North by West

When you do a two week tour of an entire country, even one as relatively small as Ireland at 85,000 square kilometres, you have to carefully manage your days so that you squeeze as much walking, gawking, and drinking in as possible. We did the triumvirate in spades, but that hasn't left a lot of time for writing about it. I'm not surprised that here I am, picking up the story from the lofty position of seat 7F, looking out to the clouds above the Atlantic Ocean and, having decided to stay awake, wishing that the Westjet flight attendants would come back with the coffee tray.

At any rate, the low-key two nights we spent in Galway were something of a refuel for when we hit the road on Sunday morning, a grey foggy day if ever there was one, drizzle on the windshield and a map strewn across my lap. 

Our road today went through Connemara, a national park in the western part of County Galway with wild sea coasts, boglands, and the Maamturk Mountains.

Roundstone is a village within this area, nestled on the cusp of a coastal route off the main drag that loops back to reconnect at Clifden. With the tidal flats and boats drawn ashore, this unassuming village could belong on the other side of the Atlantic, were it not for an old Franciscan monastery on a turn off that we almost missed, housing a craft shop, cafe, and a bodhran workshop.

In fact, probably the most significant bodhran workshop in the whole world, with the master craftsman sitting behind the counter. For the kids who bought knickknacks, he signed a postage stamp and stuck it on their bag—oh, and he was on the 1997 postage stamp. 

Malachy Kearns has become known as Malachly Bodhran, and his drums have been used by the crowd of River Dance, Christy Moore, and the Chieftains.

A curved rim of wood with a goatskin stretched across it. It sounds almost barbaric or archaic, but the sound of a lilting tipper against the skin creates a thumping pulse like a heartbeat, used correctly. Irish traditional music makes ready use of the rhythm of the goat, and it's certainly no stranger to the trad music in Newfoundland, either (Sean McCann, formerly of Great Big Sea, is probably one of the best players in the province). I don't pretend to be able to play worth anything, but it's a fun addition to a jam session, so seeing an artist in the corner, painting a Celtic design onto the skin of a new bodhran, amongst rows and rows of instruments of different sizes and designs was pretty cool.

Plus, there's a sound room, where you can test them out for yourself.

I gather Malachy is an honest-to-God Irishman, set in his ways. He asks for a Euro to use the toilet, has copies of emails where he got into a racket with town council taped around his shop, and stands around cracking wise to customers. I can just imagine what would happen if Wal-Mart drove up and tried to buy him out. I picked up a copy of a book he wrote, which from a cursory glance looks like a stream of conscious examination of the music and the craft and the stories he's picked up along the way. A little piece of the Irish character to bring back with me.

"No, dammit, it is alive!" he writes of the instrument. "That's what I think anyway. The first time you run your fingers over the head of a new bodhran is like bringing something to life. [...] Out of the goatskin itself, the sense of wild freedom, the sense of paganism of nature, of the freshest of fresh air up amongst the peaks where men don't go."Almost poetic—or musical, I suppose.

We continued along the narrow ocean route, weaving between the rocky outcrops of hills and the sudden openness of beaches.

Just before Clifden, we turned off another road that you'd miss if you weren't looking for it. We take it for granted that you can fly direct to Dublin in just over 4 hours, but that wasn't the case in 1919. In fact, it had never been done at that time, and every attempt to cross the Atlantic had failed. That was until two dudes, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten-Brown, left Lester's Field in St. John's in an aircraft powered by two Rolls-Royce engines. It took them 16 and a half hours to make the flight, but imagine what that must have looked like, seeing this boggy land stretching in front of them—because, of course, this was the spot where they abruptly landed, with a memorial on the mound looking out to the the site, slightly inland. This was the first time that anyone in the world had ever done it, and the financial rewards (£10,000, huge at the time) and celebrity status were a fitting reward for the daring feat.

Not far from where they landed, there once stood a cable station. It's now privately owned and inaccessible, which is a shame, because it maintains another connection to Newfoundland and Labrador, at least indirectly. This was a station that Guglielmo Marconi used for transatlantic wireless transmission to a sister station in Glace Bay, a couple years after he received a wireless message on top of Signal Hill in St. John's (when we were there, we were under the impression this was where that original transmission came from, and very nearly trespassed down a dirt road. I'm glad now we didn't).

A short hour drive makes a loop around Clifden, the aptly named Sky Road, onto a narrow peninsula on the western edge of Ireland and looking down to the vast distances of the ocean. We took a spin and, connecting back to the main road, continued on our way through Connemara.

Kylemore Abbey, beneath hillsides half hidden by clouds and itself shrouded in damp mist, might not be as haunted as Loftus Hall on the Hook Peninsula, but it certainly had a bit of an ominous look when we drove by it. The huge house was an extravagant, Gothic revival present from a Manchester tycoon to his wife, and it later became an abbey for Benedictine nuns in the First World War.

Westport was our final stop for the night. Just as we were getting used to roundabouts, this city, replete with cobbled streets, statues, stone buildings, and a core dominated by a river, made generous use of one way streets. Apparently Dublin is bad for that too, but we never drove in the capital city, so we had no trouble getting lost trying to find Mulberry Lodge, our B&B for the night. 

When we did finally find it, we had coffee and biscuits, gazing to no avail out our second floor window to try to get a glimpse of Croagh Patrick, Ireland's holy mountain where St. Patrick, Ireland's patron saint, was said to have spent 40 days fasting.

The best I can do is say that it was out there somewhere. People still ascend the mountain, some barefoot, but there was no pilgrimage for us that day. The best we could do was get to a sandwich shop along one of the main thoroughfares in town and watched two Irishmen get into a fistfight on the curb outside.

That evening, it was out to the pub, first to Matt Molloy's, squat and lively with a session in the corner. The bar gets its name from the owner, who also happens to be a member of the Chieftains, one of the biggest Irish tune bands going (he plays the flute).

Next door at the Porter House though, that's where the real party was. Crowded but with room to move around, the Mulloy Brothers were a five-piece, inter-generation band, playing an arsenal of traditional instruments and recognizable tunes. You don't need to have any high pretensions when the frontman blows his nose with a handkerchief on stage—he was constantly pointing at the crowd, encouraging them to join along, which made for good fun. Meanwhile, the older guy in the back, having the time of his life on the drums, was by a conservative estimate at least a hundred years old.

They played “The Fields of Athenry” faster and more percussive than I've ever heard before, giving it a whole other meaning, and even though Steve Earle is American (and in Ireland at the same time as us—but more on that in a few days), these guys made “Galway Girl” sound like a traditional Irish tune. The set ended around midnight with a rendition of the Irish national anthem, “Amhrán na bhFiann,” which we saw finish the evening when we went out in Duncannon as well (even the sloppiest ones along the edge of the bar stood up in reverence and sang along).

With a band like that, as on their game as the crowd was receptive, I wouldn't have minded if the music went on into the wee hours of the morning, even though we had an ambitious day of travel ahead. Hands down this was the best pub experience we had in Ireland (and that's a big statement)—and they'll be back every Sunday, just in case you happen to be lucky enough to find yourself in Westport some evening.

We didn't waste any time getting on the road after a hefty breakfast of cereal, pancakes, and scrambled eggs, driving steadily in a diagonal line north-east. As we entered Sligo, the county and pastoral landscape that Irish poet William Butler Yeats had such affinity with. Even though he died abroad, his body was returned to Drumcliff in 1948.

When you enter the churchyard, which is the former site of a monastery and has a really cool round tower and cross engraved with primitive Biblical images, you're greeted by words of the beautiful Yeats' poem, “Aedh Wishes for the Clothes of Heaven,” which goes like this:

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

With wind cutting to the bone, we pulled over to a simple asphalt picnic area. Nothing about this place was superficially different from the countryside we'd already passed through, but there was something different here. Cars going in the opposite direction bore different licence plates and a heavy cloud sat on the horizon. At the risk of someone calling me a liar, I had an unsettling feeling that was impossible to shake off.

And then, across the River Foyle through Strabane, road signs were in miles per hour and prices were listed in pounds sterling. There's no checkpoint or passport needed, but in a moment on that bridge we passed into Northern Ireland, another country, and another world.

That is, of course, another story. All in due time.

Cheers,

rb