Ireland

A Travelogue

[Author’s note: In the summer of 1992, my husband, Hal Cannon, and I spent a little over three weeks in Eastern Europe and then moved on to Ireland for three weeks before traveling in France and Italy. These are a few jottings from the Celtic portion of our trip.]

When we arrived in Dublin, we rented a car and took several leisurely days making our way over to the West Coast. We particularly wanted to visit Galway but arrived there on Bank Holiday. The town was filled with teenagers and college kids and the general hormone level was more than we could handle; we headed south in search of something quieter.

We stopped for the night in Ennis and broke our bed & breakfast tradition to stay in the Queen’s Hotel. We were given a lovely corner room with a window seat.

That night we walked around town in search of a music session and found one in O’Toole’s Pub, a small, smoky, unfussy place. There were three women players — a concertina player we later learned had won the all-Irish, and two sisters, one a pretty fiddle player whose chin doubled on the chin rest when she played but disappeared entirely when she took her fiddle down, and the other a keyboard player who supported her electric Yamaha on her knees. This second sister had an air of complete lassitude, as if she were catatonically depressed, and sometimes she rested her head on the bench behind her while she played and closed her eyes, as if asleep. Other times, between numbers, she laid her head on her hands on the keyboard itself and dozed.

Among the other players were a left-handed fiddle player of forty-five or so and an older gent on snare drum and woodblock. The fiddler, we learned later, originally played right handed but switched when he lost three fingers. The drummer played very softly but effectively, humbled to his task, the sticks resting weightlessly in his hands. Later, when he got up to ask Mary, the bartender, for a pint, he looked twenty years younger than he did when he sat to play. There were also two Englishmen in the group, one a dark haired fellow, maybe thirty, handsome but shy, on the bouzouki (a Greek stringed instrument), and another, taller and blond, on the Uilleann pipes. “That man’s a fine piper,” the drummer admitted to us later, “even if he is a Brit.”

The music seemed competent but uninspired when we first came in, but took off as the evening progressed. “That’s sort of how Irish music is,” Hal explained to me later. “Your job is to play it as well as you can and the spirit will come or it won’t.”

Late in the evening, a tottery old fellow pulled up a stool and took out his mouth organ. He was a tall fellow with a great breadth of shoulder but a head much too small for his body. His face was no larger than a child’s, so red with a lifelong taste for Guinness that even his ears seemed to glow. He was squeaky clean for his night in the pub, his dark hair freshly cut and his face so clean shaven I could almost feel the razor.

And then he started to play. His hands were huge against his small face and they were worker’s hands, scrubbed pink except for the fine lines of dirt ground deep in his nails and calluses, the joints swollen with a lifetime of labor. It was something to watch him play, his face all but disappearing behind his great hands, his eyes squeezed shut in concentration. He sat beside the keyboard player, and when the tune ended he set down his harp and took one of her frail hands in his huge ones. “Lily,” he said, “you’re so tired tonight. You need to take better care of yourself, get some rest.” She brightened considerably under his tenderness.

The pub closed at midnight and we made our way back to our room. The streets were still full of school kids and we sat in the window seat and watched them for a long time before we went to bed.

We woke early in the morning to a thunderstorm. I wrapped myself in a blanket and returned to the window seat. Rain came in great grey sheets along the now-deserted streets, thunder rattled the windows, the lightning seemed only blocks away. The downpour lasted an hour or so and then settled into a steady grey drizzle. We snuggled back in bed for a few last minutes of drowsing.

Later, while we were at breakfast in the hotel dining room, a large woman with grey hair and great, amazed eyes came in and sat down heavily at the table beside us. She was breathing hard and immediately started fanning herself with a menu. “Isn’t it hot,” she said to us,”terrible, terrible hot. And no, Thomas,” she said to the waiter who had arrived with a pot of tea, “it’s too hot for tea. Bring me some juice, be a dear.”

She turned to us again. “Don’t ye think it’s scorchin’? The thunder and lightnin’ had me near scared to death. I’ve been under me covers and I’m so hot I could boil.” She spoke with a thick brogue; “thunder” as “‘tunder;” “think” came out “‘tink.”

“Don’t ye just hate the thunder, tho? Don’t it give ye a fright? It forks, you know, and there’s no saving the pair of you.”

I told her I found it exciting.

“You like it? You’re Americans? In Canada, they say it rains like this all the time.

“You’re Americans, you say? Well, you must like it over here, ye don’t have to be lookin’ over your shoulder all the time. Oh, they say ’tis awful over there — isn’t it? I went to London for me holiday and I fell down in the street. I was wearing these very shoes” — she shows us her shoes, a pair of black patent leather pumps with high, gold heels — “and I fell down flat, a terrible gash on me knee. No one would help me or even quite look at me. That wouldn’t happen here, I should say. They’d give you a hand. But there, they thought I ’twas drunk, can you imagine. A God fearin’ woman like me.

“What do you think about the state of the world?” she asked us. “Don’t you think it’s all going to come crashing down like a pack of cards? It’s prophesied that Mary will appear and she has, in this very city, but no one wants to hear it, no want wants to know. You won’t be able to tell the winter from the summer, the prophecies say, and faces will dance in the flames. The priests will lose their religion, and the girls will lose their shame. And what do you think we have right now, I ask you. What do we have right now?”

We heard about a singing festival a bit further north, in Ennistymon, and turned back up the coast. That town, too, was full for holiday, with the triple enticements of a horse show, a produce fair, and the singing contest. We headed first for the fair grounds. The horse show had finished and the main green was filled with dancers. We watched for a while and then wandered over to hear a tinker hawk his wares.

The official singing contest had also finished but the town was still filled with singers and the best seemed to be congregated in a tiny pub with a Gaelic name that someone later pronounced for us as something close to O’Erin. The pub was jammed but Hal noticed a back door and gradually we worked our way in. The clientele had been singing and drinking for a long time and was lively, but they respected the music. Some singers were clearly better known that others. One white-haired woman sitting along the wall would have been lost in the din but anytime she started to sing, people made a place for her. “Shhshh,” they’d say, “Margaret’s going to sing.”

The singing was unaccompanied, in the old style known as shah nos. Each time a song began, folks would murmur approval and call out encouragement — “lovely,” “quite nice” “lovely imagery, that” High spirits and Guinness kept things from becoming too reverent but any time talk or laughter threatened to overwhelm a song, there where strong shushes and calls for order. There were recitations as well as songs, some in English and others in Irish.

A grand-parently couple ran the pub. The woman, trim and white haired in a navy dress, handed around plates of sandwiches like we were intimate friends who had turned up just in time for tea. The husband was tall and stoop shouldered and wore wire rimmed glasses and a permanently perplexed look as he drew perfect pints. Their granddaughter — or perhaps youngest child, a dark-haired wisp of about twelve — helped out, passing sandwiches and picking up used glasses. She was shy and yet earnest in the way she pushed through the crush of people in order to serve them.

We left town late in the afternoon to find a place for the night and ran across a bed & breakfast about five kilometers from town called the Doorty Farmstead. Mary Doorty greeted us at the door and ushered us into the lounge, where a peat fire glowed warmly. “Me lovely husband died quite sudden, bless his soul,” she told us. “I’m all alone now but I do fine. I just keep a few people here, three bedrooms, people like yourselves, the better sort, none of that riffraff. Me sister is down for to help me this weekend, it being so busy, you know.” She drew our attention to some pamphlets on the area, particularly one on the high crosses of Kilfenora, for which the area is famous. “The most famous of all,” she said, “is the Doorty Cross, which dates back to the Twelfth Century, and which is from me husband’s family. Dear John is buried beneath it, just two years gone. You browse as ye like,” she said, “and I’ll fetch you some tea. The toilet’s down the hall if ye be needin’ it.”

The farmhouse had been updated with a different, brightly patterned carpet in every room: orange geometric in the lounge, fuchsia flowers in the hall, turquoise paisley in our bedroom. A sign pointed us toward the single bathroom with its “toilet and electric shower” and its yellow-daisied carpet; our room had its own sink. After we had finished our tea and brought in our bags, Mary showed us her garden — parsley, rosemary, lemongrass, many varieties of phlox and roses — and told us about the mountain gentian, a wild violet that grows only in this part of Ireland and in the Swiss Alps. She introduced us to her dog, an elderly, lop-eared fellow with a limp. “I call him Richard Burton,” she said fondly, “because he’s such a good actor. He’s all crippled up now ’cause he wants your attention but he was a spry one this mornin’ when we were out on our walk and he ran after that hare.”

She showed us where to find the key when we came in later that night. She and her sister might not be around, she said, for they, too, were going to town to hear the music in the pubs. She suggested we take showers — “If ye be wantin’ the hot water, ye should use your portion now, before the other’s come back.” Later, when we were ready to return to the village, we asked her how to pronounce Ennistymon. By way of an answer, she told us a story:

“When I was a small girl, I visited Ennistymon with me cousins and I thought the name was Ennis-Diamond. All me life after that, I was wanting to get back to that town where they had the diamond. I felt drawn to this place, like to a magnetic force. As soon as I grew up a bit and was able to get about on me own, I came back. I wanted to find the diamond, you know. And I did. That’s when I met me beautiful husband.”

The next morning, after breakfast of brown bread, eggs, and rashers of bacon, we loaded the car. When I came back inside to thank Mary and say goodbye, she complimented me on the burgundy cape I had bought a few days earlier at a hand weavers’ mill in Avoca. “It’s a lovely shape,” she said. “Was it terribly dear?”

“I suppose so,” I said,”but not compared to what you’d pay in the States.”

“I suppose it must have been two-hundred pound?”

“Oh no, it was only forty or forty-five.”

“Forty-five? Such good value. Tell me,” she said, suddenly girlish, “may I try it?”

She stepped out of her slippers and into a pair of pumps and I put the cape on her shoulders. She twirled in it and laughed. “I’ve seen people wear things like this to mass, but they’re so heavy and stiff. This has such a lovely drape. Will ye tell me where ye found it?”

I did and gave her a card with the hand weavers’ number.

“You looked so lovely passin’ the window earlier,” she said, “your hair down and that lovely cape. I said to me sister, ‘doesn’t she look like an Irish girl?” And then Mary Doorty put the cape back on my shoulders and gave me the biggest hug.

Journal entries from the same trip: Eastern Europe; France and Italy.

©1992, 2006 by Teresa Jordan