At the Edge of Ireland Page 6

  JUST OUTSIDE TOWN AND across the bridge over the Kenmare River is an alluring sign pointing westward to the Ring of Beara.

  “What d’you think?” asked Anne (already knowing the answer). “Go south to Glengarriff and then into Beara. Looks like a pretty wild drive over Caha Pass and through some rock tunnels. Or turn here?”

  It was a larky-spirited no-brainer. To the south were ogreous tumblings of dark clouds over a hulking muscular mountainscape. The sun seemed hostaged in a tomblike fug. To the west, however, a narrow road meandered past tree-lined meadows into a misty haze of pearlescent light. Smoke-serpents curled languorously from the chimneys of small cottages…

  So—west it was. And we congratulated ourselves on our choice as the light brightened and the wind-rippled surface of the bay shimmered in gold-platinum undulations.

  The first few miles were mellowed by woods and copses, but slowly the trees thinned out and the shattered fangs and stumps of a far more ancient and broken terrain rose up through the winter-bleached swirls of moorland grasses. We passed a solitary standing stone locked in place by rugged drystone walls. Sunlight bathed its sturdy flanks in lacquered luminosity.

  “That was a fast change of landscape!” said Anne.

  “And just look ahead…,” I said, pointing toward an abrupt clustering of ominous bare-rock bastions rising precipitously out of the narrow, ocean-lapped plain.

  “That’s our route…over those things!?”

  “You’ve got the map. Do we have an option?”

  “Well, there’s a road that seems to twist all along the coast, but it’s shown as one lane and not recommended for large vehicles…”

  “We’re not that large…”

  “You feel like playing around backing up on one-lane Irish roads with Irish drivers honking away at us…?”

  “Not particularly,” I admitted.

  “So—I guess it’s the mountains then!”

  At least it was scenic—according to Anne. I wouldn’t know. My eyes were fixed firmly on each of the fifty or so switchbacking twists and bends that Irish drivers seemed to treat with glorious devil-may-care abandon. It didn’t make the slightest bit of difference that the road had two distinct (admittedly very narrow) lanes divided clearly by a solid yellow line. Most drivers seemed utterly oblivious to our presence as they wheelied around the bends way over on the wrong side, with tires screeching in Steve McQueen madness.

  Standing Stone

  All this came as something of a shock, as I’d read the famous author John B. Keane’s eloquent description of Kerry and your typical Kerryman and expected a little more decorum and decency on the highways here:

  The County of Kerry is distinguished by a gossamer-like lunacy which is addictive but not damaging. It contains a thousand vistas of unbelievable beauty…The Kerry attitude is spiced with humor and we tend to digress. To a Kerryman life without digression is like a thoroughfare without side streets…He loves his pub and he loves his pint and he will tell you that the visitor, no matter where he hails from, is always at home in the Kingdom of Kerry…Being in Kerry, in my opinion, is the greatest gift that God can bestow on any man…In belonging to Kerry you belong to the spheres spinning in their heavens.

  You just can’t beat that Irish blarnied eloquence. And after such praise, I can only assume that the mad drivers were all from County Cork.

  Lauragh came as a great relief. Not that there’s much to see here except the enticing subtropical exuberance of Derreen Garden. Like Kenmare, this was the outcome of another Cromwellian gift to a loyal British henchman, this time the conqueror’s trusted physician. And also, as with Kenmare, it came under the Lansdowne family’s control in 1866, which proceeded to create this masterpiece of a rhododendron and Australian and New Zealand tree fern estate in a moist, mossy microclimate on the south side of the Kenmare River. A perfect enclave in which to recover from the manic antics of those drivers.

  We agreed to keep on driving westward down the peninsula toward Allihies and Dursey Island but were fully aware of a most tempting alternative. Right by the turnoff at Lauragh to Derreen Garden, a sign pointed toward the great granite wall of shattered Caha peaks and jagged purple shadows rising abruptly from wild swathes of boggy moorland. The sign read HEALY PASS and was cluttered about with warnings for narrow roads, dangerous bends, sudden climatic shifts, avalanche tendencies, and man-eating sheep. Sorry—slight exaggeration here. It was actually a warning that the sheep up on the high fells tend to regard the road as part of their pasturage and, particularly on warm days, enjoy sunbathing on the heated tarmac and are often reluctant to move, despite their possible imminent and messy demise. A more promising sign indicated great photo ops of Glanmore Lake, the barren bastion of Knockowen, the dramatic profile of the Iveragh ranges, and the majestic Macgillycuddy’s Reeks way to the north on the Ring of Kerry.

  After Lauragh the low road scenery became distinctly less dramatic to the point where we both wondered if we should have chosen the Healy Pass route. Of course—as the seasons rolled on—we drove that wildly exhilarating sequence of serpentine switchbacks many times, deep into the high heart of Beara. We found it one of the most beautiful and dramatic drives in the whole of the southwest—a wild, empty landscape full of ghostly presences. But if we’d done that on this first day of our Beara experience, we’d have missed little Eyeries.

  Old Gas Pump near Healy Pass

  And little Eyeries should definitely not be missed, from its handful of traditional pubs and small stores (some great homemade sandwiches here) to the superb contemporary stained glass in the bright lemon-painted Catholic church. Of course, in a village renowned for winning national awards for “prettiest,” “tidiest,” and “most colorful” community, one expects to find not only a vibrantly hued church but also a whole village gone Fauvist color-crazy. Which of course it had.

  “Gorgeous!” gushed Anne.

  I must admit, I didn’t altogether share her unrestrained enthusiasm.

  Quite honestly I’m not too sure about all these fairground regalias of colors found nowadays in most villages across the depth and breadth of Ireland. At first I thought—now here’s a quaint tradition reflecting the Irish love of jollity and gaiety. “Perky as a parrot’s plumage,” I scribbled in my notebook. But my initial impression was quickly corrected by an elderly gentleman near Skibbereen on the fringe of the Mizen Head Peninsula (southernmost of the five southwest peninsulas), who, with a wide smile and all the dancing-eyed charm of a bar-hugging raconteur, stated that “the whole damned place’s gone crackers with colors you’d only see on a baboon’s ass. Y’see,” he continued, “not so long ago it was all nice and simple—whites, beiges, grays, and maybe just once in a while a touch of canary yellow. More like cream, really. Double Devon, y’might say…”

  “So why the change?”

  “Who the feck knows. M’be they thought they’d got to compete with Italy and Spain for the tourist money…Or m’be they just got bored and wanted to liven things up a bit. Whatever—it’s got nothing to do with Irish customs and traditions. It’s just a load of tourist…”

  “But y’know,” said Anne. “I like it. It seems to capture the Irish character. Colorful…and a little rambunctious.”

  The old man paused and then smiled sweetly at Anne. (Many of them do. It’s something I’ve learned to live with.) “Rambunctious…tha’s a fine word…I never thought of it that way a’suppose…”

  “Well—what’s the harm in it?” Anne continued.

  He laughed a loud belly laugh. “Ach, there’s no harm. No harm at all—let ’em have their crazy colors…Life’s gray enough as it is!”

  Well—that’s as maybe mate (old Yorkshire expression), but things were certainly not gray now in this little rainbowed village or across the surrounding smooth-crowned hills. The sun had finally graced us with its full presence. No more elusive hints of brilliance and warmth; no more pale light touching the tops of diffuse mists drifting in cupped bays of brittle, broken st
rata; no more rain-drippy cathedral-gloom naves of pines in the wooded places. Now we had azure blue skies and shrilling sunlight. Everything glowed. Cobwebs strung out among roadside bushes displayed beads of dew along their filaments, which flashed and sparkled like an Aladdin’s cave of diamond necklaces.

  “Fickle, schizoid climate here,” I said.

  “Maybe that’s why the Irish have this reputation for humor and an ironic outlook on life. If their moods changed as fast as the weather they’d all be bipolar manics,” said Anne.

  “If you listen to Sam Beckett’s plays you’d think they already were…”

  “I thought Beckett spent most of his time in France.”

  “Well—sometimes you can see things more clearly from a distance…”

  “Like those sheep ahead…which by the way are getting less and less distant!”

  She was right. The pewtery sunlight was in my eyes and I’d failed to notice a fluffy family of Blackfaces settled comfortably in the center of the road and showing no intention whatsoever of making way for anybody.

  “Stupid sods,” I mumbled, making a hasty loop around their sprawled forms.

  Anne sat silently, smiling to herself, but I could hear every word she was thinking. And they were not very complimentary words.

  HER SILENCE CONTINUED AS we entered a rather more trepidatious portion of our “Ring” drive. Our underpowered car struggled to grapple with a tortured terrain of ragged hills fringed with black precipices of broken rock, and a serpentining road barely wide enough for a single vehicle. Scores of threadlike runnels and streamlets chittered down the fractured strata, leaping off ledges in fanlike filigrees. The landscape possessed almost surrealistic Joycean images. I seemed to see slow-moving figures—great shambling forms—in the rock formations towering above the moor. There were crepuscular presences here. Then suddenly over a hump came a farm, compact and clustered up to the very road itself, and a towering white wall immediately ahead of us.

  Anne gasped—her silence broken by an alarmed “Whoa!”

  Where the hell had the road gone!?

  And then I spotted it—disappearing around the corner of the farmhouse at an abrupt right angle. Brakes on. Skid and wriggle. Wait to hit wall. Wall vanished. Car made the turn all by itself. And then stalled. Facing a long uphill.

  “Jeez!” I think I said.

  “Ditto times ten!’ said Anne breathlessly.

  “What a stupid bl—” I began.

  “Well, look at it this way.” Anne is always the optimist. “A bend like this means there’ll never be any tourist coaches doing round-the-loop, Ring of Kerry–type excursions here on Beara!”

  “Good point,” I agreed. “But a bit of a warning would have been nice.”

  Anne smiled: “There was one. I assumed you’d see it.”

  “How big?”

  “Apparently the normal size for Ireland—’bout the size of your average dinner napkin!”

  THE DRIVE NOW WAS truly serious. As the weeks went by this became one of our favorite parts of the peninsula—an adrenaline-stimulating rush of a romp through its wildest heart—a land of diminution of self. But our first introduction was just a touch too much on the precarious side. And parts of the problem were the glorious vistas that kept zapping our senses around every white-knuckle bend. Great glowing panoramas of purpled ocean, soaring cliffs, high moorland, the dark broken teeth of ridges draped with cloud-shadows, mountainsides seemingly torn by the claws of enormous primeval beasts, and that emerald shimmer of greens so richly varied and vibrant. You can’t help humming a chorus or two of “Danny Boy” and “Four Green Fields,” that amazingly moving anthem of cruel Irish history from the heart and pen of the late Tommy Makem—a man we were proud to know for a number of years before his recent death.

  Anne spotted Allihies first. “Here comes another color-cluster village.” She laughed. And she was right. Eyeries possibly wins out in terms of the overall brilliance of its hues, but Allihies had selected a more modulated range of tones that blended well with the surrounding landscape. With one notable and renowned exception—the bright Venetian vermillion red of O’Neill’s Bar and Restaurant right in the center of this small, compact community. Little did we know how this beloved nexus of local craic, céilí, and occasional dance hooley with its roadside trestle tables, cozy bar rooms, and rather more elite upstairs restaurant, Pluais Umha, would quickly become a home away from home for us (along with the adjoining smaller Lighthouse and Oak pubs). Of course neither did we know at that point in our adventure that Allihies itself would also become the base for most of our time here.

  O’Neill’s seemed a good place to pause for a ritual pint o’ the black stuff and, following the recommendation of a hiker sitting at an adjoining roadside table, two gargantuan platters of delicious fish ’n’ chips pub grub. All around the northern fringe of the village rose huge black cliffs pockmarked with shadowy tunnel holes. We later learned that this was the Puxley Family Kingdom, where an affluent Anglo-Irish family, the Puxleys, had put to good use their know-how from their Cornwall copper mines in the eighteenth century and made a fortune from reserves of copper and silver discovered here.

  Of course most of the money went directly into Puxley pockets, and the local workforce of up to 1,300 men, women, and children were as powerless as penned hens and had to endure starvation wages, appallingly dangerous working conditions, and cruel crushings of even the most modest of their pleas for improvements. The Puxleys’ importation of skilled Cornish miners also caused considerable outrage locally, particularly as they were lured here by higher wages and even new comfortable housing in a villagelike setting up on the hillside by the shafts.

  Old Copper Mines—Allihies

  The ruins are still evident today, as are remnants of the old engine houses and the shaft holes. The main one, fenced off for safety, is an eerie invitation to a vast underworld of labyrinthine tunnels. All around the shadowy maw are turquoise-hued strata indicating the rich presence of copper. Such temptations have lured speculators into occasional and more recent reopenings of some of the mines, but so far the rumored “great vein” of undiscovered ore is yet to be found.

  In later weeks Anne and I returned to wander the wild, broken terrain here. We also listened to the stories of John Terry in the local grocery store and tales whispered in the Allihies pubs of strange nighttime sightings of “things best not talked about…,” disappearances of “blow-ins” among the unmarked shafts, and spectacular “secret” finds of silver that one day might bring an instant Klondike of untold riches to this modest little village.

  There were all kinds of other tales too floating around about the mines. One of our sheep farmer neighbors later told us about sacrifices of food and whiskey that used to be made in the mine to ensure against mechanical failures and accidents. Others told us about secret tunnels linking some of the shallower shafts with the ocean cliffs and used by smugglers.

  On this first visit to Allihies we happened to meet Tom and Willie Hodge, owners of a farm near the village’s enticingly white sand beach of Ballydonegan. “Our pasture’s only thirty-six acres—with a lot of rock in it—and sixteen cows. Not much of an outfit really,” said Tom. “Ah reckon we must just like cows!”

  Conversation with the two of them was made difficult by their unique accents—a sort of combination of Irish and what sounded like Cornish brogue. Apparently many of the people here had relatives who had come from the tin mines of Cornwall in the nineteenth century and had worked in the surrounding shafts.

  “There’s still plenty of copper left,” said Willie. “If it gets to a good commodity price someone might try and open it up again. There’s always rumors—even about finds of gold and uranium—but there’s been no real interest in the place since 1967. They’re supposed to be opening a museum about the mines just up the road here, but the funds seem to keep running out. And they’ve spent quite a bit on the main engine shed up on the slopes there, but it’s so crazy-dangerous around the big
mine hole—the one with all the copper streaks in the rock, great blue bands of it—that they say they may never open it to the public.”

  Ballydonegan Beach and Allihies

  Daphne du Maurier’s world-famous classic Hungry Hill is a pretty accurate tale of the Puxley family history here but with considerable added melodrama and geographic dislocation. (The actual Hungry Hill, at 2,260 feet the highest point on the peninsula and famous for its towering waterfalls, is almost twenty miles to the east near Glengarriff.)

  Du Maurier’s description of the results of a “workers’ rebellion” here is typically evocative of her style: “The mines on Hungry Hill had ceased to work. The fires went out at last, and the smokeless stacks lifted black faces to the sky. The whine and whirl of the machinery was still. A queer silence seemed to call on the place. The mine had a deserted air. The door of the engine-house swung backwards and forwards on a broken hinge.”

  The enormous Puxley mansion, described by one outspoken writer as “a grandiose pile and lump of gross ostentation,” was built a few miles east of the mines. It adjoined the tumbled remnants of the medieval O’Sullivan Bere Castle of Dunboy perched on a Norman-styled motte-and-bailey mound surrounded by ancient yews and huge splays of rhododendrons overlooking nearby Castletownbere and Bere Island. This must have been a sturdy and most imposing monolith if the ornately decorated gatehouse here is anything to go by. But in 1601 the O’Sullivans unfortunately sided with the Spanish against Queen Elizabeth I and were largely massacred. A heroic remnant of a thousand or so supporters led by Chieftain Donal O’Sullivan sought sanctuary hundreds of miles to the north in Leitrim but were largely wiped out on their terrible “long march.”