rural village, with two long, picturesque barns; across the road from Malachy’s Bar.
It was three-thirty, and mad for a pot of tea we entered the bar, in which two locals were drinking Guinness and playing darts. They immediately offered to play a foursome, but we were too thirsty to do anything but drink tea and eat a bit of cake, brought by a young girl, for which we paid an Irish punt (or pound). While doing so I tried to imagine a couple of foreigners entering one of our local pubs in Dorset at three-thirty on a winter’s afternoon and finding customers inside, drinking and offering to play darts, and then being provided with tea and cakes; but I failed. Malachy’s Bar may not have been all that much to look at – inside it resembled a 1935 Wardour Street half-timbered film set – but its occupants were kind and welcoming and I realized that if we were going to attempt to equate aesthetics with happiness while travelling through Ireland we might just as well give up and go and be miserable in the comfort of our own, lovely home.
Outside, on a bank of the little River Rine were the impressive ruins of the Franciscan Abbey founded and built in the fifteenth century by Sioda Cam Macnamara within the perimeter of a Norman castle which had been destroyed, presumably by the Macnamaras around 1286. Other members of this clan were also buried here, among them the Macnamara of Knappogue castle who, had his precise location been known to its restorers, would probably have been dug up and restored too.
Those Franciscans were extremely tenacious. In 1541 they were expelled from their premises, as were other religious communities in Ireland, by Henry VIII in his new guise as King of Ireland and Head of the newly established Protestant Church of Ireland,5 but after the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 the monks returned. In 1649–50 Cromwell initiated his ghastly campaigns in Leinster and in Munster, of which County Clare formed a part, together with what are now Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Tipperary and Waterford. The following year, 1651, they were again driven out and in 1652 eleven years of rebellion by the Irish came to an end. In the course of them one third of the Catholic Irish population had been killed; uncounted thousands were shipped to the West Indies, to all intents and purposes to work as slaves; Irish towns were repopulated with English men or English sympathizers; and twenty million acres of land were expropriated and handed over to Protestant settlers.
In spite of these horrors the Franciscans of Quin appear to have been more or less ineradicable. Although driven out of their Friary they contrived to remain in the neighbourhood for the next 150 years. The last surviving member of the order at Quin, Father John Hogan, died in 1820 and his tomb is in the north-east cloister.
Up to now Wanda had been doing very well with her cycling, but after tea at Malachy’s Bar some of the fight appeared to go out of her and when I suggested that we should go and look at Danganbrack, perhaps the most extraordinary of all the fortress houses of the Macnamaras, which the Shell Guide said was three quarters of a mile east-north-east, and which I said, having been there twenty years previously, was only half a mile north-north-east, she said, ‘All right, providing you’re sure it isn’t five miles,’ but without much enthusiasm. But then she hadn’t seen it, as I had twenty years ago.
Then, I had reached it by a tree trunk bridge over a deeply sunken stream at the end of a very muddy track which ran east-wards from a road that led due north from Quin to nowhere. There, in a field, I saw what was known as the ‘ill-fated tower of Mahon Maechuin’, in which the Cromwellian troops, after taking it, spent some time refreshing themselves before moving on that night in 1651 to sack the Abbey. One woman escaped from the tower to bring news of what was happening to Hugh O’Neill, the beleaguered defender of Limerick, which at that time was invested by a Cromwellian army commanded by Henry Ireton until, after six months, he died of the plague.
I remembered Danganbrack as a miniature skyscraper over-grown with ivy as thick as a ship’s hawsers, with machicolations6 and tall gables crowned with chimneys. The ground floor was used as a byre and the lower courses supporting it looked dangerously eroded. The doorway was whitewashed, presumably to discourage the cattle from butting the doorposts and bringing some thousands of tons of masonry down about their ears. I wondered if it was still standing. By the time I thought of asking someone, as is usual in such moments, there was no one to ask.
The first track we now took was certainly muddy enough to be the right one, and it led more or less due east, but after a few hundred yards it made a ninety-degree turn to the north and eventually delivered us into a farmyard filled with liquid mud and policed by a pair of ferocious amphibious sheep dogs. ‘And what are you thinking of doing now?’ my helpmeet and companion in life’s race asked me when we were back on the road.
I looked at the Irish half-inch map – the one-inch map had not been on offer when I was stocking up with them – and heartily wished that it had been the latter. Those half inches make all the difference between locating a fortress house of the Macnamaras and being eaten alive by sheep dogs in a pool of slime.
‘Give up,’ I said. ‘There’s only one castle marked on this map that fulfils anyone’s description of where it really is, dammit. I’ve even got a six-figure map reference. We must have been within feet of it at that farm. But why didn’t we see it? It’s almost as tall as the Woolworth Building. It must have fallen down.’
So we gave up. And as to whether Danganbrack is still standing, we didn’t meet anyone to ask in the succeeding ten miles or so, and when we did meet someone he didn’t know and thought we were enquiring about some new brand of breakfast cereal.
By now both of us were consumed by the unspoken fear that the short December day might give out and leave us blundering about on our bikes in Irish darkness, far from our destination. This was a farm near Crusheen, where we had stayed some eighteen years before, but it was still miles away to the north, and its occupants were still blissfully unaware that we were proposing to stay with them. En route we made one rapid detour down a lane to see Magh Adhair, the Inauguration Place of the Kings of Thomond (now County Clare), one of whom was Brian Boru, High King of Ireland – a grassy mound surrounded by a deep ditch by the banks of the Hell River. On the far side of the river there was a tall, slender standing stone which probably had some ceremonial significance, though the actual inauguration is thought to have taken place under a great oak tree nearby.
This mound has a violent history. In 877 Lorcan, King of Thomond, whose crowning place it was, fought a battle there against Flan, High King of Ireland, which sounds as if it had more of the quality of opera bouffe. In the course of it Flan, to denigrate his adversary and to decrease the sanctity of the place, started to play a game of chess on the mound – a present-day equivalent from the point of view of sacrilege would be to play Bingo in Westminster Abbey – but was driven from it by Lorcan, whose fury can only be imagined. Forced to take refuge among the thorn thickets in which the area still abounds Flan promptly got lost and after three days blundering about in them had to surrender. Two other kings, Malachy, High King of Ireland in 982, and Aedh O’Conor, King of Connacht in 1051, committed even greater sacrilege by cutting down the sacred tree, which must have been pretty small the second time round. The last Coronation took place there in the reign of Elizabeth I.
Standing on this mound, looking out over what is partly a natural amphitheatre at the beginning of a long-drawn-out and sulphurous sunset, the feeling of mystery that this place would otherwise have had about it was destroyed by a ribbon of brightly lit bungalows along a nearby lane. It was only going to be a matter of getting a few more building permissions before Magh Adhair would be completely hemmed in by them, a triumph for the developers who will have succeeded in destroying what more than a thousand years, three kings and innumerable wars have failed to do.
Then we set off on what proved to be an interminable ride past O’Brien’s Big Lough and Knocknemucky Hill, at 239 feet the highest point in a plain that extended all the way north
