Round Ireland in Low Gear (17 page)
Read Round Ireland in Low Gear Online
Authors: Eric Newby
Skibbereen and the surrounding countryside suffered fearfully during the Famine. The only employment was on public works, which paid a man 8d a day, a sum wholly insufficient to support a family; this was reported to the British Government in London by two local Protestant clergymen who specially went there for this purpose, but no food was sent. On 15 December 1846 Mr Nicholas Cummins, a Cork magistrate, visited
Skibbereen and as a result of what he saw wrote a letter to the Duke of Wellington, who was himself an Irishman, sending a copy to
The Times
:
My Lord Duke,
… Having for many years been intimately connected with the western portion of the County of Cork, and possessing some small property there, I thought it right personally to investigate the truth of the several lamentable accounts which had reached me of the appalling state of misery to which that part of the country was reduced. I accordingly went on the 15th inst. to Skibbereen, and to give the instance of one townland which I visited, as an example of the state of the entire coast district, I shall state simply what I there saw … Being aware that I should have to witness scenes of frightful hunger, I provided myself with as much bread as five men could carry, and on reaching the spot I was surprised to find the wretched hamlet apparently deserted. I entered some of the hovels to ascertain the cause, and the scenes that presented themselves were such as no tongue or pen can convey the slightest idea of. In the first, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearance dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged horse-cloth, and their wretched legs hanging about, naked above the knees. I approached with horror, and found by a low moaning they were alive, they were in fever, four children, a woman, and what had once been a man. It is impossible to go through the details, suffice it to say, that in a few minutes I was surrounded by at least 200 such phantoms, such frightful spectres as no words can describe. By far the greater number were delirious, either from famine or from fever. Their demoniac yells are still ringing in my ears, and their horrible images are fixed upon my brain. My heart sickens at the recital, but I must go on.
In another case, decency would forbid what follows, but it must be told, my clothes were nearly torn off in my endeavours to escape from the throng of pestilence around, when my neck-cloth was seized from behind by a grip which compelled me to turn. I found myself grasped by a woman with an infant, just born, in her arms, and the remains of a filthy sack across her loins – the sole covering of herself and babe. The same morning the police opened a house on the adjoining lands, which was observed shut for many days, and two frozen corpses were found lying upon the mud floor, half devoured by rats.
Sir Randolph Routh, Chairman of the Relief Commission, blamed the landlords:
The proprietors of the Skibbereen district, he told Charles Edward Trevelyan, Permanent Head of Treasury, ‘draw an annual income of £50,000’. There were twelve landowners, of whom the largest was Lord Carbery [of Castle Freke], who, Routh declared, drew £15,000 in rents; next was Sir William Wrixon-Becher, on whose estate the town of Skibbereen stood; Sir William, alleged Routh, drew £10,000, while the Reverend Stephen Townsend, a Protestant clergyman, drew £8000.
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In the county of Cork alone the desperate state of Skibbereen was reported to be paralleled in Schull, Bantry, Brandon, Baltimore, Crookhaven and Castlehaven. During all this time fever was raging and by March 1847 it was epidemic, carrying off thousands more.
The most accessible of the six children’s cemeteries appeared to
be the one in Ardintenant, east of Schull Harbour, and with the sun now shining brilliantly we set off to look for it. Marked on the map north of the Harbour was the workhouse and on the same site, the fever hospital, and we went to see them on the way to look for the cemetery. The buildings, or what was left of them, were hidden behind huge, high ivy-clad walls and stood in a morass of mud churned up by the cattle which grazed around the place. A gateway fitted with iron gates led to them: one, an amorphous construction covered with ivy; the other, a larger, two-storey building with what might have been one big lofty room with an open fireplace at both ends. The roof and upper floor had collapsed and a dense growth of ivy covered this too. Which had been the workhouse and which the fever hospital was difficult to say. It may have depended on who outnumbered whom, the living or the dying. A stream ran through the field in which they stood, the waters of which, besides being used by the occupants of the workhouse, had been used to work a carding mill, and possibly other mills, down near the shore where there was a miniature harbour.
It took a long time to find the cemetery. A man building a very ugly stone wall for someone’s bungalow down on the road to Ardintenant – ‘Me labour’s costing him two thousand pounds, let alone the materials’ (someone to be avoided like the plague) – had never even heard of it. A farmer who lived within sight of it among a very dangerous collection of disused copper mine shafts thought he knew where it was, but was wrong. Most vehement was a woman living in a bungalow who said ‘it wasn’t anywhere at all nearboy’. Finally, an old man living alone in a very small whitewashed cottage told us where it was: in the field which belonged to the vehement woman, immediately opposite her house. It was thickly overgrown with brambles and gorse and only one stone was visible above the undergrowth but the rest, innumerable small stones, could be felt underfoot. It was horrible: I felt as if I was
treading on living children. Our interest in children’s famine cemeteries evaporated.
Back in Skibbereen, having cycled there with the wind astern, a novel experience, we lunched in Brendan McCarthy’s pub under a poster advertising ‘Monster Card Drive – Prizes: Bull Calf, Half Ton of Coal, A Ham, Four Bottles of Whiskey’. The local head of Bord Failte kindly did some brisk telephoning on our behalf and arranged for us to get to Clear Island (offshore Irish islands being difficult to reach, especially in winter), so after tea in a caff we set off for Baltimore, from where the island boat sails. We followed the river Ilen on its last laps to the sea, past old demesnes, one of which had a Gothic church tower rising picturesquely among deciduous trees. One of the good things about the Church of Ireland was that they certainly were dab hands at choosing beautiful situations for their excellent, mass-produced churches. Further downstream the Ilen suddenly became an estuary, and a lovely one, with minute grassy islands apparently floating in it, all flooded with a stormy, magical, lemon-coloured light. Who is responsible for these miraculous effects, so much more satisfying than meretricious moving statues constructed of cement?
We got to Baltimore about four-thirty, passing the decrepit Gulf Stream Hotel which was for sale – hardly surprising if what we were now sampling was representative of the weather. It was now raining and blowing hard from south-west and Baltimore was very, very cold, in spite of being hemmed in on all sides by islands of various shapes and sizes; but it was nice down by the harbour, which was overlooked by a little castle of the O’Driscolls. We were now in O’Driscoll country: it was here in 1537 that one of the O’Driscoll lords took for himself the contents of a ship loaded with Spanish wine bound for Waterford, which had taken refuge from the weather. This led to the burning of the town by an expeditionary force of Waterford men, and the ruination of
the castle. It was here, too, that a force of Algerian pirates put ashore on the night of 19 June 1631; they, too, sacked the town and carried away 117 of its inhabitants of both sexes as slaves, introducing what may well have been the first female O’Driscolls into the harems around the Mediterranean. The man who piloted them in, a fisherman called Hackett, was later tried and executed at Cork.
We found accommodation in O’Driscoll’s Corner House Hotel above the harbour. The hotel was being repainted and the owner himself, who was getting married shortly and was also involved in running the post office, was existing in a state of some confusion in a kitchen, the principal ornament of which was an enormous American gas stove suitable for cooking mammoth steaks which were not on offer on this particular p.m. All night it blew like hell, the wind rattling the casements and the rain battering them. Outside, chocked up on the waterfront, was a yacht with a single occupant who must have felt rather like St Simon Stylites on his column. Inside we had an electric heater, a rather frightening electric blanket, the O’Driscolls’ answer to the electric chair, and lots of nice cold water to wash in, but you can’t have everything and at least we had a roof over our heads.
In the morning we rode out to a huge white sugar-loaf beacon known as Lot’s Wife which looks across a narrow sound to Sherkin Island. The rain had stopped and the sun was shining but the wind was blowing so strongly that we could lean out on it without falling over, which meant it was Force 9. Gouts of froth streamed up the face of a precipice on the extreme edge of which a herd of cattle stood grazing, accompanied by an enormous, wily-looking goat; apparently the cattle often fall over, having neither apprehension nor fear of heights, but never the goat. Having done this there was not much else to do, the mail boat not being due to sail for Clear Island until half past two in the afternoon.
‘I’m afraid I can’t go on with much more of this,’ said Wanda, as we sat in a deep valley leading down to the sea next door to an abandoned Morris done out in jungle camouflage with nothing inside except seatbelts. ‘The winds and the rains are simply killing me.’ And she shed a tear or two. Nevertheless she promised to delay her decision about abandoning both me and Ireland until our return from Clear Island.
We put to sea in the good ship
Naomh
(Saint)
Ciaran II
(Ciaran or Kieran being the island’s patron saint.)
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The only other passenger was the representative on the island of the Cape Clear Development Co-operative, set up in 1970 in an attempt to arrest emigration from the island, the population of which had fallen from 1000 to 180 in a century. While courteous enough, he was not exactly a fount of free information about his kingdom. Maybe he thought we were going there to erect a casino, a tower block or something similar.
The skipper of the
Naomh Ciaran
, a steel-built vessel of about 38 tons, was Conchubar O’Driscoll, and there was yet another O’Driscoll among his crew. They had just finished loading a large tractor, and the ship was full of other produce ordered by the islanders from Skibbereen. The skipper took her out round the west side of Sherkin Island, past more O’Driscoll ruins, and into a patch of nasty short, steep sea into which the
Naomh Ciaran
smashed with vigour, throwing spray over her deck-house, as if it was bath night. Once across the Sound between Sherkin and Clear Island he turned her to go inside the Bullig reef off Illauena Island, a manoeuvre which threw us all over the place and broke my glasses. It was clear now and across the Sound the cliffs of
Clear Island with the seas breaking on them and the green, stonewalled fields above them were brilliant in the sun.
It took a little under an hour to reach North Harbour. It has a labyrinthine entrance which makes it practically impossible to get out of when something known as ‘the draw’, a nasty sort of undertow, is working. The jetty was crowded with islanders, together with a few specimens from what, apart from the Australian Outback, must be the world’s largest concentration of beat-up motor vehicles. There is no insurance, no need for a licence and no driving test, and the mainland is scoured for vehicles suitable for use on the island by the twentieth-century equivalent of grave robbers. The surroundings of the harbour, above which rises a big hill, were disordered and picturesque. There were a number of old houses and sheds used by fishermen, heaps of lobster pots, boats in various stages of decay, the power station, out of sight round a corner; and the ruined church of Trawkieran, otherwise Teampall Ciaran, built around 1200 on the site of an earlier monastery said to have been founded by St Ciaran. And down by the beach was Tobar Ciaran, his holy well, with a solitary palm tree growing on it, from which water is still procured for blessing the homes of the islanders and the sick. Next to this was a Grotto occupied by Our Lady and St Bernadette, with what looks like a lingam in front of it but is really the stump of a cross.
In search of somewhere to stay we set off up the hill past a stone building with the sign ‘Club Chleire Heineken’, that was in the process of being converted by the island co-operative into a very agreeable social club, with a bar that was unfortunately closed; past a grocer’s shop with a bar inside it that was a bar no more, past a line of picturesque cottages on a ledge carved out of the hillside, all now abandoned, and past Bourke’s pub, also closed.
We put up in the commodious modern bungalow of Mrs
O’Reagan. It was still only a quarter to four so we decided to walk to the Bill of Cape Clear. The scene from the cliffs above the Bill was awe-inspiring. Four miles off to the south-west was the Fastnet Lighthouse, a tall, angular granite tower rising 147 feet from its foundations. It was now blowing Force 10 and huge seas were battering against the tower, leaping up the side of it from the boiling cauldron below. Beyond it a big slab-sided container ship was punching out into the storm but it was soon lost in the murk. The air between the Bill and the Cape was full of what looked like ping pong balls: gouts of spume generated at the base of the cliffs which were now floating inland on the wind. At four-thirty the light on the Fastnet came on. By now the sky to the north-east was clear, with a big moon riding high in it, but everywhere else it had closed in, except when the cloud opened up for a moment to allow an unearthly yellow light to illuminate the rock.