Pt3 - 19:

I’d love to have hung around Derry for another few days, but time is beginning to be an issue again. The race through Greece and Italy was to make the date to pick up the bullet, now the gathering pressure is to be back in Paris for the flight home on November 1^st. Today is the 24^th of September, day 214, and the maths says there’s less than six weeks to cover the rest of Ireland, Wales and the south of England back to London, cross the channel again to Antogny then drive up to Paris in time to return the mighty bullet before exxing Charles De Gaulle, barring the unforseen.  It’s forced a bit of corner cutting, which I’m literally doing right now. Instead of sticking to the coast as I’d originally planned, I’ve taken the most direct route to Sligo via Donegal and sliced off the northwest corner of Ireland. By way of consolation, I’ve already decided we’ll be back one day to see it all.

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Random factoid: After Spanish Armada was routed in the Battle of Gravelines most of the surviving ships drifted north, firstly into the North Sea then around the Orkneys and down the west coast of Ireland, where something like two dozen ships came to grief along the treacherous coastline. Those sailors who didn’t die in the wrecks were massacred by English soldiers and Irish sympathisers.

*

Sligo is the country of WB Yeats. I memorised every line of the old bugger’s poetry for the HSC so there’s no way I’m missing the opportunity to see where he drew much of his inspiration. Carmel, mine hostess at St Martin’s B&B on Strandhill Road, assures me the warm weather is unusual for this time of year – no small irony after the wet, cold European summer – and I rejoiced in the luck as I set off to explore around Sligo togged out in shorts and tee shirt.

A smoky haze lay on the landscape as I climbed out of Sligo town past the Yeats Hotel, the Yeats Restaurant, The Yeats Guest House and the Yeats gas station to the old church at Drumcliff. It wasn’t until almost ten years after his death in France that his remains were repatriated here to the tiny rural church in the shadow of Benbulben. For much of his life Yeats was a hopeless mystic so it seemed slightly incongruous that he should be buried in a Christian churchyard. His grave, a simple grey stone affair, carries his own epitaph: Cast a cold Eye On Life, on Death. Horseman, pass by!”  Typical of the old tosser.

I followed the road out to Glencar Lake and the postcardly symmetric waterfall the lady in tourist office claimed featured in one of his poems, though I can’t for the life of me remember which one. I continued out to Lough Gill on which lies the tiny Isle of Innisfree – another poem:

I will rise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there…

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow…

It was sublimely pretty day and since there was nobody around I couldn’t resist the urge to do a Billy Connolly and run through the grass in the altogether. No sooner had I got my gear back on than a car pulled up; five minutes earlier and their day would have been ruined.

Back in town I learned it was National Heritage Day, so entry to all historical sites was free. I took advantage of the opportunity to wander through the extensive Carrowmore Megalithic Cemetery. I don’t mind a casual stroll through a graveyard but Carrowmore is something different. The graves here aren’t your classic Christian jobs, but dolmens, or stone tables where a large flat stone is supported over the burial mound by a number of vertical stones, or megaliths; they look like Fred Flinstone bus shelters. Dolmens go back well before the year dot; the oldest one here has been dated to 4,500BC, or six and a half thousand years ago. There are no interesting, revealing or entertaining epitaphs at Carrowmore, but it’s the largest Stone Age burial ground in Europe and covers several square kilometres around the base of Knocknarea Mountain. There are worse ways to burn off a couple of hours on a balmy afternoon.

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Another random factoid: Between them Donegal, Sligo, Galway and Mayo counties are home to the most Gaeltacht districts. The Gaeltacht are areas where the government officially recognises the Irish language as the primary language, rather than English.

*

After the modest size of Derry, Donegal and Sligo the size of Galway city surprised me. I suppose it shouldn’t have, since it’s a bustling port and the centre of a thriving fishing industry. It’s also the launching pad for the Connemara, where I’m headed now.

The atmospheric haze which lent depth to the panoramas around Sligo also hangs lightly over the stark, rock strewn landscape as the road threads west along the Atlantic coastline. The countryside is a palette of soft pastels and the sea calm and blue. At Costelloe the road turns inland for Maam Cross past small lakes, peat bog and more little whitewashed stone cottages beside rushing streams. On the leg to Clifden near the western edge of the peninsula the first mountains appear, small and compact like buns on a tray. From Clifden I take the “Sky Road”, breathlessly billed in the literature as an “exhilarating drive”. It’s certainly thrilling, but for all the wrong reasons. The road is narrow and treacherous. Potholes, loose gravel and blind corners cambered to kill demand intense concentration. There’s nothing between you and the 500 foot drop to sea level but a few bent posts and a couple of strands of rusty wire which look like toothpicks and cotton against the vast background. I have to pull over to admire the view, and an admirable view it is.

Back at sea level the road calms down a bit, though it’s still a third-rate surface for such an important tourist route. The wild red fuschia is even more wild and more red down the west coast, a dramatic counterpoint to all the soft greens and browns and blues. At Letterfrack I visit the Connemara Museum and learn how the bog began to form two and a half thousand years ago, pretty interesting if bogs are your thing. I took the 30 minute walk trail from the museum around the adjacent national park, which is dominated by Diamond Mountain. I was stupid enough to leave the path at one point and immediately regretted it. I hadn’t got two meters before I began to sink in the bog, another few steps and I might have been swallowed entirely. I returned to the visitor’s centre with soggy boots.

Before Leenane I swerved off the N59 to see the mouth of Killary Harbour. The landscape here is actually wild and desolate in a proper wild and desolate sense. Bare and windswept, grey stone polished by wind and water. I haven’t seen anything like it since Crete. The road deteriorated into a primitive track, more potholes, loose gravel and weirdly cambered corners…suddenly I felt like a little lie down. The view was worth it, but I decided the best place to be now was somewhere else.

I pulled into Galway with three things on my mind, all of them Guinness.

Slainte! (pr. slawncha; Health in Gaelic)

*

There’s a lot to like about Galway, and they’re mostly pubs. There’s the Bunch o’ Grapes, Freeney’s Bar, King’s Head, Murphy’s, Stage Door, McSwiggan’s, the Booze off-license…all within a block of each other and festooned with large Guinness signs featuring classic lines like Have a Guinness when you’re Tired (a glass of G on a turtle’s back), Guinness for Strength (a musclebound worker carrying an iron beam on his shoulder), Guinness as Usual at Cullinane’s (a smiling face in the creamy head of a G). There was street art everywhere, including a mural of Jim Morrison with the line: Wild child, full of grace/Saviour of the human race. Sidewalks buzzed with busy people; it was a happenin’ town was Galway. There was just one odd thing about the streetscape and that was the soundtrack, the persistent skirl of bagpipes. At least that's what I thought I heard; I'd find out otherwise in Dingle.

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The one thing I won’t miss about the west coast of Ireland is the roads, they’re the punchline to a bad Irish joke. Even the main routes are poorly maintained, but the narrow lesser roads are fair dinkum disasters. Sudden dips, potholes, loose gravel, twisting and yawing cambers, no warning signs, no passing opportunities, no parking bays to pull over and study the map, misdirections, high hedges right up to the verges obscuring vision on already treacherous corners; sometimes it’s like steering a tinny through choppy seas. The locals have an infuriating habit of stopping in the middle of the road for a chat, I’ve even had to give way to an unattended horse out for a stroll.

The road through The Burren to the Cliffs of Moher (pr. moore) was all of the above, minus the horse. The Burren is a barren, shattered landscape of Byzantine desolation; it’s as though a giant has flung a meteor from space and splintered the vast slabs of grey limestone into a brazillion jagged pieces. Craftsman built dry-stone walls enclosed “paddocks” of stone which, unless the stone had once been covered with a thin layer of soil, seemed the epitome of weird. The Burren is just plain stoned.

The mighty Cliffs of Moher are all they’re cracked up to be. Rising two hundred and thirty meters sheer out of the Atlantic like a bite out of a giant sandwich stacked with different cooked meats, they recede as far as the eye can see into the hazy coastal distance until the last is a smoky silhouette. An unusually warm offshore breeze buffeted my back and, although a low fence ran along the top, I was conscious of not getting too near the edge. I heard on the car radio that last night a 13-year-old boy had tried to climb down the face – they didn’t explain why – and fell 30 meters. He’s in Galway hospital with severe internal injuries, having been hauled up hand-over-hand by locals because the rescue chopper couldn’t reach him. I peered way, way down at the flat, sun-bronzed sea.

Back in the car I set the controls for Limerick. I checked in to the B&B at Bridge House and made for Reardon’s pub down the road, where the plumbing in the gent’s echoed like the mating call of a male walrus and the whole pub laughed together at Rowan Atkinson in The Thin Blue Line. Later came the compulsory craic, more on which when I sober up in a few days.

*

A heavy mist obscured much of the way to Abbeyfeale but by the time I arrived there it had lifted and the day had ripened into a positively tropical warmth. Just outside the small town I came across a sight I hadn’t expected to see in this day and age, an elderly fellow re-thatching the roof on a small cottage. I pulled over and watched him work methodically around a section about a meter and a half square. First he drew out the old thatch and dropped it to the ground, then he took a thick bundle of fresh straw from a pile strung beside him and placed it carefully under the line of thatch above it. Finally, he trimmed the new section with a pair of sharp shears designed for the purpose, tamped the new work snugly into place with a small rectangular wooden paddle and moved along to the next section. He worked rhythmically and with a tradesman’s steady hand; I don’t imagine there are too many proper thatchers left so I was glad to have seen a master at work.

Despite its lyrical name there’s nothing attractive about Tralee, so I passed through it like an olive pip on the way to Dingle. As usual, I had the radio on to while away the kilometres and was hugely entertained by a program on the health risks of dance clubbing, including nightclubber’s nipple and PVC bum. On impulse I picked up a hitchhiker just outside Tralee bound for Dingle. She was a chatty character and full of stories about the area, so it turned out to be a good move.

It was a while before the road got interesting and then it got really interesting. Mt Brandon loomed over the landscape, its detail lost in the haze until we reached the top of the precipitous Connor Pass. Annie, the hitchhiker, told me where the best vantage point was for a view of the pass and also about a hidden glacial lake above the carpark. The panorama was splendid and the lake with its crystal clear water a spooky place even on this luminously sunny day. The road down Connor into Dingle could’ve been worse, which was a massive relief after the sheep trails of the Connemara and the Burren.

I installed myself at Garvey’s Farmhouse, a B&B on the Slea Head Road which proudly claimed to be less than half a mile “from the beach, the pub, the shops and the church.” It had a pleasant view over Ventry Harbour and the room was comfortable and clean. I dropped my gear and made straight for the town jetty to join a cruise out to meet Fungie, the resident dolphin. Fungie has been a fixture in the harbour for 13 years, a rarity in this part of the world. There’s a vocal minority who object to the cruises on the grounds they harass Fungie, but I reckon the dolphin enjoys the fun of it all. Like the wild dolphins at Monkey Mia back home, these highly intelligent creatures frequent selected waters by choice, not because they’re forced into some kind of demeaning servitude.

Sixteen of us piled onto the little boat and puttered out into a very placid Dingle Harbour. Within minutes, there was Fungie. He fooled around the boat all the way out to the heads where we turned around and ran back down the long sound. He raced us most of the way, breaching regularly within feet of the boat and drawing gasps of delight from the kids on board. At no point was the skipper aggressive or invasive of Fungie’s space, on the contrary I swear the dolphin was having a ball. I stepped off the boat in just the right mood for tonight’s craic.

*

I just love the private party feel of the craic and there have been a few memorable nights on the road, like nearly all of them, but last night’s at An Ćonair (The Connor Bar) was a right royal affair. I fell to chatting with Mick the bartender and settled in early. I’d already stowed a few pints away when the music started, with a guy on the Uileann pipes (descended from the baggies, but with a much broader tonal range and much more versatile) and Mick on accordion. They immediately got things moving with a rollicking jig. Soon they were joined by a guitarist and a fiddle player. Everyone in the small smoky bar either clapped or tapped along and those with enough under their belt joined in the chorus.

After a few numbers Mick came back behind the bar. I watched as he gently admonished an old codger who’d had ten too many pints. Old Paddy only kept himself upright by hanging onto the edge of the bar as though it were a piece of driftwood afloat in the ocean. Mick slid Paddy’s unfinished pint out of reach and told him to go home, which would have been fine if Paddy could walk. I noticed a young girl on the other side of Paddy eyeing him with concern. Every time the old fella swayed she impulsively reached out a hand to steady him, although she never actually touched him; it was a little dance, a crazy choreography. After ten minutes of this I couldn’t stand it anymore and left my seat at the crowded bar to see old Paddy home. When I asked him where he lived he looked at me with unseeing eyes and gurgled something incomprehensible. Mick gave me directions and as I steered Paddy out onto the street a young English guy joined me and together we managed to guide him about a hundred meters when a car pulled up beside us.

“He lives up the next street, first on the right. Treetops,” a female voice said, and the car drove off. After some buggerising around we eventually found the right house, and we knew this because the key Paddy fumbled out of his pocket fitted the front door. Before he went inside Paddy turned to us and said, “Argh gwumph fush?” It was only when he held up his hands a foot apart that we realised he was offering us a fish each. We declined his generous offer and found our way back to the Connor.

Despite the place being packed Mick had saved my seat at the bar and I resumed it in the cosy glow of having done something uncharacteristic of me – playing the good Samaritan to a hopeless drunk. The girl had gone, but returned an hour later and sidled up to me to find out how things had panned out. “At least you cared,” she said. Steady on, I might be up for a Nobel Prize!

During a break I quizzed the pipe player about his instrument. He was an absolute virtuoso and his playing mesmerised me. He showed me the bellows and the bag and when I commented on its range he said, “There are only seven notes on the bagpipes, and one octave. This has sixteen notes over three octaves.” And he could improvise across them all with endless variations.

You’ll probably be surprised to hear I drank too much, but I managed to get home in one piece and without the aid of a safety net. Tomorrow it’s Dingle and surrounds. For now though, it’s lights out.

Coming up: Around Dingle, the ring of Kerry and all that Blarney...