McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (37 page)

At last, half a mile down the road, at an even lonelier house, I found a cheerful woman who was delighted to give me a big room and bathroom looking out on to silent fields, woodland and an ivy-covered ruin. Too late to improve my mood, though. By now I was spitting blood. I changed and headed back to town, certain I was going to have a bad time. So naturally, I did.

I wandered round for a while in a red mist, convincing myself that the fairytale town that had so enchanted me just a few years ago had sold its soul to tourism. Even Murphy’s Store/Cohan’s Bar wasn’t selling sweets and tinned food and weird dry goods any more, just souvenirs and memorabilia for the wretched movie. It didn’t feel like the friendly place where, just a few years ago, every other person asked me did I know the Edge lived here. Oh sorry, that’s meant to be a secret.

Eventually I came into this little place on the main street to try and calm myself down with a meal. The food’s not bad so much as unusual. I ordered duck a l’orange, and there’s the duck all right, floating in the middle of the grey liquid. It’s a bit pale and fatty, but I can live with that. I think it may have been microwaved, or boiled in the bag, or possibly both. As well as the Mexican potatoes, and the watermelon, and the grapes, it comes with Irish potatoes, red, yellow and green peppers, two kinds of lettuce, cauliflower cheese, broccoli, sweetcom, carrots, red cabbage, parsley and a slice of orange, all on the same massive plate. It’s a colourful mixture, possibly put together by someone in the throes of a nervous breakdown who’s locked himself in the kitchen and cooked everything he could find. Through the clashing hues and flavours you can almost taste his sobs. The red cabbage is excellent, mind. And at least I won’t go hungry. One plate of this between two would be more than even the Tweedles could cope with.

And the staff are delightful. A girl of sixteen and a lady of seventy, for whom nothing is too much trouble. I declined a bread roll before my meal. ‘Ah go on, take one,’ said the lady, ‘they’re free, you know.’ At one stage, she went running past my table with an extra side order of potatoes in a rigid-looking sauce. They weren’t Mexican though. No watermelon. Maybe they were Bolivian. She’s talking to the rather lairy couple at the next table now, who look as though they gave the sherry some hammer before they came out tonight.

‘The thing is, she’s short-staffed, so I had to come in. I shouldn’t really be working.’

She lowers her voice and furtively looks round to see if anyone’s listening; then realises it’s safe to speak, because the other couple are arguing, and I’m just writing things down in a book.

‘I’ve got an infectious disease. Really, I should be at home.’

By ten o’clock I’m back at the B&B. Despite the risk of infection, I’ve brought back three-quarters of a bottle of Côtes du Rhône from the restaurant. I’m lucky to have eaten at all. Cong seems to be unique among Irish villages in not having a single attractive pub. I looked inside four tonight, and drank in two of them. All had been enlarged or brutalised in some way to cope with greater numbers of visitors. Industrial-looking food was being churned out in depressing surroundings. In all of them the TV was on, in two of them a jukebox as well, and in one there was techno muzak. Dirty plates lay uncollected on tables; no one seemed to care about the customers, because they were tourists, and would come anyway. It was a bit like being in England.

It’s clear that a fair number of the hotels, shops and bars are in the hands of the same two or three families, for whom it is boom time. Now the Irish economy is so driven by tourism, will every special little place end up like this, as they see what’s to be earned by marketing their idiosyncrasies, leaping aboard the Celtic Tiger, and getting the builders in? A successful tourist industry can quickly turn a place into a parody of itself.

As I fill my tooth mug with the last of the wine, I’m thinking that surely you can only live off
The Quiet Man
for so long. Perhaps it was different twenty or thirty years ago, but I’m sure that most of the visitors coming here now hadn’t even heard of the wretched movie until they read about it in the guidebook.

‘Oh look, that’s where they made that film with John Wayne.’

‘Which one?’

‘You know.’

‘Have we seen it?’

‘I’m not sure.’

A shrewd little village that wants to put itself on the tourist map in Ireland should simply invent a film that was supposedly made there decades ago, and create the artefacts to go with it. Humphrey Bogart, say, in
A Drop of the Black Stuff
. Look, here’s the bench he sat on. This is the shawl that Lauren Bacall wore. No one would check. They’d turn up in their thousands. A resident but reclusive rock star would be handy too, and a dolphin. Or a whale.

It’s ten to eleven, and I’m getting into bed with wine-stained lips, when the sound of a car breaks the silence outside. As the engine continues to rev, the doorbell rings. My room is downstairs right next to the door, so I consider answering it, but as I’m in a bad mood, naked, with purple teeth and lips, I decide to let events take their course.

I hear the landlady open the door. A female American voice shrills through the darkness.

‘Excuse me, I know it’s late, but do you have a room? I’m afraid we’re lost. We just arrived in Dublin today…’

Dublin? God in heaven. It’s the entire width of the country away. How the hell did they manage to end up here? It’d be hard enough to find this place even if you were looking for it.

‘…and we really don’t know where we are. We’re desperate. Do you? Do you have a room?’

‘How many are you?’

She sounds as if she’s scared it might be a coachful.

‘Four. There are four of us.’

‘Well, I have just the one room with a double and twins.’

‘Is that four?’

‘It is.’

‘Great. We’ll take it. Thank you.’

‘It’ll be £60.’

‘Perfect. Thank you. Oh, and could you tell me, where are we?’

‘Mayo.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Mayo.’

‘Right. I’ll go get the bags and the kids.’

When I go along to breakfast next morning they’re already there: Mom, her student-age daughter with a girlfriend the same age, and a twelve-year-old son in a baseball cap. It’s a huge dining-room, a recently-built annex that wouldn’t disgrace a medium-sized hotel. There’s a strong whiff of EC subsidy scam.

From their conversation, it’s clear that this is the first time the late-night arrivals have been outside the USA, let alone to Ireland, and the multiple confusions over what may or may not be available for breakfast are painful in the extreme. The landlady does her best to cope, but the bafflement engendered by ‘over easy’ on the one hand, and ‘rashers’ on the other, wastes a good ten minutes of everybody’s life. As I’m savouring the delicious tension in the minutes after they’ve ordered, but before they’ve been confronted with black pudding for the first time, the daughter—still clearly rattled by the inexplicable bagel famine—looks up from the tinned grapefruit and addresses her mother.

‘Mom, what’ll we do today?’

‘Find some Guinness, I guess.’

‘Is there a town called Guinness?’

‘I don’t think so, hon, no.’

‘Really? I’m surprised.’

The landlady comes back with the full cooked breakfasts. The kids gaze at them in bemusement. Mom looks up and smiles. ‘Excuse me? I have to ask you something.’

The landlady smiles in anticipation. ‘How can I help?’

‘Is this where the sandwich dressing comes from?’

The landlady desperately scans the sauce and mustard cruet for a clue, but Mom’s meaning remains tantalisingly elusive.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Mayo. Is this where mayo comes from? Like, tuna mayo?’

I should know by now that sometimes it’s best not to grumble when things go against you, when you’re turned away from somewhere you think you want to be, and end up somewhere else. The unexpected destination is invariably the best. It was worth everything the collected hoteliers of Cong could throw at me, and a lot more besides, to be landed here against my will, and so come to a new understanding of the concept of Mayo.

Long before the Celts came to Ireland in the fourth century BC the country was occupied by tribes of obscure origin, who have now taken on near-mythical status. Until about 1000 BC, a small dark race called the Fir Bolg held sway; but then they were swept aside by the Tuatha de Danaan, a fair-skinned people who were also reputed to be powerful magicians. The decisive battle—the first ever recorded in the history of the country—was fought at Moytura, on the edge of the present-day village of Cong.

The whole area has a still and eerie feel to it. As I drive out after breakfast, there isn’t a soul about—other than the long-dead Fir Bolg and de Danaan, of course, who I feel are watching me from behind every dry-stone wall. There’s a brooding, empty quality to the landscape that is both exciting and unsettling. Just a few minutes’ drive from the village I park by the deserted roadside and climb a stile into a field, then carefully pick my way through a threatening flock of potentially badger-skinning sheep to a stone circle.

The stones stand on a ridge, partially sheltered by trees, looking over a patchwork of fields criss-crossed by stone walls. As soon as I’m among them I feel an intense sensation of wellbeing. It’s pleasing to imagine that I’m tapping in to the residual magical energy of the Tuatha de Danaan, though it may be just the relief of escaping from Cong’s tiny but ferocious tourist industry. I’m also experiencing once again that thrill of unimpeded and unobserved contact with our ancestors’ bits and pieces that the west of Ireland provides in such abundance. Because these places have never been developed, but have just sat there waiting for us, it’s possible—if you’re blessed with the faintest spark of imagination—to feel a very direct link: those people were here once, and now so am I. Perhaps there’s a little bit of the Tuatha de Danaan in all of us.

The archaeologists and mystics who are still arguing over what stone circles were for could perhaps take heed of the explanation given by the ancient bards. The Fir Bolg’s star warrior was Balor of the Evil Eye, a three-eyed giant who used his extra one to turn opponents to dust. This is the kind of thing you’d want to take into account when you were working out your game plan the night before the battle. According to the bards, the de Danaan’s tactic was to erect these stones and paint warriors on them; so when Balor gave them the evil eye, and they didn’t disintegrate but, rock-like, stood their ground, he presumed he’d lost his power, and left the battlefield in disgrace. The Fir Bolg then found themselves on the wrong end of a fearful drubbing.

A little way away outside the village of Cross I park outside a bungalow with a gardenful of plastic slides and swings, and head up an unlikely looking lane to Ballymagibbon Cairn. It’s an immense pile of stones, its peak level with the treetops. Once again there’s no one about; the only reminder that there are people nearby is the comforting sound of a gunshot as I reach the top of the lane. After just a couple of minutes lying full-length behind a wall in the coward position, as laid out in the Geneva Convention, I get up and climb the stones.

Legend has it that the cairn was erected at the end of the first day of the four-day battle, when each Fir Bolg warrior brought a stone and the head of an enemy in tribute to his king. If true, it makes you wonder how they lost. It’s one of five cairns, spread across five miles of the ancient battlefield, that are said to cover a network of passages leading to a central cremation chamber.

It’s certainly an appropriate monument for County Mayo. From the top, looking out across miles and miles of stone walls and ruined farm buildings, ‘there are more rocks than you’d see in an average lifetime; and all of them—walls, cairns, farms, barns—shaped by people who are no longer here. The hand of man is visible, but man is nowhere to be seen. You can hear him, though. Bang! Another gunshot. I feel curiously vulnerable silhouetted against the skyline. Suddenly, the trees all round me begin to thrash and shake as a fierce wind blows up from nowhere. I scramble down the rocks, watching for severed heads as I go.