This
has been a difficult week to be away, and it feels somehow insensitive, writing
up our usual jolly travel journal in the aftermath of fear and tragedy in our
hometown. Not that the Irish are
unfamiliar with fear and tragedy. Indeed,
these are just two of the many dark threads that make up the weave of Irish
history. Still, the events of last week
are a somber backdrop to our adventures, even in a country depressingly familiar
with terror.
But,
to our journey.
Here
are some ways to prepare for a family trip to Ireland:
1. Make and eat shepherd’s pie or American-Irish
soda bread or just eat a lot of butter.
It’s all magically delicious!
2. Borrow “The Secret of Roan Inish” from your
friend Fiona (aye, Fiona O’Loughlin she is!) and watch it.
3. Speak to everyone in the family with an Irish
accent. “Will you be having another
cookie then, love?” “I’ll be after
getting you to put your backpack away.”
“Aye and its blowin’ fit to smite a leprechaun out there today.” This is particularly annoying to
children.
4. Watch Irish Spring commercials on the
Youtube. “Manly yes, but I like it
too!” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQk-imB1m2k The amazing thing is that someone thought
this would actually sell something.
Our
faux Irish accents drive the children mad, which of course pushes us to further
heights o’ blarney. As we board our Aer
Lingus flight (a small-ish looking plane, but as Bill explains, it’s for the leprechauns),
we overhear a flight attendant or someone remarking about
"tirty-four-tousand feet in t'air" and we smile secretly at one
another. "He sounds just like
me!" says Bill.
I'd
like to read my book, Malachy McCourt's History
of Ireland but I daren't turn on my light in case it wakes up the wee lass
at my side. He's a teller of tales, is
our Malachy, one of the famous Irish McCourt brothers, and clearly enjoying his
own thoroughly unscholarly but highly entertaining great-man take on Irish
history. “You should all know by now” he
says on p. 151, “that a thing is verifiable or not, the fact that it’s a great
story is all that matters.”
The
shamrock on the wingtip glows green in the morning sun as we descend toward
Dublin, having had to circle for almost an hour while the low fog burns off. Amazingly, the sun stays out for about three
hours. And then it rains, and gets cold
and windy, which is more or less what the pattern will be for the next week.
I
would say that the drive in from the airport is via a less-than-salubrious route,
but it does include 1) a view of a Cadbury's factory (promising), 2) signs
about ramps which momentarily confuse me because I wonder if they are a spring
delicacy here as they are in parts of the US before I realize they are referring
to a traffic-calming feature, and 3) the realization that, all signs being in
both English and Gaelic, the latter is pretty much impossible to
pronounce. Ireland, we conclude, is like
Canada, where all the signs are in French and English.
After
dropping our bags at the hotel, our first stop is Bewley's Oriental Cafe, a
Dublin institution since 1927. That's
the date of the present marvelous structure, but Edgar Bewley Esq. has been
serving the city since the mid-19th c. when he broke the East India Company's
tea monopoly by having forty tons shipped directly to Dublin. Anyone who does anything to tweak the Brits
is much beloved here. Bewley's Oriental
Cafe is splendidly art deco, and features some beautiful stained glass windows
that we attempted to capture on film. It
also features a Full Irish Breakfast.
Now,
this is important, because I believe it will be an integral element of our time
in Ireland. The Full Irish always has:
An
egg
Irish
bacon, which is kind of like fried ham
Toast
Sausage
Black
and white pudding (or puddin'), which is like Irish goetta, grains and innards
are involved, and the black is, well, blood.
It's actually tasty, esp. if you have some relish or ketchup.
A
broiled mushroom
A
broiled tomahto
And
may also include baked beans.
Fortunately
for Isabel, Bewley's also has bagels.
But there is really nothing like a Full Irish Breakfast to set you up in
the morning.
After
breakfast, we all put on a good face and stroll about St. Stephen's Green, even
though some of us really just want to go to sleep. We check out monuments to famous Irish people
of yore (James Joyce and Wolfe Tone), and their Famine memorial which reminds
me of the Partisans sculpture on Boston Common, except even bleaker. Isabel is quite taken with the Yeats
Memorial, which is hidden up a little stairway and features lots of faux-ruin
rocks upon which one can clamber about.
She is also fond of a great swan, sailing arrogantly as swans do, down
the little lake. We do have swans in
Boston, we just make boats out of them.
But she is enchanted nonetheless.
Undaunted
by exhaustion, and emboldened by the relative compactness of the city, we march
through the cold and damp to Trinity College.
A spectacular bookshop on the way, called Hodges Figgis, supplies an
Irish dictionary with phonetic spellings so we can actually pronounce things, a
detailed map of the South of Ireland for the next part of our trip, and the
latest by Eoin (pronounced Owen, see what I mean) Colfer, a favorite author of
Peter's set. So I can say I read it
before anyone else, he says with satisfaction.
Trinity
College has the same kind of tourist problem that Harvard does, except that
unlike Harvard, Trinity actually displays its treasures for all the world to
see (for a price). The big draw here is,
of course, the Book of Kells, the 9th c. illuminated book of gospels that you
learn about in Art 100. Waiting to see
the Book of Kells is not quite like waiting in line at the Uffizi, but it is
not far off, and it is colder and rainier here than it undoubtedly is in
Florence today. Once you are in, you
mostly go through an exhibit that provides some historical context, as well as
the really more interesting stuff about how these extraordinary creations were
made. There are a lot of huge blow-ups
of detail from the Kells and other similar manuscripts, which are all kind of
amber and red at this point. Peter
discovers a marvelous poem penned by a Swiss contemporary of
Team
Kells , in which this particular monk compares his command of his craft to that
of his cat's ability to catch mice. You
can see it in our pix. Kells itself was
probably created by monks on the isle of Iona, moved to the Abbey of Kells in
Co. Meath in the 11th c. after the Island was attacked by Vikings, and then to
Dublin in the 17th c. when that devil Cromwell, wrought havoc in
Ireland. (As our guide McCourt says,
Cromwell “left a mark of which all good men of feeling and justice should be
ashamed . . . .”) (147)
Anyway,
on to the Book. You enter a darkened
room . . . and there, in a steel case
that says Chubb, like the locks, with another manuscript that people only look
at while they are waiting to get to the four pages of Kells that you can see,
is the book itself. It is pretty
extraordinary, and you can surely find better sources than I to describe it,
but let's leave it with no surprise that there is a Book of Kells coloring book
in the gift shop, and that the youngest member of our party spent a fair amount
of time at dinner illuminating it.
Your
admission also gets you into the Long Library, which is the most beautiful
library room I've ever seen, and I've seen some nice libraries. It is a huge, barrel-vaulted room with
double-story bays of books on either side, stretching seemingly into
infinity. There is ALSO an exhibit of
Irish illustration here, and the oldest harp in Ireland, and so one really does
not know where to look first. In the
illustration exhibit I am quite taken by a memorial book listing the names of
the Irish soldiers who died in the First World War. Each page of names and information about them
is surrounded with a beautifully penned border of vegetation and silhouettes of
men in WW1 combat. There are eight
volumes, and the one on display is open to a page of Boylans - many of them.
The
Long Library is a working collection, and it is so beautiful that it makes you want
to take up a topic that would require research there.
Dublin
was originally a Viking settlement, from the mid-800s, and as it turns out,
they are still here! Marauding about as
usual, only this time from the backs of those WW2 landing craft that they use
for the Boston duck tours. But instead
of the comparatively sedate quack-quack of the duck tours, everyone on a Viking
Splash tour wears a goofy plastic Viking hat (yes, with the horns) and shouts
something unintelligible at passersby, under the direction of their loud,
microphoned leader. If you try to take
their picture, he'll holler something about the paparazzi and they'll all shake
their fists and ROAAARGH at you. It
sounds dreadful but is actually kind of funny.
They drive regularly by our hotel, and we know this because we can hear
the ROAAARGH through our windows. I
think they are howling in some primordial Viking protest at representative democracy,
because the Dail Eireann (don't ask me how to pronounce it) aka the Irish
Parliament is right across the street.
Buswells
is about as perfectly located as you can get.
It is three Georgian townhouses put together in one hotel, and while
perhaps a tad quirky (read: pipes that sound like freight trains when you run
the shower, small rooms, oddly shaped), it works perfectly as a central Dublin
base for us. In less than ten minutes, you
can be at Bewley's, the Book of Kells (for which you have to wait more than ten
minutes), St. Stephen's Green, Grafton Street, Merrion Square, and more.
Is
it Irish or is it Gaelic? (which I should note my autocorrect wishes to change
to Garlic.). At the Harvard Summer
School, we offer Modern Irish, and at the bookstore we visit, it is all about
Irish, including our dictionary, so that is what we buy and that is what we
shall say. Regardless of what you call
it, it is pretty much impossible to pronounce.
Buswells
is also just around the corner from The Pig's Ear, one of the temples of New
Irish cooking. Which is pretty gosh darn
good. Here was my eating plan for
Ireland, pre-departure: fish and
shellfish, butter and cheese and dairy products generally, potatoes, and
anything you can't get where we come from like samphire and carageenan
pudding. Here's my plan, post-arrival: all of the above, and more so. That smoked salmon that Bill had was
best-evah, and I am including Russ and Daughters. Peter has a perfectly perfect little personal
shepherd's pie in a charming wee small cast iron pot. Isabel has an upside down
cheesecake in a jar with berry jam and homemade hobnob crust, while I enjoy a
buttermilk custard with elderflower and rhubarb and ginger jelly. You can make silk out of a pig’s ear!
proclaims Isabel, and we all agree.
Peter
spends a certain part of dinner coming up with anagrams for The Pig's Ear: get hip, sear! Peg:
sit, hear. And so on. From that we naturally progress to creating a
new game: Irish Fictionary, in which you
make up definitions AND pronunciations for imaginary Irish words. Examples:
gariepehts
= pron: gar-EEP-echts; a pig's ear
pgcalc
= pron: p'gh-al-ch; small software company from across the sea
And so on.
He will eventually be stumped in his anagramming by Ballymaloe House,
which is harder to work with than you might think.
4/14
One
out of two taxi drivers in Ireland is the charming talkative cabbie that you might
expect to encounter in Ireland. We get
him this morning, although I was a little worried when he pointed out two tarty
looking girls noting, "there go a couple of walks-o-shame." How to explain that one?
Now,
a word about that accent. It is
completely charming, and makes everyone you talk to sound like the friendliest
person on the planet (which most people in Ireland are, as it turns out). It also sounds just like it does in the
movies (except less of the f-bomb), and when the lady at Buswells’ reception
desk mutters “jesusmaryandjoseph” in exasperation, Bill is thrilled. This becomes our slogan for the week, as we continue
to refine our Irish lilt. Peter,
displaying a form of Stockholm Syndrome, moves from being appalled at his
parents’ mangling of the accent, to attempting it himself.
The
warden most certainly did not throw a party at Kilmainham Gaol, although more
than 200 films and television shows have been filmed there, as it is a
particularly fine example of a Victorian-era prison. But Elvis, never.
You
could call this the Irish Alcatraz, but that comparison is really only apt from
a touristic point of view, since Kilmainham is part of the Irish national
fabric in a way that Alcatraz has never really been in the US. In other words, if you want to learn a lot in
a short time about modern Irish history, this is a pretty good place to
visit. Here were imprisoned great
nationalists and fighters for Irish freedom, men like Emmett and Parnell and
DeValera. Here in earlier areas were
imprisoned thousands of men and women and children – as young as five! – for
crimes such as stealing bread during the Great Famine. Here were held and executed the leaders of
the 1916 Easter Rising. Aye, it's a cold,
dank, and forbidding place, but with a fine museum that is nicely heated so you
can both prepare and recover there from your tour. And a tea room, of course.
Yet
Kilmainham was built in response to the prison reform movements of the late 18th
c. (Jeremy Bentham and John Howard, if you’re keeping track), so for its time,
it was considered quite modern.
Individual cells replaced open rooms, corrupt practices of paying off
the jailers for better treatment were abolished, light (windows) and fresh air
(no glass in the windows) and exercise (more cold air) and a standard but
no-frills diet were incorporated into the ideas about rehabilitation of
criminals.
But
Kilmainham is really all about 1916, because the leaders of that event – which
was doomed from the start, due to some poor planning and some clashing egos and
some events beyond the rebels’ control – were imprisoned and executed here. Their names are above the cells they occupied
while here, and in the grim stonecutting yard where the executions took place,
a single black cross marks the spot where the condemned stood. An Irish flag whips in the wind here, the
only color against the high dark stone walls.
It is hugely dramatic, esp. when told in the rich accent of our tour
guide. Over the course of the tour we have
learned the personal stories of many of the condemned (along with other
heart-rending tales of children imprisoned for stealing food, and women
executed for crimes of passion). There
is James Plunkett, who married his beloved in the prison chapel just a few
hours before he was shot, and John MacBride, former husband of Maude Gonne (the
muse of Yeats, and a great nationalist agitator in her own right), who took off
his blindfold saying that he’d faced British soldiers shooting at him before so
there was nothing different about this. (OK,
that one I got from McCourt, but he would have offered just as good a tour as our
guide.) There is Padraig Pearse the
leader, and Willie his younger brother who was probably only executed because
of his name . . . and so on. According
to our guide, more than 70 people were condemned to death in the aftermath of
the Rising, and public sentiment was generally not with the rebels because the
destruction they wrought in Dublin and elsewhere, and a general lack of public
support for revolution. But the British
took their time getting to the executions, and as they did this, and the personal
stories of the men came out, and in particular the shocking death of James Connolly
– strapped to a chair to be shot because his wounds from the fighting had
turned gangrenous and he could not stand – all served to turn public opinion
around. Ultimately, the others’
sentences were commuted as the British realized that to execute more would
simply make more martyrs. While the
Easter Rising failed, it was the beginning of the end for the British, sort of
their Lexington and Concord, says Bill.
In
the museum, there is a little area off to one side called “Last Words.” Here, in a darkened hallway, you can peer at
memorabilia of the martyrs, each with a shelf or two of his own (the only woman
condemned was ultimately not executed on account of her being a woman), labeled
with a card bearing his name, a cross, and the date of his death. There are photographs, locks of hair, and
poignant last letters, even Mrs. Plunkett’s wedding ring. When you turn the corner at the end of this,
you are faced with a life-size black and white photograph of the stonecutting
yard, taken from the perspective of the condemned, the black memorial cross
stark in the foreground. It is a wildly
effective piece of political theater – now you too are part of the Rising,
standing beside the martyrs in their final moments.
It is
hard to comprehend the history of Ireland, filled as it is with failed attempts
to throw off the British yoke. We
Americans are used to a trajectory of triumphant nationalism: once you show those lobsterbacks that you
mean business with this democracy stuff, off they go and you are on your
own. Why couldn’t the Irish get their
act together before the 20th c.?
It is not for lack of trying.
McCourt’s book is basically a collection of stories about great Irish
nationalists who did their best from about the 16th c. on, but who mostly
failed, albeit terribly dramatically and romantically. But I guess enough people were doing quite
well with the British in place, and the rest were so downtrodden that they couldn’t
get or be organized, and maybe because they kept trying to get the French to
help (who were sympathetic but not particularly interested in invading), or
there is that RELIGION question (they’re not all Catholic, and the Church isn’t
particularly interested in nationalist movements anyway), or perhaps just because
they just couldn’t agree on a shared definition of Irish nationalism . . . well,
it is complicated. People spend careers
on this and I am not one of them so I’ll take my stories from McCourt and leave
it at that.
It’s
fitting to go to the Garden of Remembrance at Parnell Square after the gaol, as
it is devoted to the Easter Rising. And
you can walk down O’Connell Street after that, spying the bullet holes in the
Post Office (the rebels’ HQ) and viewing monuments to earlier patriots Parnell
and O’Connell. Of course, this walk may
destroy your children, esp. if you haven’t had lunch yet, so proceed at your
peril.
Izzy
so loves W.B. Yeats that she wants desperately to return to his place at St.
Stephen’s Green. Which we do, so she can
run around, as she puts it. The boys
make their way to the National Archeology Museum where they view marvels of
fine metalwork such as the Tara Brooch.
Dinner
tonight is at The Winding Stair, another temple to modern Irish cooking, and
just as good as last night’s. Bill and I
share a smoked fish plate which includes scallops with their roe (Peter is
suspicious but after trying one scarfs them up), a couple of different kinds of
smoked salmon, some smoked mackerel, and an addictive smoked oyster pate, and
we are just getting started. Izzy
realizes that a local charcuterie platter will do her quite well, as will a
rhubarb and clementine mess for dessert.
This new Irish cuisine is working out pretty well for us so far.
4/15
I'm
a bit of a white-knuckler as Bill drives us out of the city but he is soon
dubbed Daddio Andretti by the back seat (once we tell them who Mario Andretti
is and date ourselves by realizing that Mario Andretti’s SON has retired, and
his grandson is now racing), and we are on our way into the countryside!
Destination
first: the Acropolis of Ireland, a great
ruined cathedral high on an outcrop, known as the Rock of Cashel. Once we finally figure out how to get into
Cormac McCarthy’s chapel among the ruins, we are quite taken with the 12th
c. Romanesque structure (the oldest in Ireland) that contains its original
carvings and even remnants of its apparently glorious frescoes. Of equally great importance to the good
people of Cashel is that QEII and Philip visited the Rock when they came to
Ireland in 2011. The register that she
signed, and the pen used, are carefully displayed in a glass case. Izzy seems a bit concerned that this trip is
turning out to be boring, but after hearing a guide talk about the chapel
concedes that it was a little interesting.
We
arrive Kenmare in a driving rain, and are happy to stay in for dinner at The
Coachman’s, esp. as they have live music – a couple of fiddles and an accordion
– which is a real treat for us all. I
happen to be checking the news and learn of the events in Boston this afternoon,
which will hang on the horizon of our trip for the coming days.
I
really tried to buy a sweater in Kenmare, but just couldn’t get excited about much
in Quill’s vast collection. There are
lovely poncho-like things, which I thought might have a very French
Lieutenant’s Woman look, but then I decided that they would actually end up
having about the same effect as a squash blossom necklace worn anywhere but the
Southwest. Which is to say, you wear it
once and then, oh here comes Lisa in her Irish Lieutenant’s Woman poncho again.
Want
to know how to get to Carnegie Hall? You’ll
find it on Shelbourne Street in Kenmare, Co. Kerry, Ireland. NK: http://www.carnegieartskenmare.ie/
4/16
What
is this strange light? Today is
improbably sunny, and we drive up and up and then down and down through
Macgillicuddy's Reeks, direction Killarney.
It is a very barren and dramatic landscape here among the highest peaks
in Ireland, no tree is dumb enough to try and grow up here. There are just rocks and sheep. About eight million sheep. Sometimes they look like rocks but then they
move and that's how you know it is a sheep.
It is lambing season here, and I think we can all agree that there is
not much cuter than a little lamb trotting about next to its mum. From the back seat comes: I see a little silhouette-a of a lamb and we
all belt out the Bohemian Rhapsody as we barrel down from the Ladies View, a
stunning vista apparently visited by Queen Victoria.
We
meet up with the lovely Kafka-Gibbons ladies - Patty and daughter Charlotte,
who happen to also be touring in Ireland this week - at Muckross House, which
is a beautifully situated pile in Killarney National Park. The children enjoy romping in the gardens but
think they'll find a house tour boring, and I'm not particularly interested in
much that has to with reinforcing misguided ideas about the gentility and nobility
of the landowning class (thanks, Malachy McCourt and Harvard!) so we skip it
and head on to Ross Castle which was eventually owned by more landlord types
but which started out being built by
a local chieftain so that exempts it.
Plus which, as a 15th c. tower house, meticulously restored, it is
pretty interesting. Patty compliments
our guide Siobhan (so that's how you pronounce that, says Peter) on her ability
to navigate the steep, narrow, and very uneven steps of Ross castle in such
high heels. Here we learn about where
the word threshold comes from (the step that holds the thresh on the floor in
the room), and the unsavory origins of garderobe. Basically, if you were a 15th c.
Irish chieftain or somesuch, your cloak-like garments would be full of ticks
and things when you came in at night. So
you would hang them in the garderobe, which happened to be positioned over the
pit into which the refuse from the necessary room fell. The ammonia created by human waste would rise
into the garderobe and kill whatever critters were hanging on your
clothes. End result: you smelled like pee, but you didn’t have
ticks.
At
the Torc Waterfall (way more splendid than those of Dochart by which Bill and I
were underwhelmed in Scotland many years ago) Izzy and I have a long discussion
about fairies, and what a nice place this would be for them to live in, how
they would build their houses, and so forth.
It is mossy and rocky and (today) dappled with sunlight, and really
quite perfect for all types of woodland sprites. Needing to know more about the cultural
intersection between fairies and leprechauns, we turn to our local expert
Peter, who, not surprisingly, is quite knowledgeable about a whole range of
magical creatures. He might lose his
audience when he veers into Norse mythology, except that of course all the
beings we are discussion are members of the E(M)U - the European (Magical)
Union. And since Ireland holds the EU
presidency this year, it follows that the E(M)U is here as well. Possibly even at Torc Falls.
Bill
presses us onward down the internal spine of the Ring of Kerry which is high
and barren and beautiful, and contains Barfinhinny Lake which could be how you
feel after completing that particular portion of the Ring and get down to the
coast.
We
are all a little tired and cranky but we know that we should usually go where
Bill suggests (and he is driving so we don’t have much choice) so we head
inland and upland from the coast on a one-track road to the magnificently
dramatic remains of the Staigue Fort, a 2,000
year-old circular rampart constructed without one bit of mortar. The remaining wall is
still pretty high, enough to drive me to almost tears of nervousness as my
children clamber up the narrow steps like goats (which you don't see a lot of
here, surprisingly) ignoring my pleas of NO HIGHER!
We
are very happy to find a laundromat in Kenmare.
Have
I mentioned how cold it is here? Pretty
much any building made out of stone – gaol, tower house, 12th c.
chapel – is colder than the outside, and the ladies rooms are the coldest of
all. And it is crazy windy.
Speaking
of ladies rooms, Isabel confesses to me that she doesn’t like the toilets in
Ireland, because the hole is too big.
She is afraid she might fall in. Fortunately for all of us, she manages
to keep her seat.
The
owner of the grocery store in Kenmare has been in Boston for the marathon
apparently. According to the innkeepers
at The Coachman's, he ran a personal best which is good because it got him in
about half an hour before the explosions. Everyone is talking about this, and it is hard
to switch your mind off and focus on your travels.
4/17
Today
turns out to be a day of driving and wind or maybe we should just say driving
wind. Not that much rain, but so soggy,
and the previous night's rain turned the river that runs across the Berea
Peninsula into Kenmare Bay into a raging torrent! And, it ran right beside the road out of
Kenmare so that was quite dramatic as in some places it looked like it might
breach the low banks of the road.
Have
I said what a good driver Bill is? He's
loving shifting, and doing it with his left hand as is natural for him, and all
the twisty turny ups and downs and narrow lanes are apparently fun to drive if
you like that sort of thing. Being the
passenger on the left is not quite so much fun however, as I am frequently just
a little bit too up close and personal with various hedgerows, banks, walls,
and now that river.
Mizen
Head is the most south-westerly point of Ireland, and it is indeed a dramatic
drive out there. And once you arrive
there, you get to cross a suspension bridge to go to the light, and it is on
dramatic cliffs and really spectacular. Except
for today when due to planned maintenance, the power is off so there is no visiting
the signal and it is so windy there is no crossing the suspension bridge. Which is a bummer because the view is
enticing from the parking lot, with crashing surf at the bottom of a dramatic
cliff, but we know it is better from the light.
The
wind blows us to Skibereen where we encounter baps (which are a kind of soft
roll) and a really delicious lemon-rhubarb-almond cake for lunch. Not without some awareness of the irony, we
follow that up with a visit to the local Heritage center which has a fine
exhibit on the Famine. Skibereen was
apparently terribly hard hit by this, and the impact was particularly
well-documented by visiting do-gooders and journalists and artists, including
James Mahoney, whose pictures in the Illustrated London News did much to raise international
awareness of the disastrous conditions. We learn many Famine facts from the gruesome –
young Tom Guerin, assumed dead and placed in the mass grave, only to bust his
way out and live into his eighties, with a limp likely caused by his mum breaking
his legs so he'd fit in the coffin – to the obscure – among the larger donors
to famine relief were the expected (Queen Victoria) and the less-so (the
Choctaw nation).
The
lady at the Skibereen Heritage Center was awfully friendly, as most Irish are,
but we think it may also have to do with the fact that there is not much going
on at the Skibereen Heritage Center this time of year.
You
have probably figured this out, but the Famine drove land reform – at a minimum,
when your population reduces by almost a third through death and emigration,
that will get rid of a lot of smallholders – and land reform went hand-in-hand
with nationalism, whence cometh the great patriots of the late 19th and early
20th c., so you can see where this goes, straight back to our history lessons from
Malachy McCourt and the Kilmainham Gaol.
But
we are leaving the tragedies of the modern era for a moment and are going
farther back in time, to the Drombeg Stone Circle, a 3,000 year old stone
circle set upon a nice hilltop in the middle of some very soggy fields which
are almost flattened by those screaming winds.
In addition to the stone circle, there are also remains of a hut and
complex cooking system, and it is a tidy and compact little site. When the area was excavated in 1957,
archaeologists did experiments with the water trough and stone found in it, and
determined that 70 gallons of water could be heated to boiling in 18 minutes,
by adding very hot stones. We, on the
other hand, have a very hard time remaining upright in the wild winds, so we
beat a measured retreat to our car.
The
Celtic Knot: you may think this is an
ancient design element, but in fact it is what happens to Isabel's hair in the
wind.
The
wind blows us to Ballymaloe House, which proves to be my fantasy of country
house living come to life. Right down to
the candles guttering in the drafts from the wind that rattles the huge and beautiful
windows in their frames, and the flickering electric power during the
evening. But some tea by the fire in the
drawing room, sets us up rawther nicely, as does the delicious five-course
dinner consisting of salad, baked oysters for me and house-smoked salmon for
Bill, roast duck and lamb and local hake and kassler (which, yes, is kässler
ripchen, aka smoked pork loin), and a sample of lovely local cheeses and our
children’s introduction to that glory of the UK dinner event: the dessert trolley. I swoon in particular over a rhubarb and
custard tart, and blood oranges in caramel sauce. Because you know, you can have more than one
dessert when it comes from a trolley.
4/18
And
the hits just keep on coming from Ballymaloe at breakfast. After the obligatory expressions of concern
and sympathy about Boston from the charming waitress, we check out the
offerings set up for self-service which are:
Fresh
squeezed – and it is the real deal – OJ and pink grapefruit juice
Several
different kinds of stewed fruit, including rhubarb, “breakfast fruits” (prunes
and apricots), and apples with sweet geranium
Some
mueslis, which I don’t like but Bill does, and the one with fresh apple
delighted our friends the next morning
Yogurt
from a local dairy
A
discreet jar of cornflakes
A
great vat of deliciously salty porridge, flanked by a pitcher of milk (pfft!)
and one of yellow cream (yeah!), and a dish of dark dark brown sugar
Various
home-baked breads – brown, raisin, soda, etc.
Scones
Tubs
of jewel-like jams incl. marmalade, black currant, and rhubarb ginger, all
homemade, natch
A
great Mizen Head of yellow butter
Once
you’ve loaded up from there a few times, the nice lady hands you a menu of
cooked items – eggs, sausages, rashers, black and white puddings, kippers,
fresh fish of the day, broiled mushroom and tomahto – and says, “now, what
would you like for breakfast?” After
which you are brought yet more toast, and eggs with practically orange yolks
and the freshest fish ever, and tasty sausages and rashers of bacon. Did I mention the gallons of tea that you can
have to wash all of this down?
It
is with some reluctance that we leave the breakfast table, relieved only by the
fact that we get to come back tomorrow.
Peter,
Izzy, and I explore while Bill deals with his unfortunate wind-driven
occurrence of the previous day – his car door blew open and smashed the side-view
mirror of the car next to ours, which turned out to belong to one of the very
nice young women who work here.[1] Here’s what we find:
-
the “bird sanctuary” which appears to be mostly for crows and ducks,
-
some picturesquely muddy piggies,
-
the vast kitchen garden
and
-
some massive antlers from an Irish Elk, a species which went extinct either
17,000 or 7,700 years ago depending on your source. The 10-foot-wide rack was found on the
grounds around 1700 and has hung in the
front hall of the house since. According
to the house history, around 1700 is also when a dwarf named Chuff was part of
the household.
We
finally roll into Cobh (pronounced Cove, unless you are Peter, in which case it
remains Cobb-huh) late in the morning, for a rendezvous with our travelling
pals Andy[2] and Laurent at the
Lusitania memorial. This is directly
across the street from the Titanic Experience[3], and a half-block from the
Titanic memorial for yes, that is the tragic history of Cobh: it was the last port of call for the Titanic
before she began her ill-fated crossing. Cobh was a great port of embarkation
for lots of folks travelling to the US, but tragically it was also the final
destination for many of the victims of the Lusitania, which was torpedoed not
far offshore. She sank in 18 minutes,
with 1,189 souls, and just 789 survivors.
The memorial is beautiful, and is not only for the dead but for the
living who strove mightily to save those whom they could, and who recovered the
hundreds of bodies that are buried in mass graves outside of town. But we can’t quite escape – the pained and
exhausted faces of the rescuers sculpted here surely reflect the emotions of
the first responders in Boston on Monday.
We
are determined to complete the Lusitania Experience by visiting the mass graves
in the Old Church Graveyard, but drive in about fourteen circles around the
same square kilometer of Cobh before we finally realize – thank you Google Maps
– that it is in fact about a klick and a half out of town. A highlight of this adventure was the app. 75
point turn that Bill had to make, with the assistance of a giggling Peter
marking distance to walls, to get out of the lane in which we ended up when we
lost Andy and Laurent.
Amazingly
we all end up at the right place at the same time, several expensive
international text messages later, as Andy says. But this is a great graveyard. It is terribly crammed, and bleak and
weathered and windy with scudding clouds and rain drops, and has a ruined
church with 17th and 18th c. graves, and of course the
stark rocks that just say LUSITANIA on top of great patches of bare green
grass. We search in vain for the grave
of the late Jack Doyle, a heavyweight fighter of the 1930s, great of talent and
looks, and an Irish tenor of note to boot, but also a great one for the drink
and the ladies. Doyle was a great star
who burned out fast. He died a pauper,
having spent a fair amount of his post-fight life in and out of jail for
penury, and for beating people up. Per
the little biography on the cemetery map at the gate, our Jack was brought down
by his great flaw: “a serious lack of purpose.”
And
now comes our serendipitous Ireland moment.
We decide to head for Ballycotton, an apparently picturesque fishing
village not far from Ballymaloe House.
You should follow Bill, I said to Andy and Laurent, he’s a GREAT
guide. And indeed, he gets us back to
the highway and off again . . . and then the fun begins. Off we go, merrily toodling down country
lanes, then, oops, ending up at our hotel, and following the signs to
Ballycotton, which take us, ha ha, in a circle back to Ballymaloe House
AGAIN. We are toodling down more country
lanes, not quite so merrily this time, although the backseat finds this all
riotously funny. Finally we reach
Ballycotton, and make everyone get out of the car. Andy wants a cup of tea, Peter just wants to
go back to the hotel, but we force-march everyone down to the breakwater, where
yes, it begins to rain. I forbid anyone
from going out on the slippery breakwater in the rain, sounding an awful lot, according
to Andy, like a mom. As we debate what
to do, the rain ends. The sun comes
out. And so does the double rainbow
arcing perfectly over the little fishing port, ending just below us in the bay,
so close that Peter thinks he might just be able to swim out to that pot o’
gold. Well, okay then, that was pretty
great.
Dinner
is at yet another new-Irish-local-ingredient temple called Sage in Midleton,
and features an unpronounceable-ly named stout, some local chorizo (really), a
fine monkfish, and steaks that Peter and Laurent pronounce excellent.
I
am awakened overnight by repeated Harvard message-me emergency text alerts and
Cambridge police code reds, updating me on the manhunt in our hometown. It is unsettling to say the least, to know
that all of this is happening in real time, but to be following it in the
conservatory because that is the only place there is wifi here.
4/19
I
swear to god that my breakfast cod had been swimming an hour earlier, it was
that fresh.
After
another brilliant breakfast at Ballymaloe, we are off to Lismore Castle and its
lovely gardens, which are really all that you can see because the castle is
actually the Irish home of Lord Burlington, heir to the Duke of Devonshire, for
whom there will definitely be no tag days.
It
is kind of grey today, which does not do the harbor town of Dunvargan any
favors, nor does the driving in circles to find parking or the search for
lunch. But we come to ground at a
portside pub called the Moorings, which features an outstanding fried plaice in
a convivial pubby setting.
We
are now in a bit of a rush so have to give the nearby headland a miss, along
with the supposedly charming town of Youghal (pronounced y’all), because we
have a scheduled Experience at the Jameson Distillery at four p.m.
All
the Jameson whiskey in the world is made right here in Midleton, but now it is
made in a shiny new plant next door to the picturesque 18th c.
distillery buildings where it was made until 1975. And let me tell you, they are mighty proud of
their product. We learn about the
malting of the barley, see the giant waterwheel that once turned the
millstones, drop our jaws at the vast vats where the initial fermentation took
place, and take many pictures of the beautiful, giant copper potstills – the
largest in the world – where the actual distilling occurred. We learn that Irish whiskey is so good
because it is triple distilled, which makes it particularly smooth. The Scots only double-distill, and we Yanks
are apparently in such a rush to get to our booze that we only distill it
once.
We
are all particularly intrigued by the barrels.
While there is still a master cooper (along with a master distiller and a
master blender), they don’t make their own barrels anymore. Rather, they import them from Spain (where
they once held sherry), Portugal (port), and the US (bourbon). In the US, distillers can only use a barrel
once, so once they’re done, they send ‘em to Ireland where they can be used
three times. And once they’re done in
Ireland, they go to Cuba for rum, in an interesting variation on the Atlantic
trade. It is the master blender’s job to
produce a consistent product by blending from all the casks, which of course
impart a particular flavor. Irish
whiskey also has to be aged a minimum of three years by law, but your basic
Jameson is four and a half to five years.
We view samples of various ages, all the way up to 30 years, which costs
5000 euro a bottle.
You
know who really paid attention during this whole tour, and can rattle off all
kinds of facts related to whiskey making?
Isabel. So if you want to know
how Jameson is made, ask her.
At
the end of the tour, you get a sample, of course – soft drinks for the wee
ones. And if you raise your hand, you
might get picked for the Special Tasting, which, amazingly, Andy, Laurent, and
I all do. While we hope there will be a
taste of the 30-year-old, in fact our task is to compare Jameson with some
scotch (Johnnie Walker Black) and some bourbon (Jack Daniels). This is a hard job, but we are up to the
challenge, and we all dutifully proclaim the Jameson the smoothest. For our troubles, we are given certificates
proclaiming us Master Tasters, which we brandish with great authority. And another sample, which I take with some
ginger beer and lime which is mighty tasty, so all in all we are a very jolly
group making our way back to Ballymaloe.
I
think that Ballymaloe is like Brigadoon.
It exists in a parallel universe where everything is gracious and
delicious and beautiful, and you drop in on it and experience this for a while
and then you return to your modern, industrial, less-locavore, faster-paced and
vaguely less congenial life while at Ballymaloe they just carry on serving
stewed apples with sweet geranium and smoked salmon and tea in the
conservatory. If you are lucky enough to
land there on a Friday night, you will enjoy the zenith of the Ballymaloe
dining experience, which is the seafood hors d’oeuvre buffet. This takes the place of the first course at
dinner on Fridays, and here’s how it works.
You go into the small red dining room, and take a plate and stand
expectantly around a small but laden table while a spritely lass explains to
you that there is:
Leek
salad
Two
kinds of beetroot salad
Potato
salad
Dressed
eggs (we’d call them deviled)
Various
relishes and pickles of cucumbers, carrots, and some homemade mayo
Oysters
on the half shell
Head-on
shrimp just like our Maine shrimp
Steamed
teeny clams and mussels
Picked
crab salad with fennel seed
Salmon
rillettes
Smoked
salmon
Smoked
halibut
Vol-au-vents
filled with creamed smoked haddock
Two
kinds of smoked mackerel – hot-smoked and cold-smoked
Cod
with a green sauce
Smoked
mackerel pate on little rounds of cucumber
Smoked
mussels in a mustard vinaigrette
Pork
rillettes
Country
pate (pork)
Pork
and chicken pate
Chicken
and bacon galantine
Chicken
liver pate
I’ll
have to run this list by Bill to see if I forgot anything.
We
take the server at her word that we shall have to come back for seconds. We can barely stop eating to talk about how
marvelous this all is. Even Isabel
enjoys the smoked salmon, while Peter maturely tackles his deviled eggs with a
knife and fork.
After
this you might have a bit of onion and thyme soup, and then perhaps some lamb
that appears completely well-done but is perhaps the tastiest and tenderest
lamb you’ve ever eaten. And let’s not
forget the cheese, and the dessert trolley which tonight features a
banana-toffee roulade that my husband so loved, he has requested it for his
next birthday, and a passion fruit posset (that’s like a light pudding) and a
prune and Armagnac tart, and some stewed rhubarb. And did I mention the beautiful bowl of ice
with flowers frozen into it that contains ice cream balls? I have to confess that dinner tonight completely
fells me to the point where I cannot entirely enjoy breakfast the next morning,
which is quite disappointing. But I
think about it all the way home.
4/20
All journeys must come to an end, and ours does
today. We have a long drive up to
Dublin, although it features a serendipitous stop for the loo where we also
find a 13th c. chapel ruin that has little ponies running around in
it! I frantically spend euros in the
airport, and am consoled about leaving just a little by Daniel Craig in Skyfall
on the flight home.
Here’s the best thing about Ireland: I never had a bad cup of tea. Ever.
Even on Aer Lingus, the tea from the carafe is perfectly fine. I think that a good cup of tea says a lot
about a country.
[1] Niceness is not limited to
Ballymaloe. Upon learning that we’d left a) the (borrowed) camera in the taxi
and b) Isabel’s beloved bluebie blanket in bed, the staff at Buswells promptly
bundled it all up and shipped it to Ballymaloe where it awaited us when we
arrived.
[2] We are so happy to be spending
yet another fun vacation with Andy, who is featured in our Rome journal, Roma
2011, and was an integral part of our London adventure in 2009. Now he comes with the “really smart” (per
Isabel) and thoroughly delightful Laurent.
[3] There are a
lot of Experiences in Ireland. We could
have gone to Dublinia, an Experience in Viking Dublin (but we didn’t, put off
by those splash tours as we were) and we will go to the Jameson Experience. We skipped the Ewe Experience, seen on the
road between Kenmare and Mizen Head. Kilmainham
Gaol was an experience, but it wasn’t an Experience.
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