McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (6 page)

Before I left, I asked where the fragrant local potatoes came from.

‘Egypt.’

On the way home, I fell over a wall.

I think Mrs Goggin knows.

The next morning, and I’m cruising the back lanes of West Cork in the repmobile, trying to remember whether the bull had any udders, as I look for the beach at Red Strand. I’ve already tried to find Castlefreke, because it’s got an interesting name, and a ruined old Gothic house, and you’re meant to be able to walk through the woods to the beach; but it was altogether too elusive for me. I did manage to find Castlefreke post office, mind you, which sits, quite clearly marked ‘Castlefreke post office’ in the middle of the picturesque village of Rathbarry.

I’m taking it easy on account of the hangover, just plodding along at thirty while I try and find a station on the radio; but the radio refuses to cooperate and stays in constant search mode, as it has been since the day I hired the damn thing. Just relentless static, interrupted every few seconds by a tiny fragment of a phone-in about adultery, or sexually active bishops.

I’m heading up a gentle hill, trying to forget the expression on Mrs Goggin’s face when I declined black pudding, white pudding and a third sausage, when suddenly, round the corner at the top of the hill, a car appears. It’s airborne, like a rally contestant, nearside wheels in the middle of the road, the rest of the car entirely on my side. It swerves out of my path and thunders past, pinging a stone against the corner of my windscreen, where it makes a tiny crack. I get a clear look at the driver: a slightly batty-looking sixty-something lady, who grins amiably and waves with one finger as she rockets past. She seems untroubled by the realisation that if I’d been going ten miles an hour faster, or had been fifty yards further up the lane, or both, we’d have met head-on, on a blind bend. Not for the first time I have cause to reflect that all the recklessly fast drivers I come across, who in England would usually be men in their twenties, seem to be elderly women with a strange gleam in their eyes.

Yet their driving seems entirely devoid of aggression; they’re just, y’know—
fast
. And at least they retain that old-style country habit of raising a finger off the steering wheel in acknowledgement, for all the world as if you’re the only person they’ve driven past all week. At least, I think it’s in acknowledgement. If it’s, ‘Sit on this, ya English fecker,’ then I have to say it’s done with great charm.

By the time I happen upon Red Strand I’m more than ready for a burst of air. It turns out to be a beautiful expanse of sand between two green headlands, with the ancient fort of Galley Head just visible away to the west. So it’s unfortunate that slap in the middle of the green fields that face the sea, behind the beach, is an extremely hard-on-the-eye mobile-home camp of thirty or forty
units
, I think, is the polite word for them. Still, they’re not permanent, I suppose, and they allow people with not a lot of money to come and enjoy this beautiful spot, and no one’s built an amusement arcade or fun pub, so who am I with my middle-class back-to-nature aesthetics? If the only thing spoiling the place is the mobile homes, and you’re sitting in one of them, then I don’t suppose you notice.

But Ounahincha, just a couple of miles along the coast, is beyond justification. I know I used to come here as a kid, but I have no memories, other than that it was the seaside, and there was sand. My cousin had a phobia of feathers, so perhaps it was here that I used to conceal feathers carefully under shells, inside buckets, and in other places she was certain to find them. In my defence, I can only say that I would watch her near-hysterical reaction with fascination rather than glee.

Ounahincha is in a beautiful setting, with an expansive beach, dramatic rocks in the water, and splendid sloping lush green landscape all around. Unfortunately, it was comprehensively buggered in the 1960s and 1970s. The Ounahincha Hotel looks as if it has been assembled from the remnants of a previous building that was demolished for being too ugly, and is a strong contender for Most Tawdry Seaside Building in Ireland. Next to it, a sign on what appears to be a terminally damaged shed screams: SOUVENIRS CHIPS BURGERS; in case you’re wondering how you’d obtain them, a smaller sign says: SHOP! At the eastern end of the mess, despoiling another hillside with a sea view, is a trailer park so big there’s a Bank of Ireland caravan. I find myself feeling sorry for people who voluntarily spend their free time here. Like me, now.

If you turn left off the main road when you’ve crossed the causeway across the river estuary at Rosscarbery—there’s an enormous and hideous new hotel reminiscent of suburban Oslo, so you really can’t miss the turning—and if you keep your wits about you, then in ten or fifteen minutes’ drive you will come across the Drombeg Stone Circle. I’ve been there three times now and only seen someone else there once: an American family. The three children were sitting on top of the stones and shouting, though to be fair they were only up there because their parents had made them do it for a photo. Like the Collins birthplace, it’s maintained by the reassuringly antiquated-sounding Department of Works, and none the worse for it. Catering, merchandising and Computer-Generated Interactive Interpretative Heritage Experience have all gone missing. No one’s trying to sell you expensive jam or chutney. There’s just a small parking area, with nothing parked in it, and a path between fields to the stones.

There are seventeen of them. You enter the circle between the two largest, or portal, stones, which are both bigger than you. Directly opposite, on the other side of the circle, is a stone called ‘recumbent’ or ‘axial’ by archaeologists; by which they mean it lies sideways rather than upwards. Ancient markings have been carved on its upper surface. It’s been suggested that they represent axes, and that this proves that these circles were not places of worship, but the focal points of a Cult of the Axe which existed in western Europe in neolithic times. Or the stones may have enclosed a marketplace, and the axial stone was the counter on which goods were traded.

I have to say, though, that shopping seems an unlikely motive to me. Proponents of this undeniably imaginative theory make comparisons with shopping malls, which might be seen as the new temples. Shoppers are worshippers, McDonald’s is the sacrament, Nike provide the vestments; but the theory is of course rampant bollocks, and seems so particularly in a part of the world where there are no malls, but you can still buy a bicycle in a pub. The stone is, quite clearly, an altar stone, and something would have been placed, or celebrated—or sacrificed—on it.

When the site was excavated in 1957, the centre of the circle contained an inverted pottery jar covering the cremated remains of a young man from 3,500 years ago. Today in his honour someone has left six daffodils tied with green ribbon, ten American cents, and a magnetic glow-in-the-dark dashboard Virgin Mary. On 21 December the sun sets in alignment with the altar and the two portal stones, in a tiny cleft in the hills to the south-west, through which you can see the Atlantic. You don’t get that at the average shopping mall.

Sixty or seventy yards away, to the south-west, next to the foundations of some sort of stone hut or shelter, is a sunken pool. For all we know, it could have been some kind of neolithic ceremonial sauna; but it is believed to be a
fulacht fiadh
, or ancient cooking place. Stones were heated in a nearby fire, then plunged into the shallow water to cook deer and vegetables. Experiments suggest that seventy gallons could be boiled in this way in eighteen minutes, and that water could be kept hot for three hours, which explains why Irish vegetables have never been served
al dente
.

I walk up a short path to the north, and realise the stones are on a raised natural platform, almost like a stage. Beyond them, where the audience should be, thirty or forty fields roll away to the sea, half a mile distant, and visible in three separate places through dips in the hills. The only sound is a donkey braying, and the chug of a tractor in a clifftop field—the same guy, on the same tractor, as last time I was here, I imagine.

As evening approaches I drive down the hill and around the perimeter of the glorious natural harbour at Glandore, before hitting the main road at Leap (pronounced Lepp) and continuing west into Skibbereen. The town’s enjoyed a fame of sorts because of the song, ‘The Reasons I Left Auld Skibbereen’, and historically there have been many. The potato famine wreaked a dreadful havoc here; and between 1911 and 1961 more than half the population of the area emigrated because of failing crops and lack of employment. Skib today has a no-nonsense bustle to it, caught between the old Ireland and the new, cosmopolitan, moneyed West Cork, as personified by local residents Jeremy Irons and David Puttnam.

A decade ago I came here for an uproarious family wedding. The reception in the West Cork Hotel was a classic of the genre, and would have been dismissed as over the top had it been accurately portrayed on screen. A hundred and twenty of us sat down for a formal meal at two in the afternoon. Suddenly, the wine waiter was at my elbow, offering a choice of three bottles, with a polite enquiry I never expect to hear anywhere again in my life: ‘Red, white, or whiskey, sorr?’

When the band started playing at five o’clock there was none of the reticence and bar-hanging that characterise such events in England. Everybody in the room charged at the dance floor and made flamboyant whoopee non-stop until midnight, at which point the newly-weds were hoist skywards on the arms of their friends, laid horizontal in the air, and flown, shrieking, around the room. The crowd engineered elaborate and erotic airborne collisions between bride and groom, pounding them together till they were intertwined like two lusty cherubs on a Vatican chapel ceiling. Afterwards, we went back to the farm and drank whiskey—I suppose the red and the white must have run out—and played Richard Clayderman tapes, for complex reasons that elude me now, until dawn.

All of which means I feel very at home in Skibbereen, as indeed I should, walking past Patrick McCarthy, Solicitor; Charles McCarthy, Estate Agent; P. J. McCarthy, Insurance Broker; and so many others as to make me feel comfortably run-of-the-mill. The pattern is broken by the ever-expanding Hourihan dynasty: Hourihan’s Bar, next door to Hourihan’s Fast Food, adjacent to the newly opened Hourihan’s Launderette. My favourite is Trendy Hair Fashions, a source of continuing joy over the years. This time, its window display consists of an advert for a trip to Lourdes. Come to Lourdes and have your hair cured.

I’m staying at the Eldon Hotel, a nineteenth-century inn on the narrow main street that was derelict for many years, but has now been vigorously refurbished in traditional modern Irish vernacular. Someone told me that this is where Michael Collins spent his last night before riding out to his death, but there’s no plaque or themed display cashing in on it, so maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t. Next time I drive past the Geordie, I’ll ask him.

As night falls, I adjourn across the road to a top-notch bar called Baby Hannah’s. Small and unadorned, with a solid fuel range in the corner, a tongue-and-groove ceiling, and sawdust on the floor, possibly left over from when they were fitting the tongue-and-groove ceiling, this is the perfect bridge between past and present. A pair of children, a boy and a girl, prowl the bar looking for mischief, but settle instead for staring at me like a pair of McZombies. At first I think they must have escaped from the Goggins and followed me here, until I realise they are in some way connected with the group of half a dozen adults who are talking and laughing boisterously—let’s face it they’re shouting—across to my right.

Two of the company are larger-than-life Irish women who look as if they might be blues singers, or bouncers. The conversation is revolving around them, whether it wants to or not, and the air is turning blue, with approximately two fecks, three fucks, and a God Almighty to each sentence. Even for such vigorous turners of an everyday phrase as the Irish, this is an impressive strike rate.