Round Ireland in Low Gear (10 page)
Read Round Ireland in Low Gear Online
Authors: Eric Newby
On 2 September 1588 had come the first of a series of gales, the heaviest that summer. Most of the wrecks occurred during the north-west gale of 10 September. According to Edward Whyte, clerk of the Council of Connacht at the time, ‘There blew a most extreme wind and cruel storm the like whereof hath not been seen or heard for a long time.’ Numbers of Armada ships from the north-west began to fall in on the Irish coast, badly damaged; some reached Kerry, others were forced on to the coasts of Clare, Galway and Mayo, the latter sometimes literally driving onto the Mayo coast because the charts available did not show the coast extending more than forty miles west of Ballycastle as far as Eagle Island. Altogether nine ships failed to weather Eagle Island, off the north-westernmost point of Mayo. One of the survivors, Captain Cuellar of the
Labia
, eventually had himself ferried across to the Scottish mainland from County Antrim after nine months of wandering and evasion in the mountains of Connaught and Ulster, part of which he spent in Clancy’s Castle, a minute building on a rock in Lough Melvin, County Leitrim.
‘Did you know,’ I said to Wanda, trying to be cultural while
pretending to admire this desperate, watery scene, ‘that the inventor of the submarine was born here?’
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‘If the weather was anything like this when he lived here,’ she said, ‘inventing the submarine was probably the only way he could keep dry.’
Soon, at a fork in the road, we came to some gates and a ruined lodge. Beyond was all that remained of Birchfield House, the home and birthplace of Cornelius O’Brien, Liberal MP for County Clare and landlord of ten thousand acres. He sat for the County at Westminster from 1832 to 1847, spanning the period of Catholic Emancipation and the Great Famine, and again from 1852 until 1857, dying soon afterwards.
Now in ruins, with its castellations, turrets, squeaky gates, stumps of once splendid trees now blasted by the wind that howled over it, and carriageways so deep in mud that it was almost impossible to maintain steerage way on our bikes, it was the epitome of Gothick Horror. It was not difficult to believe that a curse had been laid on it and its builder by the local priest, who prophesied that it would become a treeless ruin after O’Brien gave up going to Mass (in fact there is no evidence he ever became Catholic); and it came as a pleasant surprise to find, when we knocked on the door to ask the way out of this labyrinth, that the young farmer who now lived in its adjoining farmhouse was perfectly normal.
It was from this base, the story goes, that ‘Ould Corny’, as he was known to his tenantry, used to ride out to take stock of his possessions, plan further building operations, and deflower or dispossess his tenants according to their sex and as the spirit moved him. His alleged habit of keeping in close contact with his female tenantry is immortalized in a story still current in Lahinch in which, dismounting from his horse in order to exercise his
droit de seigneur
by the roadside with a young woman who had taken his fancy, she was enjoined by her mother: ‘Lift up yer arse now, Mary, that’s a good girl, or the gentleman will have his balls in the mud.’
In fact almost all the stories about the man are what contemporaries of his would have described as ‘a farrago of nonsense’. As the only man who has taken the trouble to do any research on O’Brien, Henry Comber, a local teacher, wrote ‘Cornelius O’Brien has become something of a Bord Failte property and any material published about him is to be found in tourist brochures catering for tourists who thrive on diets of myths, legends and paddy-whackery.’
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O’Brien was in truth a Liberal who supported Daniel O’Connell’s attempts to repeal the Act of Union of 1800, by which the Irish Parliament had voted itself out of existence. His name has never been linked with rack-renting and evictions, and he was a member of the Ennistymon Board of Guardians and the Liscannor Famine Relief Committee. On one occasion in 1846, in the course of a spirited debate with the agent of Dean Stacpoole, another landowner who accused him of favouring his own tenants in allocating relief work, O’Brien said: ‘If Mr Westropp, the agent, had the slightest compassion in such a year as this, he would not have taken rent from his poor tenantry. He would have told them to take back their money and buy bread with it …’ It was perfectly impossible, he went on, ‘for a man with a family of ten to maintain them on ten shillings a week when wheat sold at three shillings a stone … If this was an item of relief, the Government should give wages sufficient to enable the labourer to give his family enough bread, otherwise there is no use in this enormous outlay.’
It must be said, however, that there is no record of O’Brien’s
parliamentary oratory, which no doubt accounts for Palmerston’s verdict on him: ‘O’Brien was the best Irish MP we ever had. He didn’t open his mouth in twenty years.’
After another mile or so, in which the road skirted the O’Brien demesne, it turned sharply uphill, and I wondered if we would get to the Cliffs of Moher before night fell. Here, on the landward side of the cliffs, sheltered from westerly winds, was the holy well of Daigh Bhride, St Brigid’s Vat.
If you see an eel while drinking the waters of the well your wish will be granted. There is a legend that when St Brigid stayed in the vicinity, while on her way from Munster to Connaught in her chariot, an old woman who owned the land where the well then gushed, washed potatoes in the water in order to defile it, so that it would not become a place of pilgrimage. Thereupon it welled up on someone else’s property, in its present position on the other side of the road.
The well is fed by a rivulet which emerges in a little whitewashed building constructed by Cornelius O’Brien – which itself rather belies his raffish reputation. More like a tunnel than a building, it is filled with votive offerings inscribed with the names of those who received the saint’s favours in answer to their prayers and with holy images and sacred oleographs of the Virgin, St Joseph, St Francis, St Anthony, the Infant of Prague, the black saint, St Martin de Porres, Jesus with the bleeding heart and St Brigid herself. It is also stacked with ancient crutches left by those who were cured of their disabilities, with medallions and swathes of rosaries. In feeling and appearance it is more like a Hindu shrine on the banks of the Ganges than one in the extreme west of Europe – magical.
Outside, on a mound that in spring would be covered with fuchsias and other wild flowers, enclosed in two glass cases a bit like miniature telephone boxes, were two images of saints in
painted plaster, one life size, the other about three feet high. Both undoubtedly represent St Brigid of Kildare, holy, beautiful and beloved patroness of Ireland, and after Patrick the most famous of Irish saints, each holding a shepherd’s crook in one hand and in the other a model of the Cathedral at Kildare. The Cathedral was built on the site of the monastery which she founded in the fifth or sixth century and in which she was buried; thereafter, apart from a brief period when it was extinguished by order of the Archbishop of Dublin in 1220, a perpetual fire was kept burning by the nuns in a circular enclosure forbidden to men. But why then two figures? Is one intended to depict St Brigid of Liscannor, now after centuries of devotion either identified or inextricably confused with her more famous namesake?
There is a tradition that a St Brigid (but which St Brigid?) led the Virgin Mary to the place where she was purified at Bethlehem, after the birth of Jesus, on 2 February, the date which traditionally ushered in the spring, in Ireland at least. But the well has only ever been sparsely visited on that date; its great days are the last Saturday and Sunday in July, Satharn Domhnach Crom Dubh and Domhnach Chrom Dubh (the latter is translated into English as Garland Sunday, though there is no evidence that garlands played any part in its celebration in Ireland). This is the last Sunday before Lammas Day (1 August), known in Ireland as the Festival of Lughnasa, a Church feast commemorating St Peter’s miraculous deliverance from prison. In a more pagan context Lughnasa is a harvest festival, marking the last Sunday of summer and the beginning of the potato harvest. In some areas the first Sunday in August, Domhnach Lughnasa, was the day of celebration instead.
Here, at Daigh Bhride, the celebrants spent the Saturday night in prayer, singing, drinking and festivity, and until comparatively recently they were joined there by Aran Islanders from Inisheer, who used to row their
currachs
across to a gap in the cliffs at
Doolin
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from where they would walk the five miles to the well; it was their singing, according to witnesses, that made the night so memorable. Then on Sunday the
patron
(parish celebration) was continued on the sands at Lahinch and in the town, as it still is today, and it was after this
patron
that the first meal of the new potato crop was eaten.
The scenes on Chrom Dubh Sunday on the strand at Lahinch were described in 1942 by Sean Mac Mathuna, who lived all his life at a townland between the Cliffs of Moher and the cove at Doolin. He referred to it as Cranndubh:
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… it was a real day of sport there on the strand. In the old days there used to be a horse-race on the sand and crowds of people watching it. In the town itself and on the Promenade there were crowds to be seen, and every one seeking some kind of sport. There used to be the whole world of tricksters there, each trickster of them making as much noise as if he were paid for it. The man of the musical instrument was there and the dancing woman, the card-man, and the man that used to frighten us when we watched him dipping a fork in the barrel of blazing tow and putting it into his mouth and down into his throat. And if the tinkers were not there with their women and children it is not yet a day! The world of noise from them by afternoon when the grown tinkers had a good drop past the tooth! Some of them in a fighting humour and more of them without power in foot or hand but lying in a heap after the day … Before my time the man who had the gander
in the barrel used to be there. There were ‘standings’ in the street selling a kind of biscuit that is never seen now, a hundred sorts of sweets, lemonade, oranges and many other good things besides. The street used to be thronged with people and the taverns bursting out with those drinking in them. I regret to say that it was not always the Patron of Lahinch passed without a blow being struck amongst those who were drunk or those who had some spite for each other. But probably it was part of the sport and merriment of the day whatever strife would break out amongst the few who would make a show of themselves. It was very seldom that illwill or enmity resulted from a fight people might have on a day of fun and diversion like Cranndubh Sunday at Lahinch.
The vigil at St Brigid’s Well and the associated
patron
at Lahinch, together with the pilgrimage to the summit of Croagh Patrick, the holy mountain in County Mayo, on the last Saturday and Sunday in July and the Puc Fair at Killorglin in County Kerry – the Fair of the He-Goat – which lasts for three days are, according to Maire MacNeill, the four most enduring survivals in Ireland of Lughnasa, the harvest festival observed in all Celtic lands.
Close to the well is a burial ground and in it a vault in which the omnipresent Cornelius lay behind a rusty iron door under a Victorian Gothic memorial; and on the hillside stands O’Brien’s monument, an elegant Ionic column with an urn on top of it. It was said to have been erected at the expense of his grateful tenantry by compulsory subscriptions; in fact they contributed £36 out of a total of £400. At the base of it a long and fulsome inscription records his many virtues.
Down on the road next to the well there are two pubs, Murphy’s and Considine’s. Murphy’s used to have three fiddles hanging on the wall behind the bar which were available to anyone who fancied
playing a tune at any time; but now the lady who used to loan them out was dead, and the pub had been improved and the fiddles packed away or thrown away or given away. There was no one to ask.
By the time we reached the Cliffs of Moher the grey, watery December day was nearly done and it was beginning to grow dark. The cliffs are among the great wonders of the western world. They are not anywhere near the highest cliffs in the British Isles but they are certainly among the most awesome. A five-mile enfilade of sheer precipices, many of them overhanging a void and highly unstable at certain levels, in places overgrown with moss and other vegetation, they rise from beds of limestone and shale through hundreds of feet of stratified flags to, successively, a wide ledge of yellow sandstone, a narrow band full of beautiful but almost completely inaccessible fossils, and finally a thick band of black shale which extends to the top.
About a mile from the northern end, at the highest point, 668 feet above the sea, stands O’Brien’s Tower, a tea-house and gazebo built by him in 1835 and now restored, from which visitors to the cliffs might admire the unparalleled view. He also provided a piper to entertain them, according to the
Clare Journal
of 5 October 1854, who unfortunately fell over the cliff while drunk. O’Brien also commissioned a three-mile-long wall made of upended olive-tinted Liscannor limestone flags six feet high and an inch thick, and set up by his peasantry along the cliff edge to prevent visitors and their horses being sucked over it by some sudden downdraught. These flags are to be seen everywhere in this region, serving as door and window lintels, roofing slates, floor slabs and most commonly as fencing. Beyond this point the cliffs gradually descend to a ruined signal tower at Hag’s Head where they are still 400 feet high. Beyond that they vanish into the sea.
By now the rain had stopped but it was horribly cold and damp and the wind was still strong enough to blow the waterfalls pouring over the cliff edge high into the air in what looked like long plumes of steam, to fall in the fields behind. By now it was high water and in spite of the wind, except where it broke white on the screes at the base of the cliffs, the sea was about as calm as it was ever likely to be off the Cliffs of Moher in winter.
