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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
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
The house was built by John Rothery and his son Isaac for Colonel Henry Ievers
(#litres_trial_promo) sometime between 1730 and 1737, and is thought to have been based on the design of Chevening, in Kent. The beautiful pink bricks used in its construction were brought back as ballast in a vessel that had carried rape-seed oil to Holland, oil that was milled at Oil Mill Bridge, which we had cycled over on our way from Cratloe.
After this detour we set off northwards under what was now a grey sky, bound for Kilmurry and Quin, through a wide expanse of flat, rural Clare with the Slieve Bearnagh hills running away to the north-east on our right.
The road was the site of intensive ribbon development. Along it on either side stood bungalows in an astonishing medley of styles – Spanish hacienda, Dallas ranch house, American Colonial, Teutonic love-nests with stained glass in their front doors, and others in styles difficult to put a name to. Some were already occupied and their windswept, treeless gardens and patios were enclosed with breeze-block walls or with balustrades made from reconstituted stone. Some still had the builders on the premises – their vans and battered cars stood outside and you could hear their owners whistling and their radios on the go. Some were empty shells, abandoned by both the builders and those whom they were building them for, until the present dire state of the Irish economy improved.
If it did, it would only be a matter of time before every secondary road in Ireland would suffer in the same way; many, we subsequently found, already had. These bungalows were alien in the Irish countryside: most of them for instance had no porch in which to hang coats and keep gumboots, an absolute necessity in a place like Ireland. But obviously the Irish love them and they are infinitely better to live in than the damp-courseless, thatched, whitewashed cottages in which their forebears crouched in a single smoke-filled room, stirring some mess suspended over the fire in a blackened pot and fulfilling their destiny by satisfying visitors in search of the picturesque such as ourselves.
Kilmurry, when we finally reached it, having emerged from this Irish subtopia, was a very small place indeed. Of the six roads which met there, five meandered to it across country from points on the map which had no names at all. There were the picturesque ruins of a church and an equally picturesque abandoned churchyard and the sort of picturesque house the Irish were abandoning in droves, with blackbirds in residence in its grass-grown thatch. In the distance the little loughs with which the region abounded sprang to life when from time to time sunbeams forced their way through the clouds that had now gathered overhead.
After this we rode past Knappogue, a Macnamara castle. It was open (morning and afternoon teas were served), and providing a quorum could be found ready to participate, mediaeval banquets could be served at the drop of a hat. But according to the Blue Guide, although built in 1467 it had since been over-restored, not by some Victorian nutcase, as might be expected, but in 1966. So we gave it a miss and pressed on to Quin, a pretty, rural village, with two long, picturesque barns; across the road from Malachy’s Bar.
It was three-thirty, and mad for a pot of tea we entered the bar, in which two locals were drinking Guinness and playing darts. They immediately offered to play a foursome, but we were too thirsty to do anything but drink tea and eat a bit of cake, brought by a young girl, for which we paid an Irish punt (or pound). While doing so I tried to imagine a couple of foreigners entering one of our local pubs in Dorset at three-thirty on a winter’s afternoon and finding customers inside, drinking and offering to play darts, and then being provided with tea and cakes; but I failed. Malachy’s Bar may not have been all that much to look at – inside it resembled a 1935 Wardour Street half-timbered film set – but its occupants were kind and welcoming and I realized that if we were going to attempt to equate aesthetics with happiness while travelling through Ireland we might just as well give up and go and be miserable in the comfort of our own, lovely home.
Outside, on a bank of the little River Rine were the impressive ruins of the Franciscan Abbey founded and built in the fifteenth century by Sioda Cam Macnamara within the perimeter of a Norman castle which had been destroyed, presumably by the Macnamaras around 1286. Other members of this clan were also buried here, among them the Macnamara of Knappogue castle who, had his precise location been known to its restorers, would probably have been dug up and restored too.
Those Franciscans were extremely tenacious. In 1541 they were expelled from their premises, as were other religious communities in Ireland, by Henry VIII in his new guise as King of Ireland and Head of the newly established Protestant Church of Ireland,
(#litres_trial_promo) but after the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 the monks returned. In 1649–50 Cromwell initiated his ghastly campaigns in Leinster and in Munster, of which County Clare formed a part, together with what are now Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Tipperary and Waterford. The following year, 1651, they were again driven out and in 1652 eleven years of rebellion by the Irish came to an end. In the course of them one third of the Catholic Irish population had been killed; uncounted thousands were shipped to the West Indies, to all intents and purposes to work as slaves; Irish towns were repopulated with English men or English sympathizers; and twenty million acres of land were expropriated and handed over to Protestant settlers.
In spite of these horrors the Franciscans of Quin appear to have been more or less ineradicable. Although driven out of their Friary they contrived to remain in the neighbourhood for the next 150 years. The last surviving member of the order at Quin, Father John Hogan, died in 1820 and his tomb is in the north-east cloister.
Up to now Wanda had been doing very well with her cycling, but after tea at Malachy’s Bar some of the fight appeared to go out of her and when I suggested that we should go and look at Danganbrack, perhaps the most extraordinary of all the fortress houses of the Macnamaras, which the Shell Guide said was three quarters of a mile east-north-east, and which I said, having been there twenty years previously, was only half a mile north-north-east, she said, ‘All right, providing you’re sure it isn’t five miles,’ but without much enthusiasm. But then she hadn’t seen it, as I had twenty years ago.
Then, I had reached it by a tree trunk bridge over a deeply sunken stream at the end of a very muddy track which ran east-wards from a road that led due north from Quin to nowhere. There, in a field, I saw what was known as the ‘ill-fated tower of Mahon Maechuin’, in which the Cromwellian troops, after taking it, spent some time refreshing themselves before moving on that night in 1651 to sack the Abbey. One woman escaped from the tower to bring news of what was happening to Hugh O’Neill, the beleaguered defender of Limerick, which at that time was invested by a Cromwellian army commanded by Henry Ireton until, after six months, he died of the plague.
I remembered Danganbrack as a miniature skyscraper over-grown with ivy as thick as a ship’s hawsers, with machicolations
(#litres_trial_promo) and tall gables crowned with chimneys. The ground floor was used as a byre and the lower courses supporting it looked dangerously eroded. The doorway was whitewashed, presumably to discourage the cattle from butting the doorposts and bringing some thousands of tons of masonry down about their ears. I wondered if it was still standing. By the time I thought of asking someone, as is usual in such moments, there was no one to ask.
The first track we now took was certainly muddy enough to be the right one, and it led more or less due east, but after a few hundred yards it made a ninety-degree turn to the north and eventually delivered us into a farmyard filled with liquid mud and policed by a pair of ferocious amphibious sheep dogs. ‘And what are you thinking of doing now?’ my helpmeet and companion in life’s race asked me when we were back on the road.
I looked at the Irish half-inch map – the one-inch map had not been on offer when I was stocking up with them – and heartily wished that it had been the latter. Those half inches make all the difference between locating a fortress house of the Macnamaras and being eaten alive by sheep dogs in a pool of slime.
‘Give up,’ I said. ‘There’s only one castle marked on this map that fulfils anyone’s description of where it really is, dammit. I’ve even got a six-figure map reference. We must have been within feet of it at that farm. But why didn’t we see it? It’s almost as tall as the Woolworth Building. It must have fallen down.’
So we gave up. And as to whether Danganbrack is still standing, we didn’t meet anyone to ask in the succeeding ten miles or so, and when we did meet someone he didn’t know and thought we were enquiring about some new brand of breakfast cereal.
By now both of us were consumed by the unspoken fear that the short December day might give out and leave us blundering about on our bikes in Irish darkness, far from our destination. This was a farm near Crusheen, where we had stayed some eighteen years before, but it was still miles away to the north, and its occupants were still blissfully unaware that we were proposing to stay with them. En route we made one rapid detour down a lane to see Magh Adhair, the Inauguration Place of the Kings of Thomond (now County Clare), one of whom was Brian Boru, High King of Ireland – a grassy mound surrounded by a deep ditch by the banks of the Hell River. On the far side of the river there was a tall, slender standing stone which probably had some ceremonial significance, though the actual inauguration is thought to have taken place under a great oak tree nearby.
This mound has a violent history. In 877 Lorcan, King of Thomond, whose crowning place it was, fought a battle there against Flan, High King of Ireland, which sounds as if it had more of the quality of opera bouffe. In the course of it Flan, to denigrate his adversary and to decrease the sanctity of the place, started to play a game of chess on the mound – a present-day equivalent from the point of view of sacrilege would be to play Bingo in Westminster Abbey – but was driven from it by Lorcan, whose fury can only be imagined. Forced to take refuge among the thorn thickets in which the area still abounds Flan promptly got lost and after three days blundering about in them had to surrender. Two other kings, Malachy, High King of Ireland in 982, and Aedh O’Conor, King of Connacht in 1051, committed even greater sacrilege by cutting down the sacred tree, which must have been pretty small the second time round. The last Coronation took place there in the reign of Elizabeth I.
Standing on this mound, looking out over what is partly a natural amphitheatre at the beginning of a long-drawn-out and sulphurous sunset, the feeling of mystery that this place would otherwise have had about it was destroyed by a ribbon of brightly lit bungalows along a nearby lane. It was only going to be a matter of getting a few more building permissions before Magh Adhair would be completely hemmed in by them, a triumph for the developers who will have succeeded in destroying what more than a thousand years, three kings and innumerable wars have failed to do.
Then we set off on what proved to be an interminable ride past O’Brien’s Big Lough and Knocknemucky Hill, at 239 feet the highest point in a plain that extended all the way north from the Shannon estuary to Galway Bay. By the time we reached Crusheen, at a crossroads on the fearful N18, it was quite dark. The only human beings we had seen on our journey from Quin, a distance of some seven or eight miles, were two small boys playing outside the lodge gate of a demesne. There were three pubs at Crusheen, and parked outside them were a number of huge heavy goods vehicles, drop-outs from what was currently taking place on the N18 which looked like an HGV version of the Mille Miglia. Inside, one hoped, their drivers were taking it nice and steady and not mixing the J. Arthur Guinness Extra Stout with the Paddy, or vice versa. Of the three, we chose O’Hagerty’s, the inside of which was even more attractive than the outside, small and snug and a sort of amber colour, a compound of varnish and smoke applied liberally to what was perhaps, half a century ago, white lincrusta. Mr O’Hagerty had been a horse breeder and dealer until one bad day he was kicked in the neck by one of his stallions. This had left his neck and left hand partially paralysed but had by no means destroyed his animation; in fact he was such a great conversationalist and raconteur that, listening to him, we wondered what he must have been like before his mishap. He talked about Irish tinkers or, as they themselves like to be called, ‘travelling people’, with whom he had an affinity because of a shared passion for horses; and about the great horse fairs, the best of which he said was and still is the one held at Spancil Hill in June each year. Mr O’Hagerty remembered the horses being brought in to Spancil Hill, nose to tail, from as far away as Cork, by drovers who slept rough in the open and kept going on tobacco and booze.
While he was telling us all this we drank strong, orange-coloured, very sweet tea brewed by Mrs O’Hagerty and ate slices of a delicious cake, one of a number she had made for Halloween, which was remarkably fresh considering that she had baked it thirty-seven days previously. The only other visitor while we were there – he could scarcely be described as a customer – was a rather grim-looking elderly priest who had come to empty a collecting box for some overseas mission and who didn’t seem exactly overjoyed at what he found in it.
All Crusheen’s other booze customers were next door on Clark’s premises, where, some said, the best Guinness in Ireland was served. Apparently, Clark got so worried about Mr O’Hagerty’s Guinness that he very kindly let Mr O’Hagerty have a set of his own pipes to connect up to his barrels, clean pipes being of crucial importance to the quality of any beer; but in spite of this poor Mr O’Hagerty’s Guinness was still not thought to be as good. Personally, having sunk a couple of pints of both Mr Clark’s Guinness and Mr O’Hagerty’s, I couldn’t detect any significant difference between them, and I rather fancy myself when it comes to appraising beer.
Then I went to telephone the farm, which eventually turned out to be so close that if I’d brought a megaphone with me I could have communicated with it direct. I wished I had. Telephoning from a call box in Ireland is a hazardous and expensive business. You place a number of silver-coloured coins on an inclined plane and watch them disappear into the machine, rather like a landslide. Once this has happened there is no possibility of getting any of them back even if, by no fault of your own, you are disconnected, unless you take a sledgehammer to it. This may explain why the IRA spend so much time robbing banks at gunpoint: to reimburse themselves, at least partially, for all the money they have lost in Irish call boxes.
Mrs Griffey, the owner, was getting dressed up to attend an end-of-the-year do organized by Pan Am in Limerick, but whoever answered said it would be fine for us to stay. There was no food in the house, however, so we should find a place to eat either in Crusheen or in Ennis (ignoring the fact that we were on our bikes and it was fourteen miles to Ennis and back).
The third pub in Crusheen, we were told, did evening meals; but when I went to ask it was closed, it looked as if for ever. So we went to the supermarket and Wanda bought the ingredients of a dinner which, if necessary and providing the stove was still going at the farm, she could cook herself.
Then, in the teeth of the gale, we set off on our bikes for the farm down the N18 in the direction of Ennis, as we had been told to do. It was not marked on the map, but no one I asked could read one anyway. ‘It’s only half a mile,’ said someone, a bloody know-all if ever there was one. ‘Sure, and you can’t miss it, you take a roight after the railway bridge. There’s a great soign.’ And more in the same vein, which in Ireland usually means that you will never find what you are looking for and you yourself will probably never be seen again.
In London and Paris, the Elephant and Castle and the Place de la Concorde on a bicycle are for me the equivalent of St Lawrence’s red-hot griddle. In Rome the one-way sections of the Lungotevere are exactly as I imagine they would be for an early Christian mounted on a bicycle and taking part in a chariot race with charioteers, all of whom have received instructions to squash him flat. I have also been scared stiff in New York, pedalling flatout on Seventh and St Nicholas’ Avenue, Harlem, where everyone else is doing 50 m.p.h. with the windows wound up to escape being mugged. But nowhere have I been anywhere like as frightened as I was that night of my birthday on the four hundred yards or so of the N18 (it may have been shorter but it seemed much longer) leading down from Crusheen to the bridge.
‘I don’t like this,’ Wanda said as we pedalled off in line ahead, echoing my own thoughts on the subject with uncanny fidelity. ‘I’m frightened, really frightened.’ And she was right to be. This particular section of the N18 was single carriageway; it was unilluminated, either due to a power failure or because someone had forgotten to switch on the street lights, or because there weren’t any to switch on; and big container trucks, a lot of them with trailers that doubled their length, were hurtling down it at between 60 and 70 m.p.h. in both directions, with about fifty feet between them. Cars didn’t constitute a problem: there were so few of them and their drivers were probably as scared as we were – if they weren’t they needed their heads examined.
The trucks travelling towards us gave us the full treatment with their headlamps so that we could see nothing else. Our feeble little Ever Ready battery lamps that had been barely strong enough to allow us steerage way in the lanes on the way from Quin to Crusheen were a joke. (Anyway, it was our own fault: we had promised ourselves that we would never ride at night and here we were on the first one doing just that.) All that we could see of the road ahead was illuminated by what was overtaking us.
When whatever it was actually did pass us I had the eerie impression of something huge and black looming up on my offside, rather as if a contractor was moving a section of the Berlin Wall to Ennis by road. This took place to the accompaniment of a terrible roaring sound and a blast of air, more like a shock wave really, the sort of thing one might expect to occur when one’s neighbourhood munitions dump goes up.
It was only too obvious that the majority of the drivers didn’t even see us despite the fact that our machines and ourselves were bristling with almost every procurable electric and fluorescent retro-reflective safety aid, in brilliant shades of red, yellow or orange: glittering Sam Browne belts with shoulder straps, reflective trouser clips and pedals, and pannier bags with panels of the same material, as well as front and rear reflectors, wheel reflectors and the Ever Ready front and rear battery lamps.
The bridge spanned the road downhill from the village at one of those sharp bends that were the pride and joy of the more perverse Victorian and Edwardian railway bridge builders, a bend which continued to curve away to the left for a considerable distance on the other side of the bridge before straightening out again. This meant that anyone or anything, in this case our two selves and our bikes, would be invisible to any following traffic until it was literally on top of us.
It was at this moment, as we emerged from beneath the arch, that I heard Wanda cry out – her actual words were, ‘They’ve killed us, the bastards!’ – and the next thing I remember was being literally lifted off the road by what seemed like a giant hand and deposited, lying on my side but still on my bicycle, in something cold and nasty, which turned out to be a mud-filled expanse that had been churned up by vehicles such as this one taking the corner so fine that they had completely destroyed the hard shoulder. The same thing had happened to Wanda. By screwing my head round I could see the light from her bicycle’s headlamp, but I could see and hear nothing else because of the pandemonium on the road and I had a terrible feeling of panic, afraid that she might be either dead or badly injured.
‘Are you all right?’ I shouted and heard her shout back ‘Yes’ and something else extremely rude and knew that she was. Like me, she was still on her bicycle, lying on her left side in the ditch, half buried in mud, but miraculously alive and uninjured. If there had been any trees on the roadside for us to be hurled against we would have been goners.
The question was, how long could we continue to stay where we were and still remain alive? The trucks and trailers were still coming, their drivers changing down before the bridge on the downhill stretch, then screaming round the corner under it, hugging it close and blinding us with their headlights.
I had a job to get the bikes out. Both the front nearside panniers had jumped off the carriers and were sinking in the slime but with the rest of the gear on them both machines were still very heavy. As far as I could make out, they were undamaged, as they had fallen on us and, most important of all at this moment, the rear lights were still working.
When I finally succeeded in getting them out I left Wanda cowering with her bicycle as far from the road as possible and, during a momentary lull in the traffic, I sprinted twenty or thirty yards down the road with my own bike to the point where the road straightened out, and parked it against a tree. Then I went back to fetch Wanda’s bike and we both ran for our lives. In doing all this we failed to see the entrance to the lane which led to the farm, or the ‘great soign’ which was supposed to draw attention to it. Even if we had seen the lane it would have been impossible to turn into it on such a night, as it would have meant crossing both streams of traffic.
The next half mile was slightly less unpleasant than what had gone before. The road was without any dangerous bends and ran, so far as I could see, through fairly open country, although the trucks kept on coming and there was no footpath to push our bikes along. We were much too unnerved to cycle. We were also covered in mud from head to foot. We passed two small roads which led off to the right, neither of which, although we did not understand the reason at the time, was marked by any sort of ‘soign’, let alone a great one.
It now began to pour with rain, which was a blessing in that it washed away the worst of the mud from our boots and our Gore-Tex suits, and just as we were beginning to despair of ever finding the right road, we came abreast of a couple of workmen’s cottages which stood above the road on the left, one of which had a light in its front room and a front door without a knocker. After battering on it with my fists for some time – the roar of the traffic must have made it almost impossible to hear anything within – it opened to reveal the outline of a tall figure standing against the blacked-out entrance. ‘Ah, it’s Dilly Griffey you’re wanting,’ the figure said in the voice of a youngish man. ‘You should have turned away at the bridge. You will have to go back to the bridge, now, and you’ll see the soign and a road running away up along the railway to the left. It’s no distance, with your boikes.’
I wondered if this man, who presumably had been brought up in the automobile age in Ireland, had the slightest idea of what travelling along the N18 at night on a bicycle was like. Or perhaps he had. Perhaps he was one of those cyclists one encounters in rural Ireland on wet nights who wear black suits, long black overcoats and black caps with buttons on and who wobble down the middle of the road on machines without any sort of lights or reflectors, yet are somehow never touched, let alone blown off them, knocked down and ‘kilt’. Whatever he was, I told him that nothing would persuade us to go back to the bridge. Was there no other way of getting to it?
‘Well, there is,’ he said. ‘You can take the next right down past Ballyline House – you’ll be knowing Ballyline House, no doubt – then you don’t take the road to Dromore or Ruan, but the one up the hill and you’ll be there. There’s a soign for it.’
So we did another half mile on the road, then scuttled across it into a lane which led past an expensive-looking illuminated blur to the left which was presumably Ballyline House, in which I imagined Anglo-Irish ladies with high voices and men wearing waistcoats and watch chains downing Beefeater’s gin and Glenlivet. Then we turned sharp right up a nasty hill (anything not dead flat was nasty by this time) past a conifer plantation. Half way up it we met a man with an electric torch who had the impertinence (or perhaps he was feeble-minded), since it had only stopped pouring with rain a few seconds previously, to say that it was a grand noight – grand noight for what? Murder? He also said that the farm was down the hill on the other side, a bit, and that there was a crossroads and a ‘soign’, and we couldn’t miss it.
At the crossroads, using my bicycle lamp and promising to buy myself a pocket torch for map reading at noight on future events such as this, I eventually discovered the soign, which was not at all that great, coyly hidden in a hedgerow, half-covered by vegetation and pointing uphill in the general direction of Ballyline House, the way by which we had come.
I felt my reason going. Perhaps it had, already. Was I already one with the great Gaels of Ireland, the men that God made mad, as most of the other Gaels I had met on this, my first day in Ireland, appeared to be?
I told Wanda to stay where she was at the crossroads and guard herself, the soign and her boike, and let no one take any of them away, or otherwise interfere with them. Then I engaged the lowest gear at my disposal and pedalled away uphill in pursuit of the man with the torch who had so foully misused us. By the time I had climbed it and gone down the other side and caught up with him he was practically at Ballyline House. Perhaps he was on his way there to tell the assembled house party what a trick he had played on two foreigners. ‘Ah,’ he said courteously, ‘I should have told you about the soign. It should point left at the cross but then the wind catches and turns it back on itself. It often happens with it. It’s a strange thing.’
I went back up the hill, past the conifers, and down the other side to the crossroads where Wanda, like the Roman soldier faithful unto death at Pompeii, kept her vigil, and told her that it was left at the crossroads we had to turn, to which she replied that it all depended whether he meant left going towards Ballyline House or left going away from it.
We plumped for the latter, and tackled another steep hill, from the top of which, to our inexpressible relief, we could see the lights of the farm shining in a hollow below.
We were welcomed by Mrs Griffey’s small grandson, Gary, an enthusiastic cyclist who was so enamoured of Wanda’s pint-sized mountain bike that he wanted immediately to ride away into the boondocks on it, and by Mrs Griffey’s grown-up son, Tom, who had been lying on a sofa watching telly with his shoes off and who said it was a funny thing about the soign that the wind always twisted it. Present also was Mrs Griffey’s daughter-in-law, the girl to whom I had spoken on the telephone, who said she would cook the food Wanda had bought at the supermarket.
After all this, and a couple of very hot baths (hot baths, as we subsequently discovered, being something of a rarity in Irish B and Bs, especially in winter) we went to bed, whacked, although altogether we had only covered about thirty-five miles. By now it was a fine night and a moon in its last quarter shone down from a sky filled with stars in the last hours of my birthday, which I shared with Henry VI, born 1421, and Warren Hastings, born 1732. If the next ten days in Ireland produced cycling anywhere near as exciting as this evening’s we would probably be dead before Christmas.
CHAPTER 4 Round the Burren (#ulink_6f972cc8-2180-5907-87ab-af268e9d4cef)
The Burren, ‘of which it is said that it is a country where there is not water enough to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him, which last is so scarce that the inhabitants steal it from each other, and yet their cattle are very fat, for the grass growing in tufts of earth of two or three foot square that lie between the rocks which are of limestone, is very sweet and nourishing.’
Memoirs of EDMUND LUDLOW, one of Cromwell’s generals The following morning we woke around seven-thirty to find brilliant sunshine pouring in through the bedroom windows. Anxious to make the most of the day, we got dressed and went downstairs to find no one about, except Gary, the grandson of the house, a fount of energy and of information about everything connected with the property and its occupants.
‘It’ll be a good bit yet before you get a sniff of your breakfast,’ he put it, picturesquely; and indeed it was ten o’clock before it finally appeared, or indeed there were any signs of life at all. It had certainly been a working farm when we had stayed on it last, but now showed signs, in spite of a tractor parked outside, of being an erstwhile one.
Inside, the house was still much as we remembered it, almost twenty years previously, enlarged but still homely and welcoming. The most recent acquisition appeared to be a set of large armchairs, upholstered in delicate green velvet, which would make a happy stamping ground for dogs whose owners had forgotten to bring their dog baskets and for children equipped with bubble gum and muddy rubber boots. Mrs Griffey now appeared, after her late night out with Pan Am, and gave us a warm welcome. Her husband, whom we remembered well, had been dead for some years.
How did we come to stay in this remote, pleasant spot in the first place? Back in 1964 the Irish Tourist Board began to compile a list of farmhouses and other houses in rural situations whose owners were prepared to take in visitors, and at the same time provide a certain modicum of comfort for them, which might or might not be forthcoming if anyone knocked on a door at random and unannounced.
To encourage the farmers’ wives and others on whom the brunt of the work would fall, and to give them confidence in their abilities and the opportunity to exchange ideas, courses were arranged in a large country house near Drogheda in County Louth, with the cooperation of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association. The courses lasted a week, which was reckoned to be about as long as the average Irish farmer could survive with his family but without his wife. They were a great success: among other subjects they dealt with cookery, interior decoration and household management. The culmination was the answering of an impossibly difficult letter from an apprehensive potential guest. As a result of all this a tremendous esprit de corps was built up among the ladies who had been on what they proudly referred to as ‘The Course’.
As a result, the number of recommended farmhouses rose rapidly. The only trouble was that the guests failed to materialize. Understandably, after the expenditure of so much effort and money by all concerned, depression reigned. Alarmed at their lack of success the Irish Tourist Board asked me, in my then capacity as Travel Editor of the Observer, if I would like to visit some of these houses and see for myself what I thought of them. They produced a complete list, helped me to whittle it down to about thirty, and then left Wanda and myself to get on with it in our own way.
It was an extraordinarily interesting experience. Some were working farms with eighteenth- or nineteenth-century buildings, such as the one we were now staying in. Some were not farms at all but quite large country houses, standing in their own parklands, and with or without farms and rambling outbuildings. Some were neat and modern bungalows, rather early prototypes of those we had passed the previous day on the way from Sixmilebridge to Quin, some with plastic gnomes in their front gardens, which were fashionable then. Indistinguishable from ordinary B and Bs, we gave them a miss.
All had one thing in common: they were very clean. Many had washbasins in the bedrooms; others had vast bathrooms with washbasins like fonts, and baths commodious enough to hold a baby whale. In one of them the lavatory was on a dais in a long, narrow chamber so far from the door that, installed on it, I was in a perpetual state of uncertainty as to whether or not I had locked myself in. Students of early plumbing, I noted, would find a visit to such houses worthwhile for these features alone.
Some of the most modest-looking houses concealed within them beautiful fireplaces and remarkable furniture, some of it very fine, some very eccentric, such as bog oak bookcases and extraordinary what-nots. The interior decorations were unpredictable. Some of the ladies, after being visited by a representative of the Tourist Board, panicked and replaced their nice old floral wallpaper with contemporary stuff covered with designs of Dubonnet bottles and skyscrapers, and coated the slender glazing bars of their eighteenth-century windows with a thick coating of bilious yellow paint.
In the course of our journey we played croquet and tennis, got stung by bees, struck up friendships with various donkeys, one of which was called Noël, and innumerable tame rabbits, puppies and dogs. Often there was riding, which we were no good at, and fishing, at which we were not much better but which we enjoyed.
And there was the food, which was always abundant, too abundant. I was anxious to do my best by the ladies but it was not always possible to be kind and at the same time truthful. When it came to bacon, ham, eggs and sausages, soda bread and butter, home-made cakes, jam and cream, everything was fine. Let them loose on a steak, a piece of meat to roast, or even on a cut of freshly landed salmon, and they would turn it into something that resembled an old tobacco pouch, which is, I am sorry to say, in my own judgment, the story of Irish cooking. In spite of this they did me the honour of referring to me very kindly in their brochure, by which time the scheme had become a resounding success.
What followed was what lawyers call a dies non, a day on which no legal business may be transacted (a prohibition which has the effect of making them bad-tempered), and what I call a no-day. In some mysterious way, although some parts of it were pleasant, altogether it added up to a day with something wrong with it, and it made us bad-tempered too.
After breakfast that almost qualified as lunch we set off in the brilliant sunshine on a circular tour of the middle part of the nameless plain which extends from the Shannon to the Bay of Galway, or as much of it as we could manage. No sooner had we got to the ‘soign’ at the crossroads than a downpour of tropical intensity began to fall on us, but by the time we had both struggled into our rainproof suits (the trousers, although made ample on purpose, are particularly difficult to get into when wearing climbing boots) it had stopped and Wanda insisted on taking her trousers off. Within a couple of minutes it began to rain all over again, so she put them back on. The trouble was it was unseasonably warm with it, and in the sort of conifer woods which should only be allowed in Scandinavia, Russia, Siberia, the Yukon and Canada the insects were beginning to tune up for what they apparently thought was the onset of summer. At this point I took my waterproof trousers off. All this effort to see Dromore, a castle of the O’Briens, in a region where castles, except as appendages to the landscape, or notably eccentric, can easily become a bit of a drug on the market.
We pedalled on through these endless woods and past Ballyteige Lough and fissured beds of grey, karstic limestone, duplicates of similar beds in the Kras, in Wanda’s native Slovenia, to which so many times in the course of our life together she had threatened to return, leaving me for ever. Then on past a couple more castles and across a snipe bog on a narrow causeway, with Ballylogan Lough beyond it, golden in the sun, and ahead the mountains of the Burren, stretching across the horizon as far as the eye could see like a fossilized tidal wave. Overhead, clouds with liver-covered undersides, pink on the upper parts where the sun caught them, drifted majestically eastwards. Here it was colder. I put on my trousers again.
In the middle of this bog, we met three young men gathered round a tractor who stopped talking when we passed them and didn’t reply when we said it was a lovely day, something so unusual in our admittedly still limited experience of talking to the natives that it gave us both the creeps – another nail in the coffin of the no-day. Dogs to match them emerged from a farm on the far side of the bog and tried to take chunks out of our costly Gore-Tex trousers.
Beyond the bog was Coolbaun, a hamlet in which most of the houses were in ruins. In it the minute Coolbaun National School, built in 1895 and abandoned probably some time in the 1950s, still had a roof, and its front door was ajar. Inside there was a bedstead, a table with two unopened tins of soup on it, a raincoat hanging on a nail and a pair of rubber boots. It was like finding a footprint on a desert island. Hastily, we beat a retreat.
The first real village we came to was Tubber, a place a mile long with a pub at either end (neither of which had any food on offer), in fact so long that on my already battered half-inch map one part of it appeared to be in Clare, the other in Galway. The pub nearest to Galway was terribly dark, as if the proprietor catered only for spiritualists; the other had three customers all glued to the telly watching a steeplechase, none of whom spoke to us even between races. Meanwhile we drank, and ate soda bread and butter and spam bought in the village shop. ‘Is this what they call “Ireland of the Welcomes”?’ Wanda asked with her mouth full. Another coffin nail.
The nicest-looking places in Tubber were the post office and Derryvowen Cottage, which was painted pink and which we passed on the way to look for something marked on the map as O’Donohue’s Chair. What is or was O’Donohue’s Chair? No guide book that I have ever subsequently been able to lay my hands on refers to it. Is it, or was it, some kind of mediaeval hot seat stoked with peat? Or a throne over an oubliette that precipitates anyone who sits on it into the bottomless rivers of the limestone karst? Whatever it is, if it isn’t the product of some Irish Ordnance Surveyor’s imagination, further inflamed by a spam lunch in Tubber, it is situated in a thicket impenetrable to persons wearing Gore-Tex suits, and hemmed in by an equally impenetrable hedge reinforced with old cast iron bedsteads, worth a bomb to any tinker with a pair of hedging gloves.
After this, misled by two of the innocent-looking children in which Ireland abounds – leprechauns in disguise – we made an equally futile attempt to see at close quarters Fiddaun Castle, another spectacular tower house more or less in the same class as the unfindable Danganbrack. ‘Sure and you can’t miss it. It’s up there and away down,’ one of these little dumplings said, while the other sucked her thumb, directing us along a track that eventually became so deep in mire that it almost engulfed us. From the top of the hill they indicated, however, we did have a momentary view of the Castle and of Lough Fiddaun to the north, with three swans floating on it, before the whole scene was obliterated by a hellish hailstorm.
The next part of our tour was supposed to take in the monastic ruins of Kilmacduagh, over the frontier from Clare in Galway. However, one more December day was beginning to show signs of drawing to a close, and so we set off back in the direction of Crusheen. It really had been a no-day. Not only had we not seen the Kilmacduagh Monastery, but we had not seen, as we had planned to do, the early nineteenth-century castle built by John Nash for the first Viscount Gort on the shores of Lough Cutra, similar to the one he built at East Cowes on the Isle of Wight, now scandalously demolished; or the Punchbowl, a series of green, cup-shaped depressions in a wood of chestnut and beech trees where the River Beagh runs through a gorge 80 feet deep and disappears underground, perhaps to flow beneath O’Donohue’s Chair; or Coole Park, the site of the great house which was the home of Augusta, Lady Gregory, whose distinguished guests, among them Shaw, O’Casey, W. B. and J. B. Yeats, AE (George) Russell and Katherine Tynan – a bit much to have all of them together, one would have thought – used a giant copper beech in the grounds as a visitors’ book. To see all these would have taken days at the speed we were travelling. Well, we would never see them now.
So home to dinner, after which Tom took us to Saturday evening Mass in Crusheen. His mother was going the following morning, but if you attended Mass on Saturday evening you didn’t have to do so again on Sunday. If asked, he said, we were to say that he too had been present. Meanwhile, he headed for Clark’s, to which most of my own impulses were, I admit, to accompany him.
The church was almost full; and the subject of the sermon was Temperance, an obligatory one in Ireland for the First Sunday in Advent. This being Saturday, perhaps the priest was giving it a trial run. He certainly had a large enough audience for it. He was a formidable figure, this priest. Was he, I wondered, the same one we encountered in O’Hagerty’s taking a dim view of the contents of a collection box? To me priests in mufti look entirely different when robed. Ireland, he said, was as boozy as Russia – a bit much, I thought, to accuse any country of being, with the possible exception of Finland. He then went on to castigate the licensed trade as spreaders of evil, something I have always fervently believed myself. If any Guinnesses had been present they would have been writhing with embarrassment. ‘Just too awful,’ I could imagine them saying, but then one imagines that any Catholic Guinnesses, if such there be, give the First Sunday in Advent and the Saturday preceding it a miss. And there were prayers for the wives of drunks, but none for the drunks themselves, or the husbands of drunks, all of whom I would have thought were equally in need of them.
We were in bed by nine-thirty, slept nine hours and woke to another brilliant day, this time completely cloudless. After another good breakfast, we set off on what, for Wanda, proved to be a really awful four-mile uphill climb to Ballinruan, a lonely hamlet high on the slopes of the Slieve Aughty Mountains, where a Sunday meet of the County Clare Foxhounds was to take place. Its cottages were rendered in bright, primary colours, or finished in grey pebbledash – one house was the ghostly silver-grey of an old photographic plate. The church sparkled like icing sugar in the sunshine, and across the road from it, in Walsh’s Lounge Bar and Food Store, four old men, all wearing caps, were drinking whiskey and stout and sharing a newspaper between them.
The view from the village was an amazing one. Behind it gentle slopes led up to a long, treeless ridge; immediately below it, and on either side, the ground was rougher, with outcrops of rock – a wilderness of gorse and heather interspersed with stunted, windswept trees. Out beyond this a vast landscape opened up: the level plain, part of which we had travelled through with so many setbacks the previous day. Its innumerable loughs, now a brilliant Mediterranean blue, blazed among green fields of irregular shape, bogs, woodlands and tracts of limestone, with here and there a white cottage or the tower of a castle rising among them.
And beyond all this, the far more immense bare limestone expanses of the Burren rose golden in the morning sunlight; Galway Bay could just be seen to the north-west; while to the south, beyond the Shannon, were the hills and mountains of County Limerick, their feet shrouded in a mist which gave an impression of almost tropical heat.
