Round Ireland in Low Gear (31 page)

The next day we set off on the main road to Sligo, which runs along the feet of the lonely Ox Mountains. About nine miles from Ballina we came to a crossroads bearing a large sign to the effect that ‘Our Lady of Carns. Site of Apparitions’ was away to the right. This was what we had come to see – a Site of Apparitions, not a boring stretch of road along the south side of Sligo Bay.

The shrine, which had only recently been completed, was built of stone and stood on a platform reached by three steps. It was in the form of a Gothic archway, the arch itself however being faced with glass, rather like a shop window. Behind it stood a statue of the Virgin: Our Lady of Carns, as she was now known to countless thousands. Four girls, aged between fourteen and sixteen, witnessed the original apparition at ten on the night of 2 September 1985, in what was then a grazing field belonging to Kathleen Conmy. They had been accompanying another girl back to Bolan’s, a shop which we had passed down the road, and after buying some chocolate they began walking home together. It was a dark, moonless night but when they reached the field all four of them were confronted by an apparition of Our Lady overhead. She appeared to be about 12 feet high, and wore a white veil which concealed her hands. Her face was pale and sad, and a star shone to the right of her head. At her side was another figure, whom two of the girls recognized from pictures they had seen of her as St Bernadette. The two figures followed the girls, who were by now frightened, to the house of the eldest, Mary Hanley, though her mother did not herself see them when she opened the door.

The Virgin appeared to them the following night and to some thirty local people who had gathered in the field; this time her face was seen in the moon and she mimed the words ‘faith’ and ‘hope’. To her right was a headless blue statue. The farmer who rented his field from Kathleen Conmy, fed up with having his hedges trampled and walls knocked down by the growing numbers of people who flocked to the site, refused to let a gathering take place the night after that, but he was prevailed upon to relent, and as the apparitions continued the crowds grew nightly. On the seventh night, with three thousand people present, the majority saw an orange ball shooting across the sky, and some saw drops of blood coming from what they identified as the Sacred Heart.
The skies then opened to reveal a dazzling, revolving light. Some saw a cross among the clouds; others, the Virgin walking towards them, leaving behind her the scent of roses. By this time the ecclesiastical authorities began to display their customary unease when confronted by the supernatural; what the farmer said may have been recorded but is not available. It was decided that thenceforth the girls should gather at the ‘Apparitions Site’ on every feast day connected with the Blessed Virgin.

Now, as if in a play, three of the girls appeared in the lane, on the way, as they had been when the whole extraordinary chain of events began, to stock up with chocolate at Bolan’s. They were comely, un-trendy, un-selfconscious, un-pious, completely typical Irish country girls. ‘No,’ they said, ‘we don’t mind having our pictures taken’, and ‘No, we never saw them again, the apparitions, after a certain point.’

About twenty people were present at the shrine, talking in whispers, about four carloads. The price of petrol in Ireland does not encourage joy riding. Among them was Mr Martin James McDonnell, one of the masons who built the shrine. He had what he had seen off by heart: ‘At eleven-fifteen on the ninth of September my daughter and myself stayed until midnight, and we both saw the Sacred Heart light in a long-distance view. It had a sort of background of a round golden ring – in a reddish heart shape with a light in the middle of it, like it might have been a candle light. It moved to three different places, each about thirty feet apart, each time vanishing before appearing again.

‘At about a quarter after midnight we were about to go home when we saw a large statue appear on the piece of wood where the small statue was. (This was the statue which was brought to the field when the apparitions began and which is now displayed on the side of the shrine.) It was about five feet high … On Saturday the fourteenth I saw a halo in the sky, about four times
- a good few others saw it as well. On Sunday the fifteenth I saw the sun dance before sunset – a good few saw that, too. I wasn’t there again until the twenty-fourth of September, with my daughter, Teresa – we both saw the moon breaking through the clouds – very bright and egg-shaped. And a good few people saw that as well. Then on the eleventh of October I saw the Blessed Virgin once more – this time just like a statue, her hands joined. I could even see her eyes, her eyelids, eyebrows and nose. She was small, about twenty inches high. A lot of other people saw her too, and one girl saw her disappear and a cross stand there in her place – but I didn’t see that happen.’

Since then Mr McDonnell had seen further apparitions, the last only a couple of weeks before our arrival. It is forbidden by the hierarchy for Mass to be celebrated there, a prohibition which will almost certainly continue.

With 54,000 occupants Cavan is not thickly populated, but it is magnificently served by roadways, which are traffic-free.

A. J. O’R
IORDAN
.
The Cavan Guide

‘Any questions?’ said Wanda, as one or other of us always did when confronted, as we were now, with a water source. It was an old family joke, originally uttered by our son, aged twelve or so, when after infinite difficulty I succeeded in locating one of the places in the Belgrade Forest outside Istanbul from which derives the bottled water to which so many of its citizens are addicted. It turned out to be in a field of churned-up mud, its only occupant an old Turk who was squatting in a sea of bottles, filling them from a tap. Now, thirty-five miles from Sligo, from where we had set out that morning, at the foot of the boulder-strewn Cuilcagh Mountains, on the border of the Republic with Ulster, we found ourselves in yet another muddy field, this time looking down into a hole in the ground surrounded by trees and bushes, into which water was bubbling up from somewhere below. To get to it we had had to break through a cordon of cattle, determined to defend to the last their right to foul it up.

What we were looking into here, 256 feet above sea level and 224 miles from its mouth at Loop Head, was Shannon Pot, the source of the Shannon, known to Irish speakers as Log na Sionna and to Irish English speakers as ‘Ther Part’. The half-inch map is excessively vague about its location, and finding it had been
diabolically difficult. It was, in fact, reminiscent of the experience of the lively Chevalier de la Tocnaye, a young French Royalist and ex-cavalry officer who escaped the Revolution to walk the length and breadth of Ireland in 1796–7, and wrote a very amusing book about it.
^*
He legged it round the country with his belongings on the end of a swordstick, onto the other end of which he had fixed an umbrella. (‘It made the girls laugh. I can’t think why,’ he said.)

‘As with all great personages,’ he wrote, referring to the infant Shannon, ‘the approach to this one was very difficult. As with them, too, access did not reveal anything very remarkable. However,’ he went on,

Indeed, the Shannon ends up by draining one fifth of the entire area of Ireland.

The only guide book which I now had with me was what was left of
Murray’s Guide
, 1912. Opening it at the appropriate page to read to Wanda, I immediately wished I hadn’t. ‘… the traditional source,’ wrote John Cooke, quoting a maddening but no doubt perfectly correct pedant named Hull,

‘Do you mean to say,’ said Wanda after digesting this information with much the same relish as one would a fishbone, ‘that after five and a half hours’ cycling here from Sligo and another half hour going up and down and round and round looking for it, this isn’t the source of the Shannon?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘not strictly speaking. That is, if Cooke, Hull and Wilkinson are anything to go by.’

‘In that case,’ she said, ‘Cooke, Hull, Wilkinson and you, too, should all be bloddy well shot.’

‘You don’t want to try and find the other little lough, the one into which Wilkinson threw his hay, or whatever?’ I said. ‘It must be quite close.’

‘You must be joking,’ she said.

Altogether we had seen a lot of things since we had first taken to coming to Ireland, and met a whole lot of people we would not otherwise have met; but however interested one is in the world about one there is a moment when one has to say, This is enough – something the reader may have said long ago.

It was a mild, grey afternoon in mid-October. Although we were only a few miles from the border, we turned our backs on it and began the long ride back to Sligo. Our bike rides round
Ireland were over. We had seen a lot more of Ireland than there is space to write about, penetrating far into northern Donegal, to the cliffs of Slieve League and the magical valley of Glencolumbkille. The weather had been wonderful, and much of the time we had slept under the stars, sometimes waking up in the morning covered in windblown sand like prospectors in their graves. Ulster would have to wait until another year. On 16 October satellite pictures still showed clear skies over Ireland, but a thick bank of cloud was moving in eastwards from the Atlantic, to disperse the anticyclone that had made September and October months to remember. It was the last day of summer.

Now that the whole thing was more or less over I realized that we hadn’t really needed mountain bikes at all: there had been no point at which we had required those enormous great tyres, and two chainwheels and twelve gears would have been quite sufficient.

‘Next time …’ I was about to say to Wanda, but I just managed to stop myself.

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