Round Ireland in Low Gear

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At twelve-thirty the hounds arrived in a big van, very well behaved, and soon more vans and horse boxes trundled up the hill, some drawn by Mercedes. Here, the hunt was more or less on the extreme limits of its territory. It normally hunted over stone walls on the west side of the County, and over banks and fly fences on the east and south. The rough country round us, on the other hand, might give shelter to hordes of hill foxes. Anyway, they were safe today. This was a drag hunt in which the hounds would follow an artificial scent.

By one o’clock those horses still in their boxes were becoming impatient, kicking the sides of them, and catching the air of excitement that was gradually gathering in the street outside. People were beginning to saddle up and mount now, especially the children, of whom there were quite a number. A big van with four horses in it arrived and one of their owners said to the driver, ‘It’s a lovely day! Let’s go and have a jar now in Walsh’s.’ By now the bar was splitting at the seams.

This was not a smart hunt such as the County Galway, otherwise known as the Blazers, the County Limerick, the Kildare, or the Scarteen, otherwise the Black and Tans. It was not the sort of hunt that Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who loved hunting in Ireland more than anything else on earth and was so proud of her figure that she had herself sewn into her habit every hunting day, would have patronized. Most were in black jackets and velvet caps, some were in tweeds, others wore crash helmets, and one man with a craggy, early nineteenth-century face wore a bowler. One man in a tweed coat sounded suspiciously like a Frenchman, there was an elegant American girl in a tweed coat, and what looked like several members of the scrap metal business. A cosmopolitan lot.

The hounds were released; there were eight and a half couple of them, which is a hunter’s way of saying seventeen. After a brief period in which they were allowed to savour delicious smells, one of the Joint Masters, who was wearing a green coat with red facings and black boots with brown tops, took them up the road to cries of what sounded like, ‘Ged in! Ged in!’ and ‘Ollin! Ollin!’ Then they were suddenly turned, and ran back down the street through a press of people and out through the village, down and over the flanks of Derryvoagh Hill and into the eye of the now declining sun. Soon they were lost to view to us and other followers, watching their progress from one of the rocks below the village.

‘By God,’ someone said, ‘the next thing we’ll be hearing of them they’ll be in America.’

I left Wanda to take the long downhill back to Crusheen and the farm, where Tom was very kindly waiting to take her to Ballyvaughan, on the shores of Galway Bay, where we were going to stay for a few days. Then I, too, zoomed downhill bound for the Monastery of Kilmacduagh, which we had failed to see the previous day. I was so exhilarated by the fast cooling air that I almost felt I was flying.

Six miles out as the crow flies from Ballinruan, I zoomed past the site of a ruined castle on the shores of Lough Bunny, then right, past a field in which a small boy was trying to catch a wild-looking horse and bridle it, the Burren blue-black against the setting sun, the plain close under it already in shadow, and on, having missed the road to Kilmacduagh, through the bare, limestone karst from which black and white cattle were somehow scratching a living, spotting an occasional small white farmhouse in what was effectively a limestone desert. Suddenly, there was the monastery, far off to the right across a wide expanse of limestone pavement riven with deep, parallel crevices that looked like an ice floe breaking up: a collection of silver-grey buildings with the last of the sunlight illuminating the conical cap of its enormously tall round tower – 112 feet high and two feet out of the perpendicular. This was the monastery founded in the sixth century by Guaire Aidhneach, King of Connacht (I was now just in Galway and therefore in the old County of Connacht) for his kinsman St Colman Macduagh, on the very spot where the saint’s girdle fell to the ground. The girdle was preserved in the monastery until the seventeenth century.

I pedalled on for another four or five miles through the bare limestone plain, the only visible living things in it now blackbirds and rooks. The last of the sun on this beautiful day was shining on the high, treeless tops of the Burren mountains, so convincingly sculpted by nature into the forms of prehistoric camps and forts that it was difficult to know whether I was looking at the work of nature or of man.

At the intersection of this loneliest of lonely roads with the main road, I nearly ran into the car in which Tom was taking Wanda and her bicycle to Ballyvaughan, together with Gary, the infant prodigy. A signpost still showed thirteen miles to Ballyvaughan and I cycled on, a bit tired, through a landscape by now an improbable shade of purple. I passed a wild-looking girl on a bicycle, and saw two young men in an enclosure full of rocks pushing them to one side with a bulldozer, the only way in the Burren, which is Ireland’s largest rockery, in which you can ever create a field. Until the invention of the bulldozer the inhabitants of the Burren removed all the rocks by hand, either using them for building walls or forming great mounds with them, which are still to be seen. In those days it would have required the help of many people, possibly an entire community, to make a field; now most of those people are either dead or emigrated or both.

The road ran close under the Burren mountains now and along the side of Abbey Hill, which conceals within its folds the beautiful, pale, lichen-encrusted ruins of Corcomroe, a Cistercian abbey built by a king of Munster. High above it, on a saddle, are the three ruined twelfth-century churches of Oughtmama, all that remain of yet another monastery of St Colman Macduagh. To the right, fields of an almost impossible greenness ran down to the shores of Aughinish and Corranroo Bays, long, beautiful, secretive inlets from Galway Bay. Then a delicious descent to a little hamlet called Burren, beside a reedy pond. Then up and down again to Bell Harbour on Poulnaclough Bay; the water in it like steel, with the mountains black above it and above that cobalt clouds against an otherwise pale sky in which Venus was suspended. When it comes to thoroughly unnatural effects it is possible to equal Ireland, difficult to surpass it.

(#litres_trial_promo) By the time I got to Ballyvaughan I had covered forty-five miles and it was dark.

CHAPTER 5 Land of Saints and Hermits (#ulink_b2d1c9e2-6736-5554-a9e3-64e51c894c80)

Stony seaboard, far and foreign,

Stony hills poured over space,

Stony outcrop of the Burren,

Stones in every fertile place,

Little fields with boulders dotted,

Grey-stone shoulders saffron-spotted,

Stone-walled cabins thatched with reeds,

Where a Stone Age people breeds

The last of Europe’s stone age race.

JOHN BETJEMAN. ‘Sunday in Ireland’,

Selected Poems, 1948

The whitewashed cottage we were to stay in (looking at it no one would have guessed that it was built with breeze blocks), at which Wanda had already arrived in Tom’s car, with her bike strapped precariously on top, had a thatched roof and a green front door with a top and bottom part that could be opened separately so that if you opened the bottom and kept the top closed, or vice versa, you looked from the outside as if you had been sawn in half.

The ceiling of the principal living room went right up to the roof and was lined with pine. The floor was of big, olive-coloured grit flagstones from the Cliffs of Moher, and there was an open fireplace with a merry fire burning in it, fuelled by blocks of compressed peat. There was a large table which would have been ideal if I had actually been going to write a book instead of thinking about doing so, which I could do better in bed, and traditional chairs with corded backs and seats. To be authentic they should have been upholstered with plaited straw, but straw had apparently played hell with the guests’ nylons.

The rugs on the floor, all made locally in County Cork, were of plaited cotton which produced a patchwork effect, and there were oil lamps on the walls with metal reflectors behind the glass shades, but wired for electricity. A wooden staircase led to a room above with two beds in it, the equivalent of a mediaeval solar. Leading off the living room was a very well-fitted kitchen, and there were two more bedrooms on the ground floor: altogether, counting a sofa bed and a secret bed that emerged from a cupboard, there were eight, a lot of beds for the two of us. The rooms, primarily intended for the visiting Americans, could be made fantastically hot: they had under-floor heating, convectors, a portable fan heater upstairs, infra-red heating in the bathroom, plus the open fire. Gary was bowled over by all this. He was even more pleased with it than we were. ‘Never,’ he said, ‘in all my born days’ had he seen anything like it.

‘When I get married,’ he confided, ‘I’m going to bring my wife here for our honeymoon.’

‘How old did you say you are?’

‘Eight.’

‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘is there any girl you really like?’

‘There’s one in First Grade. I like her.’

‘How old is she?’

‘About six.’

‘But would you marry her?’

‘I would not.’

‘Why wouldn’t you?’

‘Because she’s an O’Hanrahan. You can’t marry an O’Hanrahan in the parts we come from.’

Later, after he had eaten three apples, a banana and a large plate of salted nuts and drunk three large bottles of Coke, left as a welcoming present by the proprietors (together with a bottle of gin for us), Wanda asked him if he spoke Gaelic.

‘No way!’ he said firmly.

‘But I thought they taught you Gaelic in school.’

‘No, they only teach us Irish,’ he said.

After this we went to a pub where he ate all the nuts on sale there and drank three large orange juices.

Ballyvaughan is a small village and one-time fishing port. Until well into the twentieth century it imported Galway turf for fuel in sailing vessels called hookers – something which makes Americans when they read about them or see a rare survivor go off into peals of laughter – exporting in return grain, bacon and vegetables. Until the First World War and for some time after it there was a regular steamship service to and from Galway in the summer months.

There was not much of Ballyvaughan but what there was we liked: two streets of cottages and shops, one of them running along the shore with a pub restaurant at the western end, open most of the year, which served fish. In the other street there was the post office, Claire’s Place, a restaurant now closed for the winter, a couple of miniature supermarkets and two of the four pubs. Of the pubs, O’Lochlan’s was of the sort that in Ireland was already a rarity: dark in the daytime behind the engraved glass panel in its front door; at night still dark but glittering with light reflected off a hundred bottles and off the glasses and the brass handles of the black wooden drawers stacked one above the other like those in an old-fashioned apothecary’s shop. Behind the bar was a turf-burning stove which kept whoever was serving warm.

The equivalent of Piccadilly Circus in Ballyvaughan was where the roads from Galway and Ennis met; the equivalent of Eros was a monument-cum-fountain equipped with faucets in the shape of lions’ heads erected in 1874 by Colonel the Hon. Charles Wynn, son of the Baron Newborough, who at that time was Lieutenant of Clare. Behind the village the steep, terrace limestone slopes of a mountain called Cappanawalla, which means ‘the stony tillage lands’, rose 1200 feet above it.

Our cottage stood in a meadow in which cows grazed and overlooked one of the two jetties in the harbour which, apart from one fishing boat, was empty. Beyond it was the expanse of Galway Bay and beyond that again, the best part of forty miles away and barely visible, the Twelve Bens of Connemara, at the feet of which, completely invisible, was the Lough of Ballynahinch. This still held the record for having more rainy days in a year than anywhere else in the United Kingdom and Ireland – 309 in 1923 – and was somewhere that I felt we should do our best to avoid.

The next morning was cold, cloudless and brilliant with an east wind, and with what looked like a vaporous wig of mist on the mountains above. While we were eating rashers and eggs we received a visit from an elderly man wearing a long black overcoat and cap to match who offered to sell me a walking stick he had made – one of the last things I really needed, travelling on a bicycle. ‘I’ll bring you a pail of mussels this evening, if you like,’ he said, negotiations having fallen flat on the blackthorn. The whole coast was one vast mussel bed where it wasn’t knee-deep in oysters, but as the tide was going to be in for most of the morning and it was also very cold, it seemed sensible to let him gather them for us.

Our destination that day was Lisdoonvarna: ‘“Ireland’s Premier Spa,”’ I read to Wanda in excerpts from Murray’s Guide (1912) over breakfast. ‘“Known since the middle of the 18th century … situated at a height of about 600 feet above the sea … its climate excellent … the rainfall never rests long upon the limestone surface. The air, heated by contact with the bare sun-scorched rock of the surrounding district, is tempered by the moisture-laden breezes from the Atlantic three or four miles distant, and is singularly bracing and refreshing owing to the elevation.”’ It also spoke of spring water conveyed to the Spa House in glass-lined pipes, thus ensuring its absolute purity. More modern authorities spoke of a rock which discharged both sulphurous and chalybeate (iron) waters, rich in iodine and with radioactive properties, within a few inches of one another, the former to the accompaniment of disgusting smells.

The town was equally famous as a centre of match-making. Farmers in search of a wife were in the habit of coming to stay in the hotels in Lisdoonvarna in September after the harvest; there they found unmarried girls intent on finding themselves a husband. The arrangements were conducted by professional match-makers, in much the same way as sales of cattle and horses are still concluded by professional go-betweens at Irish fairs. This marriage market is still said to thrive, although to a lesser extent than previously. Professional match-makers, masseurs and masseuses, sauna baths, sun lounges, springs, bath and pump houses, cafés, dances and pitch-and-putt competitions, all taking place on a bed of warm limestone – it all sounded a bit like Firbank’s Valmouth. With the addition of a black masseuse it could have been.

‘Did you know,’ I said to Wanda, ‘that according to the Illustrated Ireland Guide “its sulphur water contains more than three times as much hydrogen sulphide gas as the spring at Harrogate”?’ To which she uttered an exclamation, the equivalent to ‘Cor!’ in Slovene, which I knew from a lifetime of experience meant that she wasn’t in the slightest bit interested.

We set off in the sunshine in the general direction of Lisdoonvarna, this being the nearest thing attainable in this part of the world to going from A to B by the shortest route. All was well at first. The road ran through meadowy country interspersed with hazel thickets, ‘fairly level but with a strong upward tendency’ as the Cyclists’ Touring Club Irish Road Book of 1899 rather charmingly put it, en route passing close to the Ailwee Cave, closed for two million years until its discovery in 1976, and now closed again because it was winter.

At this point the ‘strong upward tendency’ began in earnest – a succession of steep hairpin bends up Corkscrew Hill. At the same moment the sun vanished and we found ourselves in what seemed another world, enveloped in dense, freezing cloud which whirled across our path borne on the wings of the east wind and reduced visibility to not more than twenty yards. In spite of all this, once she had stopped changing up instead of down, and falling off when her Wild Cat subsequently ground to a halt, Wanda very nearly succeeded in winding her way to the top, and only had to get off and push the last fifty yards or so.

From the top, if it really was the top, there was nothing to be seen of the famous view over the Burren to Galway extolled by every guide book. Indeed it was difficult to imagine that on every side now, enveloped in what resembled cold gruel, were a host of natural wonders, some of them so extraordinary as to be positive freaks of nature: what are known – how uncouth the terms used by geologists sometimes sound – as clints, grykes, glacial erratics, and potholes and turloughs (what Wanda knew in her own country as doline and polje).

(#litres_trial_promo) Here, the last glaciation took place only about fifteen thousand years ago, making this one of the most recently created landscapes in the whole of Europe. What we were riding over now was hollow; beneath us rivers ran, quite literally, through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea.

It was equally difficult to imagine that hidden among these arid rocks, nurtured by often infinitesimal quantities of soil, something like a thousand different species of flowering plants and ferns were waiting for spring and summer to appear, at this meeting place of the northern (Hibernian) flora, brought here in the form of seeds during the last glaciation, and the southern (Lusitanian) flora, which had previously flourished there and continued to do so. Among them were creamy white mountain avens, spring gentians, hoary rockroses, fairy foxgloves, limestone bugles, various violas, greater butterwort, ladies’ bedstraw, bloody cranesbill, seven types of orchid and broomrape.

About the only thing currently visible on the High Burren and able to continue growing there throughout the winter was grass. The limestone retains the heat of the summer sun, turning it into a species of giant storage heater and making the hilltops and the higher valleys much warmer than the low-lying country below. For this reason the cattle are left high up to forage for themselves from November to late April and are then taken down to the lowlands for the summer months, the reverse of what happens in most other places. Herds of wild goats perform an invaluable function in keeping down the hazel scrub which rampages in summer.

At this moment, as if wanting to prove to us that they really were living up there, a herd of Burren cattle came sweeping round a corner towards us in close formation, steaming and smoking and completely filling the road, and looking to me very much as the Sixth Iniskilling Dragoons must have done to the French infantry when they were being charged by them on the afternoon of Waterloo. We did what the French would probably have done had it been available: took refuge in the entrance to the Corkscrew Hill National School, built in 1885 and now abandoned, while they thundered past it and on down the hill, apparently unaccompanied, in the direction of Ballyvaughan. Where did they think they were going? To the seaside for a dip?

For the next seven miles the only living soul we met with was a young Australian girl, sopping wet, padding gamely through the muck in her training shoes with a big, rectangular pack on her back the size of a large suitcase. She was a bit pissed off, she said, having been given a lift from Ballyvaughan post office by this old guy who said he was bound for Lisdoonvarna, but then changed his mind and dumped her at a fork in the road, with a six-mile hike to go. Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do to help her. ‘You should have brought a tandem,’ Wanda said to me. ‘Then you could have given people lifts.’

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.

(#litres_trial_promo)

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.

It was in this remote place that St Colman spent seven years of his life with only one companion, sleeping in the cave. Before retiring to his hermitage he founded churches on Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands, and the monastery at Oughtmama. It was for the saint and his companion, slowly dying of starvation in Keelhilla, that angels spirited away the Easter banquet of King Guaire Aidhneach, founder of the Monastery of Kilmacduagh. And it was across the water-eroded beds of karstic limestone known thereafter as Bothar na Mias (the Road of the Dishes) that the King and his followers pursued their banquet, all the way from his castle on the shores of Kinvarra Bay. Here, a patron, or parish celebration, is still held on the last Sunday in July.

It was now three-thirty and the sun had left the Hermitage. I retraced my steps across the Road of Dishes, found my bike and continued to climb the awful hill, to a ridge between the Doomore and Gortaclare mountains, where the road, to my horror, began an endless descent into the great, verdant Carran Depression through the whole of which I was pursued by a really savage dog. From it I climbed onto a great, grass-grown plateau that looked like a golden sea in the light of the setting sun, then down again and up again, the map giving no inkling of these awful undulations. On the way I passed a wonder called the Caherconnell Ringfort, but was dissuaded from visiting it by yet more wretched dogs which came streaming out of the neighbouring farmyard to attack me at a time when any reasonable dog would have been watching television. By now the sun had gone from the Burren and its expanses were, apart from the dogs, silent and mysterious. By now I was fed up with hills and was grateful for what followed, a wonderful, five-mile descent from the escarpment all the way to Ballyvaughan in the dusk, to find that Wanda’s lobster catch had failed to appear. It didn’t matter – we still had half a sack of mussels to get through.