Round Ireland in Low Gear
Eric Newby
'You've had some pretty crazy ideas in your life, Newby, but this is the craziest.' Grandmother Wanda Newby was exasperated after continuous rain, snow, and gales that knocked from her bike. Twice.To avoid other tourists, Eric Newby had decided that the depths of winter would be the very best time to explore Ireland by mountain bike. More astonishing still, he managed to persuade Wanda, his long-suffering wife and life-long co-traveller, to accompany him - mainly, she admitted, to 'keep him out of trouble'. Lashed by winter storms, fuelled by Guinness and warmed by thermal underwear, their panniers laden with antique books on Ireland, the elderly adventurers cycle the highways and byways, encountering hospitable locals, swaying saints and ferocious dogs.From the shores of Donegal to the holy mountains, Newby guides the reader on a tale of mishap and magic, all in his own peculiar style of humour and charm, relishing his never-ending curiosity of the world and his insatiable quest for adventure.
ERIC NEWBY
Round Ireland in Low Gear
DEDICATION (#ulink_9789d328-c616-56ef-b486-b6739e6afa0e)
For the Irish,
the Eighth Walking (and Talking)
Wonders of the World
CONTENTS
Cover (#u6b82c127-521f-5d76-bf9c-0994717c9683)
Title Page (#uac8110fb-8eb7-544a-9fed-ac1656c8e712)
Dedication (#uc66c13b9-0213-5f4e-ba97-eee592edc944)
Introduction (#u61ecd8af-eee0-579b-a6b9-62da137184bd)
PART ONE December (#u2bda394a-5111-505d-8e53-dfb6b99dc75c)
1 State-of-the-Art (#u922aa0d4-6c6c-562a-a40d-a3006bcf9104)
2 To the Emerald Isle (#u74acd8af-78dd-501a-bcfe-effec55c7315)
3 Birthday on a Bicycle (#u78638948-4306-55f0-bebb-f480c08d1349)
4 Round the Burren (#u64b4f666-051d-592f-89c2-323b3bc1a479)
5 Land of Saints and Hermits (#uf48f2b51-a7df-5daf-b948-0cd20246bc0b)
6 In the Steps of St Brigid (#litres_trial_promo)
PART TWO January (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Through Waterford to Cork (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Through the Realms of Moving Statues (#litres_trial_promo)
9 A Night in Ballinspittle (#litres_trial_promo)
10 On the Road to Skibbereen (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Return to Kilmakilloge (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THREE June (#litres_trial_promo)
12 Dublin Unrevisited (#litres_trial_promo)
13 Main Line to Shannon Harbour (#litres_trial_promo)
14 To the Fair at Spancil Hill (#litres_trial_promo)
15 To the Aran Islands (#litres_trial_promo)
16 Stormy Weather (#litres_trial_promo)
17 An Ascent of Croagh Patrick (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FOUR October (#litres_trial_promo)
18 Last Days in Ireland (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Footnotes (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_3fdc6fba-5133-5371-9db3-9e42e98afbf1)
The roads are very variable, some being grand, others very bad. Intercourse with the peasantry will be found interesting and amusing. Nothing can exceed their civility and courtesy; and for those who are not too particular it will be found an excellent plan to lunch in their cottages, excellent tea, home-made bread, butter and eggs being procurable for 1s. [5p] a head.
The Cyclists’ Touring Club Irish Road Book, c. 1899
In the autumn of 1985, more or less on the spur of the moment, we decided to go back to Ireland and travel through as much of it as we could in the space of three months or so, starting in the South. The North could wait. If things improved there, so much the better. If they got worse we would simply not go there. We were not going to travel in the guise of sociologists, journalists or contemporary historians. I was unlikely to write a book called Whither Ireland? or Ireland Now. We were not going there, we hoped, to be shot at. We remembered it as it had been some twenty years previously, when it had been idiosyncratic and fun. (Romantic Ireland was long since dead and gone, as Yeats wrote, ‘with O’Leary in the grave’ – that is, if it had ever existed.) We were going there, in short, to enjoy ourselves, an unfashionable aspiration in the 1980s.
It was now mid-November. All Souls’ Day was already past. The dead season, as far as weather went, was in full sway all over the northern hemisphere and would last until Easter, and probably longer. We had no illusions about the dead season. Anywhere in the British Isles and in most parts of the Mediterranean it conjured up vistas of matchstick figures bent double by the wind, silhouetted against a colourless sea without a vessel in sight to break the monotony; sun lounges in hotels and guest houses filled with rolled-up carpet, those still open soldiering on with a skeleton staff, their proprietors in the Canaries, those left in charge in their absence never quite sober.
But it will be better in Ireland, we said, putting our faith in the Gulf Stream, and in the Irish themselves with their humour, and trying to forget, while adding up their other virtues, their cooking, though even that was said to have improved.
The reason we chose to begin our journey in this dead season was simply that at home in Dorset in the not-so-dead seasons we are engaged in extensive gardening operations without any sort of outside help. We have a large kitchen garden in which we grow all our own vegetables; large expanses of grass to be cut, a lot of it in a steep-sided orchard which, no sooner than one turns one’s back on it, becomes infested with moles whose excavations knock hell out of a mower; not to speak of a long, tapering field and quite an extensive beech wood to try and keep under control.
Having decided to explore as much of Ireland as we could between December and March and the rest of it when we could afford the time, we then had to decide what means of transportation to employ. My first impulse, one not shared by my wife Wanda, was to walk it; but what makes Ireland such a meal from the walker’s point of view is its coastline, which is 3500 miles long, more than a thousand miles longer than that of England and Wales and exactly a thousand miles longer than that of Scotland, and a lot of it on the Atlantic coasts very indented. Peninsulas such as the Iveragh, the Beara, the Dingle and Mizen Head are between thirty and forty miles long. To skirt the perimeter of these four adjacent peninsulas would involve a journey of at least 255 miles – the Ring of Kerry on the Iveragh Peninsula alone is over a hundred miles – and at the end of it one would only be about sixty miles further on one’s way. Similar vast detours would also have to be made, if one was serious about it, all the way up the West coast.
According to the excellent Ireland Guide, published by the Irish Tourist Board (otherwise Bord Failte, the Welcome Board), it is possible to visit the country ‘in its entirety in a couple of weeks’ by car or motorcycle; they then go on to say, however, rather like a band of roguish leprechauns, that ‘you cannot see everything, of course’. But we both rejected the idea of using a car on the grounds that whoever is driving sees hardly anything except the road ahead – if not they shouldn’t be driving – and the one who isn’t is either permanently map-reading or looking things up in guide books to entertain the driver, and getting ticked off if he fails to do so, which leads to what my wife calls ‘rowls’. In this way no one sees anything. Motorcycles we regarded, and still do, as just plain dangerous.
Buses sounded a little more promising but a closer look at the Amchlar Bus do na Cuigi agus Expressway, otherwise the Provincialand Expressway Timetable (not surprisingly there is no equivalent for ‘Bus’ and ‘Expressway’ in the Irish language) showed that some of the services were pretty skeletal in the winter months. The Amchlar Traenach, or Train Timetable (trains, presumably because of their more ancient lineage, having somehow contrived to get themselves incorporated into the language) offered even less hope. However carefree the image the Irish Railways tried to project, it was obvious that the system had suffered the attentions of some Irish equivalent, if such can be imagined, of Beeching, the destroyer of the British railway system. To understand what had been lost as a result it was only necessary to look at the railway map in the 1912, and last, edition of that splendid work, Murray’s Handbook to Ireland.
We also ruled out horses, as we are both terrified of them. Anyway, we would have had the problem of feeding them. I could foresee us buying them dozens of packets of All Bran in supermarkets and getting soundly kicked for our pains. Remembering what happened to Mr Toad we were less than enthusiastic about hiring a caravan. What we really needed was a balloon, but that would have meant employing a balloonist, and most likely ending up beyond the Urals.
The only other practical method of making the journey, although I was not sanguine about persuading Wanda to agree, was by bicycle.
PART ONE December (#ulink_5cd44741-ce32-5ff1-b117-0517724480e0)
CHAPTER 1 State-of-the-Art (#ulink_4d914049-1736-5bc4-a916-cd595527c796)
STATE-OF-THE-ART adj. (prenominal) (of hi-fi equipment, recordings, etc.) the most recent and therefore considered the best; up-to-the-minute: a state-of-the-art amplifier.
Collins English Dictionary
A bike is a very personal thing and the only person who can really judge it is the rider.
The Bicycle Buyer’s Bible, 1985/6
When I was seven or eight I used to have an awful recurrent nightmare about Germans invading England on bicycles.
It was inspired by a story in a germ-laden, pre-First World War magazine which I rescued from a dustbin behind the block of flats we lived in by Hammersmith Bridge in south-west London. In this tale, the Germans were landed on the shores of the Wash under cover of fog – a difficult feat, but Germans were up to it. Instead of horsed cavalry, however, which would have had a pretty glutinous time of it out in the marshes, battalions of them squelched ashore with folding bicycles strapped on their backs.
Once on terra firma these pickelhaubed hordes split up into flying columns and, led by expert local navigators, traitors to a man, of whom there were inexhaustible supplies even before 1914, swept through the fog-bound low country at a terrific rate. In the course of the following night they seized all the principal cities of the Midlands, including Birmingham. (‘Only ninety kilometres as the crow flies, Herr Hauptmann,’ said some unspeakable turncoat, clicking his heels.) Cambridge fell without a shot being fired, which was not surprising considering its subsequent record – or was it the long vacation? Other columns were directed towards the metropolis. At this point the narrative ended. It was a serial and by the time I went back to have another dig in the dustbin to find the sequel it had been emptied.
They must have been foiled in the end because we later won the Great War, but for years I had this terrifying vision of Germans with spiked helmets pedalling swiftly and silently over Hammersmith Bridge in the night, finding my bedroom and spitting me on their bayonets like a knackwurst.
It was therefore to some extent paradoxical that the swiftness and silence of the bicycles about which I had dreamt with such horror, as irrational as the horror of whiteness described in Moby Dick, but equally real, were the very qualities which subsequently attracted me to this form of transport, and turned me into a keen cyclist and owner of many bicycles of varying degrees of splendour.
My first really good bicycle was a second-hand Selbach which I bought from a boy at school for £3 – it would have cost about £12 new. I was heartbroken when it was stolen from the school bicycle shed. Selbachs were the Bugattis of the cycle world. The frames were made from tapered tubes which, although almost paper thin, were immensely strong, and they were fitted with Timken roller bearings instead of conventional ball-bearings. The lightest machine Selbach built is in the Science Museum in London. He flourished between the wars, and was far ahead of his time. He was killed when the front wheel of his bicycle got stuck in a tramline in South London; he didn’t even rate an obituary in The Times. Ever since the 1890s, when for a time it was fashionable, though never as a competitive sport, cycling had been and still is hopelessly déclassé. Even today the only socially acceptable bike for a member of the British upper crust is one that looks as if it has been retrieved from a municipal rubbish dump, and probably has.
The finest bicycle I ever had was a Holdsworth which my father allowed me to order when I was sixteen. He had arranged with a Swiss business acquaintance of his called Mr Guggenheim that I should work in his silk firm in Zurich in order to learn the business and the German language, and no doubt he thought that cycling up and down the Alps would keep my thoughts in wholesome channels. It was a model called Stelvio, and was specially designed for cycling in the Alps.
It was hand-built in a small shed at the back of Holdsworth’s shop in Putney by a thin, energetic, chain-smoking genius with wispy hair and a terrible cough. He had lined the walls of the shed with a really wonderful collection of pin-ups all of which displayed enormous tits; presumably to stimulate him to even greater activity. They certainly stimulated me. It was the finest bicycle procurable at that time and it cost a colossal £20. The day I took delivery of it I remember him bouncing it up and down on its over-size hand-made tyres as if it was a ping-pong ball.
‘Luvly job,’ he said, with a cigarette stuck to his lower lip. ‘A real iron. Go out and give them Alps a bashing. Funny to think I’ll never see ’em.’
I never saw the Alps either, let alone gave them a bashing. The arrangement with Mr Guggenheim was shelved when my father found out that the kind of Schweitzerdeutsch they spoke in Zurich was so extraordinarily funny that if real German speakers heard it they fell about. I never dared tell the creator of the ‘iron’ that the furthest I got was the Black Mountains on the Welsh border.
In the war I rode huge bicycles with 28″ wheels that weighed 60 lbs or more, of the sort still popular in parts of India and Africa. At the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, which I attended in 1940, a special drill had been invented for riding these monsters:
‘Number One Platoon!’ (or whatever it was) ‘’Arf Sections Left! Prepare to Meount! … Meount! ’ And we would wobble off into the asylum country round Broadmoor.
Wanda’s affair with the bicycle was very different from mine. For her there was, and still is, a Platonic, archetypal bicycle, the first one she ever had. It was the sort of bicycle on which droves of girls used to cycle past the prison camp in which I was incarcerated in the Po Valley, near Parma, during the war. Similar droves were to be seen riding through the equally flat countryside around pre-war Ferrara in Visconti’s film The Garden of the Finzi-Contini.
It was a single-speed lightweight roadster with an open frame, raised handlebars fitted with a wicker basket and a back pedalling brake on the rear wheel, the upper part of which was covered with thin cords to prevent the wearer’s skirt becoming entangled in it, which made the whole thing look like some archaic stringed instrument on wheels.
It was a present to her from her godmother on her sixteenth birthday. Originally she had given her a wristwatch but Wanda displayed such obvious disappointment on receiving it that her godmother eventually wrung from her the confession that what she really longed for was a bicycle. Unfortunately Wanda’s godmother had no idea how much a bicycle cost, and the money she gave Wanda in lieu of the wristwatch was totally insufficient to buy even a good second-hand one, which was why Wanda’s bicycle came to be made up of salvaged parts, re-assembled by the village bicycle repairer. In spite of this it was a good bicycle, with a frame made by the still excellent firm of Bianchi.
Because of all this Wanda had the fierce affection for her bicycle that most people reserve for the living. So when the Germans occupied Italy in September 1943, and her father was arrested by the Gestapo as an anti-Fascist, her bicycle was impounded as an additional punishment, to which she took strong exception. Eventually she succeeded in tracking it down to a German military headquarters at Salsomaggiore, a spa miles away from where she lived in the foothills of the Apennines, to which literally thousands of confiscated bicycles had been taken.
‘You have stolen my bicycle,’ she said without preamble to the first German officer she encountered there, who happened to be a colonel taking a turn in the open air.
‘What, me?’ he said in genuine astonishment, saluting. ‘Why should I take your bicycle? I have no need of a bicycle.’
‘Well, if you didn’t take it your soldiers did. My father was in the Austrian Imperial Army. He never stole ladies’ bicycles.’
‘Where is your bicycle?’ he asked.
‘In there,’ she said, indicating through open doors in a hangar what appeared to be the biggest second-hand bicycle shop in the world.
‘Signorina,’ he said gallantly, anxious to be rid of this Slovenian fury he had somehow unwittingly fielded, ‘if we have taken your bicycle I can only apologize on behalf of the Wehrmacht. We are not here to make war on young ladies. We will restore you a bicycle. Please take any bicycle. I will personally authorize it. Take a good bicycle.’
‘I don’t want any bicycle,’ she said. ‘I want my bicycle.’
Eventually the colonel was constrained to send for a couple of soldiers and order them to force their way through the masses of bicycles, many of them superb machines, any of which she could have had for the asking, until they reached the enclave in which Wanda’s humble machine was finally located. For with Teutonic efficiency they were grouped according to whichever town or village they had been impounded in.
Knowing all this, and that a facsimile of her old bicycle was the only thing that would really make her content, I felt myself in the same sort of spot as the German colonel at Salsamaggiore in 1943. In one of my wilder, more fanciful moments I imagined trying to sell her the idea that dropped handlebars are nothing more than raised handlebars installed upside down. And in my mind’s eye I could see her wrestling with them, like an Amazon with the antlers of a stag at bay, trying to return them to what she regarded as their proper position.
The heart of rural Dorset is not the easiest place to find out about the latest developments in the world of bicycles, but by good fortune our local newsagent in Wareham had a copy of a magazine called The Bicycle Buyer’s Bible, 1985/6 on its shelves. By this time the question of what sort of bikes we were going to take with us if we were going to get moving before Christmas was becoming extremely urgent. The Bible gave detailed specifications of about three hundred machines with prices ranging from £105 to £1147, and £1418 for a tandem.
The machines that interested me most were the mountain bicycles, otherwise ATBs, All Terrain Bicycles. Everything about a mountain bike is big, except for the frame, which is usually smaller than that of normal lightweight touring bicycles. They are built of over-size tubing and have big pedals, ideal for someone like me with huge feet; wheels with big knobbly tyres which can be inflated with four times as much air as an ordinary high-pressure tyre; very wide flat handlebars, like motorcycle handlebars, fitted with thumb-operated gear change levers; and motorcycle-type brake levers connected to cantilever brakes of the sort originally designed for tandems, which have enormous stopping power.
Most of them are fitted with 15- or 18-speed derailleur gears made up by fitting a five- or six-sprocket freewheel block on the rear hub and three chainwheels of different sizes on the main axle in the bottom bracket where the cranks are situated; a sophistication so conspicuously unnecessary that it would have had Thorsten Veblen ecstatically adding another chapter to his great work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, had he lived to see it. This equipment produces gears ranging from 20″ or even lower (which can be a godsend when climbing mountains) to 90″ or even higher for racing downhill, or with a following wind on the flat.
(#litres_trial_promo) Not all these gears are practicable or even usable, however, for technical reasons.
These mountain bikes looked very ugly, very old-fashioned and very American, which was not surprising as they were the lineal descendants of the fat-tyred newspaper delivery bikes first produced by a man called Ignaz Schwinn in the United States in 1933. To me they looked even older. They made me think of Mack Sennet and Fatty Arbuckle and Jackie Coogan. If I got round to buying one I knew that I would have to wear a big flat peaked cap like Coogan’s. Eighteen gears apart – perhaps she would settle for fifteen – and providing we could find one with an open rather than a man’s diamond frame model, this seemed exactly the sort of bike, in the absence of her beloved Bianchi, that Wanda needed to carry her the length and breadth of Ireland and even up and down a holy mountain or two.
‘“To buy a mountain bike now”,’ I read, ‘“is to win yourself a place in the first of the few rather than the last of the many.”’
It was a wet Sunday evening in Dorset. We were in bed surrounded by the avalanche of catalogues and lists I had brought down on us by clipping out the coupons in The Bicycle Buyer’s Bible. One dealer, in what seemed to me an excess of optimism, had also sent order forms which read:
PLEASE SEND … MOUNTAIN BICYCLES(S), MODEL(S) … FRAME SIZE(S) … COLOUR(S) … PLEASE GIVE ALTERNATE COLOUR(S). I ENCLOSE A CHEQUE/BANKER’S ORDER, VALUE …
‘I don’t want to be one of the first of the few,’ Wanda said.
‘Shall I go on?’ I said. ‘There’s worse to follow.’
‘Okay, go on.’
‘“From prototype to production model they have been around for less than a decade. In that short time they have been blasted across the Sahara, up Kilimanjaro, down the Rockies and along the Great Wall of China.”’
‘Isn’t it true that the Great Wall of China’s got so many holes in it that you can’t even walk along it, let alone cycle along it?’
‘Yes, I know,’ I said, ‘but there is a picture here of two men sitting on their bikes on the top of Kilimanjaro. And anyway, just listen to this: “With each off-the-wall off-the-road adventure, with each unlikely test-to-destruction, the off-road-state-of-knowledge has rolled the off-road-state-of-the-art further forward.”’
‘Read it again,’ she said. ‘More slowly. It sounds like bloddy nonsense to me.’
‘There’s no need to be foul-mouthed,’ I said.
‘It was you who taught me,’ she replied.
I read it again. It still sounded like bloody nonsense and it came as no surprise when I later discovered that some of the early practitioners of this off-the-road-state-of-the-art mountain bike business hailed from Marin, that deceptively normal-looking county out beyond the Golden Gate Bridge on the way up to the big redwoods, which gives shelter to more well-heeled loonies to the square mile within its confines, all of them into everything from free association in Zen to biodegradable chain cleaning fluid, than any other comparable suburban area in the entire United States.
‘Read on,’ Wanda said.
‘“You don’t have to be some gung-ho lunatic to get your kicks”,’ I read on. ‘“Take a mountain bike along the next time the family or a group of friends head off for a picnic in the woods. There’ll be plenty of places to put the bike through its paces and it sure beats playing Frisbee after lunch [interval while I explained the nature of this, I thought outmoded, pastime to Wanda]. Or take the bike on a trip to the seaside – rock-hopping along the beach is a blast.”’
‘That’s enough,’ she said in the Balkan version of her voice. ‘I can just see you on your mountain bike, a gong-ho (what is gongho?), Frisbee-playing, rock-hopping lunatic.’
‘I say,’ I said, some time later when the lights were out, ‘I hope all this isn’t going to make you lose your enthusiasm.’
‘Enthusiasm for what?’
‘For these bikes, and Ireland and everything,’ I said, lamely.
‘Not for these bikes, I haven’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve never had any. Nor for Ireland in winter. If I come it will only be to make sure you don’t get into trobble.’
‘What sort of trouble?’
‘In Ireland all sorts of trobble,’ she said, darkly.
We went to London to make the rounds of shops selling mountain bicycles, and if possible purchase some. Under the arches off the Strand, in the substructure which was all that remained of the Adelphi, the Adam brothers’ great riverside composition, we saw and rode our first mountain bikes. Wanda tried something called a Muddy Fox Seeker Mixte, which had an open frame constructed from Japanese fully lugged chrome molybdenum tubing with Mangaloy manganese alloy forks; I tried a Muddy Fox Pathfinder which had a lugless frame of the same material, put together by the TIG (Tungsten Inert Gas) welding process. Wanda quite liked her Mixte which reminded her a bit of the old Bianchi open-framed bike on which she had ridden out to bring me and my friends food and clothing in the autumn of 1943.
What the staff of most of the bicycle shops we visited had in common, we discovered, was almost complete indifference as to whether we bought one of their bikes or not. This was surprising, considering how much money was involved and the fact that the industry was going through one of its periodic slumps. In mountain bikes there was nothing worth buying under £200. From £200 to £300 the choice was very limited and it was only in the £300 to £500 range that one started to find high quality bikes. From £500 to around £1000 or more, one was in a world of prototypes and purely competitive machines in which everything, as the Buyer’s Bible put it in a way that I was beginning to find insidiously corrupting, was ‘silly money’. One thing we had learned was that whatever make we bought, our bikes should come from a firm that actually built, or at least assembled them, on the premises. But time was now running out and if we did not leave for Ireland within ten days we would have to wait until after Christmas. One of the firms we had not yet visited was called Overbury’s, in Bristol, who designed and built their own racing, touring and mountain bikes. And Bristol had the added attraction that our daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren lived there.
Overbury’s premises, in Ashley Road, can scarcely be described as being at ‘the better end’ of Bristol; in fact Bristol has no better end. The more enviable parts are perched high above the city at the top of impossibly steep hills or on huge cliffs above the Avon Gorge, from both of which eyries the inhabitants look down with Olympian detachment on those less fortunate mortals below. Overbury’s, which is run by Andy Powell and his mother, Enid, is about the size of an average newsagent’s and is crammed with bikes that are either beautiful or sophisticated, or both, and all the complex bits and pieces that go to make them up. What space remains is taken up by machines in various states of malfunction or collapse awaiting attention. In fact on the Monday morning we visited, it was rather like being in a National Health doctor’s waiting room during surgery hours. One of the more spectacular accidents had befallen an ATB-riding log-hopper who had failed to clear a huge pile of them in a Forestry Commission conifer wood. The resulting smash had destroyed the special welded guard bar, fitted under the bottom bracket to protect the triple chain rings from just such a mishap, doing a wealth of damage.
‘You’re looking at more than a hundred nicker,’ the owner said with gloomy pride, when I showed an interest in it. ‘That’s the end of guards for me.’
We were lent a couple of test bikes on deposit and we set off with them in the back of our van for an attractive open expanse called Ashton Court Park, to try them out. Wanda’s was the most expensive and the most unconventional in appearance. It was called the Wild Cat and was going to take a bit of living up to.
Mine was a Crossfell, at that time the most expensive of Overbury’s diamond frame mountain bikes.
By the end of this outing Wanda was very depressed. It was not surprising: the last bicycle she had ridden had been a borrowed ladies’ Marston Golden Sunbeam which she had used while house-hunting in South London in the 1970s, perhaps the finest conventional bicycle ever made. This was the bicycle on male versions of which deceptively fragile-looking curates used to zoom past me, as I frantically pedalled my Selbach back in the 1930s. She liked the semi-open frame of the Wild Cat, but found it difficult to live up to the image conjured up by its name. She couldn’t cope with the complexity of the twin-change shift mechanisms on the handlebars which controlled the eighteen gears: the right-hand one which shifted the chain from any one of the six sprockets to another on the Shimano Extra Duty Freewheel Block; the left-hand one which shifted the chain on the costly oval Shimano Biopace triple ring chainset. ‘Biopace delivers power when you need it most,’ the blurb said. ‘Computer analysis shows round rings force unnatural leg dynamics that interfere with smooth cadence and can lead to knee strain.’
In comparison with a traditional lightweight bicycle fitted with narrow, high-pressure tyres I found the knobbly mountain tyres sluggish uphill, but very good downhill at speed on a track full of pot-holes. The saddles, amalgams of leather and plastic, we both agreed were hell. By the time our trial run through the wilds of the Ashton Court Park was over I had resigned myself to giving up the idea of mountain biking, or any other sort of biking, in Ireland; but when we got back to the shop and redeemed our deposits Wanda, to my surprise, told me to go ahead and order. ‘If I have it I will have to use it,’ she said.
There was no problem in producing my Crossfell in time, as there was a frame in stock of the right size that only needed stove enamelling. Wanda’s Wild Cat, as its name suggested, was more difficult. It would have to be built from scratch in seven days. But first her inside leg had to be measured for the frame – a feat difficult to accomplish in a crowded bike shop when the subject is wearing a skirt – and all work ceased while I performed it.
In a state of shock at the realization of the enormity of what I was doing I allowed Andy Powell to persuade me that I should also have eighteen gears. I forget the reason he gave. Perhaps he had run out of five-sprocket freewheel blocks, the last shipment from Osaka having gone down with all hands in the South China Sea to become a source of wonder to marine archaeologists around 3000 AD, who would eventually identify them as amulets against the evil eye.
In the course of the next hour or so I spent vast amounts of money – we paid for everything ourselves – on what bicycle builders laughingly refer to as ‘optional extras’: pumps, front and rear reflectors, guards to protect the derailleur mechanisms, frame pads to make it easier to lift my diamond-framed Crossfell over gates and fences, over-sized mud guards for the over-sized tyres, two sets of front and rear panniers, front and rear pannier frames to hook them on, ‘stuff sacs’, rudely named bags to keep our waterproof clothing in, front and rear lights, drinking bottles, Sam Browne belts and trouser clips made of reflective material that might improve our chance of not being knocked down and squashed flat at night. Foolishly, having donned them and then looked at one another, we decided against crash helmets – ‘head protection for the thinking cyclist’, as one catalogue put it.
We also needed a whole lot of tools and spares: a three-way spanner, a ten-in-one dumbell spanner, two brake spanners, a pair of cone spanners, a Shimano crank bolt spanner and freewheel remover, a 4″ adjustable wrench, three Allen keys, a spoke key, a cable cutter, a pair of pointed pliers, a tyre pressure gauge, an adaptor so that a garage air-line or a car foot pump could be used with Presta bicycle valves, a set of tyre levers, spare spokes, two spare inner tubes, spare gear change and brake cables, spare brake blocks (at a colossal £3.90 a pair), and valve caps.
My next purchase was something called a Citadel Lock which had a half-inch metal shackle said to be proof against a pair of 42″ bolt cutters and big enough to lock both bikes to a parking meter or a set of railings at the same time. However it was so heavy that we left it at home and took with us instead a couple of pre-coiled 5ft steel cable locks which would last about ten seconds against bolt cutters.
By this time I began to feel myself in a state of euphoria, like a character in a Fitzgerald novel going shopping – Gatsby stocking up on shirts, or Nicole Diver buying an army of toy soldiers in Paris in 1925: ‘It was fun spending money in the sunlight of the foreign city, with healthy bodies … that sent streams of colour up to their faces; with arms and hands, legs and ankles that stretched out confidently, reaching or stepping with the confidence of women lovely to men.’ Although it was a bit different in Bristol in deep December for a senior citizen with all the confidence of a man unlovely to women – well, most women.
Then we shopped for clothes. The most difficult to find on the spur of the moment, because they were very expensive, were the long zip jackets with baggy trousers to match made from Gore-Tex, a wind and waterproof material which allows perspiration to evaporate. Shoes were another problem. Cycling shoes designed for riding lightweight bikes on the road would be hopeless anywhere off it in waterlogged old Ireland. In the end we both took climbing boots and short, wool-lined wellingtons which were warm and could be accommodated on the big mountain bike pedals but soon lost their linings. And we bought long wool and nylon stockings with elasticated tops that came up over the knee and waterproof over-mitts with warm inner linings.
We also spent a gruesome hour in company with other senior citizens stocking up for the winter, buying thermal underwear, which everyone said we must have: long johns to sleep in and underwear to ride in. Some of it looked terrible, especially a particular brand of men’s underpants which came down to the knees and gave the wearer, in this case myself, an air of geriatric instability. It also, when it warmed up, gave off an awful pong. ‘I wonder,’ Wanda said, emerging from the fitting room in which she had given the thumbs-down to the underpants, and surveying the milling throng, ‘if they are all going to Ireland, too, on bicycles. If they are we shall look pretty silly.’
As I had promised myself, I took with me a huge cap that had belonged to my father – almost a dead ringer of that worn by the now dead and gone Jackie Coogan, which Wanda from now on referred to as my ‘Jackie Hooghly’.
The bikes were delivered to us by van from Bristol the following Tuesday at what was literally the eleventh hour. Together with the optional and non-optional extras, all done up in protective wadding, they made an impressive pair of packages, and the bikes themselves, which had been wrapped like Egyptian mummies in the equivalent of cerements, were so scintillating when finally exposed to the light of day that it seemed a pity to foul them up by riding them. If there really was such a concept as state-of-the-art, this was it.
‘We can put it all down to expenses,’ I said to Wanda.
‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ she said. ‘I can just see the expression on the Inspector of Taxes’ face. He’ll laugh all the way to your funeral.’
‘Well, why did you let me buy all this stuff if that’s what you think?’ I asked.
‘I was going to stop you,’ she said, ‘but when I saw how much you were enjoying yourself, somehow I couldn’t. You looked like a small boy in a sweet shop.’
We set off to negotiate some of the network of lanes in the Isle of Purbeck, the majority of which involve ascents of unnatural steepness. The first part included a fairly hard climb along the flanks of Smedmore Hill. This time I rode behind Wanda in order to be able to tell her when to operate the front and rear gear shift mechanisms. This worked all right until she suddenly pulled the left-hand lever back and at the same time pushed the right-hand one forward, while still riding on the flat, which transferred her instantly to the lowest gear available to her, 23.6″, leaving her with her legs whirring round until she fell off.
In spite of this setback, she did succeed in climbing the hill, from the top of which we roared downhill towards the hamlet of Steeple, which consists of a manor, a vicarage, a very old church which houses a giant eighteenth-century version of a pianola and a plaque displaying the stars and stripes of the Lawrences, a family who were collateral ancestors of George Washington. From here a hill climbs to the summit of West Creech Hill, a rise of about 295 feet in 1000 yards, which may not seem much, and certainly doesn’t look much, but is in fact excruciating. If any of the Alpine passes I rode over on my way to Italy in 1971 had been as difficult as parts of this hill, I would never have ridden a bike over the Alps at all.
‘You go on,’ said Wanda, when the time came to tackle it. ‘Don’t watch me.’
From the top, completely breathless, I watched the little figure gallantly toiling up, very slowly, very wobbly at times, but she made it.
‘I did it,’ she said. ‘Not bad for a grandmother, am I?’
I felt so proud of her I wanted to cry; but privately I prayed that there wouldn’t be many similar hills in Ireland.
When we got back to the house Wanda allowed me a fleeting glimpse of what her hand-finished, calf leather, high-density, memory-retentive foam Desmoplan base saddle had done to her in the course of about six miles and I knew that unless a better alternative could be found she would be a non-starter in the Irish Cycling Stakes, 1985. So I got on the telephone to Enid in Bristol and the following morning a large carton full of saddles arrived by special delivery.
I had solved the saddle problem on my mountain bike by ordering a Brooks B66 leather saddle which had big springs at the back. Most mountain bike saddles seem to have been designed by men who don’t realize that on a mountain bike the rider sits more or less upright, as on a roadster, so that the whole weight of the body, divided on a bicycle with dropped handlebars between the saddle and the bars, falls on the saddle. It is even worse for women. Women have wider hips and, as the Buyer’s Bible delicately put it, having presumably taken female advice, ‘the pubic arch between the legs is shallower, making the genital area very vulnerable to pressure’.
The saddles we now received were mostly similar in construction to the one that had originally come with Wanda’s bike. Some had been injected with silicon fluid, to make them more bouncy beneath the layer of ‘high-density memory-retentive foam’ already referred to. With all these lying around in the hall, it resembled a saddle fetishist’s den. Eventually, Wanda chose a Brooks B72 leather touring saddle, ‘specially designed for women cyclists and those wanting a broader support’.
I now spent the time, when not engaged in packing my pannier bags (we were leaving the next day), in bashing her saddle with a lump of wood, and rubbing it with Brooks Proofhide and something called Neatsfoot Oil in order to take some of the sting out of it for Wanda’s inaugural Irish ride, which I was planning with my customary inefficiency.
CHAPTER 2 To the Emerald Isle (#ulink_1ccf6bb7-0b5a-53ee-9dcb-2ae91ba6c56e)
There lay the green shore of Ireland, like some coast of plenty. We could see towns, towers, churches, harvests; but the curse of eight hundred years we could not discern.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. English Traits, 1856
Ireland is not Paradise.
JONATHAN SWIFT, in a letter to Alexander Pope,
30 August 1716
I spent our last evening in England in the basement bedroom of our daughter and son-in-law’s house up on the highest heights of Bristol, where those who are chronic worriers wear oxygen masks, making final adjustments to the Crossfell and the Wild Cat.
There were no other contenders for this utterly boring task. Somewhere upstairs, above ground, my eleven-year-old grandson, using his father’s computer, was extracting information in a matter of seconds from what appeared to be thin air. Elsewhere in the building my granddaughter was dancing the sort of dances that little girls of six habitually execute, dreaming of being Flossie Footlights or Fonteyn. In the kitchen my daughter was about to start roasting a duck, happy, one hoped, at the thought of going back to work in the outside world from which bringing up her children had largely excluded her. Half a mile up the road, immured somewhere in a wing of the University, her husband, a mathematician turned biologist, was locked in what looked like becoming a lifelong struggle to extract the secret of what makes eyes and ears function.
And somewhere in the house was Wanda. She was about as interested in the finer points of her Wild Cat as I imagine Queen Boadicea would have been in the alignment of scythes on the axles of her chariot wheels. Both assumed, rightly, that some member of the lumpenproletariat would be keeping their equipment up to scratch. For Shimano Deore XT hubs, Biopace computer-designed drive system chainwheels, 600 EX headsets with O ring seals, and such – all items I had been forced to take an interest in, simply to know what to try and do if they went wrong – she cared not a hoot.
One of the best reasons for owning an ordinary bicycle with no expensive trimmings is that everything about it, apart from mending punctures, which is a bore whatever sort of bike you have, is comparatively simple. With expensive, thoroughbred bicycles it is another matter altogether.
If I had ever forgotten this I re-discovered it when I tried to fit Wanda’s final selection, the Brooks B72 leather saddle, the one ‘for those wanting a broader support’, to a highly sophisticated, space age Sr Laprade XL forged alloy fluted seatpin with micro-adjustment and a replacement value of around £20. A lot of money, you may say. But worth every penny of it since, according to those who know, anything nameless in the field of seatpins may snap off with rough off-the-road usage, leaving the rider either impaled on what is left of it or, at the very least, pedalling away without any visible means of support, rather like a fakir using a bicycle to perform a variation of the Indian rope trick. I had asked Overbury’s for a seatpin which gave the maximum amount of adjustment and this was it.
By now it was seven o’clock. ‘It won’t take long,’ I said, talking to myself in the absence of an audience.
The saddle was mounted on a frame which consisted of two sets of parallel wire tracks and each of these tracks had to be attached to the Laprade pin by means of a clamp with two parallel grooves on it. The principal difficulty I experienced in performing this ostensibly easy task was that the track wires were not only too far apart to fit into the grooves but were extraordinarily resistant to being drawn together. However I finally succeeded in doing this making use of a form of Spanish windlass made with a lace from a climbing boot and a skewer.
I was so pleased with myself at having accomplished this feat that I failed to notice that when I inserted the tracks into the grooves I did so with the saddle the wrong way up.
This was the moment when my daughter, fearing for her dinner and my sanity, set off in the rain and darkness to enlist the help of Charlie Quinn, who lived a few doors away. Apparently Charlie Quinn was a schoolboy who was completely dotty about bikes and when not engaged in doing his homework spent most of his spare time either riding them or working on them in a part-time capacity at Clifton Cycles, a rival bike shop to Overbury’s.
Charlie arrived with a comprehensive tool kit which included a pair of clamps, with the help of which he drew the wire tracks together with shameful ease, and inserted them in the grooves. It was therefore not without a certain despicable satisfaction that I noted that when he tightened the bolt the tracks were still loose in the grooves and the saddle wobbled.
By this time I would have been in despair, but not Charlie. ‘That’s all right,’ he said, ‘I’ll get some scrim. That’ll hold it.’ It did indeed hold it. By now the duck was nearly ready.
‘Is there anything else?’ he asked.
‘Well, if you wouldn’t mind terribly I’ve got to fit some pannier adaptor plates. It’s quite a simple job. But what about your dinner?’
‘I’ve already eaten it,’ he said. ‘I call it supper.’
All those bored by the horrendous complexities of bicycle mechanics should skip the rest of this section and resurface on page 30. For those who are not, I should explain that pannier adaptor plates are flat pieces of alloy with holes cut in them and drilled to take a single nut and bolt. These plates had to be fitted because the hooks on the elastic cords supplied with the Karrimor rear panniers to keep them in place were not a proper fit on the American-designed Blackburn alloy carriers. Although they will work at a pinch the hooks cannot be guaranteed to remain hooked on, especially when the bicycle is being used on rough ground.
It was soon obvious that we were in trouble. In order to fit the plates, the bolts used to attach them to the carriers had to be inserted through the brazed-on carrier eyes at the lower end of the chain stays, and then through eyes in the triangulated struts at the bottom of the carriers. The devilish thing was that it was not possible to insert one of these bolts from the outside in, and secure it with a nut on the inside of the carrier eye, because any nut on the inside would become enmeshed with the teeth of the outermost low-gear sprocket on the freewheel block.
This meant that both rear wheels had to be taken out so that the bolts could be inserted from the inside. At the same time the rear axles had to be packed with sufficient washers between the cone locking nuts on the hub axles and the wheel drop-outs to spread the chain stays sufficiently to give the necessary clearance to keep the bolt heads out of range of the teeth of the outermost sprocket.
But this was not the end of it. The addition of these washers had the effect of throwing the rear derailleur shift mechanism out of its pre-set alignment and this in turn affected the alignment of the front derailleur which shifted the chain on the triple chainwheels. And it was not only the shift mechanisms that went on the bum. The springing of the seat stays with the washers on the axles caused subtle alterations to the settings of the Aztec brake blocks fitted to the XT cantilever brakes operating on the rear rims and also to the amount of travel on the brake levers.
Almost literally enmeshed in all this Charlie was in his element, rushing backwards and forwards between our house and his in pouring rain, for nuts, bolts, washers, more tools and so forth. Meanwhile, I wondered if it would be all right to desert him and go off and eat the duck. When I did, feeling a pig for doing so, I don’t think he even noticed I’d gone.
It was not until we got back to England that I discovered that there had not been any need to fit these plates at all, as Blackburn marketed special shock cords to attach Karrimor panniers to Blackburn carriers.
The morning after Quinn the bicycle wizard had performed his magic and we had eaten the duck and gone to bed, we set off in torrential rain that turned day into night to drive our van with the bikes in it to Fishguard.
Here, on the coast of Dyfed, otherwise Pembroke, in what is known as England beyond Wales, in windswept, watery Fishguard with rainbows overhead, with its brightly painted houses glittering in the sunlight and its harbour built in the 1900s, itself a period piece, there was already a feeling of Ireland. Perhaps the French thought they were in Ireland when they undertook the last invasion of Britain here in 1797, commanded by an American, Colonel William Tate, and laid down their arms before a bevy of Welsh ladies dressed in traditional cloaks, under the impression, it is said, that they were soldiers.
We spent most of the voyage re-packing our pannier bags. Sitting surrounded by them in the ferry saloon we looked like beleaguered settlers on the old Oregon trail. It was remarkable how much room two sets of front and rear panniers, not to speak of the stuff sacs, took up when removed from the bicycles. All the contents had to be put in plastic liners as the panniers were not guaranteed waterproof against torrential rain, and since these liners were opaque, once they were packed it was difficult to remember what was in them. We had started off very efficiently at home before leaving, sticking on little labels bearing the legends ‘spare thermal underwear’, ‘boots and spare inner tubes’, and so on, but now Wanda decided on a complete and more logical redistribution, while other passengers looked on with fascination.
It was seven-thirty before we finally disembarked at Rosslare; and a cold, dark evening with the wind driving great clouds of spray over the jetty. We had planned to stay the night there in a bed and breakfast and take a train to Limerick, where we proposed to start our cycling, the following morning, but we now discovered that in winter there was only one train a day to Limerick, and this was due to leave in seven minutes. We had to buy tickets and somehow find something to eat and drink as we had eaten nothing except a cold sausage each and a rather nasty ‘individual rabbit pie’ in a pub since leaving Bristol.
A porter told us to put our bikes in a van at the end of the train. When I had finished locking them up he changed his mind and told me to put them in an identical van at the other end of the train, so I unlocked them and did so. Another man said that was wrong too, so I unlocked them again and took them back to the original one. Meanwhile Wanda was buying the tickets at a reduced rate using our international old age pensioners’ cards. By now, in theory, the train should have left.
The station buffet was warm and friendly, but served no hot food, only ham sandwiches which had to be made-to-measure. Wanda boarded the train while I waited for the sandwiches, but after a minute she got down and rushed into the buffet crying, ‘The train, the train is leaving!’
‘It isn’t leaving, whatever your good lady says,’ remarked a rather quiet man in railway uniform whom I hadn’t noticed before, who was only about a quarter of the way through a pint of Guinness. ‘Not without me, it isn’t. I’m the guard,’ and he took another long draw at his drink. Emboldened by this I ordered a second one myself. Eventually we left more or less on time: the station clock turned out to be about ten minutes fast.
There ensued an interminable journey through parts of Counties Wexford, Kilkenny, a large segment of Tipperary and Limerick, in a hearselike, black upholstered carriage with doors to the lavatories that looked as if they had been gnawed by famine-stricken rats. Outside it was still as black as your hat with a howling wind and torrential rain, and the dimly-lit, battered stations at which the train stopped reminded me of our travels in Siberia. At Wexford our kindly guard, who was in his early sixties, and very old-fashioned-looking in his peaked cap and blue overcoat – infinitely preferable to the ludicrous Swiss-type uniforms affected by British Rail – brought us a jug of hot tea which, after two pints of Guinness in something like five minutes, I was unready for. Meanwhile we spent an hour or so continuing with our re-packing, forgetting which container was which and starting all over again, but this time without an audience.
At Limerick Junction a man with wild hair, a huge protruding lower jaw, wearing a crumpled check suit and looking like a Punch 1850s cartoon of an Irishman joined us in our carriage and began producing unidentifiable items of food from plastic bags.
His meal was interrupted by the arrival of the guard to inspect his ticket, and he spent the next twenty minutes slowly and laboriously going through his pockets and his plastic bags, time after time, without ever finding it. Eventually he produced a 50p piece which he offered to the guard who, by this time bored with the whole business, rejected it. The train – could it be called the Limerick Express I wondered? – arrived at Limerick thirty minutes late, at 11.45 p.m. The weather was still appalling but the area round the station at least still seemed lively and the pubs were still taking orders.
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.
CHAPTER 3 Birthday on a Bicycle (#ulink_ccc052f2-0a52-5dd3-938d-067700a94728)
Nothing in Ireland lasts long except the miles.
GEORGE MOORE. Ave, 1911
(An Irish mile is 2240 yards – an English one 1760 yards.)
As there is more rain in this country than in any other, and as therefore, naturally, the inhabitants should be inured to the weather, and made to despise an inconvenience which they cannot avoid, the travelling conveyances are arranged so that you may get as much practice in being as wet as possible.
W. M. THACKERAY. The Irish Sketch Book of 1842
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!’
(#litres_trial_promo)
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
(#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.
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.
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Mr O’Lochlan spoke of the past: Ballyvaughan was not a particularly old village, he said; it really dated from the early nineteenth century when a quay was built for the fishing boats. In 1829 or thereabouts this collapsed and a new one had to be built by the Fishery Board. Gleninagh (‘Glen of the Ivy’), the deserted village that looked old enough to be a candidate for carbon dating, apparently still had eighty-five men fishing from it in the mid-1930s, using currachs, rowing boats consisting of a light framework of laths covered with tarred canvas. In the summer they fished for mackerel, three men to a boat using long lines; in winter, two men to a boat to fish for lobsters, while others dug for worm bait.
I told him what the man at Fanore had said about the school and he had more to add. ‘From Loop Head,’ he said (which is the extreme south-westerly point of County Clare at the mouth of the Shannon), ‘very soon you will be able to draw a line five miles inland from the sea, to the west of which, apart from people involved with holidaymakers, there will be no local inhabitants at all.’ In the fifteen years from 1963 to 1978 it was thought that two-thirds of the population of marriageable age had emigrated. This tale of woe even extended to the holiday cottage in which we were staying, and its neighbours. They had been built to encourage tourists to visit the area, with money put up by the local inhabitants (who held 60 per cent of the shares), the Irish and regional tourist boards and the local councils; even some local schoolchildren held shares by proxy. But so far none of the locals had had any return on the money they had invested some sixteen years ago, and this had created a great deal of ill-feeling.
After this we went home to a delicious dinner: mussels, very good sausages, runner beans and soda bread, then walked in the rain to the end of the jetty, where the steamers from Galway used to be met by horse cars to convey their passengers to Lisdoonvarna. They had to walk up Corkscrew Hill en route.
That night our dream lives were preoccupied with the Royal Family. I dreamt of King George VI. Both of us were in naval uniform, the King like a brother. As we walked together up Old Bond Street I asked him to have dinner with me, but he said, ‘Come and eat with us,’ which turned out to be a group of about a dozen at a table under a sort of porte-cochère, rather draughty and with no view. At the same time Wanda was dreaming of walking in a garden with the Queen Mum, who was very friendly. Wanda’s father featured too, having trouble with a member of the SS. He hit on the idea of having a Mass said, and that, as Wanda said, speaking of the SS man, ‘put an end to him!’
It was in fact fortunate that in my dream encounter with King George VI he had not accepted my invitation to lunch. We were now in dire straits for money and I would have looked pretty silly having to borrow from him, especially as English kings and queens never have a bean on them. There was no bank in Ballyvaughan, and my Coutts cheques and various credit cards were treated with extreme suspicion. Finally, Mr O’Lochlan offered to help, provided we could work out what the exchange rate was.
We had intended to seek out together a very esoteric remain known as St Colman Macduagh’s Hermitage which was hidden away at the foot of a mountain called Slieve Carron, but by the time we had negotiated this deal and arranged for a local farmer to give us a lift to Ennistymon the following morning, it was nearly midday. The weather was beautiful, so we decided to go to a place called New Quay on the south side of Galway Bay where we could buy oysters.
New Quay was nice. There was a pub, a house or two, the sheds of the oyster company, and a jetty which the tide was doing its best to sweep away as it came ripping into Aughinish Bay at a terrific rate, covering the dark, whale-like rocks and penetrating into other bays within, Corranroo and Cloosh. On the promontory beyond it was a Martello tower, built to discourage Napoleon from landing an army there. The sea and sky were bright blue and everything else bright green, except for the grey stone walls and buildings, and the rocks along the foreshore.
Three men were working outside one of the sheds, selecting oysters and putting them in sacks. At their destination they would sell for £1 apiece, one of them said. ‘Not for the likes of us,’ said another. But here Wanda bought a dozen for £3.50 and they threw in two more for luck. Even here, almost at the source, lobsters were £6.50 a pound. Leaving Wanda to ride back to Ballyvaughan, where she had an appointment with a fisherman who might be able to sell her a lobster on more advantageous terms, I set off on my bike for the Hermitage, which was some eight miles off on the east side of the Burren in a wilderness called Keelhilla approached by the first section of a hellish hill, six miles long.
The Hermitage was hidden from view in the hazel thickets at the foot of the cliffs of Slieve Carron, across about three quarters of a mile of limestone pavements full of parallel and apparently bottomless grykes, so I hid my bike in one of the thickets that bordered the road and set off on foot. Some of these grykes had had slender pillars of limestone inserted in them at intervals, as if to mark the way to the Hermitage, but after a bit they came to an abrupt end in the middle of one of the pavements.
I passed a small cairn and came to a dry-stone wall, beyond which was the wood. Like so many other old walls in the Burren, this one was a work of art. It had been built with an infinite expenditure of effort, using thin flakes of stone set vertically instead of being laid horizontally. I climbed over the wall and went into the hazel wood. It was a magical place. Everything in it – the boles and branches of the trees and the boulders among which they had forced themselves up – was covered in a thick growth of moss, dappled by the last of the sun. The only sounds were those of the wind sighing in the trees and of running water.
By absolute chance I had arrived at the Hermitage. It was in a clearing, among the trees and the boulders. There were the remains of a minute church with a white cross in front of it, and two stone platforms one above the other. The water I had heard came from a spring in the cliff and ran down into a sort of box-shaped stone cistern in a hollow. Above the church in the face of the cliff was a cave, big enough for two people to take shelter in, though in considerable discomfort.
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.
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