Guest Post # 4 – Connemara
The region Connemara begins just north of the Burren, on the other side of Galway Bay. But when we told our Ballyvaughan hosts that we were heading to Maam Cross, they talked about it as if it were one of the last frontiers on mother earth. Our original plan had been to lodge with a certain Philomena, whose B&B in the Maam Valley came highly recommended – but when Chevy called in April, Philomena informed him that a return to university had forced her to suspend business until the cessation of the exam period. The nearby B&B that she, in turn, recommended was just down the road from the famous (in these parts, at least) Keane’s Bar. The proprietors at Leckavrea Lodge, however, were not home (day trip to Ballyvaughan?) when we called in around midday, so we continued north to the mouth of Killary Harbour, from where we began our afternoon walk.
And a very pleasant walk it was along the south bank of Ireland’s only fjord (though there seems to be some dispute in the literature whether it is actually a fjord or not) with the Mweelrea Mountain rising sharply from the shore on the other side.
We saw plenty of sheep all over Western Ireland, but this was the closest we got to the critters, their shaggy backs painted according to which farmer they belong.
After an hour or so we doubled back until we came to a pass in the mountain on our left that the guidebook said had once been used by smugglers (there’s a word I hadn’t heard since my Enid Blyton days.
Once safely negotiated, we spent a few minutes on the other side looking across the water at a rare patch of green marking off an estate that had once belonged to some English worthy, before following the road back to the car. I read later that the philosopher Wittgenstein had twice lived at Killary Harbour, once on a short stay and then again on a longer one when he wrote most of his Philosophical Investigations. Connemara, he was reported to have said, was one of the last pools of darkness in the world.
When at first we arrived in Leenaun for dinner we couldn’t find a place to eat. Then we spotted a modern looking restaurant that was about to open for the evening. It had large windows that looked out onto the water and Irish stew on the menu, which I finally decided to try. I’ve forgotten what Kevin ate, but I have the feeling it was something exotic. The stew was good if a little on the expensive side, and I flatter myself that the Irish stew I used to produce when living in Canada was just a trifle better than what I was sampling here. The waiter (who I also suspect was the owner) had buzzed around us all evening, but just as we finished she went into the kitchen to converse at length with the chef, possibly because he had failed to furnish my stew with some vital ingredient or other. In any case, and not known for his patience, our man Hawkins at some point marched across to the kitchen door and rapped smartly on its small window. The waiter looked none too pleased when she emerged, and to double the effect the chef appeared over her shoulder glaring angrily through the window. We paid and got out of there.
Outside I found a public telephone box, and from there I telephoned my girlfriend Juliana in Colombia, using a telephone card I had purchased on the internet. Given the setting, it is probably the most unusual call I have ever made, if not the most expensive. From there we journeyed back to our B&B. This time the proprietor, an elderly woman, was home, and she gave us the full “Yer verrry welcome!!” as she opened the door with the mien of someone paid to do so by the Irish Tourist Board. In an online review of the place some stiff Germans had called it a rabbit warren and complained of mustiness. I wouldn’t say they were wrong on either point, but such foibles just added to the character of the place – that, and the shower with water pressure so weak, it was like showering under a leaky pinhole. The lady soon had us sitting down in her lounge room and was serving us tea on paraphernalia that looked like it belonged in a museum, the roaring fire in front of us not losing any of its charm when, on closer inspection, it turned out to be a gas heater with a simulation burning log exterior.
We passed that evening, and the one after, in the same manner. I mentioned the late John O’Donohue in a previous blog entry (see this radio interview), and it was in search of the village in which he had lived that we went after unpacking, and then again the next evening on our way back from Clifden. I had found an obscure reference to the village on the internet, and had heard O’Donohue mention the presence of a giant rock in front of his house, so when we drove into the village (off the beaten path even by Connemara standards) that first sunlit evening, the plan we had formulated was to drive around and see if we could spot any boulders from the narrow lane. We couldn’t, and in the end we sought help from a spry-looking man at the side of the road who, though he sounded as if he hadn’t spoken English in a long while, and smelled as if he had indulged in some evening libations, quickly gathered himself together to very obligingly point us in the direction of O’Donohue’s cottage, adding that the the writer and philosopher had been much loved in the village.
A few minutes later we were standing in the lane behind the cottage. It didn’t particularly look uninhabited, but there were no signs of life, and in fact the Gargery-like character wandering about the slope was the only human we’d encountered in the village (was he watching us from his elevated post?). I cautiously made my way around to the rear of the cottage and my surprise at finding that the back consisted of a bank of windows, thus enabling full view of an interior impeccably illuminated by the sinking sun, was trumped by my surprise at discovering that this back room was fully furnished, its walls lined by densely-packed bookshelves.
Aside from one or two storage boxes on the floor it appeared that everything had been left exactly as it was when O’Donohue died while holidaying in France in the new year of 2008, up to and including the handwritten notes on his desk and the sleeveless leather jacket draped over his chair.
I hailed Kevin from around the front, and we spent the next hour looking around the rather large property, never straying far from the hypnotic back room. Indeed there was an impressive boulder in the front garden (upon which Kevin stood in poetic silhouette during the twilight of the following evening), but equally as eye catching was the presence, just beyond it, of a clunky computer monitor that had literally become part of the low, and probably quite ancient stone wall in which it was nestled. We felt sure that it had been placed there deliberately and probably as some sort of philosophical commentary on time or technology, or perhaps both. As soon as I had walked around the back and realised what I had stumbled upon I felt a rare urge to document the occasion photographically. Chevron was happy to help, but his camera was not among the various contraptions in his possession. So we took some makeshift pictures with his telephone and were only to happy to return to the cottage the following evening at roughly the same hour, this time armed with a proper camera (with which most of the photos here were taken).
On each of our evenings in Connemara we drove from O’Donohue’s cottage to the aforementioned Keane’s Bar, which provided us with a very pleasant and gemütlich atmosphere, the perfect forcing house for Kevin to develop a penchant, strangely dormant until I rolled into Ireland, for the good old Guinness. I had never been a big fan of Guinness myself, but in Ireland it seemed like the sensible thing to be drinking, and I found that it tasted far better here than abroad. The proprietor at Keene’s assured us that they brewed the stuff on site and after a few pints who were we to dispute this information.
Our second day in Connemara was a very full one, and not just because we loaded up once more on the Irish breakfast (or was it just me? – I believe Chewy had by now reverted to his customary mad monk brekkie of cereal and water). Our plan was to ascend the first part of Maamean at the edge of the Maumturk mountains and visit St. Patrick’s Bed, the pilgrimage site where St. Patrick is reputed to have spent the night after blessing the nearby well. It was the beginning of an established hiking route that would have taken us the best part of a day, but our guidebook and other sources I consulted were full of warnings about the deathly quick fog that could blow across the mountains at any moment, sending even the most experienced climber astray. On this morning the light cloud intermittently yielded to the sun, and as we walked up the narrow path to the bed I secretly regretted having informed Kevin of these perils, because I think we might have just about managed to pull the entire walk off, even without the prescribed compasses and flares. In any case, much has been done in recent times to revitalise the site around St. Patrick’s Bed, and today it consists of a grotto with an altar, a small chapel, a statue of St. Patrick with a sheep encircling his leg (at the bottom of the mountain the sheep were reenacting this scene by encircling our car), a contemporary setting of the stations of the cross, as well as the “bed” itself, a barely discernible shelf of rock that looked my bed in Galway look like the princess’s minus the pea.
It was a suitable spot to pause for a while in silent contemplation, after which I decided to test Kevo’s backbone by seeing how much of the adjacent Maumturk mountains he would climb before losing his nerve. Quite a bit, as it turned out, as we scrambled and panted our way to the initial summit, two experienced hikers (our only humanoid company that morning, and indeed they were equipped to the hilt) energetically passing us about halfway up. The already difficult ascent became treacherous just before the top, and as the gap between me and the good man Chevron lengthened, I could tell from his body language that he wasn’t much keen on continuing. It was worth making that final push, however, as the panoramic views from the top were truly outstanding.
Leaving a muttering Kevin behind – something improbable about the possibility of encroaching fog – I ventured along the top of the mountain on the cracked, lunar landscape in the direction I’d seen the hikers go. From a high point I waved across to the distant Hawke, who then promptly disappeared from view. After a good 20 minutes exploring the lakes hidden in the depressions, I returned to find my intrepid partner cowering (see here for a rough idea of his facial expression) behind a rock, no doubt under the impression that I had disappeared forever and that the minute he attempted his descent a belligerent band of fog would roll across his path and lead him to the edge of some cliff and beyond. He pulled himself together and we slowly made the tricky descent before following the path past St. Patrick and down to the car.
We hadn’t planned anything specific for the afternoon. After consulting our maps, we decided we could drive to Roundstone, walk around a bit, and head from there to Clifden for dinner. Roundstone has been known to promote itself as the most picturesque town in Ireland, and though I didn’t find it that beautiful, it was a pleasant enough seaside town. We stopped for a coffee and I wandered into a small bookstore tucked away at the end of the main street. I expected that the proprietor would be pleased to see me, but instead she greeted me as if I had wandered into her department at Harrod’s and couldn’t be taken seriously either as a customer or a human being. A display near the entrance contained Tim Robinson’s two books on Connemara, one of which I’d bought in Galway. I knew he lived in Roundstone so I asked whether he was well known throughout the town, to which she answered in curt condescension: “He’s well known throughout the universe.” That wasn’t at all what I meant, and she probably knew it, nevertheless I took pity on her and book the second book. Then for once our walking book failed us (or perhaps we failed it) as we got lost attempting to follow one of the routes it contained. In the end we settled on walking in a perpendicular line from the main street to the hills rising steeply in the distance, passing fields of dense, brilliantly yellow scrub and the odd Connemara pony (or were they simply a brand of ordinary pony?). At the base of the hill stood a quaint sort of man peering across to the mountains behind us with binoculars. His talk was gabbled but when we turned to see in the distance the same smoke that we’d wondered about earlier in the day, we realized that he was monitoring some isolated fires that had recently broken out.
Though Clifden is still a town, it is the biggest one in Connemara, and it had a feel of tourism about it that is foreign to the rest of the region. The main street kept us occupied, first with a store that bore my surname followed by the word emporium, and second by another advertising victuals. An ensuing discussion broke out between us as to what victuals actually were, and after concluding that it was probably just an old-fashioned word for foodstuff (or what the Germans call Lebensmittel) we sought to confirm this by consulting a dictionary at the public library. We were right, but in our excitement forgot that we might have also benefited from looking up the word emporium. In any case we decided that it was time for our evening victuals and found a very decent pub offering an early bird menu (as is the custom in Ireland – from about 7 on it gets more expensive) with multiple courses at a very good price.
Returning to our B&B later that evening we were greeted by an elderly man, presumably the husband of the old lady who had welcomed us the night before. I asked him about my underwear that I’d washed and hung up to dry in the morning, but which was no longer on the line in the backyard. He returned with a neatly ironed and folded pile of the desired items, holding them out to me with both hands like some sort of offering. I thanked him and, needless to say, was promptly informed that I was welcome. And very.
Before returning to Galway next morning we had time for one last walk, in the expansive gardens of a castle in Cong, right on the border between Connemara and County Mayo. The drive there along the Lough Corrigh was splendid, and it was one corner of this lake that formed one corner of the Castle property, once owned by English royalty. It was a nice way to end our trip to Connemara, though the manicured lawns and opulence of trees were in marked contrast to the “genuine” Connemara we had left behind.
Between dropping off our rental car and boarding the train for Dublin we had just enough time to visit the famed Galway fish & chips store one last time. Kevin once again ordered the ray and they were finally able to meet his request, though judging by the tepidness with which he ate the thing, this ray will be his last.