Round Ireland in Low Gear (18 page)

The only time I had seen the Fastnet from the sea was in June 1939, when we had raised it fifteen miles to the north-east at eight in the evening, coming up to it in a four-masted barque. We had been within an ace of making one of the fastest sail passages from Australia to Europe between the wars, but now, ninety days out from Spencer’s Gulf, South Australia, baffled by contrary winds, we had long since lost out to the
Parma
, which had made it in eighty-three days in 1933. As night came down the wind fell away and all through the night the light flashed at us mockingly every five seconds. By the next morning there was still no wind and we were closer in to the land, making a lot of leeway. The air was full of haze and what we first took to be a dredger with a white funnel resolved itself into the angularities of the Fastnet seen in strange perspective with the white lighthouse on top of it.

All that day we hovered near the rock. Later in the afternoon a boat approached, with five men in it rowing like demons, and an old man in the stern sheets looking like Coleridge’s Ancient
Mariner. They had rowed nine miles from the village of Crookhaven on the Mizen Head Peninsula. We invited them aboard and the Captain gave them rum, and soon a light breeze began to stir and the ship began to rustle through the water. It was time for them to go and the last we saw of them they were drifting away into the sunset, very drunk, towards the New World, with the Ancient Mariner sitting erect in the stern. They were the first strangers I had talked to for ninety days. Some twenty-five years later I went to Crookhaven and got drunk with the survivors.

Back at Mrs O’Reagan’s we had bacon and eggs and whiskey. She had come to live on the island from the mainland with her husband, who was a mechanic. He had died twelve years previously, leaving her with a daughter who had first of all gone to school on the island and then, when she was old enough, to a boarding school on the mainland, which was the usual arrangement. The school on the island now had twenty-five children on the roll. She didn’t speak Irish herself, and said the families on the island were very self-contained. The majority were O’Driscolls.

When her husband died Mrs O’Reagan continued to keep about a dozen heifers for fattening. She tried to grow green vegetables but the island is infested with rabbits which makes it difficult; the latest news was that someone had introduced myxomatosis. Like all the offshore islands I had ever visited, the economy of Clear Island verged on the dotty. Milk, or most of it, came from the mainland. Only one family had sheep and only one person knew how to butcher them. Some people grew potatoes; one man grew wheat for his own use. But most food was ordered from Skibbereen.

After the bacon and eggs we decided to go to a pub, not knowing that none of them opened until nine or after. We were in bed by eight.

The next morning was one of cold, violent rain squalls, and we learnt that ‘on account of the draw’, the
Naomh Ciaran
wouldn’t be able to leave at least until noon, if at all. So we decided to walk to the Old Lighthouse which was high up on the east side of the island. Whoever built it had obviously failed to notice that the site chosen was shrouded in fog for the greater part of the year, rendering the light quite invisible. The road climbed steeply through a stone-walled landscape, its houses either ruined or secretive-looking, like their occupants. There was not a dog to be seen. Had the islanders eaten them all? All along the road and in the fields and farmyards were numbers of what appeared to be parked cars, but were in fact cars that would never move again. Far off we could see the Fastnet still getting a battering, and the ping pong balls of froth continued to drift in across the fields. From time to time we were whipped by hail. It was a melancholy scene. I tried to imagine what life would be like for us if the
Naomh Ciaran
didn’t sail, or had already sailed and never came back – and failed.

Back in Bourke’s pub near the North Harbour which for some inscrutable reason known only to himself Mr Bourke had decided to open, we listened to Mr Bourke’s tale of woe in what even by Irish standards was a remarkable orange and yellow interior, lit, a bit early in the day for it, by one gas mantle, and so old that the stone that separated the front from the back part of the premises had almost been worn in half by the passage of innumerable booted feet. ‘Sixty years in the Bourke family,’ he said, ‘and I can’t open in the evening any more because the custom doesn’t pay for the fire.’

We eventually sailed at twelve-thirty in a wind Force 8. When a beam sea hit the
Ciaran
just after we left the harbour I nearly broke my other pair of glasses. The following sea, when we got on course, was not all that nice either. Again we sailed inside the
reef, which was displaying horribly spikey rocks on either side of it which I hoped the skipper had noticed; from time to time everything was obliterated by heavy hail. There was no doubt that these were dangerous waters; even a
précis
of ships lost in them had made chilly reading.

Baltimore was cold and miserable, but a bus was leaving for Drimoleague on the Bantry Road at two o’clock, and the driver let us put our bikes on board. Travelling with this kindly driver was his daughter, a solemn little girl of four, and ‘a great one for the buses’. He was a mine of information, some of it on the most recondite subjects; passing a place called Caheragh, invisible from the road in the rain-sodden greenery, he volunteered the following: ‘At Caheragh there is a cemetery. It was three years ago now they were disinterring a girl aged fifteen or sixteen who’d been buried for sixty years, to make room for an additional one, and when they opened up her coffin they found her in it, uncorrupt.’

‘Dead, dead,’ said the solemn little girl, having presumably heard the story when travelling the same route on a previous occasion, being a great one for the buses, and looked even more solemn. ‘She was dead.’ As a result of all this, Caheragh had become a place of pilgrimage.

It was not surprising that when the time came to leave this pair, we did so with genuine regret. Especially as the driver of an Expressway bus which was due to leave Drimoleague for Bantry at 15.07 was an old fellow of near pensionable age who would not allow our bikes on his bus. The next twelve miles to Bantry, with the rain beating down on us, were pretty boring, most of them being up rather than down.

Bantry, with its huge square full of pubs opening out on to the Bay, should have been nice, even in the rain, but it wasn’t really, even though there were no huge tankers discharging oil at the
Terminal in the Bay. There was no problem about coming to a decision about whether or not to visit Bantry House, built in 1765 by the first Earl of Bantry and filled with treasures by the much-travelled second Earl, because it was closed. By now it was dark. Neither of us wanted to stay in Bantry but the next place was Glengarriff, eleven miles off around the head of the Bay by a road which on the map looked like a snake in its death throes. It was no time for false economy. Feeling musty and dilapidated we chartered a large taxi, and followed the driver’s recommendation to stay in the Bay View Guest House. It was jolly good, not the least of its charms being a huge cast iron bath in mint condition which the landlady, Mrs Heffernan, wanted to get rid of on the grounds that it ‘uses too much hot water. Not all the people who come here being educated like yourselves.’

Unfortunately, Mrs Heffernan drew the line at supplying supper so, being ravenous, we were forced to re-robe ourselves in our Gore-Tex suits and sally out into the terrible night for the mile-and-a-half walk into Glengarriff, where Mrs Heffernan had said she was ‘by no means sure that you will find a bite of food at all’. She was nearly right. Of the six pubs we found there only one, called Perring House, had anything, and that was a choice of stew or re-heated roast beef, but at least they meant well. Behind the bar was a Cockney mulatto girl from Kilburn of about sixteen whose uncle played in a local folk group. She was bored out of her mind, she said, by winter in Glengarriff. The owner, who also spoke Cockney, was Irish but had spent six years in England, putting in foundations for houses, first living in Kilburn – ‘Kilburn’s all right’ – then Stanmore: ‘Stanmore’s a sort of death in life. I met my friends either at the Cricklewood Tavern, full of Irish, or the Welsh Harp Inn, which had an Irish landlord, that is until it went and got burnt down, didn’t it?’

Then we went back for a go in the huge bath, sharing. Educated
people like ourselves know the value of water, especially hot water. Downstairs Mr Heffernan, an otherwise cheerful fellow, was immobilized before the TV, bored to death.

The next day dawned, when it did, long after eight o’clock, wet and cold with a very strong wind and snow on the 2000-foot tops of the Caha Mountains. We left the nice, warm haven of the Bay View Guest House with extreme reluctance, and on the way out of Glengarriff we met an Australian dressed like an imitation Irishman in a long black overcoat and a woolly hat with a bobble on it, waiting by the roadside for a bus to Bantry. He told us that he was living in a cabin on the mountainside on property belonging to a friend, and that he passed the days gathering wood in an enclosure of oaks which once formed part of the demesnes of the Lords of Bantry. Given the kind of weather we were having it sounded a rather joyless occupation. He was going back to Australia in February. How we envied him. Then we set off westwards along the south side of the Beara Peninsula on the road to Adrigole, crossing an arcadian, wooded river on the banks of which flourished an assortment of wonderful trees and shrubs, with a view downstream of the ruins of Cromwell’s Bridge, said to have been built for him in an hour. Here, in the surroundings of Glengarriff, the vegetation was extravagantly rich – giant fuchsia up to twenty-five feet high, escallonia, eucalyptus, tree ferns, oak, holly, yew, mountain ash and Chilean myrtle – while
clethra arboreus
, pink saxifrage, Irish spurge, pale pink English heather and greater butterwort were some of the flora that clamoured for attention in due season.

The sun chose this moment to make an appearance, illuminating the little tree-clad rock islands in the Bay, and the snow-covered mountains behind. Then it began to rain again. What followed was the very steep ascent via Furkeal Bridge, more
or less at sea level, to the Avaul Loughs 400 feet up, in a distance of only a mile and a quarter. To the right of the road was a wilderness of bogs which turned orange when the sun came out, and above them huge expanses of dead grass with waterfalls of shiny stones pouring down from the slopes of the Caha Mountains, the highest of which in view was the Sugar Loaf, which gave the impression of being a perfect pyramid and looked as inaccessible as a peak in Tibet. The air was filled with the sounds of innumerable, invisible brooks, but there was not a bird in sight; those with any sense were down near the Equator. The loughs were near a pass from which there was a stupendous view over Bantry Bay, with Cooleragh Harbour immediately below and, across what was now a shimmering expanse of water in which a solitary fishing boat floated motionless, the Whiddy Island oil terminal, the long, black finger of Sheep’s Head Peninsula pointing into the Atlantic, and, far away to the north-east, what were probably the Sheehy Mountains on the Cork-Kerry border, also covered with snow. Then a steep descent – what a waste of hard-gained height – to Cooleragh, a hamlet above the Bay, followed by a stiff climb from 281 feet to 415 feet in half a mile. Ahead now were the extraordinary contours of Hungry Hill, at 2251 feet the highest peak in the Caha Mountains. When it wasn’t blotted from view by the elements it looked like a whipped cream walnut. I mentioned this to Wanda and she reminded me this was the comparison I had used of the gateposts at Castle Freke, what now seemed a lifetime ago, and that if I wanted to have whipped cream walnuts in my book either the gateposts or Hungry Hill would have to go.

From this dizzy height we flew downhill among bogs, expanses of gorse and bracken and small walled fields in which little groups of black and white cattle stood around, no doubt discussing the absence of tourists and the dreadful weather, which was keeping
them away in the fleshpots of Glengarriff, and wishing that they themselves were under cover in the white
clachans
(or small groups of dwellings) of their owners on the hillsides of Curragh and Curraduff.

Adrigole, the village at the foot of the Healy Pass, would have been quite nice if it hadn’t been pouring with rain. As it was now twelve-thirty, as well as raining, it seemed to be time for a drink and something to eat before facing up to the rigours that lay ahead of us; I had tried to make light of them to Wanda, but she no longer believed anything I said about roads and how hilly they were. Anyway she was now so cold, in spite of her Korean gloves, that she had lost all feeling in her fingers. In the first two pubs we entered no one seemed to have even heard of food, let alone provide it, and treated us like a couple of loonies when we opened our mouths, pointed our thumbs down our throats and went through the motions of chewing. The third pub had a somewhat depressing interior and clientèle, but at least there were sandwiches on offer.

‘At Adrigole Bridge we may turn right for the winding ascent of the Healy Pass, completed in 1931 under the aegis of Tim Healy, at the summit of which (1084 ft) we enter County Kerry …’, intones the
Blue Guide to Ireland
, so we did. The road to the Pass across the Caha Mountains was begun during the Famine years to give occupation to the needy; the remuneration was 4d (the
equivalent of about 1½p) for a twelve-hour day, which gave rise to such a high death rate that work on it was abandoned, and only resumed in 1928 at the instigation of Tim Healy, the leader of the Irish Party at Westminster, and Governor-General of the Free State from 1922 to 1928.

The first couple of miles of road from sea level were easy enough, with the snowy-white Adrigole Mountain to the left with waterfalls pouring down its slopes, and to the right the steep cliffs which fell away from the outlying parts of the Sugar Loaf to the glen of the Adrigole river. It was when we rounded the big bulge of Adrigole Mountain that we found ourselves riding into a succession of freezing squalls that came roaring down on us from the head of the Pass, now just visible high above a wilderness of peat bog at the top of an uncountable number of hairpin bends. It took us an hour and a half to cover the four and a half miles to the Pass from the bridge (one of the old men in the pub where we’d had lunch said he had done it in half an hour but I bet he hadn’t). For the last two and a half miles or so Wanda had to walk, and I walked with her, afraid that she might pass out.

By the time we reached the Col, where there was a big white crucifixion group and a shut-up tourist shop, evening was coming on. A bitter wind was funnelling through it and MacGillycuddy’s Reeks, the mountain range beyond the Kenmare river, and the Iveragh Mountains on the Ring of Kerry, were all white. Then a violent hailstorm enveloped us and, our faces stinging, we began what would otherwise have been a lovely, four-mile freewheel downhill to sea level in County Kerry. To the left were the huge, steel-coloured cliffs of Tooth Mountain with a long glen running back into it. By the time we reached the bridge over the Glantrasna river, which was in full spate, the hail had stopped but it was
raining buckets, and from there we had a miserable ride among what were now the funereal rhododendron thickets in the demesne of Dereen House.
³¹

Then, all of a sudden, we were out on the shores of Kilmakilloge Bay, to be greeted, as if by magic, by a brilliant orange sunset under our first cloudless sky of the whole trip, although the mountains and Healy Pass behind us were shrouded in black cloud. The wind had dropped completely and it was very quiet, apart from great flocks of oystercatchers out on the mud, making a tremendous whistling.

There was a stone jetty with a kink in it, an Edwardian ocean-going steam tug named
Stentor
up on the foreshore, from the interior of which the noise of hammering could be heard, an English King George V letterbox painted Irish Republican green with a palm tree rising above it, and across the road a yellow and white painted pub with a slate roof and a sign which proclaimed that it was Teddy O’Sullivan’s.

Frozen, we parked our bicycles outside and opened the front door, and there was Mrs Joan O’Sullivan selling a little girl some sweets. She looked up and gradually a slow smile of recognition spread over her face.

‘You’ve been a long time away,’ she said with a certain hint of reproach. ‘You missed a fine funeral today – Mrs Lyons from the shop at Lauragh. There was a great turn-out. Some came all the way from Dublin in a Mercedes. Some are still in the bar; they won’t go home. You’ll stay the night, of course.’

It was eighteen years since we had last been to Kilmakilloge. Insofar as we have any rules as travellers, there are two that we try to obey, not always with success. One is never to fail to make a detour to see something of interest on the grounds that the opportunity to visit it will occur at some future date. It rarely does. If you see a signpost that reads ‘Source de la Seine, 6 kms’ and you feel impelled to visit it, you should do so. The other is never to go back, on the grounds that nothing will be as good second or third time round.

Altogether, this was our third visit to Kilmakilloge. The first time had been more than twenty years previously when, just as for the funeral, the bar had been crowded, and that time Joan had been in tears.

‘Why are you crying?’ Wanda had asked her. ‘Is someone dead?’

‘No one is dead, at all,’ she said. ‘It’s the schoolmistress at Lauragh, she’s leaving us,’ and began to howl again. That night, after the schoolmistress had finally taken her departure, we dined on the most delicious skate. ‘You’ll come again,’ the O’Sullivans both made us promise the next morning before we left.

Two or three years passed, then, just before Christmas, Wanda ricked her back and was in agony that no doctor could relieve. We decided that the only thing to do, in order to avoid an exhausting Christmas in England, was to skip it and leave the country. My daughter said she would like to come, too. I rang the O’Sullivans at Kilmakilloge and got a surprisingly unenthusiastic response when I suggested that we should spend Christmas with them. Nevertheless, I went ahead with arrangements to ship our Land Rover to Cork on the 23 December. The only memorable thing about the voyage was that a very drunk man, on his way to Ireland for Christmas, managed to blunder into our cabin in the middle of the night and be sick in the washbasin under the mistaken impression that it was a convenience.

On the morning of Christmas Eve, even as choirs were giving renderings of ‘Holy Night’ in Cork, I got the tourist office to telephone the O’Sullivans and announce our immutable intention of arriving on their doorstep. ‘They will take you,’ the tourist official told us eventually, ‘but they don’t sound very excited about it.’

It was dark when we arrived. Mrs O’Sullivan looked at Wanda when we entered the bar and a look of ineffable relief appeared on her face. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I thought it was another Mr and Mrs Newby. We had another woman with a name something like that. She was a dreadful sort of woman, the sort of woman who has forty frocks.’

That night we all went to midnight Mass at Lauragh and on Christmas morning while it was still dark outside drank a bottle of champagne in bed, which our daughter had thoughtfully provided for this purpose. Then, after rashers and eggs we set off for nearby Lough Mackeenlaun, a holy lake nearby, named after St Mo-Chionlan, otherwise St Cilian or Kilian, which has the peculiar property of drying out when it rains, and was, in the past, famous for its floating islands formed of tussocks of vegetation. On its shore there was a grassy mound with some stones sticking out of it, all that was left of the church of St Kilian, who was martyred at Würzburg and whose
patron
is held here on 7 and 8 July.

Christmas lunch was a great success: turkey accompanied by a magnum of red Hermitage we had brought with us was preceded by a soup into which Joan had introduced the best part of half a bottle of sherry. After the pudding we joined a great press of people in the bar, all drinking whiskey or Guinness, or both. Later I went for a walk in the gloaming and went to sleep in a ditch for a bit. On the following day, Boxing Day in England, the Wren Boys arrived, one of seven parties of boys and girls from the school
at Lauragh who case the area on their annual Christmas visitations. They wore strange, home-made masks, funny hats and their mothers’ old dresses, irrespective of whether they were boys or girls, and they sang the following:

That afternoon, out for an airing, we met an elderly farmer with a brand new motor car, something pretty remarkable in the vicinity of Kilmakilloge Bay at that time. Would I have the kindness to turn it round for him, he asked, as otherwise he would have to drive it all round the Beara Peninsula and over the Healy Pass, about eighty miles, to get it turned the other way as he hadn’t yet ‘got the trick of going backwards’. After all this Wanda found herself miraculously cured and we went back to England, but we knew that wherever else we might go in the world, this was one place to which we would want to return.

Now, in January, in a beautiful sunset over a golden sea, we visited what remained of the ancient church of Kilmakilloge, a short distance from the holy lough, in the graveyard of which Mrs Lyons had just been laid to rest, not far from the monument to the O’Sullivan Chieftain Mac Finghan Dubh O’Sullivan, who died in 1809. By the time we got back to the pub the hammering noises that had come from inside the good ship
Stentor
had ceased, and the man responsible for them had emerged – a Mr Langford who divided his time between demolishing the
Stentor
in Kilmakilloge
Harbour and demolishing other things in Shaftesbury, England, where he owned an enormous scrap dump and employed a squad of seven men to bust things up. And that night we had mussels and scallops fresh from the Bay, followed by Christmas pudding, vintage 1985, in memory of our last visit. Overhead a full moon swam in a star-filled sky.

The next morning, a Saturday, was as foul and dark as the previous evening had been clear and golden. It required all one’s determination to get up and pack.

‘How far do you think we’re going on this trip?’ Wanda said, while we were eating an O’Sullivan breakfast. ‘And when do you think we’re going to get there?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s difficult to say. I’d really like to go round the Ring of Kerry. That’s about seventy miles. (I was hopelessly out – it is more than a hundred.) And then there’s the Dingle Peninsula. And there’s Killarney, too. With luck we might make Tralee by next Saturday.’

‘Do you really have to go round all these bloody peninsulas?’ she asked. ‘They all look about the same in this sort of weather.’

‘I don’t see how I can just ignore the Ring of Kerry
and
the Dingle Peninsula.’

‘In that case I’m going back to Mrs Walsh’s to get the van. I can just see us stuck in Tralee, wherever that is, on a Sunday, waiting for a train on Monday.’ In fact, for once, she was maligning the Irish Railways which run two trains from Tralee to Cork on Sundays.

‘I don’t want to use the van,’ I said, becoming heated. ‘It’s against the spirit of the venture.’

‘
You
don’t have to use it,’ she said, ‘but I wouldn’t feel immoral about it. We’re not trying to break any records. We can leave it in Kenmare, if you want to be heroic. It only means we can go home when we want to without biking all the way to Cork. Meanwhile
you can go and look at tings.’ She left at one-fifteen, having been very kindly offered a lift back to Douglas. I wondered if she would ever come back. I don’t think I would have done had I been her.

So I set off to ‘look at tings’ astride my bicycle which, minus its customary load, felt as if it was fitted with wings. I trespassed recklessly in the demesne of Dereen House, home of the Lansdownes, among rhododendrons, plantations of bamboo and skyscraping conifers, over which the spirit of Sir John Betjeman’s Irish poems would have hung like a fog, if it hadn’t been foggy already. Then past Lauragh Old School, still in use, training up further reinforcements of Wren Boys, and up the glen of the Glanmore River to Glanmore Lough, with islands floating in its absolutely still waters, one of which had some sort of ruin in it.