lies beyond me
I have enough depth
to know that I am shallow.
I have my pools, my bowls
of rock I flow
into and fill, but I must
brim my own banks, persist,
vanish at last in greater flood
yet still within it follow my task,
dreaming towards
the calling sea.
Denise Levertov

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Radical Unlearning

We walk Magilligan Strand by the light of the full snow moon. The wind is fierce, whipping clouds across the night sky so the moon disappears and reappears at intervals. In the pockets of darkness, we listen to the waves, when the moonlight shines, we watch for Tonn Tuaithe, the one that rises higher than the rest.

This is part of our radical unlearning. We are unravelling the tight weave of logic and certainty, allowing some give for mystery and myth. Our senses are honed here: what can we see when there is no light for our path? How can we hear if no-one tells us the old stories? What is there to smell when we cannot put nose to the ground in search of something earthy? How will there be savour in our days when we do not think they’re ours to season? And how can we feel our way when we are taught to distrust our own bodies?

My youngest runs from the waves like he is being chased. Tongues of seaweed flicker in the water and I imagine the breakers on The Tuns, wild and aggrieved by the interruption of their journey to the shore.

“I can feel the waves,” my son shouts. “It’s a bit like a shock from the pigs’ electric fence.”

The moon appears briefly and casts his shadow on the sand. He is twice the height and the wind fills his coat like a sail.