Round Ireland in Low Gear (20 page)

The next five miles or so, conducted in thick, yellow Sherlock Holmes-type fog of a sort long extinct in Britain, were absolutely ghastly. The road, which was said to offer some of the Ring of Kerry’s finest views over the islands in Darrynane Bay, now invisible, wound round the edge of the Cahernageeha and Farraniaragh Mountains and culminated in the ascent of the 683-foot Coomakista Pass. There followed a steep descent, still in swirling fog, until suddenly the sky opened up ahead to reveal stone-walled fields sweeping down to Waterville on the sandy shores of Ballinskelligs Bay, and beyond it the sheer cliffs of Bolus Head with the sun setting behind them.

Waterville had all the distilled melancholy of a seaside resort out of season. The Butler Arms, The Smuggler’s Inn, the Waterville Beach and the Waterville Lake Hotels, the owners and managers of which smiled so welcomingly from the pages of
Discover Ireland
,
Hotels and Guest Houses
, were all shut, and I only hoped that they themselves were in warmer climes.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Wanda said.

Recklessly we hired yet another taxi owned by yet another O’Sullivan – in Ireland you can travel for days through regions in which all the inhabitants appear to have the same name. How does one distinguish between fourteen Mike O’Sullivans, apart from having casts made of their teeth? We asked O’Sullivan where he would stay if it wasn’t in Waterville and preferably not somewhere that meant going backwards, and when he had got over the shock of anyone not wanting to stay in Waterville he suggested a place on Valencia Island away to the north that might
be just the thing, and said he would take us there for a consideration, but wouldn’t we like to see the sunset over the Skelligs on the way? We said we would love to and we set off at breakneck speed with our bikes – ‘Now those are the finest boikes I ever saw’ – on the roof rack, through a flat landscape at the feet of the Ballinskelligs across which a band of beaglers with five or six couple of shagged-out beagles were wending their way home. We could see why they looked tired when we crossed the ridge of the Ballinskelligs and saw another pack, this one in full cry up the steep hillsides (or as full cry as a pack of beagles can be on a 60° slope after a long day), with a hare with the situation well in hand way ahead of them. ‘There’ll be no kill today,’ said one of the followers, a phlegmatic man armed with a stave and wearing a cap.

Eight miles offshore were two conical black shapes silhouetted against the dazzling light of a stormy sunset: Little and Great Skellig, rock islets composed of grit and shale veined with quartz, rising sheer out of the Atlantic, and the home of seals and innumerable puffins, stormy petrels, fulmars, shearwaters, nesting gannets and many other seabirds. Together with the Great Blasket and its attendant islands further north, off the Dingle Peninsula, these were at one time the westernmost inhabited spots in the whole of Europe.
³³
If one counts the lighthouse keepers on the Great Skellig and on Tearaght Island in the Blasket group, both manned at the time of writing, they still qualify. At Portmagee, small fishing village of orange, pale green, white and ochre houses where the boats were sheltering inside the jetty, there was a pub in which the proprietor, a young man who ran trips to the Skelligs in the summer months, told us that if we wanted to go out to
them in winter it would cost us £70, weather permitting. ‘Come back at Easter,’ he said. ‘It might be cheaper.’

On Valencia Island, of which it was difficult to form any opinion in the prevailing conditions, it now being pitch dark, we stayed in a pub in which the landlord went on and on while we were eating plaice and chips, dizzy with fatigue, quoting extempore from guide books about the island – ‘Contrary to general belief its Spanish-sounding name is an anglicization of the Irish
Bheil Inse
, pronounced
Val Inshe
’, he recited, and ‘Knightstown, the principal settlement, has a Western Union cable station at which the first cable messages from America were received in 1858.’ But he made us feel a couple of heels when he got onto his early life. Born Cardiff, 1919. Mother died when he was aged two. Abandoned by his father aged seven. Brought up by aunt in Cardiff. Cycled here from England in three days in 1937 on beautiful lightweight bike, of which he still has the frame, etc. And he turned out to be positively angelic when we discovered the next morning that we were short of money, upon which he cashed an English cheque for us, backed by a now defunct Eurocheque card, giving us £100 for £90.70 English.

That morning, with a ghastly grey light suffusing the landscape, we made our way over a foul hill to the abandoned Geokaun slate quarries, now a shrine: an enormous cavern, dripping with water, in which Our Lady of Lourdes was perched high up among slates that looked as if at any moment they might fall on our unworthy nuts, with St Bernadette below, standing in front of an altar and a fountain and gazing up at her. Below it was a lighthouse at the entrance to Valencia Harbour, and away to the north, out beyond Doulous Head, was the Dingle Peninsula. ‘We’re getting there,’ I said, in parody of British Rail’s ridiculous slogan, but my partner didn’t think it very funny.

Knightstown, to which we now descended, the capital of the
island, was a really attractive place: a lot of fishing boats in and out of the water, the old lifeboat station with all the rescues recorded on boards, the old fishermen’s huts, an old-fashioned hotel with a palm tree growing outside it, and a post office with a very friendly postmistress who had a miniature gondolier’s hat with
Venezia
inscribed on it, one of the most westerly postmistresses and gondolier’s hats in Europe. Then all the way back to Portmagee, and out on the road to Cahirciveen. Cahirciveen (c. 1550 inhabitants and shrinking), birthplace of Daniel O’Connell ’the Liberator’, had a very, very long main street and apart from being asphalted and having a lot of cars in it, it was exactly as it had been before 1914, if the old photographs displayed in a shop window were anything to go by. Altogether it had between fifty and sixty pubs, according to various independent witnesses, although one reckless young fellow said there were sixty-two. Whatever the real number, for the size of the place they must have constituted some kind of record. The most amazing was The Harp, which had a facsimile of this instrument outside it and an old-fashioned exterior which didn’t prepare me for the interior, a labyrinth which housed a squash court in which the thud of ball on rackets could be heard, a sauna and a huge, pitch-dark ballroom with cunning steps concealed in it, on one of which I tripped and fell flat on my face. After this I inspected a restaurant which had roast chicken lunches at £1.95, and a nameless shop illuminated by one single, bare electric bulb, perhaps until that morning a drapery, its shelves filled with empty cardboard boxes, and at the far end a screen from behind which strange rustling noises proceeded. Meanwhile, Wanda took tea at the Tower Tearoom in front of a cosy fire. Before she went in there was a sign in the window which said ‘No Cyclists’, but when she parked her bike outside and went in the proprietress took the sign down, replacing it when she left.

We left Cahirciveen by the road to Killorglin, up what was the estuary of the river Ferta. To the left of the road, beyond a steam power station, rose Knocknadobar, a holy mountain, the Hill of the Wells. A great festival used to take place there on Lughnasa, the last Sunday in July, a pilgrimage with singing, dancing and athletics. Fires were lit, and special cakes were cut either by a young couple about to marry or, failing such a pair, by the couple who performed best in the dancing contest. The pilgrims and revellers stayed on the hill until midnight and before they left the summit was strewn with wild flowers. They then went down to the houses and
shebeens
(drinking places), where those too infirm to climb the mountain were already gathered, and there passed the rest of the night in dancing, card-playing and story-telling.

There are several wells on the mountain; the water from one (Fionan’s Well) was reputed to cure sick cattle, and a cattle fair was held nearby. The pool at the foot of Knocknadobar, called Glaise Chumra (the Fragrant Stream) and dedicated to St Fursey,
³⁴
was visited in particular by pilgrims with eye trouble for its healing powers.

A similar festival took place on Drung Hill, north of Knocknadobar, at the summit of which is Leacht Fhionain (Fionan’s Cairn). Fionan is the patron saint of this parish. A number of legends are connected with this hill: that St Fionan is buried under the cairn and the well sprang up there for this reason; and that three nuns for three years in succession, and on the same day, saw a round stone rise out of the hilltop and descend the slope, which led them to conclude that an annual pilgrimage should be made to the summit. There was also a custom recorded by the historian Charles Smith, who travelled in these parts in the
middle of the eighteenth century, that anyone who passed the mountain should compose some verses in its honour, or risk misfortune. ‘All the verses that I heard,’ he wrote, ‘were about as rugged and uncouth as the road on which they were made, for which reason I shall not trouble the reader with them; although I had several copies given me for that purpose.’

At about one-fifteen we reached the heavenly warmth of the Falcon Hotel, in which three Frenchmen dressed in long rubber boots and Barbours, who had been shooting woodcock, were drinking whiskey and eating a picnic put together in France from a wicker hamper. We asked the gillie, who was excluded from the feast, who came shooting in these parts of Kerry nowadays.

‘There used to be a lot of Germans shooting,’ he said, ‘but now they all go to Kenya. The Italians like to come but they’re terribly dangerous and no one wants them. The only good shot is what they call a “Conte” from Milan; but he’s a terrible man, too, a terrible fussy man.’

‘He is that,’ interjected a boy from behind the bar.

‘With this man everything has to be just so. The drinks must be right, the food must be right – he gets very angry sometimes about the food’ (I can’t blame him, I thought) ‘and the bed must be just right, not too hot and not too cold.’ (‘What that Conte needed was a week in the bed and breakfasts; that would break his spirit,’ Wanda said later.)

I asked him if there were any deer.

‘Only Japanese Sitka deer,’ he said.

‘What do you do with them?’ I said. ‘Shoot them?’

‘No, we export them.’

‘Where to?’

‘To Japan.’

We continued on our way. It was now very cold. We passed the ruins of a huge folly built high above the road, backed by
mountains – Glenbeigh Towers, built 1867–71 and burned down in 1922 during the Civil War. It was designed by Edward William Godwin, the architect of Dromore Castle in County Limerick, for Roland Winn, fourth Lord Headley of Aghadoe, a landlord notorious for his ill-treatment of his tenantry. He later threatened to sue Godwin, who had already run off with the actress Ellen Terry, because the Castle let in water in authentic mediaeval fashion, and because the cost was too high. The fifth Lord Headley, his successor, having married three times, then became a Muslim and made the pilgrimage to Mecca, after which he assumed the title of
Al Hadji
and became President of the British Muslim Society.

We rode the next twenty-five miles or so to Killarney by a minor road that skirted Lough Caragh and the northern flanks of the now snow-covered MacGillycuddy’s Reeks in the sort of rain that would have made Noah batten down the hatches, and arrived long after dark. Although we felt pretty miserable, the lights burning inside St Mary’s, the great Gothic Cathedral that is Pugin’s masterpiece in Ireland, lured us into its soaring interior and there, in a pew remote from public view, we listened to Benediction while two enormous pools of water spread about our feet, as if we were incontinent.

Killarney, with all the lights on in its narrow streets, was full of life in spite of the oceans of water that were falling on it, everyone except ourselves being quite content under the umbrellas which the inhabitants of Cork and Kerry, not to speak of Limerick, Galway, Mayo and Sligo, are presumably born with already open. After the places we had visited, being in High Street, Killarney was a bit like being in the rue du Faubourg St Honoré. But all of a sudden the lights began to go out, at which point Killarney became a city of dreadful night.

We had tried five different pubs and B and Bs which either
didn’t want us or we didn’t want them before we finally washed up on the front doorstep of The Orchard, Props. Mr and Mrs Roger and Joan O’Donoghue, whose eight sons had provided eight-elevenths of the local football team before four of them emigrated to America. Then to bed after the hottest bath anyone could possibly imagine. The following morning after breakfast we talked to Joan O’Donoghue, a ball of fun despite being crippled with arthritis, a complaint that seems particularly prevalent among the devout ladies in Ireland, especially those with large families. I asked her, in an unguarded moment, what she did besides running a guest house and having four sons more or less on the premises, upon which she went off into peals of laughter.

After this we penetrated what were now the snowy fastnesses of the Gap of Dunloe, battling through it up a series of hairpin bends to what is called the Madman’s Seat from which a view of what looked like Siberia was obtained. Then we took the road along the bank of the River Laune – strong, deep, wooded and silent – to Killorglin, passing en route Liebherr’s German Crane Factory and a Bavarian delicatessen and butcher’s shop installed in an apartment block that might have been transported block by block from Munich.

Killorglin, where we ate the
würst
,
sauerkraut
and
dunkelbrot
we had acquired there, is the place where on 10 August, what is known as Gathering Day, a male goat is hoisted to the top of a high stage where it remains, presiding over an extensive market in cattle, sheep, horses and goats, until Scattering Day, 12 August. That evening, he is taken down and carried round the town on the shoulders of four men to the premises of the town’s shopkeepers, most of whom have benefited from the fair and are consequently asked to contribute to the attendant expenses of maintaining a goat up in the air. When the goat is finally released into greener pastures (one would imagine that it would have had
its throat cut as the climax to what is an extremely ancient ceremony), the horses, cattle and sheep are taken away too, but at all the exits from the town there are road blocks at which men armed with sticks enforce a toll on every animal’s head. The proceeds all go to a family named Foley, who have an ancient and unique charter which entitles them to it and, if hindered, gives them the right to use force to gain it.