Round Ireland in Low Gear (4 page)

Pushing our bikes through the rain we arrived on the threshold of the Station Hotel, from which the last revellers were being ejected, to find that a double room was £22 a night and the night was half over.

So instead we went round the corner to Boylan’s, part gift shop, part B and B, where we were warmly welcomed and our bikes put in the shop to see the rest of the night through in company with a consignment of nylon pandas. A kindly girl, Miss Boylan, brought tea and cakes – ‘Try and eat them’ she begged, as if we were convalescing from an illness – and we went to bed after a nice hot shower, whacked and surrounded by our mounds of kit.

‘What a fucking day,’ Wanda said before she dropped off. It was difficult not to agree with her.

The next morning I opened a window and was confronted by a painting of a double-headed eagle glaring at me from a wall across what had once been an alley three feet wide, presumably the sign of some former mediaeval hostelry. Rain was falling in torrents and I was in a state of despair and indecision as to what we should do. I could see ourselves sitting in tea shops for days on end waiting for it to abate, playing with nylon pandas and sleeping for endless nights in Boylan’s B and B.

I became even more depressed when 1 suddenly remembered that it was my birthday. Wanda had forgotten it, and this made her depressed, too. Anyway, she gave me a kiss. Then, after a huge breakfast, we sallied out with our bicycles into the terrifying early morning rush hour traffic of Limerick, among drivers many of whom appeared to have only recently arrived in the machine age or were still on the way to it, with Miss Boylan’s warning still echoing in our ears. ‘Be careful, now, on the Sarsfield Bridge, for there are a whole lot of people blown off their cycles on it every year by the wind of the lorries, and
kilt
!’
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We were heading for County Clare, via the dread Sarsfield Bridge, passing on the way the establishments of purveyors of bacon (bacon is to Limerick what caviar is to Astrakhan) and tall, often beautifully proportioned eighteenth-century brick houses, many of them decrepit to the point of collapse.

It was somewhere in O’Connell Street that Wanda contrived to get in the wrong lane and was borne away on a tidal wave of traffic, crying ‘Hurruck, help me!’ at the top of her voice, although what I was supposed to do to help her was not clear. The last I saw of her for some time to come was disappearing round the corner into that part of the city where stood or used to stand some of the relics of British Imperial rule, such as the County Gaol, the Lunatic Asylum and the Court House of 1810. She finally fetched up back at the station, after which she took a right into Parnell Street and started all over again.

‘You’ve chosen a grand day for it,’ an old geezer about the same age as me said as, reunited at last, we were crossing the Sarsfield Bridge. He let out an insane kind of ‘Heh, heh, heh!’ cackle as an afterthought.

He was wearing a white beard with lovely yellow stains in it that looked like the principal ingredient in a prescription for birds’ nest soup; an ankle-length oilskin coat to match the stains in his beard and a sou’wester ditto, an ensemble that made him resemble the fisherman on a tin of Norwegian-type sardines. I would have hated to live next door to him, in Limerick or anywhere else. ‘Wise guy, eh?’ I shouted after him, but he didn’t get it, probably because his sou’wester was fitted with flaps.

We were pushing our bikes along the footpath, not even riding them, but still being deluged with un-recycled Irish rainwater that was being thrown up by the west-bound trucks whose drivers, deprived of the pleasure of actually ‘kilting’ us, were now doing their best to drown us, and were damn nearly succeeding – the
very same men who, reunited with their wives and eight children all under the age of fifteen at weekends, wear subfusc suits and take the collection bags round on the ends of long sticks at Mass, eventually leaving a bundle, and generous bequests to the Society of the Holy Name.

Meanwhile, huge and pale and speckled in the rain, the Shannon flowed on, under the bridge towards the mighty sea, past what looked like a disused Indian chutney factory in Bengal with a tall chimney, and past quays built in the 1870s for what was to be another Liverpool, though it never became one in spite of there being nineteen feet of water off them at high water springs.

Here, the Shannon was 154 miles from its source on the slopes of Cuilcagh Mountain in County Cavan, near the Northern Ireland Border, a place I had promised myself we would visit if we could do so without getting our nuts blown off. At this rate, I wondered if we would ever live long enough to reach it.

Then, suddenly, the rain stopped and the sun came out. Too unnerved by the happenings on the Sarsfield Bridge to really appreciate the fact, we pushed our bikes a few hundred yards or so through suburban Limerick along the N18 to Ennis and points north, then turned off it and rode out into the country on a lesser road between thin ribbons of bungalows, some of them offering yet more beds and breakfasts. And now for the first time we had the chance to appreciate what it was really like riding mountain bikes laden with gear. To me it was much as I imagined it would be to ride a heavily loaded camel, the principal difference being that you don’t have to pedal a camel.

To the right now was Woodcock Hill, a green, western outlier of the Slieve Bearnagh hills; to the left were fields in which donkeys bemoaned their loneliness and battered old trees stood in the hedgerows, and beyond all this to the south was the Shannon,
much enlarged since we had last set eyes on it, shimmering in the sun.

A car passed, going in the opposite direction, and the four occupants waved to us cheerily, as did a young man in shirt sleeves, waistcoat and cap who was in a ditch, wielding a fearsome-looking slashing instrument on a long handle that made him look like a survivor of the Peasants’ Revolt.

‘It must be your Jackie Hooghly hat,’ Wanda said. ‘They think we’re Americans.’

The wind was strong and cool, if not downright cold, but at least the sun was shining and the road was flat – well, almost. We were in Ireland at last. There was no doubt about that. In fact we were now in County Clare.

At the village of Cratloe, an avenue led steeply uphill from silver painted gates to a grotto modelled on that of Lourdes, one of the countless thousands erected during 1954, the Marian Year of Special Devotion to the Virgin, decreed by Pius XII. Silver painted gates and railings in Ireland are an infallible sign of the proximity of something Catholic and therefore holy.

To the south of the road was Cratloe Wood. Inside it was wet and dim and mysterious, with long, diagonal shafts of sunlight reaching down into it through the trees. Some of the oaks were descendants of those that had provided timber for the hammer-beam roof of London’s Westminster Hall, when it was built in 1399; and for the roof of the Amsterdam Town Hall, later the Royal Palace, built in 1648 on a foundation of more than 13,000 wooden piles. And long before all this, in the ninth century, men had come here all the way from Ulster to cut down oaks and carry them away northwards to make a roof for the Grianan of Aileach, the summer palace of the O’Neills, Kings of Ulster, on Greenan Mountain, near Londonderry. At some very far-off period the wood had been cut in two by what is now the N18, and another
beautiful part of it is still to be found south of this road in a walled enclosure, which forms part of the demesne
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of Cratloe Castle. It belonged to the Macnamaras who, together with the O’Briens, seem to have had more castles in these parts alone – the remains of more than fifty have been identified – than most other families had in the whole of Ireland. At Cratloe itself there are three castles within half a mile of one another, which could constitute some kind of record.

After paddling around in these woods for a bit, wishing we had brought our waterwings, we resumed our journey; but not before Wanda, one of whose foibles is to have no faith in maps, however good, or map readers, however accomplished, had knocked on a cottage door to enquire the way to Sixmilebridge, for which we were bound and to which I already knew the route.

The misinformation she was given by an innocuous-looking old body – ‘Sure, it’s just away down the hill’ – sent her zooming off by herself under a railway line in the direction of Bunratty Castle, the largest of all the Irish tower houses. Had she actually reached it, she would have received no more than her deserts if the directors had put her to work as a serving wench at the mediaeval-type banquets for which they are internationally renowned.

The village of Sixmilebridge bestrode the deep, dark, narrow Owenogarney river. It was really two villages, Old Sixmilebridge on the west bank and New Sixmilebridge on the east bank, built in the early eighteenth century, when an iron works was opened. It had brightly painted houses – a bit like Fishguard – streets with royal names such as Orange, George, Frederick and Hanover, which sounded a bit odd in the depths of republican Ireland, and seven pubs, only one of which served any kind of food, something
which seemed extraordinary at the time but which, as we proceeded on our way through Ireland, we came to regard as commonplace. This pub was huge, considering the size of the village. It had three bars, decorated with imitation half-timbering, wallpaper of a sultry tropical design and hue and glass cases containing stuffed, predatory animals. I asked the landlord whether he thought a place the size of Sixmilebridge could really support seven pubs, since I know many villages of a similar size in England that can scarcely support one.

‘Why, yes,’ he said, apparently genuinely surprised by what he obviously regarded as a daft question in a place which in 1931 had a population of 325, and probably had even less now. ‘There’s a living for all of us.’

‘There was no need at all to be chaining your bikes up in Sixmilebridge,’ said a small girl of about seven with a hint of reproof, as we were unchaining them, preparatory to continuing on our way.

We were still only nine miles from Limerick. If we went on like this and I continued to record what I saw in such superfluous detail it would take us five years to travel round Ireland, and the rest of my life to write about it. I put this to Wanda and she said perhaps it didn’t matter, and what other plans had I got for spending the evening of my days; but I knew she wasn’t serious about it. Nevertheless, emboldened by her hardening attitude I talked her into a detour of a mile or two to see Mount Ievers Court, a country house at the foot of the Slieve Bearnagh hills.

As it was not open to the public, we hid our bicycles near the entrance and approached the house on foot across the park, in which it stood half hidden among trees, some of them enormous beeches, and invisible from the three roads that hemmed the property in.

It was a tall house in every way: three storeys high, with a
steeply pitched, tiled roof, tall chimneys, tall doorways and tall windows with white glazing bars. Both its fronts had seven bays and each upper storey was slightly narrower than the one below.

The garden front was faced with bricks of a beautiful pale pink colour and the quoins, the cornerstones, the string courses and the window surrounds were cut from a silvery limestone. A flight of steps led up to a simple doorway on the first floor. The entrance front was entirely faced with this silvery stone, and with what was to be the last of a pale, wintry afternoon sun illuminating the windows the house was an enchanting sight. It could have been the abode of some sleeping princess, waiting to be awakened after a sleep of centuries.

There was no sign of life but we skulked among the trees, anxious not to be detected, certain that if there were any occupants they would not want to be bothered with trespassers in Gore-Tex suits. Neither of us was keen to see the inside in case it failed to equal the exterior of what has been described by Mark Bence-Jones, the author of
Burke’s Guide to Irish Country Houses
, as ‘the most perfect and also probably the earliest of the tall Irish houses’, but apparently it is well worth seeing.