McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (19 page)

The kid with the squint is sitting on an oil drum eating a doughnut, while his boss works on a Peugeot. He shouts across to him. I don’t quite catch it, but I think he says, ‘Michael, Bird Man’s here to see you.’

‘Ah, hello, sir, she’s all ready for you; not a lot I could do, I’m afraid.’

‘So, the bird’s still up there?’

‘Well, ya see, it wasn’t a bird. Come on and I’ll show you.’

‘But it had feathers.’

Squint Boy goes into a major coughing fit at this. We walk to the car, which is parked outside near the art deco petrol pumps. Michael peers knowingly underneath and I copy him, doing my best to exude an air of mechanical knowledge.

‘See that?’

He’s yanking hard on the blackbird wing, which appears to be unravelling. As he pulls, several feet of the black feathery stuff come out in a long sooty string.

‘It’s just the lining like, from inside the exhaust. Sound insulation, I suppose. You’ll need a new rear section but I don’t carry them here. Ah, you’ll be fine, no problem driving, just a bit noisy.’

I smile and nod in a final attempt to preserve my dignity.

‘What do I owe you?’

‘Ah, there’s no charge. Just keep an eye on it, but I’d say you’d be fine.’

I decide to get in the car quick before a crowd gathers.

‘And watch out for them low-flying herons. They’d be a divil to shift. Good luck now.’

He bangs twice with the palm of his hand on the side of the car, and I phutt off. So that’s why Volvo spares are so expensive. They’re hand lined with blackbird feathers by skilled Swedish craftsmen. That’ll be why they always start on frosty mornings.

Driving out of town past the semi-derelict Silver Dollar Bar—closed for years by the looks of it, but still with a yellowing poster of an International Cabaret Star and Recording Artiste in the window—I realise that embarrassment hasn’t been a great price to pay. I know garages where they’d have scraped a dead bird off the road, produced it as evidence, and charged me ₤167.50 plus tax. I drive for another five minutes, then turn left off the road at the sign saying Dunboy Castle.

The crenellated gatehouse is impressive, if a little dishevelled; nature is threatening to take over. There’s no one about. A notice, handwritten in felt-tip on a scrap of card, suggests admission charges. There’s an open box to drop coins in, if you want to. I pay up and drive into the grounds, where I find two castles for the price of one.

Puxley’s Castle is a nineteenth-century Romanesque mansion, all Gothic arched windows and marble-clad pillars. It was built by the Puxley family, who made their millions in copper mining, or at least in owning the mines in which other people went mining. Their colourful family history, with little altered except the names, is told in Daphne du Maurier’s novel Hungry Hill. From the front of the castle there’s a glorious view across a tidal channel to the real
Hungry Hill
, which looms high behind Castletownbere.

Inside, chunks of stone and marble litter the ground. The roof’s gone. Shrubs and wild flowers are growing in impossibly high places. Some rooms are thick with hoof prints and cowpats. It was burned and gutted by the IRA during the Civil War in 1921.

A few hundred yards away, facing Bere Island across the channel into Castletownbere harbour, is Dunboy Castle, the rugged stone ruin of a thirteenth century fortress. After the English hammered the combined Irish and Spanish forces at the Battle of Kinsale in 1602, this was the next target. The entire garrison of 143 men was slaughtered, including—and some people are still a bit miffed about this, even 400 years later—the priest who walked out carrying the white flag. There are plaques to him in Irish and in English. I sit on the mossy remains of a wall that was destroyed while Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, and contemplate this landscape that for centuries was the stronghold of the O’Sullivans. Before them the ruling clan here had been McCarthys.

Suddenly I know there’s something I must do. I stand up slowly and deliberately, and walk to the water’s edge. Across to my right is the last lighthouse before America.

I know our memories serve us poorly sometimes—but how could I have forgotten this? I reach into my pocket, pull out a greasy and unpleasant bundle and throw yesterday’s black pudding and sausage into the sea.

Even before I get to Windy Point, it’s easy to see how it got its name. Heading west from Castletownbere towards the end of the peninsula, the gusts threaten to pull the Tank across the road into the path of an oncoming sheep. At one point the road ahead is blocked by a car and a post office van that have stopped alongside each other. As I approach, a hand appears through the window of the post van and passes a clutch of letters to the car driver. It’s like a carefully composed moment from a sentimental film about the quirks of living on the Celtic fringe. Perhaps there’s been a general alert that there’s a tourist in the area, so they rushed out and laid on this little cameo when they saw me coming.

‘Look out for a blue Volvo with a bird up its arse.’

It’s a spectacular coastline where rugged mountains give way to small fields that are farmed to the cliff’s edge. There’s been no indiscriminate house-building. Every couple of minutes you pass some ancient monument, a standing stone or ring fort or mass rock, just lying there, as if these relics of the past have been randomly scattered across the landscape by some ancient giant. In such a place, where thousands of years of human continuity is laid out, random and unadorned, in an unchanging landscape, I’m sure it’s only natural to feel a strong sense of belonging, whether your name is McCarthy, or Mitsubishi.

You know you’ve reached Windy Point, and the end of the line, when you see a sign saying: ‘Moscow 3,310 kilometres’. If this is a joke, it’s impressively deadpan for a venue with such a small audience. But having said this is the end of the line, it isn’t; or not quite. Two hundred yards offshore sits Dursey Island, the furthest you can get from Dublin and still be in Ireland. The size of the population varies, from seven to fifteen, depending on who you ask. The only way on and off is by cable car, which is swaying precariously 100 feet above the treacherous waters of the Dursey Sound.

I park next to the only other vehicle, a Volkswagen with a yellow crook lock on the steering wheel, presumably to protect it from any joy-riding fishermen or shepherds who might be hiding in caves nearby, waiting to pounce. The cable car looks like it’s seen better days, though you’d be hard pressed to put a date on them. The Perspex window in the sliding door is broken, and the metal floor seems to be held in place by what can only be described as a stick. There’s clear fresh air between it and the wall.

‘It’s licensed for six adults,’ says Paddy, the operator, as he takes my fare. ‘Or one cow. Mind, we did have fifteen sheep in it once.’

The gap between the floor and the rest of the cable car is clearly a sensible precaution, given the likelihood of terrified cattle looking down on the churning depths and crapping themselves. ‘Ah no, it doesn’t bother the animals at all. Before this was built cows had to swim across, with the farmers in a boat alongside.’

It sounds unlikely, but he’s telling the truth. There are photos to prove it. Paddy and his wife own a B&B overlooking the water a couple of hundred yards away. He says that there are queues for the cable car in the summertime, but residents and livestock always take precedence over tourists and go to the front of the line. ‘The Germans don’t seem to mind, but the Brits get a bit pissed off.’

I’m the only passenger, which is a relief. You wouldn’t want to be cooped up in a space like this with a nervous sheep or incontinent heifer. The seats are plain benches, rather than upholstered plush, which must make them easier to hose down. To reassure any traveller who has suddenly become aware of his mortality, prayers about death have been pinned to the wall. A bottle of clear liquid, possibly holy water, maybe poteen, is laid on for emergencies. As we rattle off, I look down on the rocks at the water’s edge below me, and see the previous cable, fraying and rusting where it fell.

We make a smooth landing on Dursey, but the weather is closing in. Two cars are parked, or abandoned, close to the cable car. It’s fair to say that their bodywork is in need of some attention; so is the gaffa tape that’s holding them together. In the rear window of one of them is a sticker saying ‘Looney Car Sales’. Cars on outlying Irish islands are driven till they disintegrate, before being abandoned in bogs and ditches, where they’ll be discovered one day by a future civilisation and venerated as relics of an ancient and mysterious culture.

Dursey is about four miles long by a mile wide, and I’d had a notion to do a circular walk, with no clear aim in mind. Maybe I could count the people. But there’s no pub or shop, and I haven’t thought to bring any provisions, so as the first drops of rain begin to fall a long hike isn’t looking like a great way to spend the day. The rugged hillsides provide grazing for sheep, but no shelter.

I plod on for ten minutes trying to enjoy a view which is disappearing before my eyes. Down the slope to my left, close to the water’s edge, is a ruined church and graveyard, so I head towards it out of force of habit, and cower in the lee of a wall. My supposed all-weather hat, purchased in Babbitt’s General Store at the Grand Canyon, is hopelessly out of its depth this far from Arizona and behaves like a blocked gutter, pouring cascades of water down the neck of my coat. I like a walk on a wild hillside, but I’m not a fanatic; I don’t own a plastic pouch to hang round my neck with a map in. I don’t feel guilty about heading back to the cable car.

There’s no system I can see for summoning it from the other side, so I’ll just have to wait. The doorway of a maintenance shed offers protection from the worst of the weather, and having a different place to cower from the rain adds variety. As the mainland recedes into the gloom, I try and remind myself that if it weren’t for the weather, it’d be all feckin’ high rises over there. I find an old mint in my pocket, carefully peel off the fluff and oose, and suck it slowly for lunch.

Luckily, I’ve trained myself over the years never to go anywhere without something to read, just in case someone turns up late, the meeting ends early, or I’m inadvertently imprisoned for thirty-five years and put into solitary confinement. I’m actually quite worried about those people you see on long train journeys with nothing to read, just staring blankly into the middle distance. What the hell is going on in their heads, then? Perhaps they’ve got excellent memories, and they’re just remembering a particularly good book they once read, which saves them having to carry one round. Because there’s a danger in carrying a book round: you might leave it somewhere before you’ve finished it. I once left my copy of
Get Shorty
in the back of a drunken farmer’s Jeep in Costa Rica when I was only two-thirds of the way through, and it completely ruined the trip. The rainforest is a much duller place without Elmore Leonard. And I’ve lost
Angela’s Ashes
twice. Does that poor kid ever grow up? Do they persuade his dad to go into rehab?

Tucked in my inside pocket is a history of the island I picked up in town. There’s no better time to read about a place than when you’re marooned there in a monsoon. After waiting till I’ve finished my mint, so as not to use up two pleasures at the same time, I immerse myself in the book.

I soon discover that ‘the island is often the first landfall for birds accidentally flying from America’; and that in the ninth century, when the Vikings were constantly ransacking the Cork coast, Dursey was used as a staging post for kidnapped villagers who were then sold into slavery in Scandinavia or Spain. And in 1602, after the Battle of Kinsale and the storming of Dunboy Castle, terrible things happened here.

It seems that the British troops advancing from Dunboy found that many villagers from the mainland had taken refuge on Dursey, in hope of escaping the invading army. It was not to be. The book quotes from a contemporary account by Philip O’Sullivan:

…they shot down, hacked with swords, or ran through with spears, the now disarmed garrison and others, old men, women and children, whom they had driven into one heap. Some rammed their swords up to the hilt through the babe and mother who was carrying it on her breast, others paraded before their comrades little children, writhing and convulsed on their spears, and finally binding all the survivors, they threw them into the sea over jagged and sharp rocks, showering on them shots and stones. In this way perished about three hundred…

I’m standing next to the cliff from which they were thrown. This cheers me up no end.

The explicit dramatic reconstruction of the massacre playing inside my head is suddenly interrupted by the rattle of the cable car. Paddy has obviously decided that a death by exposure would be bad for business and has come to my rescue. The car clatters ashore, and two tall blond men in pastel Gore-Tex waterproofs clamber out. I decide not to mention the cruel things the Vikings did around here provided they say nothing about the British army. I try some satire instead.

‘Nice day for it.’