Round Ireland in Low Gear (26 page)

We had a second memorable pub contact on another day, at Gallagher’s Pull Inn in a very rural situation by the Canal at a hamlet called Pollagh. Mrs Gallagher, the innkeeper’s wife, who was thirty-nine and very handsome, had been married for thirteen years and the pub swarmed with her eight children, all good-looking and in rude health, the older ones taking good care of the small ones. In answer to our request for a sandwich she cut such an enormous quantity that what we left would have provided a square meal for her entire family. This Irish Catholic equivalent of a Heroine of Socialist Labour in the USSR first met her husband-to-be while working in a pub in Galway, although she neither smoked nor drank. Like almost every other married woman we had met on our travels in Ireland she was strongly anti-divorce. And now for our benefit she prophesied, quite correctly as it turned out, the result of the Irish Government’s national referendum on divorce which was to take place a few days later, and in which the voters were to reject a proposed constitutional change allowing divorce by a majority of 63.5 to 36.5 per cent, thereby confounding the Government.

Finally, after a four-mile detour, because the towpath was impassable, to a place called Cloghan where Wanda wanted to buy a marble bust of Aesculapius (which fortunately turned out to be plaster-of-Paris), we rode the last couple of miles down to Shannon Harbour, which turned out to be on this fine Saturday in June a sort of rocking marina, with a fair in full blast, people cooking their evening meals on board their motor cruisers, and others sitting drinking on the grass outside the pubs. All this against an incongruous, dilapidated, early nineteenth-century background – the Grand Canal Hotel of 1806 (out of action), a police barracks and some old warehouses (out of action too), and what had once been the agent’s house, all strung out along the bank below Lock No. 25.

A quarter of a mile further on, 81 miles, 7 furlongs and 44 locks from the Ringsend Sea Lock, we reached the Shannon, beautiful as it always was, now glittering in the evening sun, with what looked like an Edwardian pleasure steamer aground in it and some thoroughly wild-looking horses zooming about in a nearby field. It was nearly six-thirty. It wasn’t much of a journey to write home about, or even write about, but it had been fun and we had made it, with a total of four thorn punctures en route.

We spent the night in Banagher, a small town a couple of miles downstream from Shannon Harbour, in a nice B and B on the main street. Here, Trollope started work for the Post Office as a surveyor in 1841 and wrote his first two novels, both with Irish settings:
The Kellys and the O’Kellys
and
The MacDermot of Ballycloran
. It poured all night and the next morning, while Wanda attended Mass, I spent some time studying the most remarkable shop window 1 have ever seen, before or since, in Ireland, that of Messrs Hunts in the main street. It displayed the following, each in their own individual showcases, embellished with mosaic glass: a rubber instrument for unstopping blocked sinks, a bricklayer’s trowel, a rat trap, three wooden handles with nothing on the end of them, two bath plugs, and a used golf ball.

By now it was a beautiful, rain-washed morning, one on which you could see for ever, and we took the road to Ballinasloe, fourteen miles to the west as the crow flies, but considerably more by road, leaving County Offaly for County Galway. The idea was to catch a train from Ballinasloe to Galway, which some local case had told us would leave at 13.13. And in spite of stopping off to see the great Romanesque doorway of the Protestant Cathedral at Clonfert, and the Bishops’ Palace behind it, an enviable building
now in ruins whose last tenant had been Sir Oswald Mosley, not to mention a fine, fourteenth-century wooden statue of the Virgin and Child, said to have been found in a tree and now housed in the Catholic church, we still managed to arrive twenty minutes before the time of departure, only to find that our man in Banagher – ‘May the Lamb of God stick his hoof through the floor of heaven and kick you up the arse below in hell!’ as the old Irish curse picturesquely puts it – had forgotten that it was a Sunday and the train had left hours ago. Oh, dear! We had already had as awful a row as one can possibly have while pedalling heavily laden bicycles, on account of me trying to make Wanda go faster up the hills than she could possibly manage, and now the next train was at 20.15, arriving Galway 21.30. There were no buses either. In a word we were stumped. We could have stayed on but who wants to stay on in Ballinasloe on a Sunday? Every second emigrant to the United States from Ballinasloe has gone there precisely to avoid doing this. And we were about fourteen weeks too early for the Ballinasloe Fair, still with the Old Lammas Fair in Ballycastle, Co. Antrim, the greatest fair in Ireland and at one time the greatest horse fair in Europe. It was founded 1722 by Frederick Le Poer Trench, Earl of Clancarty, whose family seat, Garbally Court, now a Catholic school for boys, is on the west side of the town. In 1790, 73,300 sheep and 8600 horned cattle changed hands on the fair days and these numbers continued to increase until the peak year, 1856, when 99,680 sheep and 20,000 cattle were sold. Throughout this period, and further into the nineteenth century, it had the reputation of providing the best draught horses and the finest cavalry horses for the armies of Europe. ‘I know nothing of England or Ireland,’ General Platov, a Russian commander, told a member of the Clancarty family whom he happened to meet in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna, ‘apart from the Fair at Ballinasloe.’ By which time, together with the fair at Nijni
Novgorod, which was attended by 130,000 people from all over Europe and Asia, Ballinasloe had become the greatest fair in Europe.

The Fair, which still in 1912 ‘presented a scene to English eyes of rare confusion’, in the words of one who saw it, was customarily held on the first Tuesday in October and the four following days, partly in the Clancarty demesne and partly in Fair Green below the church on the hill. It was a wonderful spectacle: all the roads converging on the town for miles around on the evening preceding the Fair were jam-packed with sheep. The crush on the first day was intense and the fatigue endured by men and animals very great. But by 1912 the sale of sheep had fallen to about 30,000 (most of them were taken direct to Dublin by rail), although cattle were still selling at around 12,000 head and good horses were still in great demand.

Reading about all this convinced us that if we happened to be in Ireland at the time of the Fair we would make every effort to attend it. But the Curse of Ballinasloe, which had just so effectively fouled up our train ride to Galway, was to be in operation once more on our next journey, when we tried to travel from Sligo to Ballinasloe on the morning of the first Tuesday in October, and discovered that it would have been easier for General Platov to get there from Vienna on horseback in 1815, one way and another.

It is thirty-five miles to Galway by rail, if you are fortunate enough to be able to make use of this service; and the shortest route by road is 39½miles, ‘mainly through bleak, exposed bog country with some distant mountain views’, as our guide book put it. Still barely on speaking terms, although our shared misfortune had brought us slightly closer, we rode a boring eleven miles to Kilconnell, which has the remains of a very beautiful friary, with a wealth of extravagant tombs within it and a tablet recording the
unfortunate Baron Trimlestone, ‘whoe, being transplanted into Conaght with others by orders of the Vsvrper Cromwell, dyed at Monivae, 1667’.

Here, at Kilconnell, in one of Ireland’s ever-open grocery halls, we bought yet more soda bread and worked-over ham that was, if anything, even less attractive than the spam, of both of which we were rapidly beginning to tire. And for the next three quarters of an hour we sat in the extraordinarily ruined back parlour of one of the pubs, on plastic-covered seats that had either been saved or looted from a cinema, munching our tenderized ham sandwiches and watching a video of scenes of hideous violence in the company of three chain-smoking, very pimply but friendly boys. All three were dressed identically in big, black leather-type jackets, greasy black trousers and winkle-picker shoes which could have done with a coat or two of Tuxan renovating polish before being donated to a museum. The boys really loved the film: whenever any of the protagonists, of whom there were inexhaustible supplies, got what was coming to them, either by being
flammenwerfered
, hanged from cranes or in lift shafts, or simply by being kneed between the legs, the foetid parlour rang with cries of ‘Dat’s roight! Give it ’um! Give it ’um eggen!’ which made us glad that we were, as it were, ‘on the same soide’.

It would be tedious to describe the rest of the journey through bog and limestone country, in which the fields, instead of being hedged as they had been in Offaly, were enclosed with stone walls and were full of eskers – known more economically as ‘os’ – rather dreary ridges of stone deposited by the streams that ran under the melting glaciers, at the end of the Ice Age.

Eventually, at eight-thirty, having spent half an hour asleep on the roadside and having consumed a pot of tea in a pub which was still going full blast at four-fifteen, we arrived in Galway by an interminable and extremely ugly main road and there, in the
birthplace of Nora Barnacle, indomitable companion of James Joyce, by luck rather than judgment we put up at the premises of Mrs J. Robinson and her husband at Frenchville House, Gratton Road, the most economical, remarkable and the best bed and breakfast we ever stayed in while biking round Ireland. We were given cake, whiskey and wine in abundance on arrival, followed by a cooked meal.

The Robinsons’ house was on what had been the Claddagh (the Beach) before it was reclaimed, westwards of the mouth of the Galway river which here enters Galway Bay, and the old site of the fish markets. It was a labyrinthine fishing village of low, thatched cottages, inhabited by a community of Irish-speaking people of Irish descent, unlike the great bulk of the population who were of Anglo-Norman ancestry. At one time back in the 1840s they numbered between five and six thousand. They were very moral, very religious, and never fished on Sundays or other holidays or festivals. And if the day was regarded as ‘unlucky’, too, nothing would make them take to their boats (called
pucans
and
gleotags
) in search of the herrings, sunfish and turbot with which the Bay abounded. On the eve of the Nativity of St John, which falls on 24 June, the entire community went in procession through the town, and the election of a mayor or ‘king’ and other officials took place. Fires were lit and Claddagh boys and girls danced round them, armed with long-handled brooms made from dock stems.

The King, who seems to have borne a certain resemblance to some twentieth-century union leader, ran the community according to its own rather peculiar laws and settled internal disputes without recourse to the laws of the land. At sea, where he acted as Admiral, the King’s vessel was distinguished by a white sail and colours flown from the masthead.

The women wore a blue mantle, a red gown and petticoat, a
scarf bound round the head and went barefoot, winter and summer. Once ashore, the fishermen gave over to them the responsibility of selling the fish, before setting off to drink in the
shebeens.
At sea, however, they only drank water and lived on oatcakes and potatoes which they cooked themselves over a fire in the boat. In 1937 the whole of the Claddagh, with the exception of its austere Catholic church, was razed to the ground and replaced by concrete houses, and with it this way of life passed away also.

The next day, Monday, was the day of the Fair at Spancil Hill which we had first heard about from Mr O’Hagerty while drinking at his establishment at the Crusheen crossroads in County Clare the previous December. As it turned out, it was extremely difficult to find out anything more. Although almost every Irish man, woman and child knows at least some words of the immortal song ‘Spancil Hill’ – The cock crew in the morning, he crew both loud and shrill/ And I woke in California, many miles from Spancil Hill – far fewer have any idea of where Spancil Hill actually is; the most precise directions we heard were ‘somewhere up or down Limerick way, or thereabouts’. It doesn’t appear on the half-inch Ordnance Survey map of the appropriate area; that otherwise trustworthy compendium of fairs and cattle marts,
The Genuine Irish Old Moore’s Almanack, 1986
, has not a word about it, and all the other guides I had read were silent on the subject.

Eventually one of Bord Failte’s spies in County Clare came up with the information that it was held at a ‘crass’ somewhere between Ennis and Tulla, and that ‘if the parties concerned were still in Galway city they’d best get a move on as the fair had been going all night, and the latest news was that there had already been a bit of fighting, but not with sticks, so far’. So after a mammoth breakfast – eggs, tomatoes, rashers laid out like a sheaf of banknotes, sausages, four kinds of bread and toast (white, brown, soda, and soda with currants) not to mention several sorts
of jam and marmalade (coarse and less coarse cut) and goodness knows how many sauces and gallons of tea (‘or would you rather have coffee – there’s plenty of everything’) – we managed by a whisker to catch the Expressway Service to Ennis, 43 miles away. During this journey, while Wanda snoozed, recharging her batteries for whatever horrors lay ahead, I took the opportunity to bone up on The Divorce Question, as dealt with in a couple of reject newspapers I had found on board that had been used for packaging sandwiches. I soon got bogged down in the letter pages, most of whose correspondents were respectfully suggesting to their opponents that they should read the Gospel according to Mark, chapter 10, verse 10; while their opponents retaliated with Matthew 19, verse 9, in which Our Lord appeared to give a conflicting judgment on the subject to the wretched Pharisees. Various Irish ecclesiastics also used these columns to tell the laity that they should do what they had been told to do, and not to push their luck. All of which soon put me in a coma, too.

The bus deposited us at Ennis railway station which, like so many Irish railway stations and most Indian ones, was sited more for the convenience of the builders of railways than for the inhabitants of the towns the names of which they so misleadingly appropriated. And if you don’t believe me, try doing a four-minute mile from Ennis to Ennis station, or for that matter from Ballinasloe station to Ballinasloe
centre ville
. From here we telephoned for a taxi, which arrived like lightning, driven by a female who thought she knew everything, including the whereabouts of the Fair at Spancil Hill but, as became painfully clear, didn’t. When we found ourselves well on the way to Magh Adhair, the Inauguration place of the Kings of Thomond on the banks of the Hell River, a site we had ‘done’ back in December, I shouted ‘Whoa’ and asked her to reconsider her position vis-à-vis our proposed destination.