At the Edge of Ireland Read online

  So who’s this Pete McCarthy? you might well ask.

  Well, sadly he’s now the late Pete McCarthy, who passed away from cancer in 2003 at far too young an age. But from all accounts he lived a full life as an actor, writer, professional scriptwriter and comedian, BBC radio commentator, traveler and travel filmmaker and TV travel program presenter (and seemed to possess the potential for a dozen more multi-incarnations). And it was his hilarious and very popular travel book, McCarthy’s Bar, that was another reason Anne and I felt lured to Beara. Pete had set himself the enviable task of meandering around the west of Ireland in search of bars that bore his surname. Despite an Anglo-Irish identity, he had a strong leaning toward the latter and was an enthusiastic proponent of the “eighth rule of serious travel”: “Never pass a bar that has your name on it.”

  So—using a montage of extracts from his book—this is how Pete came to discover the magic of Beara for himself:

  [An impromptu conversation with a builder in a bar.] “So, looking for ya roots are ya? Like all them poor feckin’ Yanks in Killarney…Where you heading next then? Have you been out to the Beara Peninsula?”

  I never have; a piece of news which is greeted by sighs of pity and incredulity all around. I’ve heard about it all right, a wild strip of land poking out into the Atlantic off the Western fringe of Cork.

  “It’s a beautiful place. You’ll find plenty of McCarthy’s out that way to make you feel at home.”

  It’s a nice idea but there just isn’t time to go to Beara.

  “And there’s a MacCarthy’s pub out there, real old style, never been changed.”

  “I really couldn’t change my plans now.”

  “Why the feck not?”

  [Another customer joins in.] “I reckon there’s only two kinds of people, the Irish and the wannabe Irish.”

  Clearly she’s one of the former, but what if I’m one of the latter?

  Pete finally has to make a decision in the gorgeously verdant, Gulf Stream–lapped town of Glengarriff. Go north to the Ring of Kerry and the Dingle Peninsula or be serendipitous and take the narrow road west down into Beara.

  A man after my own wanderlusting Anglo-Irish heart, Pete decided to go west into

  an altogether wilder place…with stark mountains of biblical ruggedness…Radiant shafts of sunlight pierce the dark bruise of cloud cover and hit the water with a metallic flash, as if to prove there is a Creator and his taste is for random and terrifying beauty. By heading for Beara instead of following my intended route I suppose I’m hoping to leave the world of plans and arrangements behind, lay claim to my share of Ireland’s spontaneous and disorganized ebullience and see if I really fit in. I’ll simply turn up at MacCarthy’s bar and see what happens. If nothing does, I can go away again.

  So God bless you, Pete, for following the finest of travel instincts and spontaneously pursuing the hidden and the authentic—and in doing so, encouraging us to follow you in your serendipitous adventures into Ireland’s “hidden corners.”

  And this is what I’ll be describing in this book—how a nation, currently booming with newfound prosperity as part of the European Union, and known proudly now as the Celtic Tiger—still manages to hide away such little gems of authenticity and awe as the Beara Peninsula. But from time to time, Anne and I will also “disappear” and just like Yeats dreamed:

  I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

  And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made,

  (at least we’ll build it in our imagination…).

  And we’ll be celebrating the unique spirit and humor of Pete McCarthy too. May you rest in peace and also continue to share your laughter wherever you are…

  SPRING

  The Season of Imbolc

  ACTIVE LIFE IN THE IRISH COUNTRYSIDE explodes (something of an oxymoron in a nation renowned for its laid-back approach to life and living) after St. Patrick’s Day, on March 17, and that old Gaelic greeting once again celebrates the arrival of spring—Céad Míle Faílte—“a hundred thousand welcomes.”

  When the wild and pagan-tinged Imbolc and Brigid’s Feast festivities are over (much to the relief of the local Catholic clergy), and the shamrocks drooping from buttonholes have finally wilted—the year unveils itself again, and the rush of new life truly begins.

  The three incarnations of St. Brigid are revitalized—the inspired poet and keeper of ancient traditions; her creative strength of the blacksmith; and her nurturing hands of a healer and midwife. The spirit of Taispeach—the great fertility and fresh-life romp—surges across the land. The fields and the ribboned roadside hedgerows St. Brigid see their first flush of color, the daffodil. The winter winds have abated, the land is warming up, giving way to budding foliage and swathes of primroses that carpet the ditches with creamy yellows and the softest of greens. Even the bare boglands and the humpbacked mountains behind them and the cozy white cottages and the dark fortifications of old peat turf-mounds that seem like the flame-blackened ruins of once mighty forts—all these are now sprinkled with glittering Seurat-like pointillisms of sun-flecked color and the bouncing white dots of newborn lambs.

  St. Brigid

  Curlews and cuckoos call, and ravens replenish their nests. The blackthorn blossoms powder the field edges, followed in mid-May by high flurried walls of white thorn and hawthorn and all their explosions of berries, devoured in their billions by the field birds. Gorse blooms fresh-golden on the moors and bluebells carpet the small woodlands. At this time of the year the air is heavy with heady aromas—not the turfy smoke of winter but rather the life-stirring fragrance of fresh growth following sudden short April showers. And the ocean too. That aroma too is different—particularly the first earth-breath of morning rolling in with the vast Atlantic undulating under a huge pearlescent sky. And along the water’s edge, tiny dunlin and sanderlings skitter in hyperactive clusters and village children play in the rock pools and, way out there, on the horizon’s edge, and along the beautiful Allihies beach, the great colonies of kittiwakes, razorbills, guillemots, and gannets regain and aggressively retain their precarious perches on Little Skellig and other offshore sanctuaries.

  And we smile. The bone-chill and blackness of winter are gone. The days are warmer, longer, and full of fresh beauty and hope. And we’re moving in…

  Sláinte!

  1

  Coming into Dublin

  WAY BACK IN MY NEOPHYTE DAYS as a wannabe adventure-travel writer, a curmudgeonly editor of a long-defunct travel magazine once insisted that I should avoid all negativity in my submissions because “people reading pieces such as yours really don’t need to hear about the ‘reality’ of places—just give ’em the cheerful, positive, upbeat stuff,” he said. “Tell ’em only what they want to hear.”

  In hindsight I realize that most of my erratic life has been based on the motto “learn the rules first and then break them fast.” So I begin this particular chapter awash in negativity. For example: it was not a good idea for us two neophyte “blow-ins” (tourists, visitors, and other “outsiders”) to head straight into the heart of Dublin on our first hour after arrival from New York in a hired, right-hand-drive car with manual shift and all the turbo power of an egg-laden sea turtle. In fact, following the dire warnings from the rental car staff about Ireland being one of the three most dangerous places in the world to drive in and about how all credit cards, even the elite platinum cards, refused to provide ancillary insurance coverage in the country—it was possibly not a good idea to hire a car at all.

  We even began to have doubts about the country itself as we detected little from airport personnel of the “Warm Irish Welcome” that we’d been promised in all those positive brochures. And it was not a good idea for me to say to Anne, “Look, I found the street on the map where our prebooked hotel is located, so all you have to do is to guide us there.” It was not a good idea first, because Anne hates reading maps and will sit slightly traumatized staring at all the colored squiggles and barely legi
ble type and forgetting to actually lift her head to check the passing scene for street names and the like (not that it would have made any difference in Dublin, because the street signs are either nonexistent or so small and cramped with bilingual Gaelic translations that you can’t read them from a moving car anyway).

  Second, because Dublin is the proud possessor of one of the world’s most illogical and diabolically confusing one-way-street systems, which makes you wonder how even experienced residents ever find their way to anywhere around the inner city. Even the taxi drivers are flummoxed to the point where we later found it useless to request their services. They were invariably more confused by all the one-way systems than we were.

  And third, because despite a very enticing Web ad that had lured us to advance hotel booking, the hotel was actually not a hotel at all, but merely a front office for a random scattering of rentable apartments all around St. Steven’s Green park. And the office, of course, had a different name from the one on the Web site. And the name-plate was so small and insignificant that when, after hours of inane looping around downtown Dublin, we were finally parked outside the office, and it was still impossible to confirm from the car that we had in fact arrived. And, in fact, we hadn’t. We signed in, parked the car in one of the murkiest, deepest subterranean garages it has ever been our misfortune to negotiate, and then followed a poor immigrant from Nigeria who had been sent to manhandle our luggage along almost half a mile of sidewalks to a tiny, disheveled apartment that was to be our home for a few days. We complained vehemently about the garage, the luggage system, and the apartment and—our first break of the day—we were rewarded with far larger and newly refurbished accommodations.

  And it was not a good idea to go in search of the Irish tourist office. “Sure, it’s just a little stroll down the street and across the bridge,” said the girl at the hotel reception desk. But it turned out to be a very long hike, and the office wasn’t there anyhow. It apparently had been closed up for weeks and vanished without leaving so much as a relocation address (a rather odd debacle in a country so dependent upon the goodwill of tourists).

  And it was not a good idea for me then to look at the map and say, “Well, why don’t we have a stroll into town…It’s just a short walk across St. Steven’s Green.” It was, in fact, a major ambulatory expedition along broad streets lined with officious-looking, Corinthian-columned, neo-Stalinist monoliths until—ah! the relief of it all—we suddenly entered that oasis of green calm. There were bubbling fountains, chirpy choruses of birds, and cool shade beneath enormous oaks and beech trees whose branches curved gracefully to caress velvety grasses and vibrant flower beds. A small sign announced we had discovered—almost by chance—this beautiful twenty-two-acre Manhattan Central Park in miniature created around 1880 courtesy of the Guinness family, prime doyens of Dublin’s affluent aristocracy.

  Statues abound here—including (of course) James Joyce, a Henry Moore memorial for W. B. Yeats, and a huge monument to Wolfe Tone, one of Ireland’s greatest nationalistic leaders. A band was tuning up on the delicately filigreed bandstand. But most appealing were the people—locals sprawled on the lawns eating their sandwich lunches, lovers nestling and nudging beside the winding footpaths, travelers of all ethnic and national origins slowly wandering and wondering at the encyclopedic array of plants and trees—and Anne and me, utterly beguiled by this mellow, magical place.

  The mellowness ended abruptly as we emerged on the pedestrianized Grafton Street, whose gay (in all its interpretations) intimacy, retail hoopla, street-busker rowdiness, and crowded youthful brouhaha, complete with tumults of giggling teenettes zigzagging about with hen-party abandon (if you’ve never seen one of these events—don’t!), made us realize that, finally, we had found the heart, or at least one of the three hearts, of Dublin. And although it was not a good idea to have left the umbrella back at the apartment because of regular tumultuous downpours of spring rain, we still laughed and hugged in delight at finally sensing the enticing people-powered spirit of the city.

  And where better to celebrate our belated arrival in this place of creators, writers, con artists, and cock-a-jays but at John Kehoe’s little pub on Anne Street South right next door to the tiny and oh so gorgeously redolent Sheridan’s Cheese Shop. (This immediately became our favorite retail focus, with the possible exception of the nearby Marks & Spencer Food Hall.) And what a greeting we received at that pub, one of over a thousand within Dublin’s city limits. People turned and smiled; the barmaid welcomed us as if we’d been regulars for years, and in no time at all, our very first beautiful, black, smoky-flavored, cream-topped pints of Guinness were set before us. Although here I exaggerate a little. It wasn’t really “in no time.” It was actually quite a few expectancy-laden minutes because we’d forgotten the ritual three-stage (sometimes even four) process of stout pouring, whether it be Guinness, Murphy’s, or Beamish, the three traditional choices across the country, none of which are actually produced, sadly enough, by an Irish-owned company.

  Our initiation into pub protocols began as we watched the ritual of “the pour,” which is enticing yet very deceiving. The barmaid’s first pull fills a pint glass rapidly and you’re licking your lips, waiting to plunge into that semisolid cream-foam head. But then her pull ceases when the glass is two-thirds full and it’s set down “to rest” while she’s off serving someone else. Eventually, two long minutes later, she’s back and slowly easing the remaining third of the stout into the glass…almost to the top. But it’s that “almost” that’ll drive you mad with pent-up desire because you have to wait again—sometimes for up to another full minute—until a final ridiculous little flick of the pull-lever injects that last ounce or so of black liquor to provide a perfect cream topping, which she may or may not skim with a knife, in a final finessing flourish before handing you your reward for almost unbearable patience. And so I celebrate the daily patience of all those other “punters” who wait at each of Ireland’s 25,000 Guinness “taps” for their glasses of “black.” And each pub seems to have its own little pouring idiosyncrasies and customs. Some in Dublin insist that the best places are Neary’s, Long Hall, and Stag’s Head; others, particularly the writers and journalists, insist it’s Doheny and Nesbitt’s, but in terms of an overall favorite, it’s invariably the mighty Mulligan’s, founded in 1782 and still said to offer “the best pint in the whole city—and maybe the whole of Ireland!”

  Is it worth the wait? Indeed it is, although to reduce further waiting time, it’s best to order the second pint immediately upon receipt of the first.

  We had been dreaming of this moment for months, but first, permit me a pet peeve.

  As any regular bar-frequenter knows, there are thousands of erzatz versions of Irish pubs around the world complete with elaborate etched glass; brightly burnished quaint shamrock-adorned signs for O’Shaunahay’s, O’Flanagan’s, or O’Doherty’s; antiqued Guinness signs; pseudo bar pulls; red-haired (dyed) non-Irish colleens; lots of diddle-di, diddle-da music; and inane signs inviting customers to KISS ME I’M IRISH. They’re everywhere. Some even have genuine Irish pub doors ripped off some poor bankrupt place in a godforsaken Irish bog-village no one’s ever heard of. Others boast fiberglass yellowed oak beams (to suggests eons of tobacco-pub-fug), a dartboard or two, and maybe even a few clay spittoons scattered about, although no one ever seems sure what to do with those.

  And it really doesn’t matter. Because it’s all a load of “feckin eejit junk” that bears no more relationship to a real Irish pub than a tame house cat does to a wild savannah leopard. And having got all that off my chest, let me introduce you to the truly authentic Dublin watering hole of Kehoe’s, just a short stroll off Grafton Street.

  We couldn’t have found a more Irish city pub than this one, described in one revered guidebook to Ireland’s taverns as “possibly the best pub in the world.” (Similar accolades celebrate the eight-hundred-year-old heritage of the nearby Brazen Head, long regarded as the hotbed nexus of nefarious
plots to rid Ireland of the hated British.) And according to a sign outside on the side wall, even the great “Ulysses man” himself, James Augustine Joyce, wrote that “in the particular is contained the universal. Kehoe’s with all its charms and beauties will surely live for generations.” And indeed it has, with its aged yellowed ambience, old wood paneling, etched glass, ancient worn floorboards, and a clientele that knows this is one of the best places in town to enjoy the best of times. Even to the point of offering impromptu hugs, which I received from one charmingly exuberant youngish lady who said she loved my white beard and “lovely tummy” and had always wanted to say a special thank-you to dear old Santa Claus for all his kindnesses. So—as we were leaving—she did just that, which halted our departure for a while longer as we chatted with her coterie of female friends (three more hugs here—I tell you, this Santa beard is a keeper for life! Not too sure about the tummy, though…) and managed to squeeze in another pint or two before we finally eased ourselves painlessly out the door as they all wished Anne and me a very good night—oíche mhaith duit!

  Despite the abrupt deluges, which were interspersed in schizoid Irish fashion by brilliant periods of bright, hot sun and blue skies, the exuberance and vitality of the crowds on Grafton Street washed us northward into the tiny squares and courts of the Dickensian Temple Bar Quarter and eventually to the River Liffey itself.

  Writers often make this stream seem as imposing as London’s Thames or Manhattan’s East River, but in actuality it is an enticingly modest stream crossed by stubby bridges that provide easy intercourse between the twin urbanities on either side.