Enigma

gary, Finola and Furry friend contemplate the Enigma

Gary, Finola and Furry Friend contemplate the Enigma

We went to look at an exciting new Rock Art discovery, in the hills between Ballydehob and Bantry: wild country. The man who uncovered it – Gary Cox – lives close by, and became familiar with the terrain through walking his dogs over the land every day. He noticed in passing a small piece of exposed rock, just a few centimetres square, on which it was possible to make out a couple of curved lines. Intrigued, he began to carefully pull back the moss and gorse to expose a secret which had lain hidden from view for hundreds – perhaps thousands – of years.

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The Derreennaclogh panel is one of the finest and most intriguing pieces of Rock Art that we have seen in West Cork. Because the surface has (until now) been largely protected from direct contact with the weather, the carvings are pristinely visible, especially on a good bright day. On the rocks at Ballybane West – just over the hill – the designs are so weathered that you can go there day after day and never make them out, unless the shadows from a low sun are just right.

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Details from the Derreenaclogh motifs

Current thinking suggests that all the Rock Art in ireland is Bronze Age – between four and five thousand years old: it’s breathtaking to think that we are looking at such ancient depictions of …. what? There’s the enigma: we have no idea – there are cup marks, circles, lines, even squares and waves on this newly revealed one: very unusual. Theories abound, of course: sun, moon, stars, maps, calendars – I’m sure someone has suggested they are flying saucers! We’ve written more on this in previous posts, and of the prolific appearance of rock carvings on the whole Atlantic facing coast from Scandinavia down through Scotland, Britain, Ireland, Brittany, Spain and Portugal. There are variations but the same symbols or motifs occur over and over. But here – on our doorstep – are some of the most unusual shapes to challenge our imaginations.

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I have been extending my researches to petroglyph cultures beyond our own roots. I was intrigued to find some images from New Mexico – strikingly similar to our rock art – and Hawaii. In the latter place there are numerous circular depressions, around 50mm in diameter, interspersed with lines and circles. On our rocks in West Cork cup marks are also widespread – one of the most common images. They are also surrounded by concentric circles: at Derreennaclogh there is one cup mark with eight concentric circles around it – that’s more than we’ve seen on any other site.

Boca Negra Canyon Petroglyphs

Petroglyphs from New Mexico (left) and Hawaii (right)

There is folklore attached to the Hawaiian cup marks: local historians explain that these holes are called ‘Puka’. When a child was born a Puka would be carved in the lava stone. The new baby’s ‘Piko’ – umbilical cord – would be placed in the Puka to wish blessings upon the child for a long and prosperous life. In Hawaii and New Mexico the carvings are reckoned to be between 500 and 1,000 years old – much younger than our Rock Art. But here’s more food for thought: in Irish there’s also a word ‘Púka’ or ‘Pooka’ – sometimes a Fairy, or a shapeshifting spirit which can appear as a Hare or a Horse with dark fur. If a human can jump on the back of the Horse he will be given a wild ride but will probably be thrown off. Legend says that Brian Boru – the High King of Ireland – was the only man who could truly ride the Púka – by using a bridle incorporating three hairs of the Púka’s tail.

Ból an bhóthair

bowling

A damp, grey, Sunday afternoon seemed as good a time as any to find out about a strong West Cork tradition – Road Bowling – the title of this post is the Irish for that. I had come across this ancient sport on a previous visit to Ireland and was intrigued. Friends enlightened me that it was a traditional local pastime which has spread to Armagh and, through emigration, to London and the United States – while other versions of the game exist in Holland and Germany. But the county of Cork – and particularly our western part of the county – is its true home.

bowling2A notable merit of the sport is that it requires absolutely minimal equipment and facilities: an iron ball (or ‘bullet’) weighing 800 grams and 18cm in circumference (note: Ireland is fully up to date with its metrification – miles and ounces have vanished along with the old Irish punt or pound) and about 4 kilometeres of public road. That’s all, apart from a stick of chalk. The road can be anywhere: it’s good if there are some hills and bends. Today I watched a game on the Road out of Durrus going towards Schull. It’s fairly well used (although, as this is Ireland and a Sunday, there’s probably one car passing through every five minutes), but the traffic always gives way to the bowlers.

The object is to throw the iron ball along the road. There are two players – or two teams – in each match, and the match involves one journey along the road in one direction, each player having his own ball. There’s usually another match when the crowd returns along the same route. The winning player or team is the one that reaches the end of the course with the fewest ‘throws’. To throw a player runs up to a chalk mark and, using an underarm swing, propels the ball as far as possible. Regardless of whether or not the ball has hit a wall or drain or whatever, the next chalk mark is made at the point that the ball has stopped moving. There are all sorts of techniques, but nothing – it seems – breaks any rules, unless the player’s foot steps over the chalk mark before the ball has left his hand. And I’m not sure whether anyone is actually watching out for that, as the whole crowd, including the players, spend the entire time engaged in conversation; although this is interspersed at times with shouts of encouragement – or perhaps discouragement, and loud comments on how poor that particular throw was. I was guided through the process by friendly members of the gathering (many of whom suggested that I should have a go myself) and they also assured me that an essential part of the fun was ‘money changing hands’ – a gamble on the match, or on individual throws. Everything seemed so chaotic and informal that I couldn’t work out how this all went on.

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I was interested to see a tuft of grass (a ‘sot’) pulled out of the hedgerow and placed on the road at the point which the thrower should aim for in order to get the best ‘line’. And I was told that a helper known as a ‘road shower’ advises the thrower as to the best trajectory. ‘Shower’ here rhymes with ‘blower’. And – I should have said at the outset – ‘bowl’ actually rhymes with ‘howl’. But the West Cork accents I heard this afternoon were so strong that I only picked up every third or fourth word…

I returned a little wiser about another ingredient of life in West Cork.

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Monica’s Kitchen

Ireland’s first celebrity cook was Monica Sheridan, who had a lively cooking show on RTE in the early 60’s that everyone watched. The show didn’t last long – it was rumoured that the Irish Home Economics Teachers’ Association wrote to RTE to protest the way she licked her fingers. But she brought out several books and when I emigrated to Canada in 1974 I had one of them, ‘My Irish Cook Book’ in my suitcase. I was delighted to be able to purchase her classic ‘Monica’s Kitchen’ (1963) recently, and have been chuckling through it. It’s not so much a recipe book as an extended essay on food, delivered with her trademark humour and trenchant opinions. This is pre-feminist sensibility: women are assumed to be the cooks – their objective is to please their husbands and make other women jealous. She knows everyone cannot be that fortunate, however:

If you are a young bride and have married a man who is finicky about his food, and won’t eat this or that because his mother didn’t do it so…six months of married life will have blunted all your enthusiasm for the kitchen stove. You will have learned to make soup without onions, salad without garlic, dressing without oil – no curry, no out-of-the-way vegetables, no sauce except something out of a bottle. Life will stretch before you as a series of bacon and eggs, cabbage and turnips, and endless varieties of sweet cake.

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On soups: Add a ham bone, or a bit of salt pork, to the vegetables all diced up, and you have the minestrone that everybody comes back from Italy and raves about, as if the bones of Michelangelo himself were boiled in it.
On fish: The first essential in buying good fish is to get to know a sociable fishmonger.
On Meat: Passing through a fair in, say, Mullingar, you will see four year old Irish bullocks in the very pink of condition. They have the roving eyes and the debonair looks of first-year medical students…Give them a few more years and they could become a danger to the parish; but now is the time to kill them and eat them, when they are in their youthful prime.
There are few examples of what we might call proper recipes in the book. Some things she dismisses out of hand as not worth bothering about:

 

  • I can’t stand sage so I never put it in anything.
  • You are all familiar with the acrid smell of boiled cabbage that rises from the basement of Georgian lodging houses, and permeates the entire establishment, right to the top landing. Terrible, terrible, terrible.
  • There is an absolute horror of a dish known as scotch eggs.

There are directions for using every part of an animal – the lamb section is replete with exhortations not to neglect the liver, the brains, the tongue and the sweetbreads and suggestions for cooking them. There’s a famous Christmas cake section that is still followed faithfully by many Irish cooks. And I was delighted to find one of her funniest pieces, ‘A Surfeit of Snails’, reproduced as a whole in the Irish Times [Edit – no longer online, alas].

Finally, no small part of the enjoyment of this book comes from the photographs, and the drawings by Wm. G. Spencer.

Staff of Life

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We got the most incredible Christmas present from Noah, Robert’s son! It was a day of learning to bake bread at the Firehouse Bakery on Heir (or Hare) Island, about a 20 minutes drive from Ard Glas. While Robert had some experience of baking with yeast, I had none, and considered myself yeast-phobic.

Laura and Patrick

Laura and Patrick

Our day started at 10:00AM with the short ferry ride to the  Island. We were picked up by Laura who drove us back to the house/school/bakery and plied us with coffee and brownies to get us in the mood. The baker/instructor is Patrick, who ran his own bakery in Bath, England, and has written the inspirational “The Bread Revolution” with his bakery partner. He plunged us right into the process by introducing his four students to our bowl of sourdough, explaining what is was and how it worked. Then it was all mixing and kneading and scraping until we had a loose ball of dough which was set aside to prove while we got on with the next project – in my case a granary ‘bloomer’ and pull-apart buns and in Robert’s some baguettes.

We moved on from there to muffins, flowerpot bread, orange cake, brownies, cookies and soda bread. I thought I was on more solid ground with whole wheat soda bread but this was soda with a twist – each of us made a different version. We made thyme, mustard and cheddar; apple and cider with caraway; honey, blue cheese and walnuts; and roast butternut squash and cheddar and each version took different shapes, including mini-muffin shapes.

Ms. Bloomer

Ms. Bloomer

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Patrick at the Fire Oven

M. Baguette

M. Baguette

All our bread was baked in Patrick’s custom-built outdoor oven, heated by burning logs inside it. At the end of the day we sat around a table eating Laura’s excellent soup and pasta – she had been cooking away all day as we were baking – with samples of our own bread. We divided all the bread between the four of us and headed back to the ferry. We have a freezer full of bread, a sense of accomplishment, and memories of a warm and friendly learning atmosphere. What I don’t have? Yeast-phobia!

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Beyond the Pale

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‘The Pale’ was an expression first noted down in the early 15th Century to describe the ‘safe’ area around Dublin which was kept fortified and garrisoned by the English monarchs of the time. When we last looked into Irish history [my post: here] Henry II had brought the Norman knights into Ireland and in due course they settled and assimilated with the local populations, in spite of The Statute of Kilkenny which, in 1366 decreed that inter-marriage between English settlers and Irish natives was forbidden. It also forbade the settlers using the Irish language and adopting Irish modes of dress or other customs. In reality such laws were impracticable, unworkable and largely ignored.

Ireland_1450To be ‘outside the Pale’ meant to be outside a safe zone. Down here in West Cork we are a very long way ‘outside the Pale’ – a map shows West Cork and Kerry in 1450 as an isolated area in the south west of the island surrounded by Hiberno-Norman Earls and Lords. In that time there were local factions protecting their interests by building castles and fortified tower houses all along the wild and rugged coastline.  I have referred to castles a few times in my previous posts: Rosbrin, just around the corner from Ard Glas – home of The Scholar Prince Finian O’Mahon and a great centre of learning in the Sixteenth Century; another O’Mahony castle at Drumnea – close to the Bardic School – and the place where the two sons of the King of Spain were drowned and turned into swans. Opposite us is Kilcoe Castle, superbly restored from a completely ruined condition by Jeremy Irons [have a look inside it here]: this was a castle of the McCarthy clan. Further to the east are the remains of a number of O’Driscoll castles.

On a crystal clear day last week Finola and I went out to find the remotest of all the West Cork castles: Dunlough. This structure sits on a lonely promontory at the tip of the Mizen Peninsula – Ireland’s most south westerly point. We travelled as far as the snaking lane would take us, then headed on foot across the fields and past the farmhouses that were the end of the civilised world here. Eventually we were clambering over an isolated and untamed landscape of rock outcrops with the Atlantic roaring below us. Our first sighting of Dunlough as we pulled ourselves up to the top of a ridge and looked over was breathtakingly dramatic.

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The promontory – in earlier times the site of an Iron Age fort – is known as ‘Three Castle Head’, because of the O’Mahony structure which was now presented to us: there are three square towers or keeps linked by enclosing walls. The castle was founded in 1207 and is  built entirely of dry stone masonry. It is remarkable how much of this still stands after 800 years of facing up to the prevailing weather. There is also an artificial freshwater lake beside the walls, probably established at the same time as the buildings, to provide drinking water for the inhabitants and their cattle and – perhaps – a stock of freshwater fish.

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In its time the castle must have supported and sheltered a sizeable population. Today – and for us – it seems one of the most beautiful and lonely places on earth. We walked in awe around the ruins and watched a large flock of Black Backed Gulls foraging on the lake. Perhaps they are the spirits of those who lived their lives out in that extraordinary wilderness?

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Aviation

ardavia

Author and Danny - with brand new table!

Author and Danny – with brand new table!

Perhaps you didn’t know that we have our own mini airport here – right outside Ard Glas! It all started when we asked our friend Danny – who constructs wonderful furniture and accoutrements in the Irish vernacular, and paints them green – to make us a birdtable. He duly did so, and painted it green. It now sits outside our windows and provides us with hours of entertainment.

Firstly, we have a squadron of Spitfires. These are our Chaffinches – to date the record is 24 of them on or around the table at any one time: handsome birds, male and female almost alike, but the males have perky crests which they raise when they want to assert themselves. They whizz in, a whole bunch at a time in close formation, and settle on the grass landing strip where they methodically hoover up the seeds and crumbs. They don’t seem to take much notice of us or the bigger birds – they just get on with the job in hand. Quite suddenly they must get a call to action, for they all take off at once and fly across to the fields down below us, returning en masse after a short interval. They are quite quarrelsome, and often engage in dogfights with each other, diving, spinning and turning in the air.

Then there are the helicopters: these are Tits, of several varieties – Great, Coal and Blue. They hover around the seed holders and suet balls, then make a vertical landing on an impossible perch. They will hang upside down and spin around, quite unperturbed. But they don’t stay long: one seed, it seems is enough – then  they are off to a tree or bush to enjoy it at leisure, before returning on their distinctive undulating flight paths.

We no longer see the Goldfinches: they have gone south for the winter. Also vanished is the Jay, whom we saw only once, taking a break from its journey to the oak woods inland.

Airport in action...

Airport in action…

Daily regulars are our three Magpies: maybe they are one male and two wives, or perhaps parents and a child – they always come down together. One has to admire their magnificence: sleek and shiny. For me they are the flight officers and crew. You know when you see them passing through the concourse at the airport carrying those intriguing flight bags? Crisply uniformed, black and white – and strutting importantly through the crowds…. That’s Magpies: they strut. And they do think of themselves as important. They’ll dismissively push away the smaller birds and take large beakfuls of whatever is available. If I see only one I have to remember to say the mantra – “Good morning Mister Magpie – hope your wife and children are well” else some bad luck might befall me. Then, of course, there is the other mantra – “One for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a marriage, four for a birth…” As it’s invariably three of them they must be trying to send us a message.

It’s odd that the biggest birds of all are the most nervous: these are the Hooded Crows. We have two regulars and they are undoubtedly the Jumbo Jets around here. It’s great to watch them coming in – a slow descent, hovering with their wings up, then a solid bump onto the ground. But they are always on the lookout: they take ages to pick up a crust or a nut. They stand a little way from it, eyeing it up, but will then look all around to make sure no-one is watching before jumping and snatching it, quickly flying off to hide it in a safe place. Well, they don’t take off quickly – it seems to be quite an effort for them to get airborne: they need the longest runway.

I haven’t mentioned the resident Robin, and the Wren has disappeared since Christmas. I’ve got a feeling the Wren Boys were out on St Stephen’s Day, and succeeded in catching it for their supper! The Wagtail is a constant: as it is always walking around on the ground with its perky manner I feel it is that man with the two bats who very cleverly makes all the planes manouevre  in impossibly tight circles, just for the fun of it…

Robert communes with feathered friends

Robert communes with feathered friend