McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (40 page)

Before I leave, we discuss nationality and a sense of belonging. Lots of people, he says, don’t really understand what a British peer is doing here in Westport. I know what he means, because I’m one of them. So is he Irish, or British, or English, or what?

‘We were asked to be in a TV programme a few years back,
Wogan’s Ireland
. So Terry Wogan comes along and we do our stuff and then at the end of the morning, he says to me, “So are you Irish then?” ’

He grinned and rolled his eyes.

‘So what did you say?’

‘I said, well, I’m not bloody Chinese now, am I?’

I suppose he could have been, if his ancestors had moved to Hong Kong instead.

‘Those unacquainted with the oddities of Irish history are surprised to find the ancestral home of a British peer in such an Irish part of Ireland.’

So wrote Jeremy’s father, the tenth Marquess. It’s early evening and I’m in a waterfront bar reading his family history. I like reading in a pub rather than a library or study, as it’s generally much easier to get a drink.

I’d presumed that the estate had been booty for some aristocratic adventurer or one of Cromwell’s men; but it seems Mayo was considered a bleak and worthless place, more usually associated with banishment than reward. Jeremy, according to his dad, is there because, ‘in 1580, one John Browne, an adventurous misfit, with little to lose at home, arrived in Mayo.’ He settled at the Neale, among the faerie folk and their weird stones. Nearly 100 years later his great-grandson, a barrister, married a descendant of Grania O’Maille, the pirate queen, and moved to her home town of Westport, where the Brownes have remained, continually inter-marrying with the Irish families who were there long before them. This ‘Irish dimension’, according to the tenth marquess, was crucial.

‘It distinguished the integrated Anglo-Irish who stayed from those essentially alien, who left. The latter might keep an estate as a source of rents, or as a pleasant change in the social and sporting calendar. To them, Ireland was an appendage of England, the Irish themselves slightly inferior Englishmen; comic simpletons or dangerous traitors according to taste and to how they were behaving.’

It’s a warm evening and light till very late, so I have dinner in the pub garden looking out on the bay. It’s terrific: lightly spiced sauteed fresh squid, with Greek salad and soda bread. Mind you, that’s two nights running I’ve had squid. And I had it in Dingle too. Hope I’m not getting into a rut. I always used to think seafood was really light and healthy and good for you, but someone on the telly said that squid and prawns are absolutely chocka with cholesterol. There’s something like four times as much cholesterol in squid as there is in lard, I think they said. Or twice as much lard as there is in lard. Something like that, anyway.

Back at McCarthy’s, I’m in bed reading the paper when I make a decision: first thing in the morning, I’m going up that holy mountain. That’ll work the cholesterol off. It’s a worry knowing what food to eat these days, isn’t it? For years they’ve been going on about how wonderful fish is, especially oily fish like herring. Very good for the brain, that’s what they used to tell us. And now here’s a report in the paper about new research saying that if you eat herring or mackerel more than once a week, then you’ll get cancer. Your kids, meanwhile, will be getting cancer from fish fingers. It doesn’t say which brand.

I turn the light off.

Lard is probably made out of squid, isn’t it?

Next morning, the sky is Corfu-blue as I nip down the street for a paper to read at breakfast. I’m walking back at a brisk stride up the main street when a little old man appears from a doorway and springs out in front of me, like a goblin in a fairy story. He takes me by the arm. Perhaps he’s going to tell me I’ve got three wishes.

‘You’re going too fast. Slow down. There’s no need to hurry.’ I tell him I’m rushing because I’m going up Croagh Patrick and I don’t want to leave it too late. His expression darkens.

‘Be careful, now. There was a man died up there last Sunday. Fifty-one years old. Brought him down with a helicopter. And a woman before him. A shepherd and his dog found her down a ravine. Four months she’d been there.’

It’s half eight in the morning, for God’s sake.

‘Going up isn’t the problem. It’s going down you have to be careful. There’s a place where it slopes like this—that’s where you might go tumbling off. Good luck now.’

I have orange juice, muesli and coffee, with a massive cooked breakfast. In the paper there’s a review of the week’s news. Apparently, a bloke died on Croagh Patrick last Sunday. Fifty-one, he was. Seems they had to bring him down in a helicopter.

Within two minutes of beginning my ascent, I have severe chest pains. We could be looking at another helicopter job here. It feels as if the sausages, black pudding and hash browns have lodged in some crucial aperture, like a wedge of damp cardboard, as they try to penetrate my system. It occurs to me that for days now I have been on a strict diet of fried breakfasts, Guinness and squid. That’ll explain the tingling sensation all down my arm, then.

Still, it’s a glorious day and there weren’t too many cars in the car park when I arrived, so at least there shouldn’t be a mob of pilgrims. The man in the refreshment caravan was staring at me as I filled my bottle from the tap. As I walked past, he called out.

‘You’re not planning to drink that, are ya? Sure, look at the colour of it.’

I suppose there was a slight brownish tinge to it. It would probably have made very tasty poteen.

‘I’m not saying it’s killed anybody yet, mind.’

So I walked across to his caravan. There was a bundle of flimsy-looking sticks leaning against it. ‘Sticks’ said the sign, accurately, ‘£1 each’. I asked if there was anywhere else to get water. He shrugged, and glanced at a big cardboard cash-and-carry box of small, lukewarm mineral water bottles. Fat-free. Just the job. I got two.

‘That’ll be £2.’

The path rises sharply from the statue of St Patrick at the foot of the mountain. I’m trying to walk off the heart attack, but so far it’s not working. It’d be a nightmare doing this barefoot, with all these jagged rocks. I wonder if the pilgrims cheat and go on the grassy bits at the side, or do they stick to the stones and shale, on account of God being omniscient?

I stop for a rest by a large rock, on which there’s a child’s abandoned Doc Marten. Perhaps it’s a sculpture. Suddenly there’s a noise, and a sweaty, grey-bearded man in running kit comes charging down the slope past me. Sacred jogging. It could catch on. There’s another guy across to my right, way off the track, standing in a ditch. He’s wearing shorts, patterned nylon ankle socks, and plastic sandals, and he’s filming massive close-ups of heather with a camcorder. So close to the car park, and bonkers already. I’m going to treat this mountain with respect.

In a little while, without really noticing, I’ve hit a rhythm and the pain is gone. Ahead of me, a man is dragging his two sons towards the still-distant summit, whether they like it or not. They don’t seem to. The bigger boy calls out.

‘Da, it’s a very big mountain.’

‘Sure is, son.’

He’s about seven, and is walking mostly under his own steam, but keeps tumbling off the path in little mini-landslides. The smaller boy can’t be more than five, and Da is holding him firmly by the hand. Every time he falls, he’s yanked up, and his feet windmill in mid-air before hitting the holy ground again.

‘Please, Daddy, please, Daddy, drink, drink, need a drink, Daddy.’

‘Come on now, son.’

But son manages to wriggle free and sits down on a rock near me.

‘Please, Daddy, please, drink, drink.’

‘All right, Joey, we’ll just have to leave you there. Come on, Michael.’

‘No, Daddy, no, please, drink.’

It’s always risky interfering when someone is torturing their child in public. It’s best not to sound censorious, or you could end up maimed before help can arrive, especially if you’re halfway up a mountain, holy or not. I cunningly disguise my rebuke as an offer.

‘Have you run out of water? Have some of mine.’

‘Ah no, it’s okay, their mother’s got the water but she’s away back down the track.’

So he’s already abandoned her to her fate, and now the kids are going to die of dehydration. Here’s a good man to be in a tight spot with. Maybe he’d like to take me scuba diving later. I throw him one of the bottles.

‘Go on, it’ll make my bag lighter.’

The little boy drinks greedily. I ask Dad where they’re from.

‘County Down. Hey, will you look at that?’

Far below us the ocean is completely still, and a dozen shades of blue. A host of islands disappears gently in a fine heat haze. ‘Were such beauties lying upon English shores, it would be a world’s wonder,’ wrote Thackeray of Clew Bay. ‘Perhaps if it were on the Mediterranean or the Baltic, English travellers would flock to it by hundreds. Why not come and see it in Ireland…a country far more strange to most travellers, than France or Germany can be.’

‘Thanks, Mister,’ says Michael. Between them, they’ve finished the bottle. I can see Da isn’t really a cruel man. It’s just that he’s driven all the way down here from the North to climb the Reek; his enthusiasm is fighting against the dawning reality that the boys won’t be able to make it. That’s how it looks to me anyway. Either that, or he’s hit his wife with a rock and dumped her in a crevice, and the kids will be next as soon as I’m gone.

‘Bye, boys.’

Halfway up, as you reach a ridge, the wind suddenly kicks in. From here, as well as looking north across the bay, you can also see south to the mountains of Connemara. For a while, you’re walking along a narrow plateau from which the ascent to the summit looks difficult and dangerous. Up to my right is the towering granite of the mountain, lined with what look like giant fingermarks, as if someone’s fallen off, then clung on, scraping the side as they fell.

A muscular woman in pukka hiking gear falls in next to me for a while. She’s come from Dublin, as she does most weekends to walk the craggy ridges of the west.

‘I hate this feckin’ mountain,’ she says of her country’s most holy peak. ‘Always in the feckin’ way.’

‘So, how is Dublin these days?’

‘Feckin’ ruined with phoney Oirishness for tourists.’

‘So why not move out here?’

‘I have to stay. I’m a feckin’ civil servant.’

The final ascent to the summit is a steep one, scrambling over loose rock and shale that’s been badly eroded by the constant passage of pilgrims. As I’m taking a breather and munching on a life-enhancing apple, a woman comes bounding down the precipitous slope at tremendous pace, as if she’s wearing seven league boots. It’s Vicki, the Kiwi hitch-hiker I picked up a few days ago, timing herself in some kind of masochistic speed trial against the mountain. New Zealanders will never walk up or down anything if there’s a chance it will hurt more to run instead. Theirs is not a country so much as a fitness camp. Why look at something, they reason, when it will toughen me up if I charge at it with my head? This is an entire nation on a self-imposed commando training course, where no mother of three dare show her face in public unless she can torpedo-pass a rugby ball thirty yards with one arm in plaster.