There are two qualifications to get a
job with Budget car rentals in Dublin. Basic computer skills are a
must. Beyond that, you pretty much just need to be a completely
useless human being.
There's some that would call that a tad
harsh. Well, when we showed up at the airport on Sunday morning
(having been directed to the wrong spot by a different Budget
employee when we first arrived in Dublin on Thursday), the dude
behind the desk didn't look up at us until it came time to try to get
us to upgrade to a larger vehicle, since the one we had rented was
definitely going to be smaller than what we were used to in Canada.
That might be true, but I was forewarned that they would try to do
this, pawn off a vehicle they couldn't otherwise rent, under the
guise of doing you a major favour. Either way, it was almost an
argument when we assured him that this was the vehicle we wanted.
Not to jump too far ahead or to
speculate, but if our friendly Budget employee had managed to talk us
into something reminiscent of a Canadian SUV, the best case scenario
is we'd owe Budget a brand new vehicle, worst case scenario is we'd
be dead on an Irish highway somewhere just outside the Dublin city
limits.
Anyway, then he handed over the damage
report for us to sign on the spot—begrudgingly he went with us to
the car (not as terrifying small as he led us to believe) to, y'know,
look for damage before we signed a contract stating there was none,
and even more begrudgingly he added the existing damage to the
report. I don't wish anything terrible on this guy, but I'd sleep a
bit more comfortably if I knew that he spilled coffee on his nicest
shirt or something like that.
Anyway, I assumed the position of
navigator in what would be the driver's seat in a North American car,
Dad got behind the wheel, and away we went, the GPS firing on all
cylinders and successfully screwing up the first roundabout trying to
get away from the airport.
Oops.
There's a certain, often untapped, type
of stress that comes from holding a map in a foreign country. We knew
where we were headed (Duncannon, on the south east coast of Ireland,
by Waterford), and we even knew roughly how we wanted to get there,
but the first thing was getting to the M50,the semi-circular highway
encircling Dublin. After navigating the airport and surviving a few
roundabouts, we were cruising on a divided highway.
Again, not to get ahead of myself, but
that did not last.
The M10 became the
M11, and we were on the road south, pointed towards Wicklow. We got
off the main drag not long afterwards, disappearing into the
foothills of the Wicklow Mountains, barren protruding nobs that once
offered safe refuge to rebels opposing English rule. It was around
here, on twisty roads with speed limits between 80 and 100 kilometres
an hour and a hairbreadth between vehicles going in opposite
directions that the reality of the narrow Irish roads dawned on me.
To make things worse, thick hedges framed the roads, such that your
visibility sucked at best.
I mean, don't get
me wrong, Ireland is beautiful. But someone is going to get killed
over here.
Driving south for
about an hour and passing a tourist spot where it looked more like
people stopped where they felt like it rather than in any sort of
order, we were all more than happy to put the handbrake on and get
out at Glendalough.
Let's go back in
time to the 6th century. As in a time closer to the birth
of Jesus Christ than William Shakespeare, just for some historical
context. A dude named St. Kevin decided to live in a cave in
Glendalough, which would have been pretty deserted before that frenzy
of a carpark appeared on the scene. Here we have steep slopes of
greenery and two lakes, the Upper and Lower, a sheltered valley that
turned out to be a pretty good spot to set up a monastery.
I can't vouch for
how good historical records were in the year 500. Apparently St.
Kevin lived to be 120, had a bird lay an egg in his hand so he
remained still until it hatched, and threw a woman in the lake to
avoid being tempted by her. Regardless of whether any of that's true
or not, the stones and remnants are harder to make up. A couple
hundred years later, around about the 11th or 12th
century, the monastary business was booming, and the buildings that
got put together around about that time are still clinging to the
gentle hillside on the side of the lakes.
That includes the
Round Tower, 30 m high and giving a real sense of vertigo, and the
crumbling cathedral in a sprawling lawn of ancient organization.
The afternoon had a
hard time making up its mind, sometimes clear and sunny in the
secluded valley, and other times bursting forth with a downpour. We
alternated between walking with jackets in our arms to running off
the path to get a bit of shelter.
From the quiet
valley we began an assent, back into the rugged, windswept terrain of
the Wicklow Mountains. After a major Irish rebellion in 1798, the
British were pissed, and wanted to deal with the rebels promptly,
many of whom had retreated to the desolate countryside reminiscent of
the Scottish highlands. They responded by constructing the Military
Road, which gave us a route to Sally Gap, an open pass surrounded by
bogs and grass.
Again, have I
mentioned what the roads in Ireland are like? Have you ever been on
an 80 km/hr road with two-way traffic and had sheep come to see
what's happening? I dasresay an Irish rebel hiding from the King
himself still had it made compared to someone whipping around these
blind turns.
The road peaked at
Sally Gap and made a downwards turn back south. We stopped the Lough
Tay on the way, far below, the water blackened by peat. The Guinness
family owns a private estate around the lake, but it gets its nickname
Guinness Lake from the colour of the water.
Back on the road,
back south. I had a bit of a better feel for the map, but still no
sense of time—or maybe the problem was assuming you get 100
kilometres in an hour. Maybe if you drove according to the posted
limits you would, but our speedometer didn't have to peak much over
50 km/hr before it felt like we were entering warp speed. So by the
time the early evening set in, having been focused on tight curves
and road signs, we were famished at the Meeting of the Waters.
Irish poet Thomas
Moore once wrote: “There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet
as that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet.” He was talking
about the Avonbeg and the Avonmore, where we settled down at the pub
for a pint of Smithwicks and sandwiches before continuing on.
Lo and behold, the
evenings in August aren't as long as they were a few months ago, and
my map was soon illuminated by the glowing screen of the GPS, which
was missing half the roads in its database but was at least useful as
a flashlight.
Once we got off the
highways and into the backest of the back country roads along the
southern coast of Ireland, and the trees enclosed around you on all
sides, you felt like you'd entered an enchanted forest, and only
hoped that you'd avoid getting bewitched (or worse). Besides almost
getting banged by a driver who understood the roundabouts better than
us in Enniscorthy, all the turn-offs showed up where I hoped they
would, and a few hours later than we planned, we arrived at the
seaside town of Duncannon, County Wexford, population 291. Somewhere
off in the distance, the lighthouse at the tip of the Hook Peninsula,
one of the oldest in the world, was blinking.
It took a few
tries, driving up the narrow streets along the beach and asking
locals sat out enjoying what might be one of only a few clear summer
evenings, to find our bed and breakfast for the next two evenings,
the Moorings. I may have knocked on the window of the house next
door, but it wasn't long before we once again had a bed at our
disposal rather than a car seat. Our hostess, Colleen, had a pot of
tea and homemade raisin cookies ready for us as well, making the
semi-harrowing drive more worthwhile.
The bed though,
that sealed the deal, even if it was a bunkbed over my parents with slight risk of snoring.
The next day, we
did something deadly: slept in. The breakfast up in the spacious
common room was continental, which meant we could take it at our
leisure. A few slices of toast, some cereal and coffee later, and
we're out for a walk to the Duncannon Fort, a rocky fortress on the
edge of the land looking out to the harbour between Duncannon and
Waterford. They built this military fortress back in 1588, expecting
an attack by the Spanish Armada, and a couple hundred years later it
was used in the movie The Count of Monte Cristo. Some other
stuff happened in between, but much of what we saw was the seaside
views and the shops and art galleries within the enclosed parapets.
We drove down the
short length of the Hook Peninsula in the afternoon, passing through
the medieval ruins lining the roadside in Templetown, which was
originally an Irish centre for the Knights Templar.
The Hook Lighthouse
goes back to 1172, where monks were the keepers of the [literal]
fire. A lot changed since then, and the outside now looks like, well,
a lighthouse, but just about everything in Ireland is the oldest or
the biggest something or other. Well, the Hook Lighthouse is
supposedly the oldest continually functioning lighthouse in the
world. So that's something.
I love a good ghost
story. On the way back to Duncannon, we stopped at Loftus Hall,
Ireland's most haunted building (told you they do that over here).
Here's the deal: there used to be an estate here, at the edge of the
ocean in the middle of nowhere, called Redmond Hall. The Redmonds
were big fans of the monarchy at a time when Oliver Cromwell wasn't,
so he came over and gave the property to the Loftus family in the
ominous year 1666.
Ok, so in 1766,
Charles Tottenham is looking after the house with his wife and his
daughter, Anne. There's a storm, and a ship arrives in the harbour
with one passenger, an unnamed, handsome stranger. His horse takes
lame somewhere out in the storm, and all he sees is the light of
Loftus Hall, where the family is up playing cards. He approaches,
knocks, and is let in, where he wins over the family and ends up
sticking around.
Another dark,
stormy night a few weeks later, and he's joining them in a card game.
Anne has fallen desperately in love with the young man, and she can't
stop winning when she's playing on his team. But when she drops a
card and bends under the table to pick it up, she lets out a
scream—because there's a cloven foot across the table from her.
The stranger has
been found out for being the devil, and disappears in a red flash up
through the roof of the room. Anne's mind is broken, and she spends
out the rest of her days rocking on her bed in the tapestry room.
When she finally dies, they have to build a special coffin to fit her
body, which has become locked in the crumpled position she retained
during her madness.
That would honestly
be enough, except for the fact that her ghost is now rumoured to
haunt the tapestry room where she lived out the last few years of her
life.
Seriously, I love a
ghost story, and even though the tour didn't deliver any big effects,
it did guide us through the rooms in the story, peering up at the
hole in the ceiling where the devil escaped, the grim tapestry room
where even the nightwatchman's dog won't visit, and the chapel room
where all the stations of the cross have been scratched out. By
someone, or . . .
What was cool is
that it has an abandoned feel, not because it's gimmicky, but because
it actually was abandoned. And maybe a bit of a spooky
supernatural edge too—there's a Saturday evening tour that's
strictly adults only, and I bet that would be something to keep you
up at night.
For this night,
being a Monday, the only thing to keep us up were a few pints of
Irish craft beer at Roches Bar, where the pub was laid out in a
series of rooms, a traditional singer occasionally accompanied by his
dad on the pipes at one end and conversation in the other.
No chance to sleep
in on Tuesday morning, even if song, drink, and the odd ghost story
wasn't conducive to a sound rest. Our moorings at the Moorings are cast off, and there's a whole lot more of Ireland to see, even if it's from a passenger-side window on a horsecart Autobahn.
Cheers,
rb
No comments:
Post a Comment