Round Ireland in Low Gear (23 page)

To me the most wonderful of all Dublin pubs was O’Meara’s Irish House on the corner of Wood Quay. Its façade was topped by six round towers of the sort but not the size that soar up above Irish monastic settlements and the façade itself was embellished with coloured stucco reliefs of such heroes of Irish nationalism
and Catholic emancipation as Henry Grattan (1796–1820), making his last speech to the about-to-be abolished Irish Parliament in 1800, and Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847). But despite these remembrances of things and times past in Dublin’s publand, for those of a selective nature or finicky disposition it is worth heeding what Swift wrote in a letter to Charles Ford in August 1725: ‘No men in Dublin go to Taverns who are worth sitting with.’

What I remembered most about Dublin was the poverty. The poor lived in what were sometimes large eighteenth-century houses that had once been among the most elegant in the British Isles, but in Victorian times had become rookeries, teeming with inhabitants; what O’Casey described as ‘a long drab gauntlet of houses, some of them fat with filth … long kennels of struggling poverty and disordered want … the lacerated walls, the windows impudent with dirt’. The poor swarmed in the street markets, filling the air with the adenoidal noises which rose to almost supersonic levels during their violent quarrels, called narks. They were to be found in the food markets high up around Thomas Street, and Meath Street, and Moore Street west of O’Connell Street, and around St Mary’s Abbey, and in the junk and antique markets off Cornmarket and down on the quays. The big Christmas market was in Cole’s Lane and there were secondhand books behind Bachelor Walk, where a minor massacre of Dubliners by British troops took place in 1914. Second- and third-hand boots and shoes and clothing were on sale in Anglesea Market and Riddles Row – markets more like oriental souks, where some still wore, and you could still buy, the black cro – cheted woollen shawls that had been since time immemorial the uniform of the female poor, and were now soon to become collectors’ items.

The streets of the poor are almost certainly not now as they
were then: there were doorways like the entrances to rock tombs in Chambers Street and in Crompton Court; shrines high on the walls with the lamps burning, just as in Naples; there was the vast cobbled expanse of Smithfield, as big as an airfield; whitewashed cottages with half doors in Camden Row and Sarah Place that looked as if they had been flown in from County Galway. They were beautiful streets, poverty-ridden but full of vibrant life: children swung on ropes from the lamp posts, or skipped with bits of rough cord; washing fluttered everywhere in the breeze; men wearing suits and caps, never without a jacket, sat on the kerb stones waiting for something to happen, watching the horse drays putting the motor traffic into disarray.

And there was Culture, much of it behind glass; and Trinity College, a seat of learning which housed a strange mixture of Northern and Southern Irish, Anglo-Irish, and others, even more exotic, from the third world, and in which, if Donleavy was to be believed, whores were kept in oubliettes under the floors of the lofty Georgian chambers, maturing like port in more conventional establishments.

And food … city of the finest roasting beef (to be found in Meath Street) and – as a last resort – coddle-stew of bacon and sausage, or liver and mash
à la
Bloom. But it was to be for me, after thirty years of absence, Bloomsville still unrevisited.

I caught Wanda up, which didn’t take long as she was barely making steerage way in a gear about two and a half times too low, and we pedalled on together along the towpath to Charlemont Street Bridge, south of which were the suburbs of Ranelagh, scene of a large-scale massacre of English colonists on Easter Monday, 1209, a day which seems to bring out the worst in Dubliners so far as the English are concerned; and Donnybrook, where an annual fair founded by King John in 1204, and wild even by Irish
fair standards, took place every year until it was finally suppressed in 1855.

Then on past Rathmines and Terenure where, at No. 41 Brighton Square, on the borders of these two suburbs, Joyce was born in 1882. Down there too in Ontario Terrace he sited a Bloom residence, the one in which, according to Mrs Bloom, Mary the housemaid padded out her bottom in order to excite Mr Bloom, who appears to have been in a permanent state of excitement anyway, as those explorers who have finally reached page 933 of the unlimited edition would probably agree.

Well, we would not be seeing any of these wonders on this particular trip; nor Synge’s birthplace and subsequent residence, both of them not much more than a Jacob’s Dublin Water Biscuit’s toss from the bank of the River Dodder, down in the undiscovered country on the Rathmines/Rathgar border from whose bourne no English cyclist has ever been known to return. Nor would we visit Mount Jerome, the vast Protestant cemetery which we would soon be raising on the port quarter, which contains the remains of Sheridan Le Fanu; William Lecky, historian; Edward Dowden, Shakespearean scholar; AE, otherwise George William Russell, poet; John Millington Synge, playwright, and a supporting cast of thousands.

At Suir Road Bridge, after a two-mile lockless stretch from Portobello, the Circular Line ended and the Grand Canal, Main Line, began. Originally the commercial terminus of the Canal had been in James’ Street Harbour, a mile east of the bridge alongside the Guinness brewery which, at the time of its closure in 1960, was the Canal’s principal user. From the brewery, boats used to carry the drink in wooden casks as far as Limerick, which took four days. The boatmen, who were wretchedly paid, were expert in drawing off a number of pints from each barrel on board for their personal consumption. This did not mean that the publican
received less than he paid for at the other end, because the men in the brewery who filled the barrels always added a quantity over and above what there should have been, for the benefit of the boatmen. Guinness were only too well aware of this practice but there was really nothing the company could do to prevent it. It was useless to put seals on the bungholes as the boatmen had a far more sophisticated way of extracting the beverage. The company did hope when it introduced metal casks known as iron lungs during the 1950s that these would be impregnable, but the boatmen soon found a way of tapping them too. However, their triumph was short-lived. Soon after this the Canal was closed down altogether.

What a strange sight it must have been to see the crew of a canal boat tapping a barrel, presumably at night and in some remote stretch of the Canal, with the tarpaulins thrown back, more than probably in the rain. One man would hold a lantern, another would tap away with a hammer and a cooper’s chisel at one of the metal hoops, loosening it so that a small hole that would be invisible when the hoop was replaced could be bored in the barrel with a gimlet. In cold weather two holes might have to be made, and when it was really cold, and the drink became even more turbid, it was sometimes necessary to introduce a red-hot rod into the hole before the liquid would begin to flow. Meanwhile, someone would be waiting to catch the extra pints in one or other of two receptacles: a particular sort of sweet tin for a firkin (a barrel holding 9 imperial gallons) or a certain sort of biscuit tin for a 54-gallon hogshead. These held the precise amount that could be drawn off in each case without diddling the customer.

These canal boatmen were often descendants of those who had worked on the canals since they were first dug, as were the lock keepers, the crews of the dredgers and those whose job it was to keep the canals free of weeds. Unlike canal boatmen in Britain,
whose wives and families often accompanied them on their voyages and made up the crew, Irish boatmen had to leave their families at home while working, and lived together in incredible discomfort, often eating from a communal pot. Until 1911, when the Canal Company began to give up horses and equip the boats with Bolinder engines, a crew consisted of six men, including the skipper, who worked six-hour shifts in pairs; one steering for part of the time, the other looking after the horses and operating the lock gates. They had twenty-four hours off a week, from midnight on Saturday until midnight on Sunday, which meant that if they were lucky those who lived near the Canal might be able to spend at least part of that time at home with their families. For the rest of the week they travelled night and day and, except at Dublin, had to handle their own cargoes.

When engines were introduced the crews were reduced to four: the engine-room ‘greaser’, a boy of about fourteen who also acted as cook and general dogsbody, an engineman, a deckhand and the skipper. During the Famine the boats had to be given a military escort to prevent them being looted, but during the Civil War no guards were provided and the boats were often pillaged.

In 1946, after what the Irish still refer to euphemistically as ‘The Armairgancy’, and everyone else calls the Second World War, by mutual agreement between employers and employees the crews were reduced to three who worked a sixteen-hour day which sounds terrible but gave them more time at home.

The little, watery world of the Grand Canal ceased to exist in 1960 when Guinness, the last customers to use canal boats, finally gave up doing so. They continued to do what they could to encourage pleasure boating by going into the hire business in 1963, as did Bord Failte, but things were never the same again.

Beyond Lock No. 1 on the Main Line, a double lock, which gave both us and the Canal another 14.4-foot boost, the Main Line stretched away uphill to the west into what we hoped would eventually become the Irish equivalent of Wind in the Willows country, but which for the next four miles or so looked more like the twentieth-century equivalent of a landscape dreamed up by Hieronymus Bosch. Taking it at a dash, as the
Guide to the Grand Canal
advised us to do, with the time coming up to twelve o’clock, we pedalled like mad along Davitt Road, named after a famous Fenian who spent seven years in Dartmoor,
⁴¹
until we reached what had been the outer suburb of Inchicore and was now rapidly becoming an inner one. Inchicore’s streets, as the large-scale street map of Dublin showed, were literally bristling with schools, all full of children many of them no doubt ready for any kind of deviltry, and now only waiting for the noonday bell to toll before concentrating their hellishly boisterous attentions on us.

Five more locks took us up another 80.3 feet without trying,
and into a soulless area which until recently, according to the latest Ordnance Survey map, had been genuine country. Now it was largely covered with housing and industrial estates and overshadowed by pylons. The only non-blot on the landscape was what had been a rather nice old pub on the canal bank, but even this had been recently gutted by fire. The only items of any real interest seemed to be the Guinness Filter Beds on the right bank of the Canal about a mile to the west, beyond Lock No. 8, portrayed on a large-scale street map as an enigmatic octagonal shape outlined in black.

The question was how to get to them. Here there was not a living thing, let alone a boisterous child, in sight. However we eventually located what until recently had been a pretty little lane, flanked by a couple of cottages, high hedges and mature trees. Now the cottages were in ruins, the hedges were filled with wind-driven plastic, the trees looked as if they had been shattered by gunfire and the surface was littered with broken glass, all that was left of various motor cars after the tinkers had finished stripping them, and sundry other macabre junk.

The lane terminated at a locked gate, beyond which a track led away in the direction of some freshly whitewashed huts, from which an extremely savage-looking Alsatian, just released, was now streaking towards us, followed in a rather more leisurely fashion by a comfortably upholstered gentleman of fifty-odd, wearing a pullover and a cap.

‘I suppose you’ve come to see the Watters,’ said the comfortable-looking gentleman, and introduced himself through the bars as Christy O’Neill, having perused the letter headed ‘To Whom It May Concern’ given us by Bord Failte, which by this time was getting a bit frayed around the edges. To our profound relief he ordered back to its lair the awful creature that had been flinging itself against the gate in paroxysms of rage at its inability to knock it down and tear us limb from limb.

‘Now, the Watters is very interesting,’ Mr O’Neill went on. By now he had unlocked the gate and ushered us into his domain and we were looking at a number of rectangular, brick-lined ponds, some of them roofed in and grass-grown.

Nearby were the huts in which he kept the tools of his trade with signs on them that read, superfluously so far as we were concerned, ‘DANGER. DOGS LOOSE IN HUTS’, and on the far side of the roofed-over ponds there was a nice little cottage which still had most of its slates on, but now abandoned. Everything was spick and span. If it was a wall it was whitewashed. Here, we seemed to be in the heart of rural Ireland, instead of being within screaming distance of an industrial estate.

‘Very interesting they are,’ he reiterated, making them sound more like a married couple than some thousands of gallons of fluid, ‘although there are some who are disappointed on account of thinking that it is the drink itself they are going to see being filthered. Some people are just
eejits
,’ he added pointedly in a way that made me wonder if he included us. To me, a consumer, eejit or not, it was an awe-inspiring thought: that the water in these few shallow ponds, when cleared sufficiently by sedimentation to allow it to be pumped to the brewery, four and a half miles away, and there subjected to further, more rigorous purificatory processes, was the liquid ingredient in a drink of which in the fifty-two weeks ending 31 March 1984, 777,689 bulk barrels each holding 36 imperial gallons were exported. This is equivalent to 1,227,257 half pint glasses a day – a sobering thought. Hardly surprising that a couple of Guinness girls could pick up a hotel such as the Cipriani in Venice without batting an eyelid. And it was I who had helped to make it possible for them to do so, and send their sons to Eton and so forth. In fact I had always wanted to shout across to a Guinness or two in the Royal Enclosure, ‘But for me, and millions like me with our bottle
noses, you wouldn’t be here.’ They could scarcely say the same to me.

Here, among the filter beds, I experienced similar if slightly less rapturous feelings to those manifested by James Bruce, Laird of Kinnaird, the enormous, red-headed, vain but courageous Scot, when he first set eyes on the source of the Blue Nile in 1768. The source! Looking at all this water it suddenly occurred to me to wonder where it came from. I had always understood that the water from which Guinness is created came from the Liffey. But here we were a good couple of miles from the Liffey and with a considerable amount of higher ground between. Did they pump it over the watershed? If so, why?

‘Where does it come from, Mr O’Neill?’ I enquired politely.

‘Where does it come from?’ In spite of his appearance of benign rotundity I had the impression that O’Neill, the Irish Pickwick, didn’t suffer fools gladly, let alone eejits.

‘The water.’

‘The Watter? The Watter comes from the Canal. Where else would it be coming from, the filther beds being where they are, Holy Mother of God?’

‘Goodness, does it really?’ I said, genuinely surprised; but then, feeling that I couldn’t really leave it there, added, ‘But where does the Canal water come from?’ (I was going to ask how the Canal came to have water in it, but refrained because I thought he might answer, ‘Because it is there’, like Mallory or Irving of that big hill.)

‘It comes from up the country, mostly from the Seven Springs, St James’s Well, in the Pollardsdown Fen, under the Curragh, just below the race course. Beautiful soft watter it is, but not bog watter at all. Lots of lime, alkaline – bog watter’s acidic.’

‘Can we get to these springs on our bicycles?’ Wanda asked. She is keen on springs and sources, as I am.

‘There’s no towpath but if you buy a ticket from Dublin to

Kildare you can see them from the train window just before you get into Kildare; but Kildare’s not much of a place at all,’ said Mr O’Neill, no doubt forgetting that he was maligning what had been the shrine of St Brigid, where the perpetual fire burned until the Dissolution. ‘You’se best go on to Cork.’

‘What about the Liffey? Does any of that get into the Canal?’ I asked Mr O’Neill, courageously risking one of his memorable rebukes.

‘Not a drop. It goes under it at the Leinster Aqueduct but not a drop gets into it, or into the Springs either, although it wanders around the hills like a drunken man a mile or two up from them, as if it might be going to contribute a bit. Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s coming up for me dinner time.’

Later, we ate what
A Visitor’s Guide to Pubs in Dublin
described as ‘a variety of hot and cold dishes’, all of which were excellent, while sitting in the sunshine outside Healy’s Black Lion Inn by
the bridge at Clondalkin – ‘The in place’, the
Guide
went on, ‘for the young and sporting fraternity’, for which we undoubtedly qualified, if for nothing else, as a couple of elderly sports.

After this we resumed our journey along the Canal, easily resisting the suggestion made in more than one guide book that we ascend the Round Tower of Clondalkin (‘approx. 84 ft. Views of the Central Plain and the Dublin Mts. to the S.’, or words to that effect), preferring to conserve our energies for something we couldn’t avoid expending them on, a something which almost immediately made itself manifest.

Although the relevant map in the
Canal Guide
showed quite distinctly that the towpath followed the south bank west of Clondalkin, it also ran a fine, firm, solid line along this section of the north bank, giving the impression that it indicated something superior to a mere towpath. It was this that I very stupidly decided it would be best to follow. Soon, the housing estates which
hitherto had flanked the Canal petered out, and we found ourselves in the first real country we had encountered since leaving Dublin. But then, horror of horrors, just beyond Lock No. 11, the fine, firm pathway along which we were happily pedalling under the fine, warm sun suddenly degenerated into a muddy track kept open only by the cows which had somehow managed to crash through the hedges and climb the Canal embankment from the adjacent fields, accompanied by innumerable horseflies, gnats and other insects galvanized into activity by the unnaturally fine weather. This track, which followed a cliff-hanging route along the extreme edge of the Canal, was rendered completely invisible by dense growths of stinging nettles, cow parsley, reeds and other assorted veg, all of it breast-high and all of it loaded with deadly pollen which our passage through it released, reducing me instantly to a sneezing, watery-eyed, hay fever-ridden wreck.

At this point, if either of us had had any sense at all, we should have turned back, but we were now just sufficiently far from Clondalkin Bridge to make the idea unattractive. What followed, with the sun beating down as through a burning glass; with the gnats and the horseflies, all of which seemed to have been weaned on the sort of insect repellent with which we now smeared ourselves; with the nettles into which we fell flat from time to time, stinging ourselves severely; and with the abundance of cows, was a nightmare.

After a few hundred yards it became impossible to ride at all, and we had to push our bikes the rest of the way. This was partly because the Shimano transmissions, in their element hacking down the north face of Fujiyama, rock-hopping along some beach on Shikoku Island or even descending a forest ride in the Quantocks, here got so fouled up with Irish cow parsley that they would barely function; and partly because even if they had, the track was so muddy and full of holes and cow crap that you only
had to make one mistake and fall off to the left rather than the right and you would end up in about five feet of water. But the principal obstacles were the cows themselves, out in force enjoying the weather and all refusing to move in any sensible direction.

Twice we came to the boundary of one farmer’s land with another’s where what in more friendly times had been a stile was now an object so festooned with barbed wire that it looked like something in the Hindenberg Line, and here in both cases the animals turned and prepared to make a last stand, ankle-deep in mud. The only thing to do was to drive them down the Canal embankment using the only weapons we had, our bicycle pumps, unload both bikes completely, then lift them five feet in the air and over the fence, trying to avoid puncturing the tyres on the wire, wishing all the time that we had lightweights instead of mountain bikes weighing in at 38 pounds, and when it was done re-loading everything before setting off to deal with another herd, all fresh and ready for an encounter. We were a bit like one of those competing naval teams at the Royal Tournament which take guns to pieces, sling them across a yawning gulf on a wire rope, and then re-assemble them, except that we had no competition.