Читать книгу Round Ireland in Low Gear - Eric Newby - Страница 10

The Burren, ‘of which it is said that it is a country where there is not water enough to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him, which last is so scarce that the inhabitants steal it from each other, and yet their cattle are very fat, for the grass growing in tufts of earth of two or three foot square that lie between the rocks which are of limestone, is very sweet and nourishing.’

Memoirs of EDMUND LUDLOW, one of Cromwell’s generals The following morning we woke around seven-thirty to find brilliant sunshine pouring in through the bedroom windows. Anxious to make the most of the day, we got dressed and went downstairs to find no one about, except Gary, the grandson of the house, a fount of energy and of information about everything connected with the property and its occupants.

‘It’ll be a good bit yet before you get a sniff of your breakfast,’ he put it, picturesquely; and indeed it was ten o’clock before it finally appeared, or indeed there were any signs of life at all. It had certainly been a working farm when we had stayed on it last, but now showed signs, in spite of a tractor parked outside, of being an erstwhile one.

Inside, the house was still much as we remembered it, almost twenty years previously, enlarged but still homely and welcoming. The most recent acquisition appeared to be a set of large armchairs, upholstered in delicate green velvet, which would make a happy stamping ground for dogs whose owners had forgotten to bring their dog baskets and for children equipped with bubble gum and muddy rubber boots. Mrs Griffey now appeared, after her late night out with Pan Am, and gave us a warm welcome. Her husband, whom we remembered well, had been dead for some years.

How did we come to stay in this remote, pleasant spot in the first place? Back in 1964 the Irish Tourist Board began to compile a list of farmhouses and other houses in rural situations whose owners were prepared to take in visitors, and at the same time provide a certain modicum of comfort for them, which might or might not be forthcoming if anyone knocked on a door at random and unannounced.

To encourage the farmers’ wives and others on whom the brunt of the work would fall, and to give them confidence in their abilities and the opportunity to exchange ideas, courses were arranged in a large country house near Drogheda in County Louth, with the cooperation of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association. The courses lasted a week, which was reckoned to be about as long as the average Irish farmer could survive with his family but without his wife. They were a great success: among other subjects they dealt with cookery, interior decoration and household management. The culmination was the answering of an impossibly difficult letter from an apprehensive potential guest. As a result of all this a tremendous esprit de corps was built up among the ladies who had been on what they proudly referred to as ‘The Course’.

As a result, the number of recommended farmhouses rose rapidly. The only trouble was that the guests failed to materialize. Understandably, after the expenditure of so much effort and money by all concerned, depression reigned. Alarmed at their lack of success the Irish Tourist Board asked me, in my then capacity as Travel Editor of the Observer, if I would like to visit some of these houses and see for myself what I thought of them. They produced a complete list, helped me to whittle it down to about thirty, and then left Wanda and myself to get on with it in our own way.

It was an extraordinarily interesting experience. Some were working farms with eighteenth- or nineteenth-century buildings, such as the one we were now staying in. Some were not farms at all but quite large country houses, standing in their own parklands, and with or without farms and rambling outbuildings. Some were neat and modern bungalows, rather early prototypes of those we had passed the previous day on the way from Sixmilebridge to Quin, some with plastic gnomes in their front gardens, which were fashionable then. Indistinguishable from ordinary B and Bs, we gave them a miss.

All had one thing in common: they were very clean. Many had washbasins in the bedrooms; others had vast bathrooms with washbasins like fonts, and baths commodious enough to hold a baby whale. In one of them the lavatory was on a dais in a long, narrow chamber so far from the door that, installed on it, I was in a perpetual state of uncertainty as to whether or not I had locked myself in. Students of early plumbing, I noted, would find a visit to such houses worthwhile for these features alone.

Some of the most modest-looking houses concealed within them beautiful fireplaces and remarkable furniture, some of it very fine, some very eccentric, such as bog oak bookcases and extraordinary what-nots. The interior decorations were unpredictable. Some of the ladies, after being visited by a representative of the Tourist Board, panicked and replaced their nice old floral wallpaper with contemporary stuff covered with designs of Dubonnet bottles and skyscrapers, and coated the slender glazing bars of their eighteenth-century windows with a thick coating of bilious yellow paint.

In the course of our journey we played croquet and tennis, got stung by bees, struck up friendships with various donkeys, one of which was called Noël, and innumerable tame rabbits, puppies and dogs. Often there was riding, which we were no good at, and fishing, at which we were not much better but which we enjoyed.

And there was the food, which was always abundant, too abundant. I was anxious to do my best by the ladies but it was not always possible to be kind and at the same time truthful. When it came to bacon, ham, eggs and sausages, soda bread and butter, home-made cakes, jam and cream, everything was fine. Let them loose on a steak, a piece of meat to roast, or even on a cut of freshly landed salmon, and they would turn it into something that resembled an old tobacco pouch, which is, I am sorry to say, in my own judgment, the story of Irish cooking. In spite of this they did me the honour of referring to me very kindly in their brochure, by which time the scheme had become a resounding success.

What followed was what lawyers call a dies non, a day on which no legal business may be transacted (a prohibition which has the effect of making them bad-tempered), and what I call a no-day. In some mysterious way, although some parts of it were pleasant, altogether it added up to a day with something wrong with it, and it made us bad-tempered too.

After breakfast that almost qualified as lunch we set off in the brilliant sunshine on a circular tour of the middle part of the nameless plain which extends from the Shannon to the Bay of Galway, or as much of it as we could manage. No sooner had we got to the ‘soign’ at the crossroads than a downpour of tropical intensity began to fall on us, but by the time we had both struggled into our rainproof suits (the trousers, although made ample on purpose, are particularly difficult to get into when wearing climbing boots) it had stopped and Wanda insisted on taking her trousers off. Within a couple of minutes it began to rain all over again, so she put them back on. The trouble was it was unseasonably warm with it, and in the sort of conifer woods which should only be allowed in Scandinavia, Russia, Siberia, the Yukon and Canada the insects were beginning to tune up for what they apparently thought was the onset of summer. At this point I took my waterproof trousers off. All this effort to see Dromore, a castle of the O’Briens, in a region where castles, except as appendages to the landscape, or notably eccentric, can easily become a bit of a drug on the market.

We pedalled on through these endless woods and past Ballyteige Lough and fissured beds of grey, karstic limestone, duplicates of similar beds in the Kras, in Wanda’s native Slovenia, to which so many times in the course of our life together she had threatened to return, leaving me for ever. Then on past a couple more castles and across a snipe bog on a narrow causeway, with Ballylogan Lough beyond it, golden in the sun, and ahead the mountains of the Burren, stretching across the horizon as far as the eye could see like a fossilized tidal wave. Overhead, clouds with liver-covered undersides, pink on the upper parts where the sun caught them, drifted majestically eastwards. Here it was colder. I put on my trousers again.

In the middle of this bog, we met three young men gathered round a tractor who stopped talking when we passed them and didn’t reply when we said it was a lovely day, something so unusual in our admittedly still limited experience of talking to the natives that it gave us both the creeps – another nail in the coffin of the no-day. Dogs to match them emerged from a farm on the far side of the bog and tried to take chunks out of our costly Gore-Tex trousers.

Beyond the bog was Coolbaun, a hamlet in which most of the houses were in ruins. In it the minute Coolbaun National School, built in 1895 and abandoned probably some time in the 1950s, still had a roof, and its front door was ajar. Inside there was a bedstead, a table with two unopened tins of soup on it, a raincoat hanging on a nail and a pair of rubber boots. It was like finding a footprint on a desert island. Hastily, we beat a retreat.

The first real village we came to was Tubber, a place a mile long with a pub at either end (neither of which had any food on offer), in fact so long that on my already battered half-inch map one part of it appeared to be in Clare, the other in Galway. The pub nearest to Galway was terribly dark, as if the proprietor catered only for spiritualists; the other had three customers all glued to the telly watching a steeplechase, none of whom spoke to us even between races. Meanwhile we drank, and ate soda bread and butter and spam bought in the village shop. ‘Is this what they call “Ireland of the Welcomes”?’ Wanda asked with her mouth full. Another coffin nail.

The nicest-looking places in Tubber were the post office and Derryvowen Cottage, which was painted pink and which we passed on the way to look for something marked on the map as O’Donohue’s Chair. What is or was O’Donohue’s Chair? No guide book that I have ever subsequently been able to lay my hands on refers to it. Is it, or was it, some kind of mediaeval hot seat stoked with peat? Or a throne over an oubliette that precipitates anyone who sits on it into the bottomless rivers of the limestone karst? Whatever it is, if it isn’t the product of some Irish Ordnance Surveyor’s imagination, further inflamed by a spam lunch in Tubber, it is situated in a thicket impenetrable to persons wearing Gore-Tex suits, and hemmed in by an equally impenetrable hedge reinforced with old cast iron bedsteads, worth a bomb to any tinker with a pair of hedging gloves.

After this, misled by two of the innocent-looking children in which Ireland abounds – leprechauns in disguise – we made an equally futile attempt to see at close quarters Fiddaun Castle, another spectacular tower house more or less in the same class as the unfindable Danganbrack. ‘Sure and you can’t miss it. It’s up there and away down,’ one of these little dumplings said, while the other sucked her thumb, directing us along a track that eventually became so deep in mire that it almost engulfed us. From the top of the hill they indicated, however, we did have a momentary view of the Castle and of Lough Fiddaun to the north, with three swans floating on it, before the whole scene was obliterated by a hellish hailstorm.

The next part of our tour was supposed to take in the monastic ruins of Kilmacduagh, over the frontier from Clare in Galway. However, one more December day was beginning to show signs of drawing to a close, and so we set off back in the direction of Crusheen. It really had been a no-day. Not only had we not seen the Kilmacduagh Monastery, but we had not seen, as we had planned to do, the early nineteenth-century castle built by John Nash for the first Viscount Gort on the shores of Lough Cutra, similar to the one he built at East Cowes on the Isle of Wight, now scandalously demolished; or the Punchbowl, a series of green, cup-shaped depressions in a wood of chestnut and beech trees where the River Beagh runs through a gorge 80 feet deep and disappears underground, perhaps to flow beneath O’Donohue’s Chair; or Coole Park, the site of the great house which was the home of Augusta, Lady Gregory, whose distinguished guests, among them Shaw, O’Casey, W. B. and J. B. Yeats, AE (George) Russell and Katherine Tynan – a bit much to have all of them together, one would have thought – used a giant copper beech in the grounds as a visitors’ book. To see all these would have taken days at the speed we were travelling. Well, we would never see them now.

So home to dinner, after which Tom took us to Saturday evening Mass in Crusheen. His mother was going the following morning, but if you attended Mass on Saturday evening you didn’t have to do so again on Sunday. If asked, he said, we were to say that he too had been present. Meanwhile, he headed for Clark’s, to which most of my own impulses were, I admit, to accompany him.

The church was almost full; and the subject of the sermon was Temperance, an obligatory one in Ireland for the First Sunday in Advent. This being Saturday, perhaps the priest was giving it a trial run. He certainly had a large enough audience for it. He was a formidable figure, this priest. Was he, I wondered, the same one we encountered in O’Hagerty’s taking a dim view of the contents of a collection box? To me priests in mufti look entirely different when robed. Ireland, he said, was as boozy as Russia – a bit much, I thought, to accuse any country of being, with the possible exception of Finland. He then went on to castigate the licensed trade as spreaders of evil, something I have always fervently believed myself. If any Guinnesses had been present they would have been writhing with embarrassment. ‘Just too awful,’ I could imagine them saying, but then one imagines that any Catholic Guinnesses, if such there be, give the First Sunday in Advent and the Saturday preceding it a miss. And there were prayers for the wives of drunks, but none for the drunks themselves, or the husbands of drunks, all of whom I would have thought were equally in need of them.

We were in bed by nine-thirty, slept nine hours and woke to another brilliant day, this time completely cloudless. After another good breakfast, we set off on what, for Wanda, proved to be a really awful four-mile uphill climb to Ballinruan, a lonely hamlet high on the slopes of the Slieve Aughty Mountains, where a Sunday meet of the County Clare Foxhounds was to take place. Its cottages were rendered in bright, primary colours, or finished in grey pebbledash – one house was the ghostly silver-grey of an old photographic plate. The church sparkled like icing sugar in the sunshine, and across the road from it, in Walsh’s Lounge Bar and Food Store, four old men, all wearing caps, were drinking whiskey and stout and sharing a newspaper between them.

The view from the village was an amazing one. Behind it gentle slopes led up to a long, treeless ridge; immediately below it, and on either side, the ground was rougher, with outcrops of rock – a wilderness of gorse and heather interspersed with stunted, windswept trees. Out beyond this a vast landscape opened up: the level plain, part of which we had travelled through with so many setbacks the previous day. Its innumerable loughs, now a brilliant Mediterranean blue, blazed among green fields of irregular shape, bogs, woodlands and tracts of limestone, with here and there a white cottage or the tower of a castle rising among them.

And beyond all this, the far more immense bare limestone expanses of the Burren rose golden in the morning sunlight; Galway Bay could just be seen to the north-west; while to the south, beyond the Shannon, were the hills and mountains of County Limerick, their feet shrouded in a mist which gave an impression of almost tropical heat.

At twelve-thirty the hounds arrived in a big van, very well behaved, and soon more vans and horse boxes trundled up the hill, some drawn by Mercedes. Here, the hunt was more or less on the extreme limits of its territory. It normally hunted over stone walls on the west side of the County, and over banks and fly fences on the east and south. The rough country round us, on the other hand, might give shelter to hordes of hill foxes. Anyway, they were safe today. This was a drag hunt in which the hounds would follow an artificial scent.

By one o’clock those horses still in their boxes were becoming impatient, kicking the sides of them, and catching the air of excitement that was gradually gathering in the street outside. People were beginning to saddle up and mount now, especially the children, of whom there were quite a number. A big van with four horses in it arrived and one of their owners said to the driver, ‘It’s a lovely day! Let’s go and have a jar now in Walsh’s.’ By now the bar was splitting at the seams.

This was not a smart hunt such as the County Galway, otherwise known as the Blazers, the County Limerick, the Kildare, or the Scarteen, otherwise the Black and Tans. It was not the sort of hunt that Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who loved hunting in Ireland more than anything else on earth and was so proud of her figure that she had herself sewn into her habit every hunting day, would have patronized. Most were in black jackets and velvet caps, some were in tweeds, others wore crash helmets, and one man with a craggy, early nineteenth-century face wore a bowler. One man in a tweed coat sounded suspiciously like a Frenchman, there was an elegant American girl in a tweed coat, and what looked like several members of the scrap metal business. A cosmopolitan lot.

The hounds were released; there were eight and a half couple of them, which is a hunter’s way of saying seventeen. After a brief period in which they were allowed to savour delicious smells, one of the Joint Masters, who was wearing a green coat with red facings and black boots with brown tops, took them up the road to cries of what sounded like, ‘Ged in! Ged in!’ and ‘Ollin! Ollin!’ Then they were suddenly turned, and ran back down the street through a press of people and out through the village, down and over the flanks of Derryvoagh Hill and into the eye of the now declining sun. Soon they were lost to view to us and other followers, watching their progress from one of the rocks below the village.

‘By God,’ someone said, ‘the next thing we’ll be hearing of them they’ll be in America.’

I left Wanda to take the long downhill back to Crusheen and the farm, where Tom was very kindly waiting to take her to Ballyvaughan, on the shores of Galway Bay, where we were going to stay for a few days. Then I, too, zoomed downhill bound for the Monastery of Kilmacduagh, which we had failed to see the previous day. I was so exhilarated by the fast cooling air that I almost felt I was flying.

Six miles out as the crow flies from Ballinruan, I zoomed past the site of a ruined castle on the shores of Lough Bunny, then right, past a field in which a small boy was trying to catch a wild-looking horse and bridle it, the Burren blue-black against the setting sun, the plain close under it already in shadow, and on, having missed the road to Kilmacduagh, through the bare, limestone karst from which black and white cattle were somehow scratching a living, spotting an occasional small white farmhouse in what was effectively a limestone desert. Suddenly, there was the monastery, far off to the right across a wide expanse of limestone pavement riven with deep, parallel crevices that looked like an ice floe breaking up: a collection of silver-grey buildings with the last of the sunlight illuminating the conical cap of its enormously tall round tower – 112 feet high and two feet out of the perpendicular. This was the monastery founded in the sixth century by Guaire Aidhneach, King of Connacht (I was now just in Galway and therefore in the old County of Connacht) for his kinsman St Colman Macduagh, on the very spot where the saint’s girdle fell to the ground. The girdle was preserved in the monastery until the seventeenth century.

I pedalled on for another four or five miles through the bare limestone plain, the only visible living things in it now blackbirds and rooks. The last of the sun on this beautiful day was shining on the high, treeless tops of the Burren mountains, so convincingly sculpted by nature into the forms of prehistoric camps and forts that it was difficult to know whether I was looking at the work of nature or of man.

At the intersection of this loneliest of lonely roads with the main road, I nearly ran into the car in which Tom was taking Wanda and her bicycle to Ballyvaughan, together with Gary, the infant prodigy. A signpost still showed thirteen miles to Ballyvaughan and I cycled on, a bit tired, through a landscape by now an improbable shade of purple. I passed a wild-looking girl on a bicycle, and saw two young men in an enclosure full of rocks pushing them to one side with a bulldozer, the only way in the Burren, which is Ireland’s largest rockery, in which you can ever create a field. Until the invention of the bulldozer the inhabitants of the Burren removed all the rocks by hand, either using them for building walls or forming great mounds with them, which are still to be seen. In those days it would have required the help of many people, possibly an entire community, to make a field; now most of those people are either dead or emigrated or both.

The road ran close under the Burren mountains now and along the side of Abbey Hill, which conceals within its folds the beautiful, pale, lichen-encrusted ruins of Corcomroe, a Cistercian abbey built by a king of Munster. High above it, on a saddle, are the three ruined twelfth-century churches of Oughtmama, all that remain of yet another monastery of St Colman Macduagh. To the right, fields of an almost impossible greenness ran down to the shores of Aughinish and Corranroo Bays, long, beautiful, secretive inlets from Galway Bay. Then a delicious descent to a little hamlet called Burren, beside a reedy pond. Then up and down again to Bell Harbour on Poulnaclough Bay; the water in it like steel, with the mountains black above it and above that cobalt clouds against an otherwise pale sky in which Venus was suspended. When it comes to thoroughly unnatural effects it is possible to equal Ireland, difficult to surpass it.⁷ By the time I got to Ballyvaughan I had covered forty-five miles and it was dark.