Round Ireland in Low Gear (11 page)

Altogether it was a sinister scene. A land and seascape completely devoid of colour, like a black and white print of a cemetery; the black cliffs with a pale matching sky and sea above and below them and away to the west across the intervening Sound the three Aran Islands, like black sea monsters swimming shorewards. But it was the birds that made the scene memorable. What they were doing there in December only an ornithologist would know. Some floated closely packed on the surface of the water, forming what looked like great flexible rafts which rose and fell to the fetch of the sea; others hung motionless on the wind; yet more wheeled about a 200-foot-high offshore stack, and groups of them perched on ledges on the cliff face as if they were spectators in some vast ornithological auditorium, waiting for the curtain to rise, all setting up an indescribably melancholy wailing, like the cries of lost souls.

‘What a place to do yourself in,’ said Wanda, echoing my own thoughts, as we looked down gingerly into the depths below, having crossed O’Brien’s wall. What a place to do oneself in, and what a landfall. Terrible to look at from the sea as a lee shore, running down as did Ridgway and Bly in their open rowing boat, with the wind strong from the west, having crossed the Atlantic but having failed to make the Aran Islands (they were saved in the nick of time by the lifeboat on Inishmore). Terrible, too, for the crews of the surviving Armada ships which made their mostly inauspicious landfalls there.

And as if O’Brien had been there to chide me for crossing his
wall, one of the updraughts that was playing such havoc with the local waterfalls whipped off my Jackie Coogan cap and took it high into the air above us.

‘Your Jackie Hooghly!’ Wanda cried in Slavonic torment as we both watched it spinning away seawards just like a frisbee in Marin, perversely obeying some different law to that observed by the waterfalls. ‘It’s gone, your Jackie Hooghly!’ And for a moment I thought she might try and follow it. However, there was no need for alarm. An even more violent updraught caught it and brought it back as neatly as a boomerang to make a perfect landing on the grass inside the wall. As always the luck of Newby had held. How much longer would I be able to rely on it? was something I asked myself with increasing frequency.

‘That was your father’s cap,’ Wanda said severely. I think she was a bit upset that there was now really nothing to chide me with. ‘You should put it on stronger.’

Then, after a ride which began with a wonderful two-mile swoop downhill and ended in total darkness with wind and rain behind us, and men in motor cars no doubt filled to the brim with jars of Guinness in hot pursuit, back to tea at Mrs MacMahon’s. She wasn’t doing evening meals or high teas in winter; the only place in Ennistymon which was, she said, was the Falls Hotel.

We had already seen the Falls Hotel from the bridge below the falls on the Cullenagh river. In the early part of the century it was known as Ennistymon House, and had been the residence of H. V. Macnamara Esq.; possibly because of his Irish-sounding name or perhaps because he was affable, it had escaped being burned down in the Troubles. His son, Francis Macnamara, was a bohemian character whose daughter, Caitlin, married Dylan Thomas and who himself married, second time round, the sister of Augustus John’s second wife, Dorelia.

It was a large eighteenth-century building approached by an avenue of fine trees. Inside an elegant fanlighted doorway the hall contained some rather good
art nouveau
murals and a plasterwork frieze which embodied the ferocious crest of the O’Briens, a naked arm with a sword in hand.

The bar was like the stage set for the first act of some interminable Irish equivalent of
A Month in the Country
, with the players already in position for the raising of the curtain. Could they have been waiting for us to arrive before starting, I wondered?

Sitting with his back to the other actors, with his feet in the grate, and completely monopolizing what fire there was, was an elderly man with one of those sawn-off noses of the sort that used to be acquired by bare-fist pugilists in the course of practising their art, reading the
Irish Times.
At the bar a wild-looking young man in a 1930s dark overcoat, its collar snowy with dandruff, was drinking – it was difficult to ascertain what. He looked like a spoiled priest, or the dispossessed son of an Irish peer, but when he opened his mouth, didn’t sound like either. In a corner a man with a very red face was entertaining his mature and self-sufficient mistress and at the same time trying to do himself in by drinking alternate measures of Smirnoff and Tio Pepe. She had more sensibly asked for the wine list and was slowly drinking rather expensive claret. No one said anything, but when we got up to go in search of dinner they all came too, as if afraid of missing something.

I ordered scrambled eggs and bacon, Wanda a mixed grill. My luck held; Wanda’s didn’t: I watched her roll her steak up in a napkin and put it in her bag for later disposal. I must say one thing about Wanda – she knows how to behave. Meanwhile I watched the lovers. She was effortlessly eating scampi at £7 a go; he was making heavy weather with one of the steaks. Meanwhile the man with the sawn-off nose and the young man with the overcoat,
whom I had by now decided was some sort of commercial traveller (selling what? French letters?) sat at separate tables next door to one another both looking straight ahead, like passengers in a Boeing. When it finally began, by which time I had already asked for the bill, their conversation went something like this:

Young Man
: I’ve heard O’Hara’s retiring.

Old Man
:     He is, is he? And how old would he be?

There was a considerable interval. They were both eating their puddings.

Young Man
: Fifty-five … Fifty-seven … Don’t know which.

Old Man
:   Well, I retired when I was sixty-five … not surprised he’s retiring at sixty-seven.

Interval.

Young Man
: I didn’t say sixty-seven. I said fifty-five or fifty-seven.

Old Man
:   (huffily) I don’t know anything about that. All I know is that things weren’t like that when I was young.

Dinner cost £8 for two, including a pot of tea. With this kind of entertainment we could hardly complain.

Back at Mrs MacMahon’s, in the TV Room, separated from us by a hardboard partition, a well-grown schoolboy, presumably Master MacMahon, was crouching surrounded by a wealth of electronic equipment including a high-rise hi-fi that was belting out Led Zeppelin on about Regulo 10.

‘No,’ he said, when asked, ‘I don’t mind turning it down at all. In fact I’ll put it off. I’ve still got to do me arit’metic for school tomorrow.’

When he had gone off to do his arithmetic I began footling about with Mrs MacMahon’s images and while trying to find out what one of them, who bore a suspicious resemblance to St Brigid, was made of, dropped it. Again my good luck held, and it failed to break (but why do I do such things in the first place?). I wondered what I would have said to Mrs MacMahon if I had bust it – ‘Mrs MacMahon, I have broken one of your saints in the TV room, the one that looked like St Brigid’, I suppose, but it would have sounded rather lame.

The next day we had planned to begin the exploration of the Peninsula as far south as Loop Head, but it was still pouring at one-fifteen in the afternoon, so we decided to go to Ennis, some seventeen miles to the east, and then home. It was time. Recordings of choirs groaning out ‘Holy Night’ were already audible over large tracts of Ennistymon and snowballs made of cotton wool were already beginning to look slightly shop-soiled in the shop windows.

We set off for Ennis in a deluge – the rain was fantastic, more like a waterfall than a rainstorm. The road was inundated and there was a fearful cross-wind. Cars and lorries sluiced us down as they roared past. Stopping for a pee was hell. In Ennis, at four in the afternoon, the lights were already on. We wound our way through incredibly narrow streets filled with Christmas decorations and more renderings of ‘Holy Night’, past a shop where I could have bought a comprehensive selection of St Brigids, and a column commemorating the debut of the great Daniel O’Connell in the House of Commons as soon as the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 enabled him to take his seat. The rain had washed
away the name of our hotel in my address book, but when we eventually found it we had baths with endless hot water and left our boots in the boiler room.

Two days later we were hanging up holly in Dorset. There was no mistletoe.

Our next bike ride in Ireland proved to be of a more testing nature. It took place in January and took us from Rosslare along the southern and south-western coasts of Wexford, Waterford, Cork and Kerry, to Slea Head on the Dingle Peninsula (which is only about 40° east of St John’s, Newfoundland), ending up in Tralee. It rained every day, sometimes all day, except when it snowed, and when it wasn’t blowing a blizzard from the north it blew Force 9 from the west and south-west, the general direction in which we were pedalling. Whichever direction it blew from, it was horribly cold.

It is not difficult to know what the weather will be like on any particular January day in mainland Britain. All we Newbys have to do is to scrape the rime off the inside of our bedroom window to see for ourselves. What is more difficult is to discover what is cooking on the west coast of Ireland, where a lot of Britain’s weather first sights land. This is because ever since the twenty-six southern counties of Ireland became a Republic and ceased to be part of the United Kingdom their weather has been studiously ignored by British weathermen. In Britain it is now easier to learn on TV what the weather is like in Banja Luka than at Slyne Head, Connemara. Had we been aware of what was in store for us, we might have thought again.

This time, appalled by the amount of gear I had pedalled through Limerick and Clare before Christmas, I decided to weigh everything I had brought back with me and find out what it all added up to. Wanda, rather smugly I thought, said that she didn’t need to avail herself of this service.

Banished to the garden, which was currently filled with snow, I slung a rope over the branch of a beech tree, tied the loose ends together, looped them round the toggle of a Salter Spring Balance for Air Travellers, and with some difficulty hooked the loaded bicycle on to it, very nearly breaking it in the process. Whatever the total weight, it was far in excess of 66 lbs, which was the Salter’s limit. I then weighed the bike unloaded. It came out at a rather disappointing 38 lbs, far more than any other bicycle I had ever owned, but this total included the Blackburn carriers and a pump. The four pannier bags and their contents, plus a stuff sac on the rear carrier which held my Gore-Tex suit, a big pullover and front and rear lights for the bike, plus my waterproof camera, strapped to the handlebars weighed a colossal 51 lbs 1 oz. In addition there was the five-foot pre-coiled cable lock made in Germany, which weighed 14 oz. Add to all this on the return voyage from Rosslare to Fishguard a litre bottle of what is laughingly described as ‘duty free’ Grand Marnier, which weighed 3 lbs 10 oz and the whole lot, including the bike, came to 93 lbs 9 oz.

It was obviously madness to take this lot, even minus the Grand Marnier, to Ireland again and as it was bloody cold in the garden, with more snow in the offing, I decided to weigh everything by category – clothing, tools and spares, literature and sundries, which included medical and washing kit and film – indoors. Clothing came to 15 lbs. The heaviest single items were the warm-lined rubber boots, 4 lbs 10 oz the pair, and a pair of shoes for ‘evenings’, 3 lbs 10 oz. If anyone thinks these weights excessive I should explain that I take size twelves. Medical and
washing kit and sundries came to 5 lbs; tools and spares to 6 lbs; and literature to an unbelievable 15 lbs 14 oz including the six half-inch maps we were going to need. More or less happily engaged in dealing with these minutiae, I failed to notice that Wanda had joined me.

‘How much does it all weigh?’ she asked in a tone of voice that after forty years of cohabiting with her I have learned to identify with trouble. I told her.

‘The trouble with you is,’ she said, relapsing into her argot, ‘you always take too bloddy much. What I had weighed half of that,
and
I had a litre of whisky for you and a litre of wine for me, and that weighed God knows how much.’

‘All right, Mrs Know-All!’ I said, not for the first time. ‘Next time
you
carry the tools and spares.’

‘That’s not fair,’ she said. ‘You know I don’t know dese tings. I don’t even know how to change gear,’ she added pathetically, making me feel a heel, as per usual. ‘And don’t shout. Anyway,’ she went on, changing the subject adroitly, ‘why do you want two pairs of long stockings, two thick shirts and a pair of shoes when you’re already wearing stockings, a thick shirt and a pair of boots!’

‘I thought I might get wet,’ I said lamely.

So I didn’t take them.

‘And as you know so much you might cast your eye over the literature list and tell me what to do about that,’ I added.

I had pruned it viciously but it still included
The Shell Guide to Ireland
;
Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Ireland
, 1912, which nothing would part me from; the
Blue Guide to Ireland
, slightly stuffy but indispensable; Brendan Lehane’s
Companion Guide to Ireland
;
Wonders of Ireland
, which I once participated in writing; the
AA Illustrated Road Book of Ireland
; and
The Genuine Old Moore’s Irish Almanack, 1986
– ‘Beware of Spurious Imitations’ – which not only gave a list of all the horse and other
Irish fairs and markets but predicted for me, as a Sagittarian, ‘benefits from older people’, who would have to get a move on with their generosity or I would be dead; and for Wanda, born under Aries, a glittering future but only if she stayed at home. According to our kitchen scales these weighed 3 lbs 1 oz, 1 lb, 11 oz, 1 lb 10 oz, 2 lbs (even what I had collaborated in writing was overweight), 2 lbs 5 oz and ¾ oz respectively. Of these, with the greatest regret, and feeling as if I was dropping the pilot while still on soundings, I now jettisoned the
Shell Guide
, the
Blue Guide
, the
Companion Guide
and
Wonders of Ireland
, all on grounds of weight.

Other books that I would like to have had with me but for their weight were the
Ireland Guide
, published by the Irish Tourist Board (1 lb 7 oz), the
Guide to the National Monuments of Ireland
(1 lb 1 oz) by Peter Harbison, and
Burke’s Guide to Country Houses
by Mark Bence-Jones, but how the hell can you carry a coffee-table book weighing 3 lb 1 oz on a bike? I would also have liked Robert Kee’s
The Green Flag
, which deals with Irish Nationalism, for me a subject of baffling complexity. But not at 3 lb; the same weight as Maire MacNeill’s
The Festival of Lughnasa.
Strange that so many of the best books on Ireland weighed in at around this figure. What I really needed was a
chaise
to follow in my footsteps with my travelling library on board.

The sun was rising astern as we came into Rosslare, dyeing what looked like toy houses on the heights above the harbour a brilliant orange. Otherwise, it was a cold, windy, rain-washed morning and although a south-westerly gale was blowing, here in the lee of the land there was no sea to speak of. Away to the south-east the light on the tower of the Tuskar Rock was still flashing. Here we left our van.

After loading up the bikes, we wobbled away into rural County
Wexford. I was feeling ghastly. For some days I had been suffering from sinusitis and while on the ferry I had developed a fatal-sounding cough, which persisted the entire time I was in Ireland and which at night often made it impossible for Wanda to sleep.

At once we found ourselves in a pleasant countryside of winding lanes with hardly any traffic, green fields in which standard, black and white EEC-type cattle were fattening themselves in a leisurely fashion – as if they, too, knew that no one would really know what to do with them when they were fattened, except to add them to the European meat mountain – and small, single-storey whitewashed farmhouses and barns, many of them thatched, that were beginning to gleam in the emerging sun. Everything was on a small scale, even the trees. Overhead blackbirds and magpies zoomed around in a sky dappled with cirrus, infinitely remote. Gorse blazed in the hedgerows and at
Twelve Acre Cross Roads a little band of young men in shirt sleeves, waistcoats and cloth caps were hedging and ditching, using the sorts of implements that are now collectors’ items in mainland Britain.

In the course of this ride, which was mercifully flat, we passed no fewer than four castles, including Bargy Castle, home of the unfortunate Bagenal Harvey, leader of the 1798 Peasants’ Revolt, of which more later. We also passed a sign in the middle of nowhere pointing down an arcadian lane which read ‘Bicycles Repaired’, and the vaneless tower of a windmill. Here, sheltered by the hedgerows, it was like a day in early spring, not January. In spite of feeling lousy I felt extraordinarily happy.

Neither of us felt so happy when we reached the quay at Kilmore, and coming out of the shelter of the hedgerows received the full blast of the freezing south-westerly gale that was roaring in from the Atlantic, piling up the seas on the reefs around the Saltee Islands.

The owner of these two islands, which lie five miles off the coast, is the self-styled, self-crowned Michael I who, when in residence, hoists his standard on his dwelling on Great Saltee. His limestone throne stands on the flank of a hill and bears his coat of arms – a shield supported by two mermaids, each quarter containing a different sort of bird. Nearby a plaque states that the throne was installed in memory of his mother who confided to Michael, when he was ten years old, that one day he would own the island and be its first prince. His heirs are warned that they can only become his lawful successors if the coronation ceremony is properly carried out, using the regalia which he himself has provided for the purpose.

Great Saltee, the largest of the two islands, is about a mile long and is covered with spongy hillocks which in spring are covered with wild hyacinths, sea pinks and campion. Located
on one of the principal migration routes, in late May and early June it becomes one of the noisiest places in Ireland when several million birds – in all some thirty different species – gather on every ledge of its cliffs and offshore stacks, filling the air with their squawking. In fact one wondered how the monarch stood it.

‘Any news of the monarch?’ I summoned up sufficient resolution to ask the little band of fishermen confabulating in the car park.

‘He doesn’t come here any more,’ one of them replied, obviously bored to death by being asked the same question innumerable times.

‘What about his son?’ I said. I didn’t care how bored he was.

‘His son comes sometimes,’ he said, turning his back on me in a rather pointed way, while the others looked seawards, hoping for a lull in the conversation.

‘Ireland of the Welcomes, huh!’ I said, but only when I was out of earshot. It was a wild scene – an appropriate place to hear sad stories of kings, even if they were absent rather than dead. There may have been spring in the lanes but here it was a non-starter.

We battled on into the blast for another ten miles to a place called Bannow beyond the far western end of Ballyteige Strand. It stood, what there was of it, at the mouth of the wide estuary of the Owenduff and Corock rivers; beyond the shallows, over which hundreds of oystercatchers were swirling about, the ebb was running strongly against a south-westerly breeze which was tearing the surface off it. Once Bannow had been an island and it was still marked as Bannow Island on the half-inch map. Once, too, it had been a town but all that remained of it now above ground were the ruins of a thirteenth-century church standing in its graveyard, and of a chantry chapel, called St Brendan’s. It was a strange sensation standing among the long straight depressions
in the grass, all that remain of the streets of the town, the names of which have been preserved in the rent rolls at Waterford.