inhabitants steal it from each other, and yet their cattle are very fat, for the grass growing in tufts of earth of two or three foot square that lie between the rocks which are of limestone, is very sweet and nourishing.’
Memoirs of EDMUND LUDLOW, one of Cromwell’s generals The following morning we woke around seven-thirty to find brilliant sunshine pouring in through the bedroom windows. Anxious to make the most of the day, we got dressed and went downstairs to find no one about, except Gary, the grandson of the house, a fount of energy and of information about everything connected with the property and its occupants.
‘It’ll be a good bit yet before you get a sniff of your breakfast,’ he put it, picturesquely; and indeed it was ten o’clock before it finally appeared, or indeed there were any signs of life at all. It had certainly been a working farm when we had stayed on it last, but now showed signs, in spite of a tractor parked outside, of being an erstwhile one.
Inside, the house was still much as we remembered it, almost twenty years previously, enlarged but still homely and welcoming. The most recent acquisition appeared to be a set of large armchairs, upholstered in delicate green velvet, which would make a happy stamping ground for dogs whose owners had forgotten to bring their dog baskets and for children equipped with bubble gum and muddy rubber boots. Mrs Griffey now appeared, after her late night out with Pan Am, and gave us a warm welcome. Her husband, whom we remembered well, had been dead for some years.
How did we come to stay in this remote, pleasant spot in the first place? Back in 1964 the Irish Tourist Board began to compile a list of farmhouses and other houses in rural situations whose owners were prepared to take in visitors, and at the same time provide a certain modicum of comfort for them, which might or might not be forthcoming if anyone knocked on a door at random and unannounced.
To encourage the farmers’ wives and others on whom the brunt of the work would fall, and to give them confidence in their abilities and the opportunity to exchange ideas, courses were arranged in a large country house near Drogheda in County Louth, with the cooperation of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association. The courses lasted a week, which was reckoned to be about as long as the average Irish farmer could survive with his family but without his wife. They were a great success: among other subjects they dealt with cookery, interior decoration and household management. The culmination was the answering of an impossibly difficult letter from an apprehensive potential guest. As a result of all this a tremendous esprit de corps was built up among the ladies who had been on what they proudly referred to as ‘The Course’.
As a result, the number of recommended farmhouses rose rapidly. The only trouble was that the guests failed to materialize. Understandably, after the expenditure of so much effort and money by all concerned, depression reigned. Alarmed at their lack of success the Irish Tourist Board asked me, in my then capacity as Travel Editor of the Observer, if I would like to visit some of these houses and see for myself what I thought of them. They produced a complete list, helped me to whittle it down to about thirty, and then left Wanda and myself to get on with it in our own way.
It was an extraordinarily interesting experience. Some were working farms with eighteenth- or nineteenth-century buildings, such as the one we were now staying in. Some were not farms at all but quite large country houses, standing in their own parklands, and with or without farms and rambling outbuildings. Some were neat and modern bungalows, rather early prototypes of those we had passed the previous day on the way from Sixmilebridge to Quin, some with plastic gnomes in their front gardens, which were fashionable then. Indistinguishable from ordinary B and Bs, we gave them a miss.
All had one thing in common: they were very clean. Many had washbasins in the bedrooms; others had vast bathrooms with washbasins like fonts, and baths commodious enough to hold a baby whale. In one of them the lavatory was on a dais in a long, narrow chamber so far from the door that, installed on it, I was in a perpetual state of uncertainty as to whether or not I had locked myself in. Students of early plumbing, I noted, would find a visit to such houses worthwhile for these features alone.
Some of the most modest-looking houses concealed within them beautiful fireplaces and remarkable furniture, some of it very fine, some very eccentric, such as bog oak bookcases and extraordinary what-nots. The interior decorations were unpredictable. Some of the ladies, after being visited by a representative of the Tourist Board, panicked and replaced their nice old floral wallpaper with contemporary stuff covered with designs of Dubonnet bottles and skyscrapers, and coated the slender glazing bars of their eighteenth-century windows with a thick coating of bilious yellow paint.
In the course of our journey we played croquet and tennis, got stung by bees, struck up friendships with various donkeys, one of which was called Noël, and innumerable tame rabbits, puppies and dogs. Often there was riding, which we were no good at, and fishing, at which we were not much better but which we enjoyed.
And there was the food, which was always abundant, too abundant. I was anxious to do my best by the ladies but it was not always possible to be kind and at the same time truthful. When it came to bacon, ham, eggs and sausages, soda bread and butter, home-made cakes, jam and cream, everything was fine. Let them loose on a steak, a piece of meat to roast, or even on a cut of freshly landed salmon, and they would turn it into something that resembled an old tobacco pouch, which is, I am sorry to say, in my own judgment, the story of Irish cooking. In spite of this they did me the honour of referring to me very kindly in their brochure, by which time the scheme had become a resounding success.
What followed was what lawyers call a dies non, a day on which no legal business may be transacted (a prohibition which has the effect of making them bad-tempered), and what I call a no-day. In some mysterious way, although some parts of it were pleasant, altogether it added up to a day with something wrong with it, and it made us bad-tempered too.
After breakfast that almost qualified as lunch we set off in the brilliant sunshine on a circular tour of the middle part of the nameless plain which extends from the Shannon to the Bay of Galway, or as much of it as we could manage. No sooner had we got to the ‘soign’ at the crossroads than a downpour of tropical intensity began to fall on us, but by the time we had both struggled into our rainproof suits (the trousers, although made ample on purpose, are particularly difficult to get into when wearing climbing boots) it had stopped and Wanda insisted on taking her trousers off. Within a couple of minutes it began to rain all over again, so she put them back on. The trouble was it was unseasonably warm with it, and in the sort of conifer woods which should only be allowed in Scandinavia, Russia, Siberia, the Yukon and Canada the insects were beginning to tune up for what they apparently thought was the onset of summer. At this point I took my waterproof trousers off. All this effort to see Dromore, a castle of the O’Briens, in a region where castles, except as appendages to the landscape, or notably eccentric, can easily become a bit of a drug on the market.
We pedalled on through these endless woods and past Ballyteige Lough and fissured beds of grey, karstic limestone, duplicates of similar beds in the Kras, in Wanda’s native Slovenia, to which so many times in the course of our life together she had threatened to return, leaving me for ever. Then on past a couple more castles and across a snipe bog on a narrow causeway, with Ballylogan Lough beyond it, golden in the sun, and ahead the mountains of the Burren, stretching across the horizon as far as the eye could see like a fossilized tidal wave. Overhead, clouds with liver-covered undersides, pink on the upper parts where the sun caught them, drifted majestically eastwards. Here it was colder. I put on my trousers again.
In the middle of this bog, we met three young men gathered round a tractor who stopped talking when we passed them and didn’t reply when we said it was a lovely day, something so unusual in our admittedly still limited experience of talking to the natives that it gave us both the creeps – another nail in the coffin of the no-day. Dogs to match them emerged from a farm on the far side of the bog and tried to take chunks out of our costly Gore-Tex trousers.
Beyond
