Round Ireland in Low Gear

Meanwhile, huge and pale and speckled in the rain, the Shannon flowed on, under the bridge towards the mighty sea, past what looked like a disused Indian chutney factory in Bengal with a tall chimney, and past quays built in the 1870s for what was to be another Liverpool, though it never became one in spite of there being nineteen feet of water off them at high water springs.

Here, the Shannon was 154 miles from its source on the slopes of Cuilcagh Mountain in County Cavan, near the Northern Ireland Border, a place I had promised myself we would visit if we could do so without getting our nuts blown off. At this rate, I wondered if we would ever live long enough to reach it.

Then, suddenly, the rain stopped and the sun came out. Too unnerved by the happenings on the Sarsfield Bridge to really appreciate the fact, we pushed our bikes a few hundred yards or so through suburban Limerick along the N18 to Ennis and points north, then turned off it and rode out into the country on a lesser road between thin ribbons of bungalows, some of them offering yet more beds and breakfasts. And now for the first time we had the chance to appreciate what it was really like riding mountain bikes laden with gear. To me it was much as I imagined it would be to ride a heavily loaded camel, the principal difference being that you don’t have to pedal a camel.

To the right now was Woodcock Hill, a green, western outlier of the Slieve Bearnagh hills; to the left were fields in which donkeys bemoaned their loneliness and battered old trees stood in the hedgerows, and beyond all this to the south was the Shannon, much enlarged since we had last set eyes on it, shimmering in the sun.

A car passed, going in the opposite direction, and the four occupants waved to us cheerily, as did a young man in shirt sleeves, waistcoat and cap who was in a ditch, wielding a fearsome-looking slashing instrument on a long handle that made him look like a survivor of the Peasants’ Revolt.

‘It must be your Jackie Hooghly hat,’ Wanda said. ‘They think we’re Americans.’

The wind was strong and cool, if not downright cold, but at least the sun was shining and the road was flat – well, almost. We were in Ireland at last. There was no doubt about that. In fact we were now in County Clare.

At the village of Cratloe, an avenue led steeply uphill from silver painted gates to a grotto modelled on that of Lourdes, one of the countless thousands erected during 1954, the Marian Year of Special Devotion to the Virgin, decreed by Pius XII. Silver painted gates and railings in Ireland are an infallible sign of the proximity of something Catholic and therefore holy.

To the south of the road was Cratloe Wood. Inside it was wet and dim and mysterious, with long, diagonal shafts of sunlight reaching down into it through the trees. Some of the oaks were descendants of those that had provided timber for the hammer-beam roof of London’s Westminster Hall, when it was built in 1399; and for the roof of the Amsterdam Town Hall, later the Royal Palace, built in 1648 on a foundation of more than 13,000 wooden piles. And long before all this, in the ninth century, men had come here all the way from Ulster to cut down oaks and carry them away northwards to make a roof for the Grianan of Aileach, the summer palace of the O’Neills, Kings of Ulster, on Greenan Mountain, near Londonderry. At some very far-off period the wood had been cut in two by what is now the N18, and another beautiful part of it is still to be found south of this road in a walled enclosure, which forms part of the demesne

(#litres_trial_promo) of Cratloe Castle. It belonged to the Macnamaras who, together with the O’Briens, seem to have had more castles in these parts alone – the remains of more than fifty have been identified – than most other families had in the whole of Ireland. At Cratloe itself there are three castles within half a mile of one another, which could constitute some kind of record.

After paddling around in these woods for a bit, wishing we had brought our waterwings, we resumed our journey; but not before Wanda, one of whose foibles is to have no faith in maps, however good, or map readers, however accomplished, had knocked on a cottage door to enquire the way to Sixmilebridge, for which we were bound and to which I already knew the route.

The misinformation she was given by an innocuous-looking old body – ‘Sure, it’s just away down the hill’ – sent her zooming off by herself under a railway line in the direction of Bunratty Castle, the largest of all the Irish tower houses. Had she actually reached it, she would have received no more than her deserts if the directors had put her to work as a serving wench at the mediaeval-type banquets for which they are internationally renowned.

The village of Sixmilebridge bestrode the deep, dark, narrow Owenogarney river. It was really two villages, Old Sixmilebridge on the west bank and New Sixmilebridge on the east bank, built in the early eighteenth century, when an iron works was opened. It had brightly painted houses – a bit like Fishguard – streets with royal names such as Orange, George, Frederick and Hanover, which sounded a bit odd in the depths of republican Ireland, and seven pubs, only one of which served any kind of food, something which seemed extraordinary at the time but which, as we proceeded on our way through Ireland, we came to regard as commonplace. This pub was huge, considering the size of the village. It had three bars, decorated with imitation half-timbering, wallpaper of a sultry tropical design and hue and glass cases containing stuffed, predatory animals. I asked the landlord whether he thought a place the size of Sixmilebridge could really support seven pubs, since I know many villages of a similar size in England that can scarcely support one.

‘Why, yes,’ he said, apparently genuinely surprised by what he obviously regarded as a daft question in a place which in 1931 had a population of 325, and probably had even less now. ‘There’s a living for all of us.’

‘There was no need at all to be chaining your bikes up in Sixmilebridge,’ said a small girl of about seven with a hint of reproof, as we were unchaining them, preparatory to continuing on our way.

We were still only nine miles from Limerick. If we went on like this and I continued to record what I saw in such superfluous detail it would take us five years to travel round Ireland, and the rest of my life to write about it. I put this to Wanda and she said perhaps it didn’t matter, and what other plans had I got for spending the evening of my days; but I knew she wasn’t serious about it. Nevertheless, emboldened by her hardening attitude I talked her into a detour of a mile or two to see Mount Ievers Court, a country house at the foot of the Slieve Bearnagh hills.

As it was not open to the public, we hid our bicycles near the entrance and approached the house on foot across the park, in which it stood half hidden among trees, some of them enormous beeches, and invisible from the three roads that hemmed the property in.

It was a tall house in every way: three storeys high, with a steeply pitched, tiled roof, tall chimneys, tall doorways and tall windows with white glazing bars. Both its fronts had seven bays and each upper storey was slightly narrower than the one below.

The garden front was faced with bricks of a beautiful pale pink colour and the quoins, the cornerstones, the string courses and the window surrounds were cut from a silvery limestone. A flight of steps led up to a simple doorway on the first floor. The entrance front was entirely faced with this silvery stone, and with what was to be the last of a pale, wintry afternoon sun illuminating the windows the house was an enchanting sight. It could have been the abode of some sleeping princess, waiting to be awakened after a sleep of centuries.

There was no sign of life but we skulked among the trees, anxious not to be detected, certain that if there were any occupants they would not want to be bothered with trespassers in Gore-Tex suits. Neither of us was keen to see the inside in case it failed to equal the exterior of what has been described by Mark Bence-Jones, the author of Burke’s Guide to Irish Country Houses, as ‘the most perfect and also probably the earliest of the tall Irish houses’, but apparently it is well worth seeing.

The house was built by John Rothery and his son Isaac for Colonel Henry Ievers

(#litres_trial_promo) sometime between 1730 and 1737, and is thought to have been based on the design of Chevening, in Kent. The beautiful pink bricks used in its construction were brought back as ballast in a vessel that had carried rape-seed oil to Holland, oil that was milled at Oil Mill Bridge, which we had cycled over on our way from Cratloe.

After this detour we set off northwards under what was now a grey sky, bound for Kilmurry and Quin, through a wide expanse of flat, rural Clare with the Slieve Bearnagh hills running away to the north-east on our right.

The road was the site of intensive ribbon development. Along it on either side stood bungalows in an astonishing medley of styles – Spanish hacienda, Dallas ranch house, American Colonial, Teutonic love-nests with stained glass in their front doors, and others in styles difficult to put a name to. Some were already occupied and their windswept, treeless gardens and patios were enclosed with breeze-block walls or with balustrades made from reconstituted stone. Some still had the builders on the premises – their vans and battered cars stood outside and you could hear their owners whistling and their radios on the go. Some were empty shells, abandoned by both the builders and those whom they were building them for, until the present dire state of the Irish economy improved.

If it did, it would only be a matter of time before every secondary road in Ireland would suffer in the same way; many, we subsequently found, already had. These bungalows were alien in the Irish countryside: most of them for instance had no porch in which to hang coats and keep gumboots, an absolute necessity in a place like Ireland. But obviously the Irish love them and they are infinitely better to live in than the damp-courseless, thatched, whitewashed cottages in which their forebears crouched in a single smoke-filled room, stirring some mess suspended over the fire in a blackened pot and fulfilling their destiny by satisfying visitors in search of the picturesque such as ourselves.

Kilmurry, when we finally reached it, having emerged from this Irish subtopia, was a very small place indeed. Of the six roads which met there, five meandered to it across country from points on the map which had no names at all. There were the picturesque ruins of a church and an equally picturesque abandoned churchyard and the sort of picturesque house the Irish were abandoning in droves, with blackbirds in residence in its grass-grown thatch. In the distance the little loughs with which the region abounded sprang to life when from time to time sunbeams forced their way through the clouds that had now gathered overhead.

After this we rode past Knappogue, a Macnamara castle. It was open (morning and afternoon teas were served), and providing a quorum could be found ready to participate, mediaeval banquets could be served at the drop of a hat. But according to the Blue Guide, although built in 1467 it had since been over-restored, not by some Victorian nutcase, as might be expected, but in 1966. So we gave it a miss and pressed on to Quin, a pretty, rural village, with two long, picturesque barns; across the road from Malachy’s Bar.

It was three-thirty, and mad for a pot of tea we entered the bar, in which two locals were drinking Guinness and playing darts. They immediately offered to play a foursome, but we were too thirsty to do anything but drink tea and eat a bit of cake, brought by a young girl, for which we paid an Irish punt (or pound). While doing so I tried to imagine a couple of foreigners entering one of our local pubs in Dorset at three-thirty on a winter’s afternoon and finding customers inside, drinking and offering to play darts, and then being provided with tea and cakes; but I failed. Malachy’s Bar may not have been all that much to look at – inside it resembled a 1935 Wardour Street half-timbered film set – but its occupants were kind and welcoming and I realized that if we were going to attempt to equate aesthetics with happiness while travelling through Ireland we might just as well give up and go and be miserable in the comfort of our own, lovely home.

Outside, on a bank of the little River Rine were the impressive ruins of the Franciscan Abbey founded and built in the fifteenth century by Sioda Cam Macnamara within the perimeter of a Norman castle which had been destroyed, presumably by the Macnamaras around 1286. Other members of this clan were also buried here, among them the Macnamara of Knappogue castle who, had his precise location been known to its restorers, would probably have been dug up and restored too.

Those Franciscans were extremely tenacious. In 1541 they were expelled from their premises, as were other religious communities in Ireland, by Henry VIII in his new guise as King of Ireland and Head of the newly established Protestant Church of Ireland,

(#litres_trial_promo) but after the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 the monks returned. In 1649–50 Cromwell initiated his ghastly campaigns in Leinster and in Munster, of which County Clare formed a part, together with what are now Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Tipperary and Waterford. The following year, 1651, they were again driven out and in 1652 eleven years of rebellion by the Irish came to an end. In the course of them one third of the Catholic Irish population had been killed; uncounted thousands were shipped to the West Indies, to all intents and purposes to work as slaves; Irish towns were repopulated with English men or English sympathizers; and twenty million acres of land were expropriated and handed over to Protestant settlers.

In spite of these horrors the Franciscans of Quin appear to have been more or less ineradicable. Although driven out of their Friary they contrived to remain in the neighbourhood for the next 150 years. The last surviving member of the order at Quin, Father John Hogan, died in 1820 and his tomb is in the north-east cloister.

Up to now Wanda had been doing very well with her cycling, but after tea at Malachy’s Bar some of the fight appeared to go out of her and when I suggested that we should go and look at Danganbrack, perhaps the most extraordinary of all the fortress houses of the Macnamaras, which the Shell Guide said was three quarters of a mile east-north-east, and which I said, having been there twenty years previously, was only half a mile north-north-east, she said, ‘All right, providing you’re sure it isn’t five miles,’ but without much enthusiasm. But then she hadn’t seen it, as I had twenty years ago.

Then, I had reached it by a tree trunk bridge over a deeply sunken stream at the end of a very muddy track which ran east-wards from a road that led due north from Quin to nowhere. There, in a field, I saw what was known as the ‘ill-fated tower of Mahon Maechuin’, in which the Cromwellian troops, after taking it, spent some time refreshing themselves before moving on that night in 1651 to sack the Abbey. One woman escaped from the tower to bring news of what was happening to Hugh O’Neill, the beleaguered defender of Limerick, which at that time was invested by a Cromwellian army commanded by Henry Ireton until, after six months, he died of the plague.

I remembered Danganbrack as a miniature skyscraper over-grown with ivy as thick as a ship’s hawsers, with machicolations

(#litres_trial_promo) and tall gables crowned with chimneys. The ground floor was used as a byre and the lower courses supporting it looked dangerously eroded. The doorway was whitewashed, presumably to discourage the cattle from butting the doorposts and bringing some thousands of tons of masonry down about their ears. I wondered if it was still standing. By the time I thought of asking someone, as is usual in such moments, there was no one to ask.

The first track we now took was certainly muddy enough to be the right one, and it led more or less due east, but after a few hundred yards it made a ninety-degree turn to the north and eventually delivered us into a farmyard filled with liquid mud and policed by a pair of ferocious amphibious sheep dogs. ‘And what are you thinking of doing now?’ my helpmeet and companion in life’s race asked me when we were back on the road.

I looked at the Irish half-inch map – the one-inch map had not been on offer when I was stocking up with them – and heartily wished that it had been the latter. Those half inches make all the difference between locating a fortress house of the Macnamaras and being eaten alive by sheep dogs in a pool of slime.

‘Give up,’ I said. ‘There’s only one castle marked on this map that fulfils anyone’s description of where it really is, dammit. I’ve even got a six-figure map reference. We must have been within feet of it at that farm. But why didn’t we see it? It’s almost as tall as the Woolworth Building. It must have fallen down.’

So we gave up. And as to whether Danganbrack is still standing, we didn’t meet anyone to ask in the succeeding ten miles or so, and when we did meet someone he didn’t know and thought we were enquiring about some new brand of breakfast cereal.

By now both of us were consumed by the unspoken fear that the short December day might give out and leave us blundering about on our bikes in Irish darkness, far from our destination. This was a farm near Crusheen, where we had stayed some eighteen years before, but it was still miles away to the north, and its occupants were still blissfully unaware that we were proposing to stay with them. En route we made one rapid detour down a lane to see Magh Adhair, the Inauguration Place of the Kings of Thomond (now County Clare), one of whom was Brian Boru, High King of Ireland – a grassy mound surrounded by a deep ditch by the banks of the Hell River. On the far side of the river there was a tall, slender standing stone which probably had some ceremonial significance, though the actual inauguration is thought to have taken place under a great oak tree nearby.

This mound has a violent history. In 877 Lorcan, King of Thomond, whose crowning place it was, fought a battle there against Flan, High King of Ireland, which sounds as if it had more of the quality of opera bouffe. In the course of it Flan, to denigrate his adversary and to decrease the sanctity of the place, started to play a game of chess on the mound – a present-day equivalent from the point of view of sacrilege would be to play Bingo in Westminster Abbey – but was driven from it by Lorcan, whose fury can only be imagined. Forced to take refuge among the thorn thickets in which the area still abounds Flan promptly got lost and after three days blundering about in them had to surrender. Two other kings, Malachy, High King of Ireland in 982, and Aedh O’Conor, King of Connacht in 1051, committed even greater sacrilege by cutting down the sacred tree, which must have been pretty small the second time round. The last Coronation took place there in the reign of Elizabeth I.

Standing on this mound, looking out over what is partly a natural amphitheatre at the beginning of a long-drawn-out and sulphurous sunset, the feeling of mystery that this place would otherwise have had about it was destroyed by a ribbon of brightly lit bungalows along a nearby lane. It was only going to be a matter of getting a few more building permissions before Magh Adhair would be completely hemmed in by them, a triumph for the developers who will have succeeded in destroying what more than a thousand years, three kings and innumerable wars have failed to do.

Then we set off on what proved to be an interminable ride past O’Brien’s Big Lough and Knocknemucky Hill, at 239 feet the highest point in a plain that extended all the way north from the Shannon estuary to Galway Bay. By the time we reached Crusheen, at a crossroads on the fearful N18, it was quite dark. The only human beings we had seen on our journey from Quin, a distance of some seven or eight miles, were two small boys playing outside the lodge gate of a demesne. There were three pubs at Crusheen, and parked outside them were a number of huge heavy goods vehicles, drop-outs from what was currently taking place on the N18 which looked like an HGV version of the Mille Miglia. Inside, one hoped, their drivers were taking it nice and steady and not mixing the J. Arthur Guinness Extra Stout with the Paddy, or vice versa. Of the three, we chose O’Hagerty’s, the inside of which was even more attractive than the outside, small and snug and a sort of amber colour, a compound of varnish and smoke applied liberally to what was perhaps, half a century ago, white lincrusta. Mr O’Hagerty had been a horse breeder and dealer until one bad day he was kicked in the neck by one of his stallions. This had left his neck and left hand partially paralysed but had by no means destroyed his animation; in fact he was such a great conversationalist and raconteur that, listening to him, we wondered what he must have been like before his mishap. He talked about Irish tinkers or, as they themselves like to be called, ‘travelling people’, with whom he had an affinity because of a shared passion for horses; and about the great horse fairs, the best of which he said was and still is the one held at Spancil Hill in June each year. Mr O’Hagerty remembered the horses being brought in to Spancil Hill, nose to tail, from as far away as Cork, by drovers who slept rough in the open and kept going on tobacco and booze.

While he was telling us all this we drank strong, orange-coloured, very sweet tea brewed by Mrs O’Hagerty and ate slices of a delicious cake, one of a number she had made for Halloween, which was remarkably fresh considering that she had baked it thirty-seven days previously. The only other visitor while we were there – he could scarcely be described as a customer – was a rather grim-looking elderly priest who had come to empty a collecting box for some overseas mission and who didn’t seem exactly overjoyed at what he found in it.

All Crusheen’s other booze customers were next door on Clark’s premises, where, some said, the best Guinness in Ireland was served. Apparently, Clark got so worried about Mr O’Hagerty’s Guinness that he very kindly let Mr O’Hagerty have a set of his own pipes to connect up to his barrels, clean pipes being of crucial importance to the quality of any beer; but in spite of this poor Mr O’Hagerty’s Guinness was still not thought to be as good. Personally, having sunk a couple of pints of both Mr Clark’s Guinness and Mr O’Hagerty’s, I couldn’t detect any significant difference between them, and I rather fancy myself when it comes to appraising beer.

Then I went to telephone the farm, which eventually turned out to be so close that if I’d brought a megaphone with me I could have communicated with it direct. I wished I had. Telephoning from a call box in Ireland is a hazardous and expensive business. You place a number of silver-coloured coins on an inclined plane and watch them disappear into the machine, rather like a landslide. Once this has happened there is no possibility of getting any of them back even if, by no fault of your own, you are disconnected, unless you take a sledgehammer to it. This may explain why the IRA spend so much time robbing banks at gunpoint: to reimburse themselves, at least partially, for all the money they have lost in Irish call boxes.

Mrs Griffey, the owner, was getting dressed up to attend an end-of-the-year do organized by Pan Am in Limerick, but whoever answered said it would be fine for us to stay. There was no food in the house, however, so we should find a place to eat either in Crusheen or in Ennis (ignoring the fact that we were on our bikes and it was fourteen miles to Ennis and back).

The third pub in Crusheen, we were told, did evening meals; but when I went to ask it was closed, it looked as if for ever. So we went to the supermarket and Wanda bought the ingredients of a dinner which, if necessary and providing the stove was still going at the farm, she could cook herself.

Then, in the teeth of the gale, we set off on our bikes for the farm down the N18 in the direction of Ennis, as we had been told to do. It was not marked on the map, but no one I asked could read one anyway. ‘It’s only half a mile,’ said someone, a bloody know-all if ever there was one. ‘Sure, and you can’t miss it, you take a roight after the railway bridge. There’s a great soign.’ And more in the same vein, which in Ireland usually means that you will never find what you are looking for and you yourself will probably never be seen again.