The Green Saint

I welcome the excuse to put a picture of a green pyramid at the top of my post – with justification: it’s Saint Patrick’s Day, and all over the world things are turning green! It’s a campaign by Tourism Ireland to encourage people to visit the country, as tourism is now probably the largest industry here. As well as the Pyramids and the Sphinx, the Sydney Opera House, the London Eye, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and even the Angel of the North are getting the green treatment, along with many other well known landmarks. I’ve added a couple of my own – why not?

Kilcoe Castle – 17 March

Gary and Finola puzzle over this St Patrick’s Day phenomenon at Derreenaclough

We were staying near Dublin at the weekend to attend a wedding and, as there were three Irish people and me around the breakfast table, I asked the others to tell the story of St Patrick. They did a good and convincing job: I now know that Patrick was descended from a Roman family living in the north of England. He was captured by Irish raiders when a young man and kept as a slave for six years, before escaping home to Britain. After a while he had a vision in which he was being called back to Ireland to become a Christian missionary. He trained as a priest and crossed the Irish sea again. He was one of several early saints in Ireland. He has also become a hero figure in Irish folklore, and appears in many pre-Christian legends, including stories of Finn McCool and the Children of Lir.

My breakfast companions assured me that St Patrick cast all the Snakes out of Ireland (but I was interested to learn today that there are also no Snakes in New Zealand, Iceland, Greenland and Antarctica) – although someone cheekily introduced Slow-worms into Clare in the 1960s, and they are now breeding happily in the Burren (ok – Slow-worms are in fact legless Lizards – but they do look a bit like Snakes). The story I like best about St Patrick involves his ash wood staff which he always carried with him. Whenever he was evangelising he would stick it into the ground: on one occasion it took so long to get his point across to his listeners that his staff had taken root and become a fully grown tree before he was finished!

St Patrick died on 17th March – probably in the year 493 AD. It’s fitting that we should end our blog (for the moment) on St Patrick’s Day: we leave Ireland this week having spent a wonderful winter getting to know and falling in love with this little bit of land sticking out into the wild Atlantic. We will be back – and, hopefully, we will continue our posts then. Meanwhile, Finola has written our goodbyes so well above that I don’t need to say any more…

Posted on March 10, 2013August 28, 2019
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Music Mad

When we set off to find the Road Trotting we travelled roads we had never seen before: out to the east of Bantry. We were intrigued by a sign to ‘Tralibane Memorial’ and duly diverted to investigate. Up the hills and around a sweeping bend in the road: the first thing we saw was Mary, looking down over her modest garden – but that wasn’t the memorial; we found it a little further on. Our immediate view was a man playing a flute on top of a rock, approached by an ornate staircase. As we took in the whole site we had the impression of a huge plateau carved out of the hill summit – somewhere you could park a hundred cars or assemble a mighty crowd. It had the feel of a place where a Pope might come to give the Mass: there is an ornate Commemorative Wall surmounted by grand light fittings and with room for 120 granite name-plaques on each side.

It’s a place waiting for something to happen. On the day of our visit it was deserted – and a little bleak. But, on other days, things do happen: crowds arrive and pay tribute – they come from all corners of the world. They also dance, and great craic is had. What is it all about? Well, once we’d worked it out we realised that this is a very important shrine for me, and for all other players of Irish Traditional Music. This is a memorial to Captain Francis O’Neill, a man who was born in the townland of Tralibane in 1848; ran away to sea at the age of 16; worked his way around the world and survived a shipwreck; became a policeman in Chicago; survived a gangster shoot-out, and eventually attained the rank of Chief of Police in that city. But he is famous for his greatest achievement: a collection of Irish tunes which numbers nearly two thousand, and which probably forms the repertoire basis of most of the musicians keeping the tradition alive today. The O’Neill collections were certainly my own introduction to The Music, and the several volumes in my own sheet music library are still the most valuable resource I have, bar only the internet.

O’Neill was imbued with the music of his native West Cork while growing up. He played the flute himself but, like many traditional musicians, he didn’t read or write music. The transcriptions which now appear in his collections (which are still all in print) were made by another O’Neill – James: unrelated but a colleague in Chicago. If you want to read a fuller account of O’Neill’s life try Ronan Nolan’s comprehensive article, where you can also find links to many of the wax phonograph cylinders recorded by Captain Francis during his collecting years (edit 2019: this link is no longer active!).

Posted on March 10, 2013
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Craic agus Ceol

Let’s Make Music!

First the Drink, Then the Story – this is the legend above Rosies’s pub in Ballydehob. In that spirit, we hosted a brunch at Ard Glas today for about 25 people. It was to say goodbye for a while to all of the wonderful people we have met since coming to live in West Cork and to thank them for their friendship.

Michael tells a Dartmoor Story

Gillian tells The Beekeper and the Hare

Friends of Robert’s, Michael and Wendy Dacre of Raven Tales, are in Ireland and have come to stay for a few days. They are professional storytellers, with a wide repertoire of stories and songs from around the world, and we took advantage of their visit, and of our friends among the session musicians we have met, to bill this as a Stories and Music Brunch.

The food was fantastic, thanks to our wonderful catering team of Jo and Bob O’Toole, and when everyone had eaten and drunk their fill we started on the music and the stories.

We listened, wrapt, we tapped our toes, we sang along, and of course we talked and laughed and ate and drank the afternoon away.

You can read Amanda’s take on the afternoon here.

Jo and Bob, our wonderful caterering team

Posted on March 3, 2013
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Ghosts of the Past

An abandoned village slowly returns to the bog

Amanda, Bardic School

Amanda and Peter Clarke were our hosts yesterday for a Sheep’s Head Day. They know the peninsula intimately and were able to take us to places we would never have found on our own. They also love it: they have made their lives in Ahakista in a beautiful old farmhouse with a productive garden, and between them manage several projects that are great local resources.

We have written about the Sheep’s Head Peninsula in previous posts. It’s a wild and beautiful place, criss-crossed by a network of world-class marked trails, and full of prehistoric and historic sites. Part of our tour took in the Bardic School, about which Robert wrote in his Kings and Poets piece. But mostly what we saw was new to us: an impressive stone circle and a stone alignment, a lonely and moving famine graveyard, the remains of a pre-famine village, and finally a holy well and mass rock site.

The stone circle is probably the recumbent type, in which two tall portal stone stand opposite a stone with its longest axis parallel to the earth. The sightline from the portals over the recumbent stone is often focused on a solstice sunrise. Stone alignments in this area tend to be three to five stones in a row and may also be part of the solar and lunar observatory system that is characteristic of many Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments.

Ireland before 1845 had a population of 8 million people. Over a million died of starvation and disease and another million emigrated in the period of the Great Famine, from 1845 to 1852. West Cork was one of the epicentres of the disaster. It is still alive in the folk memory of the people and we saw two graphic reminders of it on our tour. The first was the Roskerig burial ground. Although stones were scattered around the graveyard, not a single inscription was visible, as if it had been hastily used in a chaotic time and then forgotten. The second reminder was the remains of a long-abandoned village, now slowly returning to the bog.

The holy well and mass rock are dedicated to Mary and are adorned with multiple images of her. The well is still in use and credited with miracle cures. The mass rock, where a crowd would gather outdoors in the days of the Penal Laws that outlawed Catholicism, to hear mass, is well preserved. When the Redcoats got wind that a mass was in progress and came to arrest the priest, Mary threw up a thick mist around the area to confuse the soldiers and allow the priest to escape. In acknowledgement, we deposited our coins in the well and said a prayer for something close to our hearts.

Posted on March 3, 2013
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Road Trotting

I constantly admire the Irish ability to make great sport and entertainment out of minimal resources. A case in point was the Road Bowling which I described in a previous post and a further example is our Sunday afternoon spent at The Races: not in a big grandstand at a famous course, but at a closed-off section of the R586 – the main highway connecting Bantry to Drimoleague and Cork. Through traffic takes second place, having to negotiate a diversion of narrow, bendy lanes in order to allow The Racing to use a half mile long section of fairly straight and level road (horse racing in Ireland is still measured in ‘miles’). Except when the Cork – Bantry bus comes through, when everything has to stop and move over.

Horse racing goes back thousands of years, and the Irish have always been good at it: Irish trainers, horses and jockeys dominate many of the big events in Britain. I was fascinated to learn that it is a non-sectarian sport in Ireland: it is governed in the Republic and in Northern Ireland by one body: Rásaíocht Capall Éireann. The British Horse Racing Authority has no jurisdiction in the North.

Today we were watching Road Trotting. It has all the spectacle of the sport: beautifully groomed animals with whimsical names, jockeys in outfits of all colours bearing stripes, chequers and stars – and bookmakers. But it’s all very local and approachable: no dressing up or flowery hats. As usual, everyone there is busy catching up with the gossip, but are always ready to have a friendly chat with strangers like us. The animals are ‘standardbred’, developed especially for both Trotting and Harness Racing (the latter involves a two wheeled trolley – also called a Sulky – being pulled along behind to carry the jockey – akin to chariot racing!); and, just to add more confusion, there are two types of ‘standardbred’: Trotters and Pacers. Trotters have the more natural movement: a diagonal gait in which the left front and right rear legs move in unison, as do the right front and left rear. Pacers, on the other hand, move the legs on one side of their body in tandem: left front and rear, and right front and rear. However, they need to be helped in maintaining their gait by wearing plastic loops called hobbles, which keep their legs moving in synchronisation. They are also especially shod to allow them to race on hard road surfaces without wear or injury. Hope that’s all clear…

The proceedings were controlled at a trailer from which a commentary was broadcast through a pair of loudspeakers. Cups for the presentation after each race were handed out through the door, while a man in a yellow jacket and a white flag was responsible for starting each race – a tricky affair, as horses and riders were seldom in one place at the same time, and didn’t stand still in any case. Another man had a red flag, and I believe his job was to signal a faulty start. All the spectators congregated at one end of the half mile stretch of road, so we only saw the start and finish of each race. Races were either over one mile or two, and at either end of the course all the riders had to make a 360 degree turn around some large bales of straw. All this looked rather chaotic.

The beginning of March has brought a very cold spell, and our hands and feet were suffering by the time the modest crowd began to disperse. Today’s event has given me a taste for the Sport of Kings, and I’m on the lookout now for some Harness Racing.

Make way!

Posted on February 24, 2013February 24, 2013
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Uisce Beatha

Ireland is an island – a fairly small one. There’s a lot of water surrounding it (3,500 miles of coastline) and coming out of the sky. This abundance of water has shaped the natural landscape and coloured it emerald green. Not surprisingly, traditional life, history, culture and folklore in this country are imbued with watery references.

Schull Pier

Down here in West Cork you are never more than a mile or two from the sea: it has historically provided defence, sustenance, isolation and wealth. When the O’Mahony and O’Driscoll clans ruled here in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was recorded that more than 500 large fishing boats from France, Spain, and Portugal were constantly harvesting the fish shoals off the Mizen. Each chieftain’s income from the foreign ships surpassed £1,000 annually by way of fishing rights, harbour dues and protection money (that’s about 3,000 cows in trading terms in those days). Today you can still see evidence that the bays, inlets and islands have long provided income and a means of transport to the local communities: there are small piers everywhere. There’s an ancient one – ruined but still visible – just below us at Ard Glas, and an hour’s walk along the water would take in half a dozen others mostly still maintained in good order and regularly used.

Piers at Cunnamore and Roscarberry

When we go up to the market in Bantry on a Friday morning to get our own fish fresh from the local quays we pass by the statue of St Brendan the Navigator. In the sixth century Brendan set out with forty other monks in a little boat to find the Island of Paradise; instead, they discovered America, returning after seven years to tell of their many adventures with sea monsters, miraculous islands and sirens. In the 1970s Tim Severin recreated Brendan’s twin masted boat using Irish ash and oak lashed together with two miles of leather thong and wrapped with 49 traditionally tanned ox hides sealed with wool grease. In this he sailed for a year via the Hebrides and Iceland to reach Newfoundland, thus proving that the legend could have been based on fact.

Colla Pier, Roaringwater Pier and St Brendan

The ‘lost’ pier at Bealaclare

In 2010 two fishermen found a small canoe in the Boyne River. It’s reckoned to be 5,000 years old and may have carried stone for the building of the great passage tomb at Newgrange (that predates the Pyramids). That boat is only 3 metres long, but another canoe discovered in 1901 in Co Galway is even older and much bigger: 15 metres long, hollowed out from the trunk of a single oak tree that was over 2 metres in diameter: something that couldn’t be found in Ireland today. It probably had outriggers and could have been used to bring tin from Cornwall to mix with the locally mined copper, enabling the Bronze Age to take off. Fascinating.

Bronze Age Canoe

Every day we look out over the water, and on all our walks we have glorious views over the bays, the Celtic Sea and the Atlantic. That’s a constant in our lives that I don’t think we could ever do without.

Oh – by the way: Uisce Beatha (pronounced Ish-kah Baahaa) – that translates literally as Water of Life – and, in Ireland, also as ‘Whisky’.

Turk Head Pier

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