Jaywalking with the Irish

by Lonely Planet

  The blurry assurances had something to do with sheer waterfalls, celestial mountainscapes, and gravity running in reverse. Well, wasn’t that the point of our moving to Ireland? The family was dubious as we left the garish seaside stucco palaces of Waterford’s tony Gold Coast, hard by the evidently drossly inferior Copper Coast, and struggled through various twists and turns in the hinterlands. At last we came to a shop at a remote crossroads whose astonishingly wrinkled proprietor offered nearly indecipherable praises of the day’s light. “There’s a rare might to it, that’s for sure,” said he.

  The shop had a surreal quality, perhaps owing to the clouds of steam billowing out of a side door to the man’s living quarters. Thence emerged the pungent odor of boiling cabbage and one could imagine the grinning cat face of a Mary Osborne look-alike stirring a cauldron on an ancient hearth somewhere in the next rooms.

  More curious, however, was the place’s merchandise, so threadbare and ancient that it looked as if it had been stocked via bicycle basket by a distributor from Flann O’Brien Grocers. The front shelves offered balls of string, tins of custard, and small vials of castor oil and glycerine, the latter old enough to have had their labels soaked through with untold years of exudations from under their caps. These goodies gave way to small clusters of canned peas and kippers, each ingredient separated from its fellows by generous foot-long empty spaces coated in historic accretions of dust. At the back stood a bin of dirt-encrusted carrots, every specimen so miserably stunted, leathery, and aged as to be perfect for making Bun’s carrot whiskey.

  But the most intriguing item was the proprietor’s face, gap-toothed and spectacularly weathered from what must have been decades spent in the surrounding mountains chasing sheep. The 1892 Annals of the Cork Historical Society describe a character named Tom Green with a very similar mien:

  His face must have been unusually plump in his youth, because in his old age, it was, without exception, the most remarkable make-up of folds and wrinkles, grooves and hollows, and miniature valleys and glens and mountains, that nature in an eccentric freak supplied to one of her sons . . . His head dress was a blue cloth cap, and in the expansive top of this he kept his pipe, match-box, and pocket-handkerchief, and stored his allowance of tobacco . . .

  Tom had one failing – whiskey. In these old times, a glass of whiskey, familiarly known as “a small darby,” could be purchased for a penny; and he could always tell you whether the publican gave good or bad measure, because, as his teeth were all gone, his mouth exactly held a glass . . . He would then select a potato of moderate size, and, putting it into his toothless mouth, would subject it to a process of rolling until it had disappeared and made room for another. His expression was so intensely comical that an eminent firm of brass founders in the city had offered him five shillings for a cast of his face, as they wanted something fresh in hall door knockers.

  Our present Tom Green was asked if there truly were any unusual gravity doings in the mountains above his shop. This fired a gleam of excitement into his deeply socketed eyes. “There most certainly is a strange power up there. It is enough to make a car run backward up the hill. And just think about the mighty weight in a car! How this can be, no one can explain, but it happens every time and you could set a watch to it, although of course time then would be going backward too, which might not be a bad thing, if you think about that. You just go up this road out here where the sign says Mahon Falls. Climb on past the cottages until you reach the high ground. Then you come to a cattle grid and, beyond that a small push, a white thorn tree with all kinds of trinkets in it. Stop beside it and go in neutral, and you’ll see.”

  The narrow track wound into ever wilder country, framed by astonishing canyon-like expanses that resembled the Dakota Badlands. But there lay the grid in the road, and a moment later the scraggly thorn tree, festooned with colored strings and odd patches of cloth, waited at the bottom of a slight but definite incline. Silence reigned on this Magic Road of wind, stone, and gorse. “Will we be going airborne now, Dad?” smirked Laura as I halted the car, shifted to neutral, and prepared to roll onward. Nothing happened – for a second – but at least we did not go forward. But then, this one-ton station wagon, with its more than five hundred pounds of occupants, silently began to roll, inch by inch, meter by weird meter, backward – and up, up, up. We all stared goggle-eyed as the car slowly flubbered its way at least fifty feet in reverse from the queer tree.

  “Your foot’s on the gas!” Jamie shrieked.

  “It is not, the damn thing’s in neutral!’

  In a few seconds, the car halted. But whatever had happened was beyond strange. Not believing my own eyes, and being well educated in the epistemological pathways of human knowledge, I proceeded forward in order to turn and test things from the opposite direction. Back to neutral, we returned after coming to a dead stop beside the trinket tree, and lo! the car, without benefit of combustion engine power, accelerated this time uphill at perhaps twice the speed as before. In fact, the thing refused to stop at the crest and kept gaining demented power until I jammed on the breaks. “Give me Spielberg!” I cried, and of course the children scoffed.

  Were the sheep dotted high on the ridges laughing? Did their own feet adhere to the ground? Was Ireland dangerous to one’s every bearing?

  “You would have to find this spot, wouldn’t you?” said Jamie, knowing that I had once written about a gravity-obsessed Roger Babson, whose college named after him in Boston boasts Isaac Newton’s rebuilt library, a transplant from the original apple tree, and the core works of the Anti-Gravity Research Foundation, along with a twenty-foot-high globe marking dozens of spots around the world where bizarre gravity-defying phenomena have been voluminously recorded. But the Comeraghs’ Magic Road was not indicated on that globe, so in the pursuit of science, we crisscrossed this enigmatic stretch over and over again to test which way the car’s wheels would roll – uphill or down? – on their own. And soon we were joined by another car, and then a second, doing the exact same thing. Here we were at the top of the world in a conga line of gravity-defying Irish. Beautiful.

  In search of more commonplace reality, we hiked to the glorious cascade of Mahon Falls, making a game all the while of competing with the kids to see who could count the most sheep hundreds of feet above us on the crests of the surrounding ridges. Everyone knows there are no reptiles or amphibians in Ireland, but the boys of course found fresh frog’s eggs in a nearby ditch and squeezed their slimy spawn into an empty Coke bottle for later enrichment in their bedroom. Strange, strange is the Emerald Isle.

  The journey home inspired us further. In the lovely coastal village of Ardmore we came upon a soaring eight-hundred-year-old round tower that protected the monks there from Vikings and local heathens. Beside it, nestled in the hill, lay the tiny, thirteen-hundred-year-old oratory of St. Declan, who some scholars believe brought Christianity to Ireland before St. Patrick. The whole hillside breathed with the sanctitude of holy ground, with the remains of a monastery surrounded by the graves of peasants and postmen, barons, sailors, and deans, and the dead from more wars than today’s students can remember. At the sea’s edge stood a quiet sculpture of the revered St. Declan embossed with the icons of his legacy – a bell, a sail, and a steeple-high round tower – inscribed with these words:

  When Declan was old he retired to his Hermitage, a place of solitude and prayer, to get away from his city where his monastery is located.

  In Art, he is often shown with his little Bell, which, according to legend, was wafted across the sea from Wales (where he had been visiting) on top of a large stone, after his servant had forgotten to pack it.

  “Follow that Stone,” said Declan, and where it comes to land will be the place of Resurrection. It is in Ardmore.

  This afternoon, there was no reason to doubt a word – about bells floating on stones, cars rolling uphill, fairy circles, the whole web of Irish wonder. In fact, we ached to share our experiences with the treasured friends of my parent
s and now ourselves, Dr. Michael Buckley and his wife, Hylda, who happened to be visiting Cork at the moment. One of their closest friends had organized a party to celebrate our arrival in the promised land that very night. How could you beat it? We’d been in Ireland for seven weeks, and still our arrival was being toasted. So we dropped off the kids and found our way to the elegant 225-year-old home of a kind of shadow mayor of our adopted city.

  “Defying gravity, Neptune thrusting your glasses from the sea, and finding Brian O’Donnell and the Hi-B? Do you have any idea of the luck you are riding over here?” laughed Mick. “I mean, I can only rejoice in the things that have happened since moving to America. Hylda, the kids, the house, the practice, and all the rest. But I can never stop feeling that the most carefree years of my life were the ones I spent in Cork. I miss this place always. They laugh louder and longer here than any other place on earth, and they do it every day. I envy you.”

  We were sipping wine in the very formal sitting room of his dear friend Michael Bradley, proprietor of a prosperous grocery shop and “off-licence” or liquor store on Cork’s North Main Street. Forty or more guests were assembled around us, our host being a friend of about every third person in Cork and a master at organizing parties at a whim. His gracious consort, the recently widowed Hilary O’Sullivan, served smoked salmon on slivers of brown bread from a silver tray, proffered with a warm solicitation after each taker.

  Mick Buckley, nearly seventy, left Ireland in 1958, along with 40,000 other members of his impoverished generation. He and his Cork-born wife, Hylda, had as always their youngest daughter, Mary, who was born with Down’s Syndrome, lovingly at their sides. Mick, who has about the gentlest eyes ever issued, looked over the merry crowd and nodded, “You’d better treasure this.”

  How could we not? Our host, Michael Bradley, impeccably attired in a pinstriped suit and blue and gold tie, was introducing us with a diplomat’s fanfare to similarly stylish barristers, restaurateurs, colonels – dozens of distinguished members of Cork’s upper classes, a number of whom belong to the select local families still called the Merchant Princes. None of this crowd would ever be caught dead in the Hi-B, and yet they had a spirit that was every bit as mirthful and quirky as was found in that place.

  Palates were constantly refreshed, and the conversation pranced in its inimitable Cork way. Suddenly our host tapped his glass with a spoon.

  “Let’s have a toast to the new Corkonians,” he announced, his lips puckering with the trickster look that half of Ireland wears so well. “I know you will all join me in wishing Jamie and David a splendid time in Cork, even if Americans do sometimes arrive in peculiar ways. Why, I believe there is a song about this.”

  With that, the urbane Michael Bradley promptly burst into “Yankee Doodle came to town, riding on a pony!” Nearly every remaining guest joined in with, “Stuck his finger in his hat and called it macaroni!” and suddenly placed their generally far from young hands on each other’s shoulders to form a train of pretend ponies as they cantered singing from room to room. Ireland of the welcomes, begod.

  A few days later we met up again with the Buckleys in Kinsale, an exceedingly pretty, if promoted-to-death, harbor town famous for fine restaurants, quaintly winding lanes, and lavish parties in seaview houses that cost over a million pounds. The property-selling agents like to call the place Ireland’s Riviera, and the briefest excursion on a sailboat, which ply the surrounding sheltered inlets in great number, yields views of shimmering, cliff-ringed bays that live up to the bill.

  Our first stop was the nearby star-shaped Charles Fort, upon whose ramparts a hundred feet above the harbor the boys scurried about with their toy guns, to the great distaste of their rapidly maturing sister. One look at the surrounding greenswards rolling forever onward to blue ocean, the whole panoply shimmering under a dance of exquisitely delicate light, and I felt yet another jolt of love for Ireland. The happy yelping of our children boosted the heart higher.

  “Isn’t it wonderful,” said Hylda, “the way the kids can run free here with no whistle-blowing park rangers roping people into official tours? Thank goodness the Irish still just leave you alone to do whatever you want at your own pace.” She herself had an arm lovingly encircling their daughter Mary, and that, too, was touching. One of Ireland’s untold secrets is the communal love that is poured out to the disabled. Perhaps this stems from the fact the country has never legalized abortion as a means, used so widely elsewhere, to eliminate looming birth defects, or perhaps it’s because the Irish still retain some heightened sense of compassion for the unfortunates once confronted everywhere in their impoverished land. Or maybe it even owes to the country’s extra wattage of surviving Christian faith. But a newcomer is struck by how much more visible and also cheerfully woven into daily life are the infirm in Ireland, where the warehousing of those with a handicap is still regarded as a moral failing. At this moment, gazing meditatively on the far ocean, I certainly wasn’t dwelling on such weighty matters. But all these truths hung like a whisper around us.

  I looked around at the atmospheric site, and Mick Buckley, his voice soft as an Irish April, began to unravel its history: Charles Fort, along with another redoubt across the channel named after King James, was built in the 1600s to protect the great fleets of barks and frigates that once used Kinsale as their last port of call before heading off for refills of West Indian rum, Chinese silk, and other supplies vital to the day-to-day life of the British Empire. These fortresses were also intended to dissuade the Spanish from repeating a certain local visit in 1601. That was the year when the powers-that-be in Madrid dispatched an invasion fleet to join with a native uprising intended to crush the might of Elizabeth I, and return the Irish to rule over their island. The Spanish expeditionary forces succeeded in seizing Kinsale’s castles, but landed far south of where they had been expected, and were soon besieged by an English counterassault that forced them to hunker down where they were.

  As a result, rebel chieftains named Hugh O’Neill and Red Hugh O’Donnell were forced to lead their six thousand soldiers from the still unvanquished northern kingdom of Ulster on a brutal sixteen-day winter march south. They would have been wise to bide their time to test the strength of the British army upon arriving, but instead quickly launched a mass frontal attack. For fighters accustomed to hit-and-run raids, this was a bad mistake, and the results were tragic. If only the Spanish had joined the action from the rear, the Crown’s forces might have been pincered and the course of history changed. But Don Juan de Águila’s three thousand soldiers blithely stayed put as a powerful British cavalry attack crushed the Irish rebels. The Spanish packed off and, after a few more flare-ups elsewhere, organized resistance to British rule essentially collapsed for two hundred years.

  The Irish remnants retreated to the lunar landscape of West Cork’s Beara Peninsula. The British, aided by traitorous locals, caught up with them there and hung eighty captives in the square of today’s quiet fishing village of Castletownbere. One by one, the remaining defiant Irish chieftains abandoned their motherland in an exodus to the Continent known as the Flight of the Earls. Quickly, the British consolidated their rule, and carried on with destroying the country’s great abbeys and ancestral castles, seizing prime acreage for their distant nobility, and generally driving the local peasantry off to land fit for goats. They referred to the native Irish as “foreigners” and forbade such types from selling so much as a potato on Kinsale’s pretty streets. The sadness of Ireland’s history, ancient and recent, is evident throughout the southwest for anyone who cares to pause.

  Nearby lay the village of Ballinspittle, which is a sleepy crossroads with perhaps a hundred houses and three pubs. Mick and Hylda took us there next to view a famous grotto with a life-sized, blue and white cement statue of the Blessed Virgin set into a steep hill. In the mid-1980s, this spot teemed with supplicants praying for miracles. The word had spread throughout a still backward and mystical Ireland that the statue perceptibly swayed as if i
mbued with a numinous inner life. God’s hand was to be seen touching Ballinspittle.

  We all stood before the shrine with a kind of rapt consternation. It did not move a centimeter, perhaps thanks to a hammer attack (since repaired) by a crazed Californian a few years earlier.

  Every few minutes, passing drivers would slow, roll down their car windows, bless themselves, and hurry on.

  “Drive-by blessings,” I said to Dr. Buckley.

  “This county has changed fifty years in a decade,” he replied wearily, “and religion has gone to hell.” But he made the sign of the cross himself, and his faith had clearly never wavered.

  We came down to a headland that spilled into the Atlantic with cliffs pushing out from either side like arched wings. The entrance to this promontory was guarded by a stone wall topped with barbed wire, and a man at the gate moved forward suspiciously.

  “What’s this?” I asked Mick.

  “It’s one of the most exclusive golf courses in the world, called the Old Head of Kinsale. They say this place was one of the first ever settled in Ireland, and people used to come fishing and walking here from all over, but the owners have stopped that. The course is said to be fabulous, but very expensive.”

  “And very hostile,” I said, filing this item for further investigation.

  The next weekend we ventured to Paddy and Anne Wilkinson’s distant Carlow refuge. Hidden by the rioting growth of pine trees they had planted nearly two decades before, their mountainside home had always seemed to be curtained off from the intrusions of modernity.

  But a new car sat in the steep drive; and the ever-thoughtful Anne, who had recently been promoted at her work for the department of the environment, looked different, more modern and self-assured than I remembered. She and Gwen opened a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and swirled it in their glasses, sniffing to decipher hidden aromas. Broiled salmon in a soy-ginger sauce, wild rice dotted with local mushrooms, and a nicely sautéed medley of fresh garden-grown vegetables were heading our way. It was delicious, and why not? Ireland had had it up to here with the donkey-cart images of old. Gwen had traversed the world’s oceans with a South African boyfriend who had become a star on the global sailing race circuit. She had enjoyed local wine in places I couldn’t even find on the map, being a citizen of a culture unimaginable at her birth.