Round Ireland in Low Gear (21 page)

We set off for Dingle in driving sleet, past the road that led to Ballyskissane Pier, from which a car-load of members of the IRA, on the way to meet the
Aud
, a two-masted sailing vessel loaded in Germany with arms for the cause, plunged into the waters of Dingle Bay, drowning all the occupants, on the night of Good Friday, 19 April 1916.
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By now we both felt unequal to the remaining twenty-nine miles to Dingle and at Castlemaine sought out another taxi man, who was willing to take us on for a consideration. I didn’t catch his name or much of the other extraneous information he purveyed about what he felt about atomic bombs, AIDS, drugs, contraception, etc. – he was the most boring man we had met in the whole of Ireland. Anyway, I was busy scribbling down notes such as the following about our surroundings: ‘Bolteens, bungs, one or two rnd hses, some boogy (sic) towards water. Clears enough to see snow on Slieve Mish Mts, rt. Washing hung on outbldngs by hswives despairing of ever drying it.’ At Dingle, delivered from this mastermind, we boarded our bikes and fled the town, knowing that wherever we went westwards on this remote peninsula, unless we had waterwings or were going to walk out over the high tops, we would be coming back this way.

Down near the shore of Dingle Harbour stood the once fine
eighteenth-century Burnham House, the property of the Lords Ventry, descendants of a Cromwellian trooper, John Mullins, who struck it rich. It had been given the Catholic Educational Institution treatment, from which it had emerged a bilious shade of yellow, together with other humiliations, but it had retained its demesne, and some of the inmates, healthy-looking girls in tracksuits, were puffing round the grounds.

‘What happened to the last Lord Ventry?’ I asked a man driving a gigantic lorry full of stones, when we emerged.

‘He’ll be across the Jardan now,’ he said.

Then to Ventry Harbour, a huge oval expanse on the steel-grey sands of which Daire, ‘King of the World’, and Finn McCoul fought a great battle which lasted a year and a day and which resulted, as all the best battles do, in the extermination of the opposing forces and the salvation of the homeland. Here, after the battle, Crede, the wife of the warrior Cael, sang a dirge for her dead husband, part of which goes as follows:

Ahead of us now was Mount Eagle, and from this point onwards I experienced a feeling of unreality about the twentieth century that I had hitherto experienced nowhere else in the western world. I find it impossible to analyse, or even begin to write about it, but the memory remains with me still. Here we entered an area which contained within it one of the greatest concentrations of ancient remains in Ireland, an area so rich in them that even the minds of scholars must reel:
clochans
(dry-stone beehive huts), ogham stones, some of them cross-inscribed,
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promontory forts, ringforts, some of them with souterrains, pillar stones, prostrate stones, one of them with cup-and-circle and other prehistoric markings, cross slabs, ruined churches, oratories and
bullauns
(stones with a depression in them, probably used as mortars). I hope I haven’t missed any out. According to Killanin and Duignan, numbers of them ‘have been cleared away by farmers, local authorities and other vandals’.

Now out along the road to Slea Head, blasted out of the mountainside with explosives, it began to snow with incredible violence but the wind was so strong that it was all blown down the cliffside into the sea. Offshore big seas were running with a full gale from north-north-west, creating long parallel ribbons of foam downwind that stretched for miles across the mouth of Dingle Bay, a phenomenon I had never witnessed before. The Great Blasket,
which from here resembled a long, narrow upended sliver of rock with cliffs in some places 1000 feet high, was separated from the mainland by Blasket Sound, a mile wide but with a navigable channel reduced to less than 1000 yards by various underwater reefs and a huge conical rock that jutted out of it. With a three-knot tide running through it it now resembled a cauldron of water on the boil.

It was through this Sound that the first Armada ship to make a successful landfall, Admiral Juan Martinez de Recalde’s
Don Juan
, together with two small despatch vessels, was brought in a similar gale on 15 September 1588. This superb feat of seamanship would have been impossible had her pilot not had local knowledge,
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especially as the
Don Juan
had been shot through close to the waterline during fighting in the English Channel in early August, in which de Recalde had greatly distinguished himself.

Another large ship, the
San Juan Bautista
, flagship of the Castilian Squadron, succeeded in following in to safety, but a third, the
Nuestra Senora de la Rosa
, was less fortunate. She tried to enter, struck a rock but continued to run on, firing her guns to attract help, and anchored in the Sound near Recalde; but at two in the afternoon she dragged her anchors, hit a rock and sank, taking with her everyone on board except the pilot’s son. He was washed ashore on some flotsam, taken prisoner and sent to Dingle, where one wonders what fate awaited him. Also lost were 50,000 ducats in gold and silver and twenty-two brass cannon on land
mountings. Two hours later the
San Juan de Ragusa
also came in with her mainmast down; she subsequently sank but her crew were saved. Here, under the lee of the Great Blasket de Recalde, very ill, and the surviving ships remained for thirteen days before sailing for Spain.

Out across the desolate waters of the Sound, the Great Blasket is the biggest of that group of islands which for their size must be among the most written about and best written about islands in the world. Reading these books (the majority written either by inhabitants of the islands or by people who lived on them and knew them and their people intimately), one is struck by how vividly they record almost everything that one could hope to learn about the islanders: not only the details of their daily lives, but of their aspirations and fears for the future, and above all of their liveliness and humour. Having read them so recently, it was almost with a feeling of horror that I looked at these now-abandoned islands, the descriptions of a little Blaskets world that is no more still ringing in my ears:

It was bitterly cold. From the Head we pedalled – it was impossible to freewheel – downhill into the paralysing wind to Coumeenoule Bay, where a scattered settlement of about a dozen houses, one of them with a beehive
clochan
standing next to it, stood on the steep slopes of Mount Eagle, here divided up by stone walls into fields that no man would probably ever till again. Down below, on the rocks out towards Dunmore Head, pounded by the sea, was the wreck of a Dutch ship. Above it on the cliff, hanging over the void, a big crane was being used to haul the engines out of it bit by bit.

We had been told by the boss of the tourist office in Killarney that one of the only B and Bs to be open at this end of the Peninsula at this time of year would be that of a Mrs Hurley at a place called Kilcooley near Ballydavid. It was by now pitch dark and snowing hard. Away to the west the loom of the light on Tearaght Island, the westernmost point of the Blaskets, was just visible through the flurries, but not the light itself. Miles before there was any chance of encountering Mrs Hurley’s B and B we
saw the first of several signposts pointing to it, but unfortunately some local joker had swivelled them round. The result was chaotic. In such circumstances the Irish half-inch map, even in broad daylight somewhat capricious in the information it chooses to furnish, was quite useless. Every time I wanted to look at a signpost I had to take my feeble Ever Ready light off the handlebars and flash it on the sign, which invariably gave its information in Irish. In this fashion we twice passed the Gallarus Oratory, the most impressive of the remaining smaller Christian edifices in Ireland, without seeing it.

We had already visited the shop in Ballydavid to ask directions, without success. It was on our way back there, to find out if they really meant what they said, that I descried a low building. Desperate, I banged on the door and waited. After some time the door was opened to reveal an unlit void.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘do you happen to know the way to Mrs Hurley’s Bed and Breakfast?’

‘Well, I do know,’ came the reply, ‘it’s just the other side of Ballyferriter. All you have to do is …’ and went off into the sort of crazy spiel that had already had us circling the neighbourhood in increasing desperation.

‘And where are ye fram?’ or words to that effect, said this invisible figure.

‘From England.’

‘Glory be to God!’ he said, and shut the door.

Eventually we found the abode of Mrs Hurley. She wasn’t feeling too good, she said (neither were we), but she did have the kindness to direct us to another B and B not more than three miles away before shutting the door on us.

Next morning snow lay thick o’er hill and dale, causing a serious hold-up in what might be called culture: projects such as climbing Brandon Mountain, the second highest in Ireland at
3127 feet. We did however manage to get to the Oratory, which looked for all the world like a beautiful, perfectly preserved stone ship set upside down in the wilderness, its hull – in this case its steep-pitched unmortared roof – made of stone slabs of such perfect fit that it was still completely rainproof after a thousand years.

Brandon, or more commonly Brendan, was born in about AD 486. A great light is said to have shone over the area on the night of his birth, and when he was baptized at a well east of Ardfert, three castrated rams leapt from it – known as Tobar-na-Molt, it is a place of pilgrimage in May and June to this day. He was educated by St Erc, ordained at Tralee, and became one of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland. It was these apostles who, having seen a wondrous flower from Hy Brasil, the Isle of Paradise, chose Brendan to go in search of it. This he did, setting out in about 525 from Brendan Creek below the mountain which bears his name. From reading the modern translation of the
Navigatio Sancti Brendani
, published in about 800, two centuries after his death, we know that he may well not only have reached the Canaries but the American seaboard as far south as Florida, using a form of
currach
, ‘a wicker boat with ox-skins covered o’er’, seeing en route Icelandic volcanoes, and icebergs on one of which a decidedly frigid Judas Iscariot was allowed a cooling-off period from the flames of hell on Sundays and festival days. Tim Severin’s account of his own voyage to Newfoundland in just such a vessel shows that it is indeed perfectly possible that Brendan could have travelled that far. He died in 578 and was buried in his cathedral at Clonfert, now a Protestant establishment.

With much greater difficulty we moved on to Dun an Oir, the Golden Fort (or Forte del Oro), on a promontory on Smerwick Bay, a long couple of miles in the snow north of where we had been staying. Forte del Oro was built on the site
of the Iron Age fort by a force of eighty Spaniards headed by the Papal Nuncio Dr Nicholas Sanders, and James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, known as ‘the arch traitor’, to assist Gerald Fitzgerald, first Earl of Desmond in a large-scale revolt against the English in defence of Catholicism. The following year six hundred Italian reinforcements arrived, but in November a powerful force under the English Admiral Winter captured their ships and Lord Grey of Wilton, the English Lord Deputy, attacked the fort with eight hundred men. After three days’ bombardment it capitulated. The officers were spared, but more than six hundred of the unfortunate rank and file were massacred, as well as a number of local Irish women. Before the surrender the Italian commander of the force, Sebastiano di San Giuseppe of Bologna, yielded up Father Laurence Moore, Oliver Plunket and William Wollick, an English Catholic, all of whom refused to acknowledge the religious supremacy of Queen Elizabeth I and were subjected to torture with an expertise not unknown to the Inquisition, before being hanged. At the time these events took place Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald was on his way to pay a vow at the monastery of the Holy Cross in Tipperary, but was slain in a skirmish before arriving. By 1583 the revolt had collapsed and Gerald, Earl of Desmond had been captured in a wood on the borders of Cork and Kerry, and killed.