What the Traveller Saw (20 page)

Returning from Mass, Inisheer.

When I first went to A ran, back in 1966, the islanders still wore their own distinctive costume, but to a greater extent on lnisheer and lnishmaan. The men wore thick trousers of homespun tweed, which were split up the side seams so that they could be rolled up when launching their boats, and these were kept up by belts with tassels on them, called
criosanna
; thick flannel shirts dyed indigo; and waistcoats made from a hairy, grey-blue tweed. They all wore caps.

The older women still wore very full red flannel skirts and petticoats, which they dyed a shade of madder. All of them wore shawls; some of them valuable heirlooms. The brown Galway shawl was already extremely rare, Until recently, all the wool for the flannel and tweed used by the islanders had been woven in Galway, but the mill had been burnt down, and although I did manage to find them an alternative source of supply, at least for the indigo flannel, I don’t think they ever made use of it. A sort of fatalism had set in.

Ardent gardener Assistant Keeper Ken fights a losing battle with his three tomato plants against advancing waves of mesembryanthemums.

Girls bathing at a waterfall in Orissa, southern India.

The sandbank full of people at the
Sangam
, Allahabad. The
Sangam
is the place where the Ganges, Jumna and a third, invisible river. the Sarasvati, meet and mingle at what is perhaps the most venerated place of worship in all India. It is
Tirtharaj
, the king among places of worship, which enables human beings who bathe and worship there to cross the ocean of existence and gain salvation.

A devotee, Hardwar.

Wistman’s Wood, Dartmoor, an ancient, wind-blasted wood of dwarf oaks, 1300 feet up, on the side of the valley of the West Dart. It is one of three surviving such copses on the moor. The trees grow from crevices between moss-covered rocks. It is a weird, wonderful place. Another, less well-known, is Black Tor Beare, between 1200 and 1500 feet up on the bank of West Okement River, under Black Tor, east of Sourton.

I love follies. We have had two in our lives, a Gothick grotto and now an obelisk. McCaig’s Folly looms over the town of Oban in Argyll. Built of granite in about 1900 by a Mr John Stuart McCaig, banker. self-styled art critic and philosophical essayist. it is a copy of the Colosseum in Rome in comparatively midget form – 200 feet in diameter. up to 47 feet in height. with two tiers of pointed arches, 50 on the top tier, 44 on the bottom. Mr McCaig planned to have a tower rising, rocketlike, from its centre, but, as with all the best folly fanciers, his aspirations were never completely realized.

Fine as McCaig’s Folly is, it cannot begin to emulate Scotland’s first folly the Dunmore Pineapple, a 50-foot-high summer house in the form of a pineapple, in the grounds of Dunmore Castle in Stirlingshire.

Dunnottar Castle, Kincardineshire. A very craggy, ruinous ruin two miles south of Stonehaven, separated by a gorge from the mainland and perched 160 feet up on a rock. During the wars of the Commonwealth, the Scottish Royal Regalia was kept here, and the crown and sceptre were carried out through the lines to the church at Kineff. six miles to the south, by the wife of the minister there. They were hidden behind the pulpit.

Lots of atmosphere existed here years ago, and may indeed still exist, providing the castle has not been tarted up, or made to form part of a ‘nature trail’.

Belle and bicyclist in the Rue Mably, Bordeaux, 1968.

Behind the waterfront of this beautiful city, on a great bend of the Garonne, five miles of
quais
with ugly sheds on them obscured what had been a river frontage of eighteenth-century houses, whose lower parts had been converted into tiny bars which, at night. were packed tight with tight sailors. To a person with my kind of imagination, some of the old and decrepit streets behind looked postively sinister, but no doubt they were innocuous enough.

Outside the Romanesque church of Ste-Croix in Place Prenaudel, tramps or
chiffonniers
(rag-and-bone men). of whom there were large numbers at that time in Bordeaux, sat with pramloads of what were either their possessions or junk watching boys playing
boules
. The next morning they could be seen hovering around the early morning fires in the flea market in Place Mériadeck.