Round Ireland in Low Gear (35 page)

Yeats, W. B. and J. B. 2, 68, 207

Young Irelanders 277

I would like to take the opportunity to express my gratitude to Terry Sheehy, who many years ago first kindled my enthusiasm for travelling in Ireland and, by presenting me with
Rambles in Eirinn
by William Bulfin, first drew my attention to the charms of cycling round it. I am particularly indebted to John Lahiffe of Bord Failte (the Irish Tourist Board) in London for the tremendous patience he displayed in searching out the most difficult information; and also for their help to Tom Magennis in Dublin and the following members of the regional tourism organizations under the auspices of Bord Failte: Frank Donaldson in Cork; Michael Manning in Skibbereen and Joe Palmer in Sligo along with their staffs; and Vincent Tobin, Joe Vaughan and Mary Watson of Shannon Development. I am grateful, too, to the director and managers of Sealink UK who facilitated our various passages to and from Ireland, often at very short notice.

I would also like to express my thanks to Peter Yapp, editor of
The Traveller’s Dictionary of Quotation
, for providing such a rich selection of quotes on Ireland and the Irish; and to Ariane
Goodman, Ron Clark and Vera Brice of Collins for their indefatigable assistance in bringing the book to fruition.

ERIC NEWBY
was born in London in 1919 and was educated at St Paul’s School. In 1938, he joined the four-masted Finnish barque
Moshulu
as an apprentice and sailed in the last Grain Race from Australia to Europe, by way of Cape Horn. During World War II, he served in the Black Watch and the Special Boat Section. In 1942, he was captured and remained a prisoner-of-war until 1945. He subsequently married the girl who helped him escape, and for the next fifty years, his wife Wanda was at his side on many adventures. After the war, his world expanded still further – into the fashion business and book publishing. Whatever else he was doing, Newby always travelled on a grand scale, either under his own steam or as the Travel Editor for the
Observer
. He was made a CBE in 1994 and was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of the British Guild of Travel Writers in 2001. Eric Newby died in 2006.

From the reviews of
Round Ireland in Low Gear
:

‘A delightful book – and one, surely, without risk of imitation’

Sunday Times

‘Newby writes and travels with a sense of wonder’

Scotsman

‘Hilarious Gaelic gallimaufry put together by that prince among travel writers, the literary conqueror of the Hindu Kush’

Daily Telegraph

‘Funny, revealing and thoroughly enjoyable’

Irish Independent

‘A relaxed and affectionate book’

Irish Times

‘His eternal curiosity in common humanity, his love of obscure facts and random delving into byways of history, mean that he is always entertaining. He carries his readers with him, effortlessly sharing his own enthusiasm’

Literary Review

The Last Grain Race

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

Something Wholesale

Slowly Down the Ganges

Grain Race: Pictures of Life Before the Mast in a Windjammer

Love and War in the Apennines

The Mitchell Beazley World Atlas of Exploration

Great Ascents: A Narrative History of Mountaineering

The Big Red Train Ride

A Traveller’s Life

On the Shores of the Mediterranean

A Book of Travellers’ Tales
(ed.)

What the Traveller Saw

A Small Place in Italy

A Merry Dance Around the World: The Best of Eric Newby

Learning the Ropes: An Apprentice in the
Last of the Windjammers

Departures and Arrivals

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This Harper
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edition published 2011

First published by William Collins Ltd in 1987
Published by Picador in 1988

Copyright © Eric Newby 1987, 1988

Maps by Leslie Robinson

Eric Newby asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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¹
The gear ratio (as a single figure) in inches is calculated by dividing the number of teeth on the chainwheel by the number of teeth on the rear sprocket and multiplying the result by the wheel diameter, in the case of most mountain bikes, 26″.

²
For those who find my attempts at reproducing fragments of Irish English as spoken by the inhabitants unacceptable, I can only plead that this is what they sounded like to me. What my own fruity accent sounded like to them can only be a matter of conjecture.

³
Demesne
: a word not much used in Britain but in Ireland signifying the land surrounding a house, or castle, retained by the owner for his or her own use.

⁴
A descendant of another Henry Ievers, a quit-rent collector to the King’s Commissioners, who acquired 12,000 acres in Clare, and who died in 1691.

⁵
The kingdom Henry established in Ireland endured until 1800, governed from England through English viceroys. In that year the Irish Parliament passed the Act of Union with England – but the State Church, the Church of Ireland, continued until 1869, when Gladstone disestablished and disendowed it. Always the Church of a minority, in its last few years it claimed only 10 per cent of the entire Irish community as worshippers.

⁶
Machicolation
: a projecting gallery or parapet with openings through which missiles, boiling oil and suchlike could be hurled on an enemy below.

⁷
I wondered what Evelyn Waugh would have thought of it. He had a nasty experience of an aesthetic sort, watching a sunset over Mount Etna. ‘Nothing I have ever seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting,’ he wrote.

⁸
Clints
are the blocks of limestone paving.
Grykes
are the open crevices in the clints.
Glacial erratics
are rounded blocks of limestone, some of them very large, deposited in the wake of an ice-cap.
Turloughs
are grassy hollows, sometimes created by the collapse of the roof of an underground cavern and often filled with water from below (
doline
being the smaller ones and
polje
the larger ones, the biggest of which is the Carran Depression in the eastern Burren).

⁹
According to Bord Failte’s
Ireland Guide
, 1982, there are between 30,000 and 40,000 of these ringforts in Ireland North and South. No one can be sure who lived in most of them, or when: the hundred or more sites excavated in Ireland shows evidence of occupation as early as the Bronze Age and as late as the Middle Ages, the most populous period being the early Christian one.

¹⁰
A pub in Ireland can sell anything. In Kinvarra, where King Guaire Aidhneach had his Easter Banquet spirited away by angels, there was a dark, cavernous pub that had its windows dressed with cans of weedkiller.

¹¹
The
Black and Tans
was the name given by the Irish to British recruits to the Royal Irish Constabulary when recruiting began in December 1919. The name was taken from a pack of Irish foxhounds, though the actual reference was to the colour of their uniforms. They were mostly recruited from the ranks of demobilized British Army soldiers, and were required to have been given an honourable discharge from their regiments. The story, so often quoted that it has become almost universally believed, that they were the criminal sweepings of the jails and gutters, is largely mythical. Altogether they numbered about 5000.

The
Auxiliary Division
of the RIC (the ‘Auxiliaries’) was made up of ex-British officers, known as Cadets. They were intended to operate in flying columns against the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and the Irish Volunteers.

Both the
Black and Tans
and the
Auxiliaries
had an effective life in Ireland of less than a year, in the course of which terrible atrocities were committed by both sides.

¹²
Sinn Fein
(inadequately translated as ‘We Ourselves’): Irish Republican political movement, founded about 1905 by Arthur Griffith and originally linked to the revolutionary IRA, which was and still is dedicated to bringing about a united, independent Ireland by means of civil war. The IRA was originally composed of armed Fenians, Fenians being members of an Irish revolutionary organization founded in the United States in 1858.

Since 1969
Sinn Fein
and the IRA have been divided by a split in opinion into a Provisional and an Official movement.

The
Irish Volunteers
, otherwise known as the
Sinn Fein Volunteers
: a splinter group of the
Irish National Volunteers
, the former founded in November 1913, the same year as Sir Edward Carson’s Ulster Volunteers, with whom it was intended they should act in concert.

The
Irish Republican Brotherhood
, later referred to as the Fenians, was a secret society founded in 1858 which originally masqueraded under the name of the Phoenix National and Literary Society in Co. Cork. It was the Brotherhood who decided, in August 1914, that a rising should take place; who approved Sir Roger Casement’s largely abortive mission to Germany in 1915; and who drafted the original plans for the Dublin Rising on Easter Monday, 1916. After the failure of the insurrection the Brotherhood was re-organized by Michael Collins, in 1916–17, and it continued to exist until his assassination in 1922.

¹³
By the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, the twenty-six counties of the Irish Free State were conceded dominion status and the remaining six were to form an integral part of the United Kingdom.

¹⁴
Freeman’s Journal
, 11 October 1920, quoted in Robert Kee,
The Green Flag. A History of Irish Nationalism
, London, 1972, and gratefully acknowledged.

¹⁵
John P. Holland, Irish patriot (1841–1914). In inventing it he hoped to bring about the destruction of the British Navy by the US Navy.

¹⁶
Source: ‘Cornelius O’Brien of Birchfield (1782–1857): Some facts about his life and times as abstracted from the Clare Journal and other sources’,
Key Magazine
, n.d.

¹⁷
Doolin is now famous as the home of farmer Micho Russell, who travels the folk festivals of Europe and America, playing on his tin whistles and his flute the jigs, marches, set dances and hornpipes he heard as a child, just as they were played in County Clare 150 years ago.

¹⁸
Translated from the Gaelic. Source:
The Festival of Lughnasa, A Study of the Survival of the Celtic Festival of the Beginning of the Harvest
by Maire MacNeill (Irish Folklore Commission), OUP, 1962.

¹⁹
Whatever the truth, Cromwell certainly landed on the Hook Head Peninsula in 1649, where he vowed, it is said, to take Waterford ‘by hook or by crooke’, Crooke being a small place on the west side of Waterford Harbour. This he failed to do. The phrase is also attributed to Strongbow.

²⁰
Translated in Hall,
Ireland, Its Scenery, Character &c
: ‘We, the subjects of his Most Gracious Majesty, William the Fourth, and as we truly believe both faithful and loyal inhabitants of the Barony Forth, beg leave at this favourable opportunity to approach your Excellency, and in the simple dress of our old dialect to pour forth from the fullness of our hearts our sense of the qualities which characterise your name, and for which we have no words but of “Governor”, “Statesman”, &c.’ (Vol. II, p. 162).

²¹
The Directory of the United Irishmen made plans for a national rising on 23 May 1798, which was to be commanded by Lord Edward Fitzgerald, son of the Duke of Leinster and cousin of Charles James Fox. The Government anticipated the rising by arresting the leaders on 12 March, only Fitzgerald escaping. What followed were disorganized risings in parts of Leinster and north-east Ulster on 24 May, all of which failed.

²²
Charles Tottenham, afterwards Loftus (1738–1806), was created Marquis of Ely for some reason connected with the negotiations which preceded the Act of Union. He had previously been made Baron Loftus in 1785; and in 1789 he was created Viscount Loftus, in 1794 Earl of Ely and in 1801 Baron Loftus of Long Loftus in the United Kingdom, ‘having thus,’ in the words of his biographer in
The Dictionary of National Biography
, ‘obtained no fewer than five separate peerage creations within fifteen years.
Prends moi tel que je suis
(Take me as I am),’ he concluded, ‘was the marquis’s motto.’

²³
At Nass, in County Kildare, where the number of native beggars was said to be twice the population of the town, a person in a stage coach, pestered beyond endurance, told the applicant to go to hell. At this, the woman turned up her eyes and said, ‘Ah, then it’s a long journey yer honour’s sending us; maybe yer honour’ll give us something for our expenses.’

²⁴
Altogether this was a bad time for Sir Walter. He had recently made pregnant Elizabeth Throgmorton, one of Queen Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, and although he married her after she had given birth to a fine boy, the Queen had him committed to the Tower. It may well have been this particular seduction which John Aubrey described so vividly in his
Brief Lives
.

²⁵
Dog-eared and damaged by damp, it was painstakingly copied in 1839 by the Gaelic scholar, Eugene O’Curry, Professor of Archaeology at the Catholic University in Dublin, and the copy is now in the Irish Academy.

²⁶
Source: June Levine in
Seeing is Believing. Moving Statues in Ireland
, ed. Colm Toibin, Pilgrim Press, 1985, to which I am indebted for this and much other information.

²⁷
Source: L
YALL
W
ATSON
,
Heaven’s Breath
, 1984.

²⁸
In Skibbereen Workhouse more than 50 per cent of the children admitted after 1 October 1846 died ‘due to diarrhoea acting on an exhausted constitution’, according to the workhouse physician. I am indebted to Cecil Woodham-Smith,
The Great Hunger, Ireland 1845–9
, Hamish Hamilton, 1962, for this and much other information on the Famine quoted here.

²⁹
Source:
The Irish Crisis,
quoted in Cecil Woodham-Smith,
The Great Hunger
. I remember reading a letter in a magazine or newspaper, some time after the publication of Cecil Woodham-Smith’s book, from someone who had found the book in a university library in the United States filed under the heading ‘Gastronomy’.

³⁰
St Ciaran of Saighir (to distinguish him from his more celebrated namesake St Ciaran of Clonmacnoise) was of the royal blood of Munster. He lived in the fifth century, and studied at Tours and Rome, from where he returned to Ireland a bishop. He inhabited a cell in upper Ossory around which grew the monastery of Saighir.

³¹
Home of the Marquesses of Lansdowne, and noted for its great collection of trees, some of them of huge size, rhododendrons and other shrubs and ferns. Now the property of the nephew of the seventh Marquess, who was killed in action in 1944. The Lansdownes were descendants of the adventurer, Sir William Petty, who acquired enormous estates during the Cromwellian confiscations.

³²
Source:
Kenmare Journal
, 1982.

³³
The Great Skellig was also the site of the westernmost religious foundation in Europe until the ninth century, when the monastery founded there by St Finan in the seventh century was raided by Vikings, from whose attentions it never really recovered.

³⁴
St Fursey, a nephew of St Brendan, had wondrous visions of the other world and founded monasteries at Yarmouth and at Lagny in France.

³⁵
At noon the next day, the
Aud
, with its German crew, was given chase to by an English patrol vessel, and at six-thirty that evening she was surrounded by English warships and escorted into Queenstown Harbour where her Captain, Spindler, ordered the crew to abandon her and blew her up.

³⁶
Ogham stones are commemorative Christian gravestones, with inscriptions in the Ogham alphabet, a fourth- and fifth-century adaptation of the Latin alphabet, originally used for carving inscriptions on sticks.

³⁷
For centuries before the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and during it, hundreds of Spanish fishing boats were operating off the Irish coasts, which at that time were as productive of fish as the Grand Banks of Newfoundland were subsequently to become. There was therefore no shortage of skilled pilots in the Spanish Armada. What is surprising was how dependent some of them were on the very inaccurate charts of the north coast of Mayo. Perhaps they were overruled by their superiors. Inaccuracies were still appearing in maps published in 1610, despite the fact that Mercator’s charts, published twenty years before the Armada set sail, were extremely accurate.