Of all the Irish otherworlds, none has held imagination quite like Tír na nÓg — the Land of the Young. It lies somewhere west, beyond the last visible island, beyond the haze that hangs on the Atlantic at evening. To reach it you must cross water, and you must be invited.
In Tír na nÓg there is no sickness, no hunger, no winter, and — most dangerous of all — no time. Apple trees are always in blossom and in fruit at once. Music is always playing. The people are always young. The Tuatha Dé Danann, the old gods of Ireland, are said to have retreated there after they were defeated by the Milesians, and they have never grown a day older since.
The most famous shore-walker of the legend is Oisín, son of Fionn mac Cumhaill. The story goes that he was hunting near Lough Leane in Killarney when a woman of impossible beauty rode out of the lake on a white horse. Her name was Niamh Cinn Óir — Niamh of the Golden Hair — and she had crossed from Tír na nÓg to find him.
Oisín went with her. The horse carried them west across the waves without ever touching the water. They lived in the Land of the Young for what seemed three short years, married, had children, wanted for nothing.
Then Oisín grew homesick for Ireland. Niamh begged him not to go, and when he insisted she gave him the white horse with one warning: do not, for any reason, let your foot touch the soil of Ireland.
He arrived to find Fionn long dead, the Fianna gone, Christianity arrived, and three hundred years passed in a country that no longer remembered him. Trying to help some men lift a stone, he leaned from the saddle. The girth slipped. He fell. The instant his foot brushed Irish ground, the spell broke — and three centuries fell on him at once. He died an old, old man, having spoken his story to Saint Patrick.
We love Tír na nÓg because it is the gentlest of the Celtic otherworlds and the cruellest at the same time. The price of its perfection is that you can never come back unchanged. Every shore on the western coast of Ireland — Doolin, Achill, Inishbofin, the long pale strands of Kerry — has felt the rumour of it on the right kind of evening.
When you wear something inspired by Tír na nÓg, you are wearing the oldest dream in Irish myth: the wish that there might be, just out past the horizon, a place where nothing has to end.