Solstice

On Midsummer’s Eve, traffic begins to slow on a motorway in the west of Ireland.

Hares run alongside the cars. Birds gather overhead. Music drifts across the road. Then figures appear in the fields, riders, antlers, banners, shadows, moving according to laws older than the motorway itself.

No one agrees on what they saw.

No crash occurs.

The official explanation calls it “an unauthorised equestrian gathering.”

But every year, at the same bend, the traffic still slows.

🎧 Solstice, the final episode of Season 1 of Scéaleenies.

This is the last episode of Season 1. Liking, sharing, following, and leaving a comment all help the podcast reach more listeners through the algorithm. Season 2 will follow later in 2026.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:35

I'll tell it as it was told to me, though not exactly as it happened. That would be impossible. There were too many witnesses and too few facts. Which is often the same thing. The man who told it to me swore it happened on midsummer's eve, on that long western evening when the sun seems reluctant to leave, and the land holds the light as long as it can. Like an old woman lingering at the gate after saying goodbye. He was driving north or south. He told it both ways on separate occasions, and it irritated him no end when he was reminded. The motorway ran through country that had once resisted roads, limestone fields, low hills, hawthorn, blackthorn, meadow suite thick in the ditches, foxgloves standing like purple bishops among the grass, pale heads of cow parsley catching on the sunlight. Beyond it all, the suggestion of bogland and distant hills, hazy and blue. The air that evening was strangely still, it was agreed. Not calm, held. That was an important difference. The shadows were flying low. The cattle had gathered along the fences facing one direction. Not grazing, watching. The radio was reporting clear roads. Twenty minutes later it was reporting significant delays due to unspecified incident. Twenty minutes after that, it reported no delays whatsoever. This, as the man pointed out, is the sort of thing that should have been warning enough. The first thing he noticed were the hairs, three of them, running parallel to the motorway, not crossing, somehow keeping pace. Anyone who had seen a hare move properly knows there's something unsettling about it. Not because it's fast, but because it seems to arrive at its speed all at once, as if velocity was not something to achieve, but something it remembered. These hares ran alongside the traffic, not frightened, not fleeing, accompanying. Then came the birds. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, perhaps only dozens. Nobody ever agreed. Crows rising from the fields, jackdaw, rooks, things numerous and dark enough that distinction became difficult. They wheeled above the road in a vast, unsettled cloud. The sky seemed briefly written over with moving ink. Drivers slowed. No accidents occurred. That was the remarkable thing. A woman later stated that she'd nearly driven directly into the central barrier while watching them. Yet somehow she hadn't. Several people reported similar moments. Near collisions, near disasters, near deaths. Nothing actually happened. The road carried on absorbing mistakes, it had no business surviving. The man himself was approaching a gentle curve when he saw movement by the median. At first he assumed horses. The West of Ireland occasionally produces horses where logic suggests horses should not be. Then he realized they were moving against traffic. Not merely against traffic. Somehow, and it's hard to describe, somehow against direction itself. That was the only way he could explain it. Some appeared to approach and recede simultaneously. The figures mounted upon them seemed small, or perhaps distant. The evening light made certainty impossible. He remembered colours green, gold, white, not bright colours, but ancient ones. The colours of things found buried in bogs. A lottery driver later claimed they carried banners, not cloth, something else, leaves, perhaps. Mist. Water. As strange as that sounds, he could never decide. Another witness insisted there were no banners, only antlers. Another swore there were neither antlers nor riders, merely trees moving very quickly. The guards eventually interviewed twenty-three people. Between them they described almost every possible event except the same one. Yet certain details repeated. Music, that was one. Not heard through speakers, not coming from cars, music drifting across the motorway itself. One woman described hearing fiddles, another pipes, a third insisted it sounded like children singing beneath water. The man said it reminded him of a tune he almost knew. The sort of melody that follows you through life but always remains a few rooms away. Then came the battle, if battle is the right word. This one seemed to involve principles. The mounted figures emerged first, racing across the fields parallel to the road. Ranks of them, or waves, or shadows, impossible to find the measure of. The grass bent beneath them without breaking. Foxgloves shivered as they passed. Hawthorne branches bowed. Then, from the opposite side came others, smaller again, perhaps, or merely closer to the ground. Shapes moving through ditches and limestone walls as though neither existed. Some witnesses described hounds. Others described deer. One man became furious when told this. They were neither, he insisted. What were they then? He thought for a long time. Important, he said eventually. The motorway entered in the middle of it. Or perhaps the battle entered the motorway. The distinction matters. The engineers who built that stretch of road believed they were constructing a modern piece of infrastructure. The events of that evening suggest they had merely laid tar through a disagreement already long in progress. The combat itself never became comprehensible. No swords, no charges, no blood. Instead there were pursuits, circless, songs, champions, maybe. The air filled with impossible movement, figures appearing in the wildflowers beyond the hard shoulder. Horsemen riding where no horse could ride. Children, or things like children, standing by the meadow suite, a procession of antlered shapes moving through a field of buttercups as though following laws more definite than gravity. And always the music. The traffic slowed to nearly walking pace, yet no collision occurred. A delivery van crossed three lanes without indicating, no collision. A motorcyclist later admitted he had entirely closed his eyes for several seconds. No collision. Two cars slammed bumpers at rapidly decelerating motorway speed. Neither suffered damage. The man himself briefly found his vehicle travelling along what appeared to be an entirely different road. Narrow, sunken, bordered by Hawthorne. Then the central reservation returned, as though it had merely stepped aside for something. The official explanation arrived three weeks later. Atmospheric conditions, driver distraction, wildlife movement, unusual light phenomena. An unauthorized equestrian gathering. This final phrase achieved local immortality. People repeated it for years. An unauthorized equestrian gathering. As though the world had briefly ended because somebody failed to obtain the correct permit. The motorway authority quietly replaced several kilometers of crash barrier that autumn. Workers excavating near the embankment discovered traces of an older route beneath. Not a famine road, just a line, a path, ancient enough that nobody could confidently explain it. The report was filed, then misplaced, then found, then archived, then forgotten. Which is another way of saying it entered Irish history. The man who told me all this still drives that road. Most people do. There isn't another way to go. And every midsummer, around the same bend, traffic slows. Not much. Five kilometers an hour, perhaps, ten. No accident. No obstruction. No visible reason. Thousands of drivers ease off their accelerators simultaneously. The way birds wheel together. The way cattle turn their heads together. The way certain old habits survive the people who invented them. Perhaps it is caution. Maybe it's memory. Or perhaps for one evening each year, the motorway still remembers what was there before it arrived. And those traveling it, whether they know it or not, are merely passing through somebody else's world.