The Tins
and The Land Beneath the Sea
They looked up to see Miolmór, with his peaceful eyes, and Niamh, who was almost as big as the whale, floated up to kiss him. Then they sang to each other.
Miolmór was too brave to complain, but they understood that all was not well in the Western Ocean. The mortals were taking over everything from the top to the bottom, and the ocean was so full of noise there was hardly anywhere a whale could find peace.
He wasn’t grumbling. It was just the whale song of the present day which would be passed down the generations, as it always had been. The mortals would soon learn the value of silence. He had lived long enough to know that disasters happened when the mortals forgot their way, but after a while they learned it again, and all was well.
the story…
Kate and Danny are twins, who live on the Western shore with their father, Cormac, a fisherman, and their mother Estrella. When they are small children, they pronounce ‘Twins ’as ‘Tins,’ so they become known as The Tins and are so close that they speak to each other by telepathy, or what they call ‘telepy.’
Estrella dies when they are two, leaving them confused and lonely. As they discover from a schoolyard bully when they are seven, ‘she walked into the sea.’ So they listen more and more to the old stories which Mrs Janey, the woman who looks after them when Cormac is fishing, and by the time they are eleven, they imagine their journeys to the heaven of olden times, Beg Ara, The Land Beneath the Sea. They go there with the aid of Miolmór, the Great Whale, and a family of dophins who surround them with protective light.
But is it their imagination, or are they really the children of Niamh, the twenty-five thousand year old Sióg who became human as Estrella for three years because she fell in love with their father, Cormac? After they have had their adventures in the Five Isles of Beg Ara (The Isle of Many Fears, The Isle of Dancing, The Isle Enchantment, The Isle of Forgetfullness, and The Isle of Victories), they are ready to hear the true story of their mother from Cormac, and why she walked into the sea.
