Round Ireland in Low Gear (27 page)

‘It’s not much of a thing at all, I’m told,’ she said airily, when
she finally deposited us at a ‘crass’ which, if not the right one, was somewhere pretty near it, if the vans, horse boxes, lorries, cars, jeeps and trailers, all parked with fine abandon, were anything to go by. To which I would have replied if I had had my Irish curse book handy, ‘
Ualach se’ chapall de chrè na h-ùir ort!
’ or ‘Six horse-loads of graveyard clay on top of you!’, for being such a pain-in-the-neck. At the same time I handed her the £5 Irish she asked for, which seemed little enough considering the miles we’d travelled together, albeit many of them in the wrong direction. The only soul in sight to ask the way of was a middle-aged, horsey-looking individual with a pair of very bright brown eyes and a beaky nose, who was wearing the remains of what must once have been a gabardine raincoat with huge, padded shoulders which made him look a bit like an over-size, moulted bird of prey.

‘It’s way down from de odder crass, way up dere, past Duggan’s Place,’ he said, pointing with a switch he had just cut in a hedgerow.

This in answer to my absurd English, ‘I say, excuse me, could you possibly tell me the way to Spancil Hill, the Fair I mean’, which, judging from the facial contortions he had to indulge in to stop himself literally falling about with mirth, must have sounded as extraordinary to him as his ‘crass, way up dere’ did to me. One of the few major pleasures of travelling is that of hearing what others do to one’s own native tongue, a pleasure equalled by the amusement they get from listening to your version of theirs.

We had a drink at Duggan’s, which was full of smoke, debris, and human beings in various stages of decay. I asked one of the barmen if it had been quiet, remembering to keep a low profile and not to call him ‘old fruit’ and he said, yes, it had been pretty ‘quoyat’, on account of their having closed at 2 a.m. and only opened again when the customers could see their hands in front of their faces without the aid of lights.

Just up the road an official sign read ‘Cross of Spancil Hill’,
and here the air began to be full of the sort of murmuring noises flocks of starlings make when talking to one another, in this case emanating from the punters at the Fair.

There’s no hill at the Cross of Spancil Hill, just a farm building and nearby, according to the map, the remains of a castle invisible from the road. From it a lane leads off to a hamlet marked on the map as Fair Green, the principal ingredients of which consist of Brohan’s pub, an outbuilding or two and Kelly’s which, on this grand morning, was serving cooked breakfasts and, from 11.30 on, dinners as well. After this momentary flirtation with city lights it leads out into what the Germans, who, with Americans, still make up the largest number of visitors to Ireland, call the
ewigkeit
– in this case the eternity of rural Ireland.

The actual scene of the action was the lane outside the pub, and a field on the other side of it edged with trees, and entered through newly whitewashed gateposts which acted as a navigational aid for those leaving the pub with a skinful. The ground around it was now a sea of glutinous mud. Beyond this more fields extended away gently upwards to something you might conceivably describe as a hill if you’d never seen a real one. It was a beautiful day. In a sky of indigo blue a warm wind was ushering towering masses of cumulus in across the Atlantic from the New World, as if it was moving day.

The lane itself was more or less choked with fish and chip vans, burger stalls, stalls at which quoits could be pitched and tossed, tables with roulette wheels ready to roll, tinkers finding-the-lady or playing heads-or-tails surrounded by little circles of men and boys, the players all looking skywards when the coin went up as if expecting the Second Coming. And there were junk sellers, and little tinker boys with bleached hair, riding sixteen-hand hunters bareback up and down it, showing them off to the customers, and there was all sorts of music. And further down the lane, beyond
Brohan’s and Kelly’s, there were some barrel-shaped tinkers’ carts, most of them now occupied by very self-conscious
Stonehengevolk
masquerading as tinkers, with their ladies ostentatiously suckling their offspring on the steps, some of whom looked big enough to be clamouring for second helpings of muesli. Any real tinkers living on this hard hat site would have been in sumptuous motorized caravans, their interiors ablaze with polished brass. Meanwhile, out in the field, there were any amount of stallions, geldings, mares and their foals, Connemara ponies, donkeys and mules, all waiting to change hands, either tethered, or hobbled, or being made to show their paces or display their teeth or their hocks. There were even a few goats. And there were any number of two-wheeled flat carts pulled by donkeys, and pony carts, all running around loaded with the fancy. And there were people selling tea, and sausages and saddlery, and other tack.

And there was every sort of horse-fancying man, woman and child for miles around, and further. If no mishaps had befallen them there would be Josie Kerrin from Ballyla, and Thomas Conroy and Thomas Ford from Tubber, and Paddy Lynch from Newmarket-on-Fergus, and all the Cashes, and Harold Lusk from up north, and Patrick O’Connor from Kanturk, and Michael O’Looney from Ennis, and Mick Moloney and Michael McKenna from Ogonneloe, and Mick Sheehan from Kilbane, and Michael Scanlan from Carranboy and John Ryan from Boher, and Frank Casey from Ennis and a power of others. And somewhere out there, though we never found him, must have been our old friend Mr O’Hagerty from Crusheen.

And the air was full of neighings and whinneyings and breakings of wind and the ghastly noises donkeys make when they think themselves unloved, and such remarks as:

‘Sure, and hasn’t he got a foine chest on him, loike ther Greatwallerchoina!’

‘Looks a bit narrer to me. Put a bitta weight on him and he’ll knock his legs about somethin’ terrible.’

‘He’s not narrer at all! Look at his great chest, willya! Loike a barrel a porter!’

‘Looks a bit shaller to me. Shouldn’t wonder if he wasn’t short-winded.’ At the same time pinching the animal’s wind-pipe and when that failed to provoke a reaction, pinching it again – ‘See what I mean, short-winded.’

‘And what a noice oye he’s got!’

‘Looks like a pig’s oye to me.’

Occasionally, but you had to wait a long time to see it happen, like waiting for the cameras to roll on location, a sale would be made and the third party presiding over the deal would make sure buyer and seller both spat on their hands before the handshake that clinched it. Meanwhile, across the lane, in Brohan’s, which was a bit like a parish hall in urgent need of restoration, the clientèle were ten and fifteen deep at the bar, all intent on ordering enough of the nourishment in one go to make it unnecessary to put in another requisition until evening. What Brohan’s did for customers for the other 363 days and nights of the year when there was no fair was unclear. They probably made enough to see them through to the following one. When it closed, at 4 a.m. on Tuesday morning, the Fair would be finally over.

Altogether it was a great day, more lively than ever, the experts said, with moderate prices ranging from £1700 for a chestnut likely to make a hunter, to £3000 in the heavy hunter class, and equivalents in the pony, donkey and mule departments. Hours later, back on our bus to Galway, we passed a solitary figure leading a horse he had bought, or failed to sell, a good seven miles from Spancil Hill.

The Islands of Aran
(Ir. Ara-Naoimh, Ara of the Saints) are still believed by many of the peasantry to be the nearest land to the far-famed island of O’Brazil or Hy Brasail, the blessed paradise of the pagan Irish. It is supposed even to be visible from the cliffs on particular and rare occasions.

Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Ireland
, 1912

As we worked out into the sound we began to meet another class of waves, that could be seen for some distance towering above the rest. When one of these came in sight, the first effort was to get beyond its reach. The steersman began crying out in Gaelic ‘
Siubhal, siubhal
’ (‘Run , run’), and sometimes, when the mass was gliding towards us with horrible speed, his voice rose to a shriek. Then the rowers themselves took up the cry, and the curragh seemed to leap and quiver with the frantic terror of a beast till the wave passed behind it or fell with a crash behind the stern.

J. M. S
YNGE
.
The Aran Islands

By the time we got back to Galway it was pouring with rain and the streets were almost deserted. We were ravenous. By a miracle we not only found a wine merchant’s that was still open but also a shop in which the assistant sold us half a pound of delicious smoked salmon, soda bread, and butter, throwing in a lemon for luck, and allowed us to sit down and eat the lot on the premises, something that would be unthinkable in England.

Because of all this we felt a bit silly when we got back to Frenchville House to find that Mrs Robinson – whom may the Saints preserve – had prepared a substantial and delicious repast.

This we ate in the company of two mature and highly entertaining students from Dublin who had just returned from a long day’s excursion to the shores of Lough Corrib on a couple of hired bikes and the air fairly rang with the ‘I tinks’ and ‘I tought’ of these hopes for the future of Ireland.

‘I was doin’ philosophy, den I heard that if I did Welsh it would be easier to get a good pass, so now I’m doin’ Welsh,’ said one.

‘Oim workin’ to be a ship’s radio operator, loike they had on the Titanic,’ said the other, ‘but by the toime I get me pass with luck there won’t be any ships to operate in.’

That evening some extra-sensory information was fed into
Wanda’s brain box informing her that the strawberries were ripe for picking back in the beds in Dorset and a telephone call to a friendly neighbour confirmed that this was so. We had agreed before setting out that in what seemed the unlikely event of them ever ripening, Wanda should return and set in train the manufacture of a year’s supply of strawberry jam.

So on Tuesday morning, after bidding a melancholy farewell to Wanda (melancholy because I am of a gregarious nature), I set off alone in good time to catch the steamer to the Aran Islands. But nobody had bothered to tell me that the boat only sailed on Tuesdays to one island, Inishmore, so what followed was another
dies non
, the high point of which was putting my feet up that evening back at Mrs Robinson’s and watching someone else’s death throes in
Dynasty
.

On Wednesday I tried again. I got to the dock so early that there wasn’t anyone in the ticket office to welcome me, take my money or clip my ticket, so I went aboard and waited. I must say I hadn’t expected luxury, having travelled this way twenty years before, but it did seem pretty sparse accommodation; there was no seating of any kind and a hellish wind blew through the whole boat, which on this dark, grey morning was more like a marine version of a house of horror than a passenger vessel. By around 08.45, with the boat due to sail at 09.00 and with no one else in sight, I began to experience sensations of unease. At 08.50 I went down into the deep-frozen bowels of the vessel where I eventually met an enormous ginger-headed man encased in bright orange plastic who informed me I was aboard not a passenger ship, but a deep-sea trawler which was about to leave for the Porcupine Bank, 180 miles out in the Atlantic, or thereabouts, where they would be fishing for prawns for an indefinite period. He went on to explain that the Aran steamer at this time of year left from quite another part of the docks, some 700 yards away round the
opposite side of an eight-sided basin. As the gangway was so narrow that I had had to unload the bike completely to get it aboard, he very kindly helped me carry the bags ashore. I caught the boat, the
Naomh Eanna
, after the bow and stern lines had already been cast off.

There are three main Aran Islands, Inisheer, Inishmaan and Inishmore, and the boat called at all three. There were few other passengers and because the weather was still beastly most of us sat below in the austere bar/tea room, looking out through the portholes at the Burren, grey and ghostly away to port. I sat opposite a rather lugubrious islander who watched me with unblinking gaze while I put a shine on my camera lens, and finally asked me to take a picture of him. His reason for wanting me to do so was unusual. Some time previously he had picked up a bottle that had been thrown up on the foreshore of his island, which was Inishmaan, the middle island of the three. The bottle contained a message written by the barman of the Midships Bar on the QE2, which he had thrown overboard in mid-Atlantic. The islander now wanted to send him a likeness of himself that would, presumably, encourage him and other members of the crew and passengers to write more messages, seal them in bottles and throw them overboard in the hope that they, too, would be washed up on a beach at Inishmaan.

At this point the ship sailed out of the gloom that enveloped the Burren and the greater part of Galway Bay. The wind, instead of being easterly, was now warm and blew softly from the west-south-west and the sun shone down from a cloudless sky of the deepest imaginable blue. Summer had come. It was a day in a million. Another twenty minutes and the
Naomh Eanna
was lying off Inisheer. Apart from the lack of trees we might have been off Tahiti.

I had been here before, with Wanda, in the autumn of 1966.
We had even travelled there in the same ship, or one that looked remarkably like it, which sailed to the islands twice a week, ‘weather and circumstances permitting’ as the timetable stated, returning to Galway the same evening, just as it would today.

Of the islands, Inishmore was then the most developed for tourists and the most self-conscious; it was said that its people had never recovered from the pride of taking part in O’Flaherty’s film,
Man of Aran
, filmed there in 1934. At Kilronan, the principal town on Inishmore, passengers disembarked from the ship at a jetty, while on Inisheer and Inishmaan landings were made in
currachs
. On Inisheer the landing took place on a sandy beach and the chances of being weather-bound were less than on Inishmaan, the least visited of the group, where the landing place was a stone slip on the east side. On the ship we saw island people for the first time, returning after a few days on the mainland. Their shore-going clothes were unremarkable, although the women still wore the shawls which by then were a comparative rarity on the mainland. The men were mostly tall, and they gave the impression of being quiet people, speaking mostly in undertones.

We had planned to stay a week. There were no hotels and only the largest island, Inishmore, had guest houses; otherwise the only accommodation was in private houses and in the summer months these were always very booked up. At that time, at the end of September twenty years ago, we had been told that we would find rooms but that we would have to be prepared to stay on one island only: in October the inhabitants began to lift the potato crop and were reluctant to cross the sounds to the other islands because they were too busy, and there were often dangerous shifts of wind. We had no idea on which island we wanted to stay, but the first stop was at Inisheer and when the ship lay off the shore and the
currachs
came racing out to her, as they did now, twenty years later, we found the place irresistible.

There was a storm beach with some vestiges of pale grass among the dunes and a settlement of low houses, most of them roofed with slate, some still thatched and others, roofless ruins. Behind the houses rose tiers of dry-stone walls which enclosed the ‘gardens’ and the fields, and to the left, on a rock, was a fifteenth-century castle of the O’Briens, ruined by Cromwell’s soldiers. There was a cemetery on a huge dune which concealed a prehistoric midden full of limpet shells and bones that had been broken for their marrow; and a long house from which donkeys were carrying quantities of
laminaria
, the long, sjambok-like sea-rods, down to the shore in sacks. They were ferried to the ship in
currachs
, and sold to iodine extraction factories on the mainland at £10 a ton.

The
currachs
are between 19 and 20 feet long. The hulls consist of a light framework of laths covered with tarred canvas; long ago they were made of cowhide. They have square counters and prows which turn up sharply, which are good in the surf. The oars are tapered, their laths almost bladeless, and they fit over a single thole pin, which enables them to be left unshipped in the water while the crew are fishing. Most of them have three oarsmen. They are very deep and can carry almost anything in good weather: up to twelve persons; more than a ton of potatoes; pigs, sheep, beds, mattresses, even tombstones. Larger livestock such as cows still have to swim to the ship when being embarked for the market at Galway, and very few actually drown. If one does inadvertently swallow a lot of water and looks about to sink, it is winched up by the hind legs and given the kiss of life on board. If that fails, its throat is cut and it is sold unofficially on the mainland, for meat. When fully loaded there is not much more than an inch of freeboard in the stern of a
currach
. Empty, they float like corks and are very volatile – too hard a pull on one oar is enough to send them spinning round and in inexpert hands they can be extremely dangerous.

Almost all the men in the boats at that time, young and old, wore the costume of the islands: very thick tweed trousers, split up the side seams so that they could be rolled up when the boats were launched through the surf, finger-braided woollen belts in colours made from natural dyes which ended in tassels, called
criosanna
, large tweed caps, thick indigo blue flannel shirts with stand-up collars and leg-of-mutton sleeves, and waistcoats made from a hairy, grey-blue tweed in which the ribbed pattern became more pronounced as the nap wore off. Some wore heelless shoes of raw cowhide with the hair on the outside, which are very pliable when wet. Until recently all the wool for the flannel and the tweed had been woven at a mill in Galway, but the mill had been burned down and in 1966 the costume seemed doomed to die out in a few years, when any stocks of material on the islands had been exhausted.

When the pandemonium of the disembarkation through the surf had abated, the various goods and chattels had been carried away, and the
currachs
had been carried up the beach, upside down over the heads of rowers so that they looked like strange six-legged monsters, a peace descended on Inisheer that was to remain unbroken until the boat returned five days later.

The following day was Sunday. The people were all Irishs-peaking and the Mass was in Irish. The men wore their uniform and sat or stood at the back of the church, the women and children were in the front. The older women wore deep, full red flannel skirts which they had dyed a shade of madder and which positively glowed in the pale autumn light. Some had shawls to match, or had rare brown ones from the Galway mainland that were beyond price. It was a wonderful sight to see, the costumes. When the Mass was over the young men and boys left first, the old men and women last. Then the priest was rowed a couple of miles across An Sunda Salach, otherwise Foul Sound, for the service on Inishmaan.

Inisheer, only 1400 acres in area, is a table-land of bare sheets of limestone slanting from north to south and dropping away completely into the sea where the lighthouse stands. From it the herculean labour of successive generations had removed millions of stones, which had been piled up to form great cairns and labyrinths of high dry-stone walls. In the thousands of stone enclosures so formed, which acted as windbreaks, here and on the other islands, the soil had been man-made too, by laying down alternate levels of sand and seaweed ferried in panniers on the backs of donkeys. The principal crop was potatoes (a boiled Aran potato is one of the most delicious culinary treats), but oats, cabbages and carrots were also grown. The grass was excellent, which is why cattle fattened so well, and in October giant daisies appeared in the fields. There were hardly any trees except a few osiers, growing in sheltered places, which were used to make baskets and panniers for the donkeys. There were no gates: the walls were knocked down to let the animals in and out, after which they were rebuilt. On the two smaller islands everything was carried down the
boreens
, the little lanes that run parallel to one another the length of them from north to south. Everywhere were the remains of the kilns in which seaweed was burned to make kelp, the rock-hard substance from which iodine is extracted, and the circular seaweed stands and lengths of wall for drying the sea-rods.