At the Edge of Ireland (50 page)

“So you even make 'em cry?!”

“Oh, yes—indeed! And especially lately, since my latest poem-song. It's one of those things that came to me out of nowhere…well, no, that's not really true. It came out of years of concern for this beautiful country of ours and all its Celtic Tiger antics. So-called progress has changed people. Tremendously. We're in risk of losing so many of our best qualities, I think…as I say at the end of the second verse…

“It seems that our nature and kindness have gone

And even the Lord is finding it hard

When it seems that He's needed no more.”

The conversation had taken an unexpected turn. “Teddy, could you play me that song?”

“Here. Better still—take a CD copy with you and play it back at your cottage. Then let me know what y'think.”

So, I did, and this is what I heard:

We say that it's progress

When we've sold off the land

the fish the sea the sand

and even the gray rocks as well

then from mountain to shore

we have ripped up and torn

the heart and the soul

from Ireland

with no time to wait or to stand at the gate,

and chat till the cows come on home,

our stories the
craic

our songs and folklore all drifting away from our shore

Chorus

We say that is progress and just what we need

could it be that we're drunk on new money and greed

and as our old country she gets up to speed

will our people be heard anymore?

For too many years we have cried bitter tears

as our young were being forced from this land

for the thousands that never came home

and now that we're able to have a fine table

it seems that our nature

and kindness have gone and even the Lord is finding it hard

when it seems that He's needed no more.

(and Way Beyond)

“I
WOULDN'T BE PARKING THERE IF
I w' you,” said the white-haired lady at the post office door. She reminded me of my Irish grandmother. Tightly bunned hair, frowny, strict expression hiding a reluctant smile, and a determined manner that forbade contradiction or even the slightest hint of a question.

But I did have a question. After our dramatic nail-biting drive over the switchback challenge of the Healy Pass, I'd parked across the road from her tiny post office/grocery store at Tuosist, which despite its nebulous size, is the key parish of the County Kerry section of the Beara, stretching twenty-three miles from Kenmare to Ardgroom. I'd parked on a grass verge off the winding narrow back road and well away from the frantic antics of Cork drivers. Not that there were any around here. We hadn't seen a car for miles.

“You don't think it's okay here?”

“That's what I jus' said,” she replied sternly.

“Well—we're just coming into your store for a minute. I'm sure it'll be fine.”

“Is that so, y'think?” was all she replied before she vanished inside.

We followed her, bought a couple of oranges and some oversugary Brit candies (our guilty favorites—Fry's Cream Bar, Rowntree's Rolos, and that Aero chocolate stuff patterned with thousands of tiny air bubbles). We explained to the lady (still unsmiling) that we were looking for Tuosist parish hall. We'd heard from Jim O'Sullivan that there was some kind of annual festival of local folklore and other regional peculiarities going on over there.

“Well now, y'jus' passed it. It's barely fifty yards away,” she said, regarding us skeptically as hapless foreign tourists. “There it is.” She came to the door and pointed from the corner of the post office down a lane to a small school building with a substantial whitewashed depiction of the Crucifixion towering twelve feet over the road. “Don't know how you could have missed that.”

“Looks like we're not going to miss this, though,” gasped Anne as round the corner from our parked car came a herd of thirty or so cattle swaying, lumbering, and mooing through the mud and constantly trying to break free from the two ankle-nipping dogs controlling them. The post office lady was smiling now. Her face creased and wrinkled with mirth and a defiant look of “Now didn't I tell y'so?”

From the cows' point of view, our car was obviously an obstacle to be enjoyed—a way to escape the dogs. So they rubbed and scrunched against it, tried to hide behind it, or ran circles around it, all the while churning up ribbons of mud and murky grime from the soggy grass verge and relieving themselves copiously along their erratic ways. When they'd finally been corralled and moved on down the lane it was rather difficult to distinguish our previously bright and shiny silver rented Opal from all the mire and muck surrounding it.

We had to laugh. “Well—I guess your advice was good,” I said as we tried to remove the goo from the door handles. At this point, God bless her, the post office lady finally let her warm Irish heart show through her stern carapace. “No—wait a minute now. Let me be getting you a bucket and a cloth. You'll never get all that stuff off with your fingers—the idea of it!”

So giggling, she brought the water and cloths for us to wash it back to something recognizable as a car.

The Healy Pass

“Well—I hope you enjoy the Eigse—our little local folklore gathering,” she said as we left to drive down to the hall. “We have one most years in memory of Dr. Sean O'Suilleabhain…Lovely man he was…Collected all our folklore and poems and stories and whatnot around here…We all helped him…His favorite saying was ‘Neighbors—don't let your fine talk go under the clay.' If he'd lived, he'd be well over a hundred by now.”

Then the postmistress smiled sweetly and sadly—quite a transformation from the battleax demeanor we'd first sensed. “But, well, of course he never really died, did he? All those tales and legends and proverbs and folk prayers and charms and songs and airs told by the
seanachai
. Thousands of them he collected. We called him ‘the master'—some of us were children when we first helped him collect all these things…It's good you're going to the Eigse. You'll be learning a lot, I'm thinking…
slán leat
and
Bail ó Dhia ort.”

I didn't feel I deserved such a pleasant good-bye and the blessing of God after I'd ignored all her advice at the outset. But I smiled and wished her a long life—
saol fada chugat.
Slowly—very slowly—I was learning these little bits of Irish, and my efforts always seemed to bring a chuckle or two.

We'd really come to hear a talk by Connie Murphy or Conchur O Murchu, as he preferred to be called, another one of our key mentors in the arena of Beara traditions and folklore. His subject, “Is There a Future in Our Past?” sounded intriguing, and we entered the meeting hall—one of those all-too-familiar bare spaces with creaky chairs, a small stage, and a stale aroma of disinfectant, as if the room had been used for far more nefarious purposes the night before. Unfortunately Connie was not there. Somehow we'd mixed up dates and times and found ourselves listening (and yawning) to a young archeologist whose lecture ended up being, when his PowerPoint machine functioned properly, a rather nebulous set of slides and lists of ancient stone piles on nearby mountains whose functions, age, and significance seemed to elude him and certainly everyone else.

Brochures in the hall on previous Eigses, however, reflected a fascinating glimpse into the folklore collected by Dr. O'Suilleabhain—tales of witches and kings and giants and moorland creatures and “hags” and death omens and resonant memories of ancient gods.

One of his most popular books,
Irish Wake Amusements
, had an oxymoronic appeal to it, but apparently wakes were not quite the grim occasions one might assume and were often an excuse for a wealth of rough and rowdy games and rituals that seemed to relate little to the individual being mourned. They were also occasions for violence, particularly if bodies were transported over the mountains from County Cork into County Kerry. Before the construction of the dramatically serpentine Healy Pass road, an impressive project to link the two counties funded at the time of the Great Famine to provide much-needed employment for the starving and poverty-stricken inhabitants, it was not unusual for “stopping the funeral” skirmishes to occur (over something about burial rites, we were told) on the high ridge near the huge flat stone where coffins were usually rested after the arduous climb.

“We were not the most civilized of people in those days,” explained one of the elderly men huddled at the back of the hall after the lecture.

“Well—are you different today, then?” I couldn't help but ask, grinningly of course.

“Oh well, what with all the TV we've got now and the stupid high price of Guinness in the pubs, we don't get as much of a chance as we did to do the mischief. Isn't that right, Dermont?”

And so Dermont joined in and then Patrick and then Sean and then “Old John,” and the tales began to roll. Some we found utterly incomprehensible, others were such a mishmash of English and Irish that we couldn't understand the punch lines, but a couple stood out—little flickers of ancient folklore, fears, and superstitions.

“Old John” Kelly claimed to recall an old woman always dressed “bog black” who lived near his family house and “used to go about with the fairies.” “A couple of farms from us was a child of four years who couldna' walk at all. So the old woman came—I think they asked 'er, y' know—to see the child, and she told the family that the cure was in the kitchen. Now in those days you often kept the hens in a coop in the kitchen. Nothing unusual 'bout that then. Quite normal. So they asked—whereabouts in the kitchen?—so the old woman points to the large cock and says ‘It's in that old gentleman over there, so take him out of the house and wash his feet three nights in a row and then wash the child's feet each night in the same water.' And would you believe what happened—the little girl was walking within the week. Within the week, I tell y'!”

“Old John” acknowledged the murmurs of appreciation at his tale. “Sean would have liked that one,” said Patrick. “Did y' ever hear his story of the mermaid horse, then…?” A shaking of heads. “Well, it appears that a farmer lived down by the sea not far from here, near Lauragh, and one day he sees this beautiful strange horse coming in with the tide—big chestnut brown creature with a long black tail—and wearing a fine-looking leather and brass collar. So the farmer went down to the strand and stroked him and removed his collar and led him back to the farm. And he kept him as a workhorse for seven long years—plowing and pulling loads. But then one day they were clearing out the barn and they left the horse's collar outside. And the horse sees his collar, runs over, and puts his head into it, and races off toward the beach. Then they say he stopped, turned, and gave this great roar that echoed all around the Caha mountains—then disappeared back into the sea, never to be seen again…”

More murmurs and smiles of appreciation.

“Good story, Patrick,” I said. “Actually it reminds me very much of those Scottish island tales of silkies that emerge like seal men or women from the sea with a sealskin belt, and so long as you keep the belt hidden, he or she will stay with you, but once the belt is rediscovered, the silkie is off back to the ocean. And like your mermaid horse, for some reason it's usually after seven years on land.”

“Aye.” Patrick nodded. “I've heard tales like that from Scotland—but that's hardly surprising, is it? It was all the Gaeltacht—all part of the Celtic-Gaelic heritage.”

“Maybe it still is,” I suggested.

Another murmur of assent and appreciation—a bonding in the mysteries of tales told down through the centuries, collected and preserved by such individuals as Dr. Sheain Ui Shuilleabhain or Sean O'Suilleabhain or Sean O'Sullivan, the English version of his revered name. No wonder this part of the Beara—the Kerry part—is so proud of his long and contributive life of research and as a storytelling
seanachai.

 

A
ND
L
IAM
D
OWNEY WAS
very proud of his research too into “bog butter.”

Traditions and tales of traditions come in all peculiar shapes, sizes, and guises, but this most certainly must be one of the more esoteric and elusive fields of academic study.

I'd been told that one of the regular meetings of the Beara Historical Society was being held at Twomey's (where else?) one Thursday evening, so I wandered down for a peep into the back room to see if anything of interest was going on. And there was Liam Downey, an eloquent, smiling-faced gentleman of very mature years, boggling the audience of fifty or so in the cramped, stuffy room with tales of his years of research into the obscurities of “
booley
huts.” These were temporary summer shelters way up on the peaty hilltops where younger farming family offspring would take the cattle from May Day to early October for upland grazing to give the lower pastures a chance to recover from overuse.