Round Ireland in Low Gear (30 page)

Later that afternoon, sitting in brilliant sunshine outside P. Dunning’s pub in the Octagon surrounded by boys and girls in T-shirts, drinking Harp under the gay pub umbrellas provided by You Know Who, what I had seen and felt on the mountain seemed like yet another dream.

Reluctantly quitting my ringside seat in the Octagon from which I was enjoying watching the procession of the human comedy, I
took my bike and baggage across the way to the Grand Central Hotel, which was nice-looking rather than grand, and took my place in a queue for the 16.05 bus bound for Newport, Mulrany, Achill Sound, and finally Dooagh. It looked as if it was going to be pretty heavily ballasted, not only with locals going home for the weekend but also with what used to be known back in the 1930s as
Wandervogeln
, now loaded with those enormously tall back packs which make those who carry them look as if they are transporting menhirs on their backs.

Among the back packers was a very serious young Protestant couple from Ulster who comported themselves rather like early Christians in a lion’s den, which may well be what it feels like for an Ulster Protestant holidaying in the Catholic South. And there was a rather awful Swiss-German boy who spent part of the trip explaining with heavy jocularity to Mrs Monaghan the meaning of
Jungfrau
and
Liebfraumilch
, something she didn’t grasp at all.

We travelled first through boggy, undulating country that I was glad I wasn’t cycling through, catching an occasional view of some of the hundred islands swimming in Clew Bay. Beyond Newport, which was once a stop on the railway line from Westport to Achill Sound, with a viaduct to prove it, we turned westwards. To the right now parts of the Nephin Beg Range rose, at first gently, then more steeply into the air. From here you could walk northwards, crossing it and the Bog of Erris for twenty miles until you reached the north coast of Mayo, through some of the loneliest parts of Ireland, without seeing any human habitation, apart perhaps from a shooting lodge or the remains of one or, for that matter, any human being.

To the left now somewhere down by the shore was Carrigahooley, one of the strongholds of Grace O’Malley (Graine Ui Maille in Irish), Queen of Clew Bay. The daughter of a family of sea-rovers, she married first the chieftain of Ballinahinch, and secondly
Richard, chief of the Burkes of Mayo and master of Carrigahooley. She had her own fleet and her own army, and her greatest enemy was Sir Richard Bingham, English Governor of Connaught, who captured her, built a gallows to hang her for plundering the Aran Islands, and only let her go on a pledge of good behaviour given by her son-in-law, known by the English as ‘The Devil’s Hook’ and by the Irish as ‘The Fiend of the Sickle’. Bingham himself described her as ‘a notable traitress and nurse of all rebellions in the province for forty years’. She went to London, after a serious defeat by Bingham, and is there said to have met Queen Elizabeth and asked for her protection. She died in poverty around 1600, and is thought to have been buried on Clare Island at the mouth of Clew Bay.

It was on the rocks of Clare Island, twelve years previously, that the great Armada vessel
El Gran Grin
went down. The survivors, who numbered a hundred and included Don Pedro de Mendoza, her captain, were all massacred on the orders of the chief of the island, also an Ui Maille, who hoped to ingratiate himself with the English by doing so.

It was a fine sight, Clew Bay, with the islands in full view now, Croagh Patrick rising above it like some dormant Irish Vesuvius and Clare Island apparently swimming across the mouth of it. Meanwhile, eccentric very ancient Achill Islanders of picturesque appearance, no doubt commissioned to do so by Bord Failte, perambulated up and down the bus welcoming monoglot foreign back packers to Ireland and their island and driving the more timid locals, who no doubt have to put up with them every Saturday in summertime, to distraction.

At Mulrany there were green meadows down by the sandy shore, in which cattle and horses grazed, and above them woods filled with flowering rhododendrons, fuchsia hedges and
erica mediterranea
, a sort of flowering heather. Beyond it the road
crossed a narrow isthmus onto the Curraun Peninsula, following what was once the railway line. To the right was Bellacragher Bay, with lines of lobster pots and a scattering of houses, some roofless, down by the shore. Here, whole families were out together in the bog below the bare, steep Curraun Hills, cutting turf and stacking it and making the most of the fine weather. Here, around five in the afternoon in the last days of June, the world looked good, even from the windows of a bus at boiling point.

We crossed the sound which separates Achill Island from the mainland by a swing bridge, and there everyone seemed to be cutting and stacking turf too, or else raking hay by hand and piling it up into cocks, something unknown in England for goodness knows how many years. We were now in a sort of undulating rocky plain, with mountains above it dark against the evening sun and huge cliffs, a landscape full of white, slate-roofed houses, fields with dry-stone walls and what had been until recently thatched cabins, now roofed with corrugated iron and used as barns or tool sheds. It was a man-made landscape filled with rusting reject motor cars, tractors and other agricultural instruments, a more or less treeless land in which their place was taken by the telephone poles that marched across it in every direction, supporting endless cats’ cradles of wires. They made me feel in some places that there was a net separating me from the sky, just like the squirrels in Wanda’s strawberry bed back home must have felt.

By the time we got to Dooagh, the end of the road for the bus, it was almost empty, the locals having melted away at request stops and the visitors having descended en masse at Tramore Strand. At this hour, with no one making the
passeggiata
at Dooagh or giving poteen-making demonstrations, it seemed slightly uninspiring, so I pedalled back the way we had come towards Tramore, stopping off en route for a pot of tea at Higgins’ Fast Food Eatery.

At Tramore the golden sands were extensive enough to absorb the few tents and caravans that stood on the edge of them. There, the boy and girl from the North were in process of pitching a tent so small that it seemed impossible that any couple could sleep in it without adopting the missionary position. Perhaps they were missionaries, sent by the Rev. Paisley. Beyond the Strand, across the Bay, were the Menawn Cliffs, plummeting eight or nine hundred feet sheer to the sea at their southern end – seen from the sea among the most fantastic cliffs in the British Isles.

That evening I put up in a B and B of incredible cleanliness and rectitude. I was the only guest. The pub was entirely populated by locals with whom it was difficult to have any social intercourse, on account of them all having long-term contracts to listen to one another; after a while I would have welcomed the interruption of one of the characters on the bus. After this I had a temporary increase in good spirits eating at the Late Date Restaurant, which was also a butcher’s shop, though again I was the only customer, apart from a couple from the beach who conversed in unnerving whispers. My lamb chops were accompanied by wine from a bottle labelled ‘Vieux Ceps’ (Old Stocks), which was just what it tasted like. Then I rang Wanda to tell her I wished I wasn’t here, as it were, but I didn’t get much sympathy as some deer had just made a meal of her Peace roses.

By now it was ten o’clock on a cloudless night with the sun still in the heavens and in the twilight I took to the road and cycled towards the foot of Slievemore, like Croagh Patrick another cone of quartz, this one shot with mica and more than 2200 feet high. At the foot of Slievemore there is a very old cemetery, its graves outlined in pebbles from the shore, and a walled holy well, dedicated to St Colman of Kilmacduagh. To the left, a muddy track leads through the ruins of Slievemore village, extending away to the westward into the sunset for nearly a mile. Abandoned as
a village in the late nineteenth century, it continued to be used as a
buaile
, a milking or pasturing place, to which the men of the nearby and by then much more considerable village of Dooagh used to go at certain seasons, living in the ‘booley houses’. This form of transhumance, already rare in other parts of Europe, continued into the early 1960s. Standing now, in the last of the twilight, among its roofless houses and bothies, it was difficult to believe that this village had only been disused for twenty-five years or so.

Mrs S. C. Hall, who travelled extensively in Ireland during the 1840s, described the houses as they were at that time:

Achill, Mrs Hall wrote elsewhere in her book, had some of the most wretched cabins anywhere.

The sky to the west was now a Schiaparelli Shocking Pink and two eccentric rainbows tinged the same colour spanned the entire sky from north to south as I pedalled back from this haunting, haunted place to the pub.

The following morning everything was shrouded in cold, wet mist. In it I rode about four miles to a place called Keem Strand below Achill Head, which really is the end of the road. There I locked the bike to a fence behind a derelict hotel, and began the treat which I had so long promised myself, the ascent of Croaghaun, up through boggy sheep country filled with wild irises. It took about an hour in the mist.

Standing on the edge of Croaghaun, it was difficult to believe that I was now on the edge of the highest sea cliffs in the British Isles, where the mountain suddenly comes to an end and falls 1950 feet to the sea in a series of vast, rocky, partly grass-grown slopes. It was difficult to believe because beyond twenty feet in any direction, up, down or sideways, it was impossible to see anything at all. All I could hear was the sea sighing far below, and the dismal crying of the gulls.

The next day, Sunday, it poured all day. There was no bus until Monday, so I knew I had to either ride it out or see it out. By a miracle I managed to buy four English Sunday papers, which would see me through until evening, and after watching the World Cup on TV in company with a very drunken fellow who kept mumbling, ‘Goo’ ol’ Arshentina! Barshtard British!’ (who weren’t playing anyway), I went to bed. I had already decided to get out of Achill, and out of Ireland, too, until things improved. Monday was the day when the summer bus service came into operation and the first bus was at 07.05. No sooner had I set out to catch it, having paid my bill, than I found that a huge nail from a donkey’s shoe had punctured the rear tyre and I had to strip the bike before turning it upside down in the rain and repairing it, almost weeping with vexation. I missed the bus, but by riding seventeen miles or so in the rain to Mulraney on the mainland, assisted by the strong westerly blast, I managed to catch the train to Westport, and get to Dublin, and thence to Dun Laoghaire for the night ferry. The next day I was in Dorset, enjoying a strawberry-less lunch with Wanda.

North of the district we are describing [Newport, Achill, etc.], are the baronies of Erris and Tyrawley; savage districts, but full of interest and character … Into this wild region civilisation has scarcely yet entered; even now the roads are few, and impassable for ordinary carriages; and probably there are hundreds of the inhabitants, at this moment, who do not even know that a queen reigns over Great Britain. Achill, and its vicinity are primitive places; but … they are refined in comparison with Erris and Tyrawley. M
R
A
ND
M
RS
S. C. H
ALL
.
Ireland, Its Scenery, Character &c
., 1846

Few but sportsmen and poor-law officials know much about Erris.

H
ARRIET
M
ARTINEAU
.
Letters from Ireland
, 1852

At the beginning of October we resumed our travels. This time we made some dramatic changes in what we took with us. Out went all the guide books except
Murray’s Guide
1912, the resulting spaces in the pannier bags being more than filled up with sleeping bags, bivouac bags, ground sheets, inflatable mattresses, gas stove, frying pan, cooking pots etc. By now neither of us could face any more bed and breakfasts, however welcoming, or for that matter evening meals in them or in cafés or restaurants, and we were both determined to sleep in sheds or barns or caravans if it rained, or else in the open. This was not as heroic as it sounded. The whole of Ireland had enjoyed an exceptional September, after almost the worst summer in living memory, and according to an archetypal figure who dwelt on Glasnevin Hill, Dublin, in the temple of the Irish Meteorological Service, the fine weather was likely to continue.

We decided to start from Belmullet in north-west Mayo. One of the more remote places in Ireland, it stands on an isthmus only about 400 yards wide which joins the mainland of Mayo to the Mullet Peninsula, which is itself separated from the rest of the country by two enormous anchorages capable of accommodating whole fleets of ships: Broadhaven to the north and to the south, Blacksod Bay.

The problem was how to get there. The nearest railhead (173 miles from Dublin Heuston) is at Ballina on the River Moy to the east, from which Belmullet is separated by forty miles of almost uninhabited mountains in the Nephin Beg range, and by the Bog of Erris. A bus service runs from Ballina to Belmullet on weekdays, passing en route the Musical Bridge at Bellacorick, and it was on this providentially provided bus – May all the Blessed Saints bless the Provincial and Expressway Bus Services Division – that we made our way there.

The Musical Bridge at Bellacorick was built of limestone in the eighteenth century to span the Abhann Mhor. Here, at our special request, the bus stopped long enough to enable us to produce musical sounds by running stones along the northern parapet, which is somewhat worn as a result of this practice. The southern parapet is more or less non-musical, possibly because the limestone was set in cement when the bridge was repaired during the Troubles. In the middle of the seventeenth century Brian Rua O’Carrabine, the ‘Erris Prophet’, foretold that when the bridge was built it would never be completed, and it never was. It is said that anyone who tries to complete it will come to a sudden end and, indeed, when some years ago an official of Mayo County Council did put the last coping stone in place he died almost immediately after – he was, however, a sufferer from chronic asthma. An Assistant County Engineer also had it placed in position but the following morning it was no longer there, and it lacks a final coping stone to this day.

Belmullet is not much more than a main street which, if one cycles westwards down it, lands you in the waters of Blacksod Bay, that is if the tide is in, otherwise in mud. Thirty-five varieties of fish (including blue shark, cuckoo ray and larger spotted dogfish) have been caught in these waters and those of Broadhaven to the west and north, with which it is linked by a canal.

Long before the First World War great plans had been afoot to build a port for transatlantic liners at the southern end of the Mullet Peninsula, which would have been linked with Ballina and the rest of Ireland by rail, but nothing came of what was to be known as ‘The All Red Route to Canada’. Just as nothing ever really came of the deep sea fishing for herring and mackerel, which existed in extraordinary quantities, simply for lack of any method of onward transportation. Most guide books referred rather
disparagingly to the Peninsula, which in fact has both on it and off it, on some now uninhabited islands, some pretty strange things and, indeed, one or two pretty strange people.

Out to the west at Termoncarragh, which is or was the last Irish nesting place of the phalarope, down near the shore among the sand dunes there is a cemetery, very overgrown, full of old tomb enclosures and some official gravestones recording British merchant seamen whose bodies were washed ashore from ships
torpedoed or wrecked off the coast here during the last war. There is also a weird family vault, through a hole in the side of which skulls and skeletons are visible. Nearby, at Doonamo, a high and lonely headland bare of vegetation because of the big seas that break over it, there is a prehistoric fort like Dun Aengus with a
cheval-de-frise
, but much smaller. Further south, about a mile and a half offshore to the west are two low-lying islands, Inishglora and Inishkeera. On Inishglora, where there are the ruins of a monastery founded by St Brendan, the nails and hair of the dead were said to grow as vigorously as they had done in life: ‘On Inis Gluair in Irrus Downan,’ wrote the author of the
Book of Ballymote
, which dates from about 1400, ‘the bodies thither brought do not Rot, but their nails and hair grow and everyone there recognises his father and grandfather for a long time after death; and no meat will putrefy on it even without being salted.’

Here, the Children of Lir (himself one of the Tuatha De Danaan), who had been changed into swans by their jealous stepmother, Aoife, swam in the Atlantic for the last three hundred years of their nine-hundred-year enchantment. The first third of their sentence had been spent in Lough Derravaragh in County Westmeath; the second in the often inhospitable waters of the Sea of Moyle, near Fair Head in County Antrim, and in the mouth of the nearby Margy River at Ballycastle. Their fate was especially cruel because they retained their human memories of what had befallen them through the centuries. Even in the guise of swans they had beautiful singing voices which brought joy to all who heard them. As swans, they were looked after by St Mochaomhog until Lairgen, King of Connacht, tried to steal them, at which point they turned back into human beings, albeit rather old ones. Fortunately, the Saint had time to baptize them before they died. As punishment for causing all this trouble Aoife was turned into an airborne witch.

Further south are two more islands, Inishkea North and South, separated by a narrow channel. On Inishkea North there is a mysterious mound 500 feet wide and 60 feet high, a shell-mound and prehistoric dye factory in which purple dye was produced from shellfish. In the 1900s, when the population of the two islands was 212, the Norwegians established a whale factory on it, where they converted the blubber into oil, the meat into cattle feed and the bones into fertilizer. Each island had its own king, and both were evacuated in 1931.

To the east was Blacksod Bay where, on 6 or 7 September 1588, yet another Armada galleon,
La Rata Encoronada
, with Don Alonso de Leyva and a band of young noblemen on board, anchored westwards of Doona Castle. The
Rata
dragged her anchors, stranded, and had to be abandoned. De Leyva and his men landed and immured themselves in the Castle of Doona, together with any treasure and armour they could salvage before burning the wreck. Two other ships, one of them the
Duquesa Santa Ana
, the other perhaps the
Nuestra Senhora de Begona
, also came in to the bay seeking shelter, and the
Santa Ana
anchored in Elly Bay, on the shores of which the hated Sir Richard Bingham, Governor of Connaught, had a castle. His first act on returning to Ireland from the Netherlands in September to re-assume his office as Governor had been to issue orders that all Spanish refugees cast ashore on the coast of his province should be brought to Galway and put to death. However, de Leyva and his men, having abandoned the Castle of Doona, joined forces with the crew of the
Santa Ana
and managed to sail away.

The other ship which had come in, the
Begona
, had no long boat to make contact with the land and put to sea again after a week; it was this ship which brought the news of the loss of the
Rata
to the crew of the
Zuniga
after she left her anchorage in Liscannor Bay to sail back to Spain.

What subsequently happened to de Leyva, the young noblemen and the combined crews of the two ships now aboard the
Santa Ana
is like something from an heroic work of fiction. On 15 September the wind once more backed to the south and, with another gale building up, the
Santa Ana
was forced to sail northwards. She went ashore in Loughros More Bay, north-west of Ardara in County Donegal, and was wrecked, apparently without loss of life. There, for nine days, the crews remained entrenched near the wreck, after which they marched south through wild, potentially hostile country to Killybegs, now a small but important fishing port on the north shore of Donegal Bay. There they found the
Gerona
, lying with a broken rudder and other damage, together with her crew of five hundred men: one of three Armada galleasses which fetched up here at Killybegs, and the only one not irreparably damaged.

On 16 October, having repaired the
Gerona
’s rudder, they again set sail with a total of thirteen hundred on board, with the intention of going east about round the north of Ireland and then south through the Irish Sea. They succeeded in rounding Malin Head, the most northerly point of Ireland, but then the rudder again gave way and the ship was driven at midnight on to a rock westwards of the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim, a wreck in which all but nine of the men on board were drowned. The survivors were conveyed to the Castle of Dunluce, the residence of the MacDonnells, later Earls of Antrim, which stands on the edge of precipitous rocks detached from the mainland, east of Portrush. There they were kindly treated by the chieftain, Sorley Boy MacDonnell, Lord of the Route and Constable of Dunluce, who took the opportunity to salvage some of the guns from the wreck, ‘three fair pieces of brass among the rocks of Bunboyes, where Don Alonso was drowned’, which he used to reinforce the defences of his castle.

Of the people on the Mullet, the least attractive to me was one who, while we were plugging down the length of it on our bikes into a strong south-westerly, allowed his horrible anti-British sheepdog to bite my ankle to the bone and having witnessed it happen (he could scarcely say he hadn’t with the damn thing continuing to hang on to it like a vampire taking nourishment) said nothing and simply went on loading dung on to a trailer. In fact, apart from Wanda, the only sympathy I received was from the girls in Casualty at the Belmullet Hospital – ‘And what sort of man, and what sort of dog is that, if you please?’ – who gave me a free tetanus injection. They also gave me a document which attested that I had suffered ‘one small dog bite’. How big do they have to be to rate as ‘big’ on the Mullet Peninsula? After which, having found the custodian of a now empty-for-the-winter caravan we slept in some comfort after dining magnificently on great big steaks.

The following day, in brilliant weather, we did our best ever ride together, more than fifty miles from Belmullet to Ballina by the coast road, which for the first twenty miles passes through the wild and almost uninhabited country of the Bog of Erris. To the north were the great cliffs which extend all the way eastwards from Benwee Head, the northernmost point of Mayo, almost as far as Ballycastle. Again we slept in a caravan, this time at Ballina, and dined on lamb chops preceded by hot rum, a bottle of which Wanda had thoughtfully bought on the ferry crossing over. We didn’t see much of Ballina – we were whacked.