At the Edge of Ireland (44 page)

 

M
EMORIES OF THESE TWO
walks are true keepers: mists writhing like semitransparent serpents around the wrinkled strata of the hills; the swirl and scurry of hungry seagulls hoping for tail-end scraps from my sandwich lunches; burpy recollections of large breakfasts to bank up the energy supplies prior to my explorations. Anne's fine repasts would honor royal palates—thick pinhead porridge with cream and treacle, gorgeous slices of pan-roasted gammon ham liberally scorched with caramelized brown sugar, a couple of oh-so-golden eggs fresh from the farm down the road and tasting like eggs did pre–World War II (or so I'm told!), and finally, whiskey-flavored orange marmalade thick with pungent zest slathered on hot buttered soda-bread toast. And of course—tea. Good old stand-a-spoon-in-it Yorkshire tea.

Such abundances make you feel ready—indeed, obligated—to sally forth like a squire inspecting his estates. And in doing so you forget your sedentary tendencies and launch into that delicious stupor of “earned exhaustion” and frisson flashes that occur in those high barren places where the wind whips away all the crud of civilized torpor and reveals your true “creature of nature” beneath. This is the one that hunted with stone ax and rough-hewn spear, the one that sensed the power of the Creator in every daily moment and act and understood the sheer glorious surge of nature in all her moods and terrible cruelties. That's the fellow you don't get to meet too often in the comfortable confines of domesticity. That's a transcendency that transcends all mundanity and moroseness and lingers in the spirit for days—even weeks. Until the next time and the next revelation on these high wild places.

 

A
ND SO IT WAS
that I was finally ready to begin my own odyssey of self-rediscovery on the Beara Way itself. And where better to put myself in an appropriate mood than by making my start at the four white stones at Allihies, otherwise known to the cognoscenti of Irish folklore as the Children of Lir.

An alternative starting point, and a place to which Anne and I return regularly like dogs exploring the scents on their favorite tree, could have been the remarkable remnant of a neolithic stone circle on the back road just to the west of Castletownbere. Among the tumultuous tumble here on Beara of standing stones, circles, cairns, souterrains, megalithic tombs, dolmen, and ring forts, this strong and ancient entity of Derreenataggart is one of our favorite and most dramatic places on the peninsula. We came here with good old Carey Conrad, our early mentor and guide, during our initial explorations, and it has remained one of our key touchstones of ancient authenticity here.

However, I chose the Children of Lir as my starting point. Anne drove me down on a windy morning from our Allihies cottage, patted my rucksack to ensure I had my sandwiches and water, and gave me an unusually clinging hug, as if she sensed some uncertainty about the likelihood of an imminent return.

We stood together, looking at the four famous stones. As stones go, these hardly seemed icons of mega-significance. In fact, they were barely more than large rounded beach rocks a couple of feet or so across and set closely together in rough-cut grass just above our beautiful Ballydonegan Beach.

“They hardly seem to reflect the importance of that great Lir legend,” said Anne. “I mean, isn't it celebrated all over Ireland as one of the keystones of all their vast Celtic culture? Four little white stones doesn't really seem to do it…”

And yet it was rather moving in its own modest and sad way. The tale has many versions, with subtle variations and nuances that only true folklorists could relish. We prefer the short, relatively untangled one that goes something like this:

The wise and revered ocean god-king Lir of Sidh Fionnachaidh, intent on bringing peace to the tribal feudings of ancient history, married Eve (Aobh), daughter of King Bodhbh Dearg the Red, a powerful member of Tuatha Dé Danann. They were the people descended from the mother-goddess Anu, who, according to Irish legend, arrived here from Greece around 350
BC
. Much later on, following a series of lost battles with the Celtic Milesians from Galicia in northwestern Spain, these people became the “fairy people”—sole possessors of the underworld.

But prior to all that, Lir was blissfully married to Eve, who conceived two sets of twins. Unfortunately Eve died in the second childbirth, so to maintain the peace, Lir married her sister Eva (Aoife). However, Eva was not so nice a character as Eve and became extremely jealous of Lir's love for his four children. So one night she secretly carried them off to Lough Darravagh and transformed them into swans.

Unfortunately, while immediately recognizing her impetuous sin, she regrettably lost the spell to release them (or so she claimed). But it was too late anyway, because King Bodhbh Dearg discovered her terrible deed and turned her into a demon condemned to float alone in the air forever. So according to the legend, the four children of Lir remained swans for nine hundred years until the coming of Christianity in the fifth century. After the first three hundred years or so, they moved from Lough Darravagh, and many other lakes across Ireland are claimed as their second home. But eventually they settled on the Atlantic Ocean for the last three hundred years. Then finally, attracted by church bells rung by a monk, St. Mochaomhog, at the Christian church in our little community here of Allihies, they finally came ashore. Immediately the spell was broken and they regained their human form, but alas, in doing so, they also became ancient, shriveled-up nine-hundred-year-old beings and died almost instantaneously—but not before the saint had rushed down to the shore from the church and baptized them.

And thus it was that they came to be buried beneath these four white stones, which are still revered by the locals and whence I began my Beara Way odyssey.

 

A
ND SO FINALLY
I was alone and striding eastward, thinking what a glorious day's adventure on the high fells lay ahead. I was looking forward to disappearing into the deep solitude of the moors—that shimmering, humming stillness that I sensed on shorter walks around Allihies and Ballydonegan beach. Then, next thing I knew, I was stopping and wondering where the hell the fells had gone. I'm sure they'd been there when I set off a short while ago. In fact, I know they were. But now they weren't. A cloud out of nowhere had snuck in when I was studying the map or daydreaming about Anne's fabulous breakfast or wondering where to camp the night after a long hike. Except I wondered if my hike might be interrupted. There was a strong suggestion of imminent rain not yet fallen.

And then, of course, the rains fell. Also out of nowhere. In fact, I could still see sunlight like jagged golden rips in the ever-accumulating black cloud mass. And of course it was your typical southwestern Ireland deluge—unforecast, unforgiving, and unforgettable. I don't believe—except maybe in the height of the Indian monsoon season—that I've ever known a rain that can so quickly turn a mood of bucolic bonhomie into a pure bloody mayhem of mud-slimed, buckled knees, clobber-soaked, heart-pounding, ankle-cracking chaos. And of course I'd left all possibilities of shelter behind me. Around me was nothing now but moor dotted with flesh-ripping huddles of ogreous, spike-laden gorse. Not to mention an unusually odiferous collection of cow pies rapidly dissolving into the mud of the path, which in turn was rapidly dissolving into the adjoining tangles of tussocks and marsh grass, and—of course—also disappearing into my now-sodden boots.

Beara Way Scene

There was no choice but to slosh and plodge on, hoping that somewhere in the murk ahead I'd find respite from the helter-skelter furor. Childishly optimistic, of course, but that's the way you feel at the beginning of a hike. And my mind, searching for softer consolations, conjured up an image of an early morning a few days back as I'd sat by the sliding glass door of our cottage overlooking Ballydonegan Beach and watched a robin pecking crumbs from around our wooden picnic table. Such a tranquil scene—the little creature proudly thrusting its ochre-colored breast outward as it surveyed the scene to locate its next morsel and occasionally cocking its head in my direction as if to say: “C'mon, mate, time for a bit more bread, if y' please—this crumb-peckin' is f' the feekin' birds. Other birds, that is—not this one.” And I'm sitting, smiling, and nodding and doing nothing because I know as soon as I get up to fetch more crusts and scraps, he'll lose faith in my benign tranquility and fly off. And what was so enticing was—

“Ah! Halloo. A nize day, I zink! Ha-ha!”

I must have been so very deeply reveried, almost fetally curled, in that captivating bubble of memory that I had completely failed to notice two figures looming out of the teeming murk. They were obviously fellow hikers but serious ones with far larger rucksacks than mine.

“Ah…oh…sorry. Didn't see y' there…”

The taller one with a dark dripping beard smiled patronizingly: “Ziss iss not zerprizink, I zink. Ze rain, she iss very wetz.”

The other man, smaller and with a rather more feminine face despite a thick brown mustache, nodded seriously. “Ya. I zink zo too,” he said.

I couldn't help an hospitable chuckle. The rain was so bloody obviously wet that to even mention it seemed ridiculous as we all stood together, drenched from tip to toe and with our boots squishing and our noses and other appendages dripping like chronically leaky faucets.

Making idle and convivial conversation in such conditions seemed a bit odd, but there again, we had nowhere to go for shelter and were so soaked already as to be beyond restoration anyway. So we removed our rucksacks, sat on them by the side of the path—which actually was now a thick mud stream—and chatted together like old buddies. I passed around a bar of chocolate. They—far more sensibly—passed around an unlabeled liter bottle of what I thought (hoped?) might be Irish poteen moonshine, but they insisted it was German schnapps—“from ver ve are comings…Stuttgart…You know Stuttgart?”

I apologized profusely for a very significant lack of familiarity with Germany while insisting that Anne and I intended to make amends in the spring with a planned visit to Eastern Europe via Berlin.

“Ah yez—Berlin. Very fine place. Ve like ver much. Goods foods. Goods beers. And ver goods ladies…”

“Ah,” I said, “in that case, maybe I should come alone.”

They both stared at me curiously. Humor, I then remembered from prior conversations with fellow German travelers, is not always such an easy form of comradely communication.

“You know—what you said about the good ladies…”

Still no recognizable response.

Last try. “What I mean is—maybe I should not come with my wife if the Berlin ladies are—”

At last. “Ah! Aye…yez, yez—yez. I zee vat you zay. Ya! Ver funny. Ver good idea! Ha-ha!”

“Ya. I zink zo too,” added the one with the mustache.

God, this is going to be hard work, my inner voice whispered. Yes, I whispered back, but the schnapps is just too good to up and leave. So somehow we chatted on inanely and the schnapps eased the edges of our conversational confusions. And when we finally parted, I encouragingly confirmed that they were almost at the end of the Beara Way and they, not so encouragingly, told me that I was indeed just at the beginning and it would very quickly get worse as I headed up into the high hills to the east.

I tried to think of some lighthearted aphorism to end our chat, but for some inane reason, all I could come up with was: “Well—may I just say that as you slide down the banister of life, I hope the splinters never point the wrong way!”

Not surprisingly I received only blank, uncomprehending stares until the smaller one with the thick mustache reiterated his “Ah, ya, I zink zo too.”

I'd like to boast that I then pulled on my rucksack, straightened my back, set my mental and physical sights at the high ground, and marched onward and upward like a true “bog-trotter,” determined to conquer all the climatic chaos, all those little incisors of insecurity, and other demons of the Beara Way.

I'd like to, but in all honesty, I can't. Because that's not what I did. I was deluged not only by the rain but by memories of my own early ineptitudes. On previous hikes, particularly as a young Boy Scout, I gained the inauspicious reputation of “the lost one,” as a result of my uncanny ability to confuse marked trails with meandering cow tracks that invariably ended in pernicious, cow-pie-filled bogs. So—determined not to repeat such a fiasco—I continued on up the path until it finally merged a few miles later on with a narrow boreen. Here I checked my map for the location of our cottage and hitchhiked home from the Beara Way with visions of a hot bath, a large Irish whiskey, a loving welcoming wife, and a huge dinner of roasted chicken and cabbage and colcannon. The visions dangled like gorgeous fat carrots on the end of an extremely wet stick.

And it all came to pass just as I had envisioned! In fact, come to think of it, Anne's splendid chicken dinner was just a little too extravagant and well prepared—almost as if she was expecting me back home as soon as the storm hit. And as usual, she was correct in her somewhat demeaning expectations.