Round Ireland in Low Gear (8 page)

Lisdoonvarna, when we reached it after a gratifying downhill run, came as a bit of a shock after all the build-up it had been given by the various guide books I had consulted. In fact I wondered if some of the authors could have been there at all. Admittedly, no resort looks its best in the depths of winter – that is, unless it is a winter resort – and Lisdoonvarna, with the east wind hurrying clouds of freezing vapour through its streets, was no exception. I tried to imagine excited farmers with straw in their hair, accompanied by their match-makers, pursuing unmarried ladies through its streets and down the corridors of the Spa Hotel, which had broken windows and looked as if it would never open again, but failed.

Now, in December, it seemed a decrepit and terribly melancholy place, like the film set of a shanty town. Its hotels, souvenir and fast-food shops had closed down in October and would not re-open until March, some of the hotels not until June. But would what the Irish call the crack – what others call the action – start even then? Rough-looking youths stood on the pavement outside a betting shop, one of the few places open at this hour. The wind struck deep into the marrow of one’s bones; in spite of being dressed in almost everything we possessed we were frozen, and took refuge in a pub, the Roadside Tavern, run by two nice ladies, the walls of which were covered with picture postcards. They
stoked up the fire for us and we gradually thawed out in front of it while we ate ham and soda bread and I drank the health of the priest at Crusheen in Guinness, while Wanda drank port.

Too fed up with Lisdoonvarna to seek out the various sources of its waters, smelly or otherwise, and the various pleasure domes in which customers were given the treatment, we quitted Ireland’s premier spa, and set off westwards up yet another cloud-bound road. Suddenly, as suddenly as we had left it at the foot of Corkscrew Hill, we emerged into dazzling sunshine on the western escarpment of the Burren. Below us it dropped away to a rocky coast on which, in spite of the wind being offshore, heavy seas were breaking, throwing up clouds of glittering spray. Just to look at the shimmering sea after the miseries that had gone before gave us a new lease of life – and we roared down towards it via a series of marvellous bends with the Aztec Super brake blocks on our Shimano Deore XT cantilever brakes screaming (a malfunction) on the Rigida 25/32 rims (for the benefit of those who like a bit of technical detail from time to time), past the ivy-clad tower of Ballynalackan Castle, a fifteenth-century seaside house of the O’Briens perched on a steep-sided rock high above the road, with a magical-looking wood at the foot of it, and on down to the limestone shore.

We were at Poulsallagh, nothing more than a name on the map. Somewhere out to sea to the west, hidden from view in their own mantle of cloud, were the Aran Islands. To the right dense yellow vapour flooded out over the Burren escarpment as if in some First World War gas attack, over a wilderness of stone, interspersed with walled fields and extravagantly painted cottages, their windows ablaze in the light of the declining sun, while high above, squadrons of clouds like pink Zeppelins were moving out over the Atlantic. Here, the haystacks were mound-shaped and covered with nets against the wind, or shaped like upturned boats, hidden
behind the dry-stone walls. To the left, between the road and the sea, were endless expanses of limestone on which the glacial erratics rested, like huge marbles, rolled down from the screes above. Here and there a walled field gave shelter to giant sheep solidly munching the green grass. At Fanore, six miles north of Poulsallagh, we spoke with the first human being we had set eyes on since leaving Lisdoonvarna. He was a small man of about fifty, who was working in a plot beside the road. He had a large head, abundant flaxen hair with a touch of red in it, of the kind that always looks as if it has just been combed, a high forehead and very clear blue eyes like T. E. Lawrence. And he had a voice of indescribable sadness, like the wind keening about a house. After exchanging remarks about the grandness of the day I asked him about the absence of people.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘there are more than meet the eye; but most of them are old, and are by their fires, out of the wind. You can see the smoke of them.’

‘But what about the school? It’s quite new. There must be some children,’ Wanda said.

‘There are children,’ he said, ‘but when those children leave the school, their parents will leave Fanore, and the school will be closed. They are the last ones.’

‘But what will happen to their houses? Surely they won’t be allowed to fall into ruin?’

‘The old ones will be allowed to fall into ruin. The newer ones will be holiday houses. Many of them are already.’

‘And what will you yourself do when the old people are dead, and the children and the younger people have all gone away?’

‘I will give an eye to the holiday houses,’ he said.

As if to prove his words, a few miles beyond the lighthouse at Black Head we came to a ruined village. Close under the mountain the cottages, or what remained of them, were hidden under trees,
moss-grown and covered with ivy, some of it as thick as a man’s arm. It was difficult to believe that people had lived in it during our own lifetime. The ruins might have been prehistoric. Down by the water below the road there was a slip, and smooth rocks with numbers and a white cross painted on them. A little further on was a ruined tower with a spiral staircase leading to the upper part, turrets and machicolations. Nearby was an overgrown, roofless church with gravestones in the churchyard that were simply unworked limestone rocks from the Burren; and Tobar Cornan, a holy well with a little Gothic well house, where a human cranium used to serve as a drinking cup until a priest put a stop to the practice.

By the time we got back to Ballyvaughan, having covered a modest thirty-six miles, the wind had dropped completely and in the afterglow the still waters of the bay were the colour of the lees of wine. Thirty thousand feet or so overhead jets bound for the New World drew dead straight orange crayon lines across a sky still blue and filled with sunshine. There was a tremendous silence, broken only by the whistling of the oystercatchers and the gulls foraging in the shallows. The inhabitants of Ballyvaughan were eating their evening meals and watching telly. If we hadn’t seen them going about their business we might have thought they were dead. Looking at what they presumably subsisted on lining the shelves of the supermarkets, it was surprising that they weren’t. Did they really eat prepacked mashed potato and tins of meat and fish that could easily have doubled as pet food with a change of labels, on which the additives listed by law read like the formula for something nasty?

Famished, we took the edge off our appetites with scones and raspberry jam – the mussels had arrived and stood outside the door in a sack, a huge quantity for £2, enough for two copious meals. Then we went to O’Lochlan’s and sat in its magical interior,
a bit like an Aladdin’s Cave with newspapers on sale. Mr O’Lochlan, it transpired, was a member of one of the historically most powerful septs in this part of the Burren. They had owned the great hazel thickets which still grow at the foot of Cappanawalla, and the great stone fort of Cahermore up among the limestone pavements, and the Ballylaban Ringfort, down near sea level, which contained a single homestead and which, with its earth walls crowned with trees and its moat filled with water, is as romantic as the limestone forts are austere.
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Mr O’Lochlan spoke of the past: Ballyvaughan was not a particularly old village, he said; it really dated from the early nineteenth century when a quay was built for the fishing boats. In 1829 or thereabouts this collapsed and a new one had to be built by the Fishery Board. Gleninagh (‘Glen of the Ivy’), the deserted village that looked old enough to be a candidate for carbon dating, apparently still had eighty-five men fishing from it in the mid-1930s, using
currachs
, rowing boats consisting of a light framework of laths covered with tarred canvas. In the summer they fished for mackerel, three men to a boat using long lines; in winter, two men to a boat to fish for lobsters, while others dug for worm bait.

I told him what the man at Fanore had said about the school and he had more to add. ‘From Loop Head,’ he said (which is the extreme south-westerly point of County Clare at the mouth of the Shannon), ‘very soon you will be able to draw a line five miles inland from the sea, to the west of which, apart from people involved with holidaymakers, there will be no local inhabitants at all.’ In the fifteen years from 1963 to 1978 it was thought that
two-thirds of the population of marriageable age had emigrated. This tale of woe even extended to the holiday cottage in which we were staying, and its neighbours. They had been built to encourage tourists to visit the area, with money put up by the local inhabitants (who held 60 per cent of the shares), the Irish and regional tourist boards and the local councils; even some local schoolchildren held shares by proxy. But so far none of the locals had had any return on the money they had invested some sixteen years ago, and this had created a great deal of ill-feeling.

After this we went home to a delicious dinner: mussels, very good sausages, runner beans and soda bread, then walked in the rain to the end of the jetty, where the steamers from Galway used to be met by horse cars to convey their passengers to Lisdoonvarna. They had to walk up Corkscrew Hill en route.

That night our dream lives were preoccupied with the Royal Family. I dreamt of King George VI. Both of us were in naval uniform, the King like a brother. As we walked together up Old Bond Street I asked him to have dinner with me, but he said, ‘Come and eat with us,’ which turned out to be a group of about a dozen at a table under a sort of
porte-cochère
, rather draughty and with no view. At the same time Wanda was dreaming of walking in a garden with the Queen Mum, who was very friendly. Wanda’s father featured too, having trouble with a member of the SS. He hit on the idea of having a Mass said, and that, as Wanda said, speaking of the SS man, ‘put an end to him!’

It was in fact fortunate that in my dream encounter with King George VI he had not accepted my invitation to lunch. We were now in dire straits for money and I would have looked pretty silly having to borrow from him, especially as English kings and queens never have a bean on them. There was no bank in Ballyvaughan, and my Coutts cheques and various credit cards were treated with
extreme suspicion. Finally, Mr O’Lochlan offered to help, provided we could work out what the exchange rate was.

We had intended to seek out together a very esoteric remain known as St Colman Macduagh’s Hermitage which was hidden away at the foot of a mountain called Slieve Carron, but by the time we had negotiated this deal and arranged for a local farmer to give us a lift to Ennistymon the following morning, it was nearly midday. The weather was beautiful, so we decided to go to a place called New Quay on the south side of Galway Bay where we could buy oysters.

New Quay was nice. There was a pub, a house or two, the sheds of the oyster company, and a jetty which the tide was doing its best to sweep away as it came ripping into Aughinish Bay at a terrific rate, covering the dark, whale-like rocks and penetrating into other bays within, Corranroo and Cloosh. On the promontory beyond it was a Martello tower, built to discourage Napoleon from landing an army there. The sea and sky were bright blue and everything else bright green, except for the grey stone walls and buildings, and the rocks along the foreshore.

Three men were working outside one of the sheds, selecting oysters and putting them in sacks. At their destination they would sell for £1 apiece, one of them said. ‘Not for the likes of us,’ said another. But here Wanda bought a dozen for £3.50 and they threw in two more for luck. Even here, almost at the source, lobsters were £6.50 a pound. Leaving Wanda to ride back to Ballyvaughan, where she had an appointment with a fisherman who might be able to sell her a lobster on more advantageous terms, I set off on my bike for the Hermitage, which was some eight miles off on the east side of the Burren in a wilderness called Keelhilla approached by the first section of a hellish hill, six miles long.

The Hermitage was hidden from view in the hazel thickets at the foot of the cliffs of Slieve Carron, across about three quarters
of a mile of limestone pavements full of parallel and apparently bottomless grykes, so I hid my bike in one of the thickets that bordered the road and set off on foot. Some of these grykes had had slender pillars of limestone inserted in them at intervals, as if to mark the way to the Hermitage, but after a bit they came to an abrupt end in the middle of one of the pavements.

I passed a small cairn and came to a dry-stone wall, beyond which was the wood. Like so many other old walls in the Burren, this one was a work of art. It had been built with an infinite expenditure of effort, using thin flakes of stone set vertically instead of being laid horizontally. I climbed over the wall and went into the hazel wood. It was a magical place. Everything in it – the boles and branches of the trees and the boulders among which they had forced themselves up – was covered in a thick growth of moss, dappled by the last of the sun. The only sounds were those of the wind sighing in the trees and of running water.

By absolute chance I had arrived at the Hermitage. It was in a clearing, among the trees and the boulders. There were the remains of a minute church with a white cross in front of it, and two stone platforms one above the other. The water I had heard came from a spring in the cliff and ran down into a sort of box-shaped stone cistern in a hollow. Above the church in the face of the cliff was a cave, big enough for two people to take shelter in, though in considerable discomfort.