Round Ireland in Low Gear (9 page)

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.

The following morning, with fully laden bikes, we embarked in the farmer’s Volkswagen van, bound for the town of Ennistymon. The sky was overcast, the wind now westerly and it looked like rain. In other words it was a grand, Irish day.

There was another passenger – a friend of the farmer’s who was, he alleged, ‘just going up the road a bit to take a look at his sheep’. In fact his ‘up the road a bit’ comprehended almost the entire journey. He settled himself firmly in front next to the driver,
so that I found myself, having paid for the van hire, crouching in the back holding up the bikes and trying to avoid being stabbed to death by brake levers. As a result, I saw nothing and he got an additional eyeful of the scenery he saw every day of his life.

The driver, who was short on conversation, was in a hurry to return to his fields, so I failed to get him to stop at Cahermacnaghten, yet another ringfort with immensely thick, high walls which stands high up in the Burren, five miles from anywhere. All I saw of it as we roared past was a gateway, a white farmhouse and a grove of windswept trees. Just as with Caherconnell, I had never had any luck with Cahermacnaghten. The last time I had tried to visit it I had been beset by a tribe of tinkers and their flaxen-haired children who were camped with their carts close by, and had literally had to run for it.

It was a pity. Cahermacnaghten was more than just another Irish fort. From mediaeval times until late in the seventeenth century it housed within its walls a law school run by the O’Davorens, known as O’Davoren’s Town, as unlikely a situation for a law school as the middle of Dartmoor. It was here that Dubhaltach MacFirbhisigh studied, the distinguished compiler of
Craobha Coibhneasa Agas Geuga Geneluigh Gacha Gabhala dar Ghabh Ere
, otherwise
The Branches of Kindred and Genealogical Boughs of Every Plantation in Ireland
, which he completed in 1650. His family were the hereditary historians of the O’Dubha chieftains in what is now County Sligo; it was they who performed their initiation ceremonies by raising a wand above their heads and pronouncing their names. They were also responsible for an extensive collection of historical, genealogical and ecclesiastical writings in both prose and verse. After the dispossession of the O’Dubha in 1643, soon after the commencement of the Eleven Years War, Duald MacFirbis (as he was known) continued to work in Galway and later in Dublin. At the age of eighty-five he was stabbed to
death in Doonflin, County Sligo, by a drunken Englishman who had been attempting to kiss a shop assistant and regarded MacFirbis as a witness to this shameful act who would be better dead.

At Kilfenora, a village about five miles short of Ennistymon, the driver stopped to fill up with petrol and we made a desperate dash for liberty, taking refuge in the Cathedral of St Fachtna, or what was left of it. In the chancel was a pair of tomb effigies: one of a bishop, said to be the saint, who founded a monastery and what became a famous theological school at Rosscarbery in County Cork, in the act of blessing all and sundry; another of a weird figure with an immensely elongated neck and head, apparently wearing a kilt. ‘You know who the Bishop of Kilfenora is?’ the man at the pump said when we got back to the van (the whole visit had taken just over two and a half minutes – see Ireland and die of heart failure). ‘The Pope.’ I’m still pondering this gnomic utterance. There was also a Burren Museum which I would have liked to have seen, but it was shut for the winter. All the shops were shut, too, and apart from the pump attendant there was not a living soul in sight.

By the time we got to Ennistymon and had been deposited at the top of its main street by a large Gothic Protestant church with an octagonal tower and a handless clock face, it was eleven o’clock and the first shops up at this end of the town were beginning to show tentative signs of opening, like early daffs. We put up at Mrs Mary MacMahon’s B and B which was situated in Church Street above a pub of the same name, of which her husband was the proprietor.

We were given a room next door to the TV Room on one of the upper floors. The TV Room was unlike any other TV Room I had ever seen. It was full of religious images executed
in plaster-of-Paris, all balanced on a rather precarious-looking what-not, and on a facing wall was a large oleograph of Jesus with his heart exposed and flames coming out of it, surrounded by a circle of thorns with a cross on top. There was a lot of blood about. Religion was everywhere. Even the lavatory had the Virgin and Child of Kiev balanced on top of a spare roll of paper on top of the cistern, which made use of the arrangements extremely hazardous. In fact as soon as I set eyes on it I began to rehearse how I would break the bad news to Mrs MacMahon, who was religious and nice with it, that her picture of the Virgin and Child of Kiev had just fallen down the hole, and please where could I find the nearest religious picture repository for a replacement.

Fifteen years ago Ennistymon, which at the last count had 1013 inhabitants, had forty-eight pubs. According to Mr MacMahon, when they were last counted, a few days previously, there were twenty-one – out of a total in Southern Ireland of 10,000 (in 1985 there were 11,000) and numbers were closing every day. The town is also famous for some of the best shop fronts in Ireland. On the left-hand side going down Church Street was C. O’Lochlen, Draper and Outfitter, with what was probably Mr O’Lochlen transferring some of his stock on to the pavement outside, having come to the risky conclusion that it wouldn’t rain today. Down from him was Keane’s, Saddler and Harnessmaker; a butcher who described himself as a victualler; Nagles, a pub that was also, conveniently, an undertakers; and on down the road, in a little square, Killybegs Fresh Fish Stall was doing a brisk trade.

On the right hand was C. Hayes, with a perfect austere pub façade, bottles of Paddy in the window and a dim interior full of drink, which never opened during our stay and now probably never would; the premises of Twoney Walsh, Outfitter and Draper, in which Wanda bought a two-yard skirt length of
expensive-looking tweed for £9. Next to that, more or less in the same line of business, was T. J. Mahoney, who emerged from his premises to present her with a card on which was printed ‘
Very Special Value – T. J. Mahoney
’. The drapers in Ennistymon carried stocks that would have made department store buyers curl up and die from apprehension. One of them, in a town with a thousand inhabitants, stocked five sixty-yard lengths of identical material all in the same colour. Others had enormous stocks of shoes and clothing in outmoded styles and would, I felt, if asked, produce a pair of 1950s winkle-pickers at the drop of a hat.

And so on, past more pubs, open and shut, for sale and haunted, than I had physique to visit and record, among them E. Burke, with another beautiful façade. Then Considine and Sons, a pub now a gift shop;
¹⁰
Hyne’s, mysterious dark façade, closed, use unknown; Vaughan’s, black-shuttered and said by an old man with a bike to be haunted, also use unknown; Nagle’s Bar, ‘Traditional Musicians Welcome’, closed and for sale; McGrotty’s Medical Hall, open; O’Leary’s Undertakers with the smallest possible window filled with artificial flowers. Here at the far end of Church Street, perched on a hill, were the remains of a church and a cemetery.

Downstream of the bridge, which spanned the falls of the Cullenagh river, was the old Falls Hotel standing among magnificent trees on the right bank, and on the left bank was a betting shop housed in a black, corrugated iron shed, and an old house with windows painted so that it looked as if people were looking out of them. The Catholic Church, built in 1953, was much more attractive than any other modern Catholic Church we had so far seen in Ireland.

Photographs taken in the 1930s showed Church Street on market day filled with horse-drawn vehicles and people. It was a bit different now.

After eating well for £3.50 in what had once been McNulty’s pub, now a fish and chip shop and takeaway crowded with schoolchildren playing the machines with their dinner money, we started out for the Cliffs of Moher. We set off, happily, without our luggage, for which we had long since managed to cultivate the sort of loathing that human beings normally reserve for one another. I myself particularly resented having to lug round what amounted to a mobile workshop of tools and spares as well as 14 lbs or so of guide books, most of which I by now realized I could have done without.

The question was which ones could I do without. What would happen to us, for example, if I jettisoned the great, out-of-print
Shell Guide to Ireland
, whose compilers can scarcely have envisaged anyone cycling with it, weighing in as it does at just over 3 lbs? On the contrary, its authors, men such as Lord Killanin and Professor Michael Duignan, probably travelled from cromlech to cromlech in a jaunting car equipped with four-wheel drive, with weeks’ of provisions on board, before taking off into the sticks in waders, in search of their quarry. In fact any quotation taken at random from the
Guide
, which covers the whole of Ireland in equal detail, will convince the reader that a bike would be the last
vehicle suitable for such a purpose, as the following typical extract, which appears under
Ballyvaghan
(as they chose to spell it), will show:

At which point, reluctantly, we must leave them, just as they are getting into their stride. How did they ever manage to complete their appointed task, one wonders, without either sinking into a bog or going round the bend?

Three miles outward bound from Ennistymon we reached Lahinch on the shores of Liscannor Bay, an old-fashioned seaside resort that became popular at the end of the last century with the opening of the West Clare Railway and of a golf course. The old part of Lahinch, if one ignored the existence of a bungalow belt and an Entertainment Centre near the beach, complete with ballroom, cinema, theatre, sea-water swimming pool, children’s pool, playground, games room and tennis courts, looked a bit like a stage set designed by Osbert Lancaster in collaboration with Edward Ardizzone, but one from which the actors
had departed. It was the sort of place, with its modest promenade, which might also have boasted a modest pier, had it been sited on the shores of the English Channel instead of the wild Atlantic.

At this time of year it was pretty quiet. Vaughan’s Aberdeen Arms, the oldest and best hotel, was closed until April. I was sorry about that: I remembered the present proprietor, Michael Vaughan, as a jolly fellow with a wealth of curious, some of it scandalous, knowledge about the neighbourhood and its inhabitants past and present – something I could have done with at that moment with the sun now in and none of the things that writers normally count on happening, especially when travelling in Ireland, actually happening. There were several hermetically sealed pubs and not a living soul in sight. Little did I realize that somewhere within his shut-up hotel was Vaughan, hidden away for the winter, longing to entertain us.

North of the town the road ran close to the shores of Liscannor Bay, but separated from it by sand dunes held together by tussocky vegetation. It was among these dunes, on the night of 22 September 1920, that the inhabitants of Lahinch took refuge when the Royal Irish Constabulary together with what were known as the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries
¹¹
went on the
rampage, partially wrecking the town and setting a number of buildings on fire. This disgraceful operation was carried out as a reprisal for the equally disgraceful ambushing and killing of four members of the RIC (only one of whom was in fact an Englishman, the other three all being Catholic Irish from County Cork, Roscommon and Sligo), a pattern of behaviour which was to become commonplace and still is more than sixty years later in the North. The constables had been killed either by the Sinn Fein, the Irish Volunteers, the Irish Republican Army, or the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the head of which was the fearful, brilliant Michael Collins.
¹²

The heady pleasures to be derived from this sort of fighting, for those on both sides, are well summed up by the following ballad commemorating the annihilation of two lorry loads of Auxiliaries in November 1920 in west Cork:

Ironically, it was in a somewhat similar ambush just under two years later, in August 1922, that Michael Collins was killed by his fellow Irishmen while travelling in an open Rolls Royce with a Crossley tender and armoured car escort on the Macroom-Bandon road by anti-Treaty Republicans.
¹³

During that night of terror at Lahinch, the local secretary of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union was shot and his body thrown back into the flames of his burning house, from which his wife had already been driven with her baby in her arms. Another man was shot for attempting to extinguish the fire in a neighbour’s house, and most of the inhabitants of Lahinch fled to the sand dunes.

‘You never saw anything so sad as the sight in the sandhills that morning,’ an eye-witness wrote.

Such killings would continue for years, long after the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries were but a memory, of Irish by British, British by Irish and, most common of all as time went by, of Irish by Irish.

We now left this area with its melancholy associations for a more agreeable and eccentric one, via a fine stone bridge built by Cornelius O’Brien MP, an eccentric if ever there was one. Beneath it, overlooked by the tower block of the ruined Dough Castle, the little river Cullenagh wound its way through lush meadows on its final stretch to Liscannor Bay and the sea.

On the seashore to our left were the low roofless ruins of the mediaeval church of St Macreiche. St Macreiche was a legendary destroyer of plagues, dragons and of a great eel, an oll-pheist, which reputedly came ashore here to feast on the corpses in the cemetery in the sixth century. Just the nave and chancel of the church remained, separated by a pointed arch. To the south-east were the dunes of unhappy memory in which there are, or were, sand holes, the abodes of Donn na Duimche (Donn of the Sand Dune) a fairy king. There are many Donns in Irish myth. One was the Brown Bull of Cuailgne who slew the Bull of Maeve, Queen of Connacht; another a foster-brother of Mael Fhothartaig,
the wondrous son of Ronan, King of Leinster, whose stepmother made advances to him. And there is oc Donn, the Irish God of the Dead, in more modern folklore associated with shipwrecks, failure of crops, death of cattle and storms at sea.

Close by the church there was a holy well, and down on the beach, lapped by the tide, were two rocks, the saint’s bed or grave. At one time people took sand from one of the graves in the churchyard and threw it into the sea to calm it; emigrants are still said to do this before setting out on their journey. Offshore, somewhere in the Bay, is said to lie Cill Stuihin, a submerged city. It was difficult to imagine a place with a greater concentration of magic in and around it, but what with the cold wind and the now driving rain it simply contrived to look thoroughly depressing.

By now very wet, we took refuge in McHugh’s pub in Liscannor, strongly recommended by Mrs MacMahon. ‘The finest Guinness in Ireland,’ was how she had described it, very loyally considering that her husband was also engaged in peddling the stuff. ‘And the very best rashers.’

Inside, McHugh’s was long, narrow and dark. Beside McHugh himself, a bright-eyed, friendly man, and innumerable trophies won by his dogs at coursing, a sport in which he was a folk hero, the pub housed three men of indeterminate age with dark hair and thin, creased faces, all dressed in the sort of dark suits the Irish use for working in the fields, caps and rubber boots. It was difficult to guess their age: they could have been anything from fifty to seventy – the sort of men who are impervious to bad weather of the kind that was raging outside.

‘I can’t drink any more of that cider,’ said Wanda. ‘I’ll have a port, a large one.’ Her teeth were literally chattering.

While I was ordering the drinks, Mrs McHugh appeared and gave one of the men a bucket, and he went out into the deluge
to milk a cow. Then, after one of the two remaining men had poured a Paddy into what remained of his pint of Guinness, the conversation turned to how much drink anyone could take without coming over peculiar. ‘Now there was this English truck driver I used to know when I was over in Kilburn,’ the one drinking the mixture said, making Kilburn sound as remote as Shangri-la. ‘And he couldn’t drive his truck at all until he had twenty pints inside him. And there’s another feller I know who’s ready to be locked away by the Gardai after only a couple. It’s a strange business, the drink.’ At the same time he ordered another.

We were reluctant to leave this agreeable refuge, but forced ourselves out into the wind and sheets of rain. Out beyond the little harbour, from which the Liscannor flags that had formed the kitchen floor of our sumptuous cottage at Ballyvaughan had been shipped away, the sea broke white on what looked like an offshore reef. Or could it be the remains of the lost city of Cill Stuihin, finally breaking the surface after centuries of submersion? To the west of the village on the cliffs stood Liscannor Castle, once occupied by Sir Turlough O’Brien who, in 1588, busied himself with the extermination of survivors of the Armada. For it was here, in Liscannor Bay, that the Spanish galleass
Zuniga
, which had just failed to weather the Blaskets on its way back to Spain, having sailed with the rest of the Armada westwards round the north of Scotland, anchored on 5 September 1588, driven by a westerly gale back on to the coast of Clare. There she remained for a week until the wind went to the northeast and she was able to get clear of the Irish coasts, eventually to reach Spain.

Other vessels were less fortunate. On 10 September two big ships were wrecked on the west coast of the Loop Head peninsula. The survivors were butchered by Sir Turlough O’Brien and Boetius Clancy, Sheriff of Clare, on the orders of Sir Richard Bingham,
English Governor of Connaught, and their bodies were buried on what is still called Spanish Point.

Everywhere we were to go subsequently on the coasts of Ireland we were to hear stories of the Armada ships and their crews, related as if the events had taken place only yesterday. Altogether twenty-five ships were lost on the Irish coast, one west of Shetland, and one on Fair Isle, while two were blown back into the Channel, two were lost on the west coast of Scotland, and a number were unaccounted for. Fifty-seven vessels and some 9000 or 10,000 men got back to Spain in September and October, out of the 129 large vessels (65 of them over 700 tons), 19,295 soldiers and 8460 sailors not including galley slaves who had set off from Lisbon at the end of May 1588.