a hamlet in which most of the houses were in ruins. In it the minute Coolbaun National School, built in 1895 and abandoned probably some time in the 1950s, still had a roof, and its front door was ajar. Inside there was a bedstead, a table with two unopened tins of soup on it, a raincoat hanging on a nail and a pair of rubber boots. It was like finding a footprint on a desert island. Hastily, we beat a retreat.
The first real village we came to was Tubber, a place a mile long with a pub at either end (neither of which had any food on offer), in fact so long that on my already battered half-inch map one part of it appeared to be in Clare, the other in Galway. The pub nearest to Galway was terribly dark, as if the proprietor catered only for spiritualists; the other had three customers all glued to the telly watching a steeplechase, none of whom spoke to us even between races. Meanwhile we drank, and ate soda bread and butter and spam bought in the village shop. ‘Is this what they call “Ireland of the Welcomes”?’ Wanda asked with her mouth full. Another coffin nail.
The nicest-looking places in Tubber were the post office and Derryvowen Cottage, which was painted pink and which we passed on the way to look for something marked on the map as O’Donohue’s Chair. What is or was O’Donohue’s Chair? No guide book that I have ever subsequently been able to lay my hands on refers to it. Is it, or was it, some kind of mediaeval hot seat stoked with peat? Or a throne over an oubliette that precipitates anyone who sits on it into the bottomless rivers of the limestone karst? Whatever it is, if it isn’t the product of some Irish Ordnance Surveyor’s imagination, further inflamed by a spam lunch in Tubber, it is situated in a thicket impenetrable to persons wearing Gore-Tex suits, and hemmed in by an equally impenetrable hedge reinforced with old cast iron bedsteads, worth a bomb to any tinker with a pair of hedging gloves.
After this, misled by two of the innocent-looking children in which Ireland abounds – leprechauns in disguise – we made an equally futile attempt to see at close quarters Fiddaun Castle, another spectacular tower house more or less in the same class as the unfindable Danganbrack. ‘Sure and you can’t miss it. It’s up there and away down,’ one of these little dumplings said, while the other sucked her thumb, directing us along a track that eventually became so deep in mire that it almost engulfed us. From the top of the hill they indicated, however, we did have a momentary view of the Castle and of Lough Fiddaun to the north, with three swans floating on it, before the whole scene was obliterated by a hellish hailstorm.
The next part of our tour was supposed to take in the monastic ruins of Kilmacduagh, over the frontier from Clare in Galway. However, one more December day was beginning to show signs of drawing to a close, and so we set off back in the direction of Crusheen. It really had been a no-day. Not only had we not seen the Kilmacduagh Monastery, but we had not seen, as we had planned to do, the early nineteenth-century castle built by John Nash for the first Viscount Gort on the shores of Lough Cutra, similar to the one he built at East Cowes on the Isle of Wight, now scandalously demolished; or the Punchbowl, a series of green, cup-shaped depressions in a wood of chestnut and beech trees where the River Beagh runs through a gorge 80 feet deep and disappears underground, perhaps to flow beneath O’Donohue’s Chair; or Coole Park, the site of the great house which was the home of Augusta, Lady Gregory, whose distinguished guests, among them Shaw, O’Casey, W. B. and J. B. Yeats, AE (George) Russell and Katherine Tynan – a bit much to have all of them together, one would have thought – used a giant copper beech in the grounds as a visitors’ book. To see all these would have taken days at the speed we were travelling. Well, we would never see them now.
So home to dinner, after which Tom took us to Saturday evening Mass in Crusheen. His mother was going the following morning, but if you attended Mass on Saturday evening you didn’t have to do so again on Sunday. If asked, he said, we were to say that he too had been present. Meanwhile, he headed for Clark’s, to which most of my own impulses were, I admit, to accompany him.
The church was almost full; and the subject of the sermon was Temperance, an obligatory one in Ireland for the First Sunday in Advent. This being Saturday, perhaps the priest was giving it a trial run. He certainly had a large enough audience for it. He was a formidable figure, this priest. Was he, I wondered, the same one we encountered in O’Hagerty’s taking a dim view of the contents of a collection box? To me priests in mufti look entirely different when robed. Ireland, he said, was as boozy as Russia – a bit much, I thought, to accuse any country of being, with the possible exception of Finland. He then went on to castigate the licensed trade as spreaders of evil, something I have always fervently believed myself. If any Guinnesses had been present they would have been writhing with embarrassment. ‘Just too awful,’ I could imagine them saying, but then one imagines that any Catholic Guinnesses, if such there be, give the First Sunday in Advent and the Saturday preceding it a miss. And there were prayers for the wives of drunks, but none for the drunks themselves, or the husbands of drunks, all of whom I would have thought were equally in need of them.
We were in bed by nine-thirty, slept nine hours and woke to another brilliant day, this time completely cloudless. After another good breakfast, we set off on what, for Wanda, proved to be a really awful four-mile uphill climb to Ballinruan, a lonely hamlet high on the slopes of the Slieve Aughty Mountains, where a Sunday meet of the County Clare Foxhounds was to take place. Its cottages were rendered in bright, primary colours, or finished in grey pebbledash – one house was the ghostly silver-grey of an old photographic plate. The church sparkled like icing sugar in the sunshine, and across the road from it, in Walsh’s Lounge Bar and Food Store, four old men, all wearing caps, were drinking whiskey and stout and sharing a newspaper between them.
The view from the village was an amazing one. Behind it gentle slopes led up to a long, treeless ridge; immediately below it, and on either side, the ground was rougher, with outcrops of rock – a wilderness of gorse and heather interspersed with stunted, windswept trees. Out beyond this a vast landscape opened up: the level plain, part of which we had travelled through with so many setbacks the previous day. Its innumerable loughs, now a brilliant Mediterranean blue, blazed among green fields of irregular shape, bogs, woodlands and tracts of limestone, with here and there a white cottage or the tower of a castle rising among them.
And beyond all this, the far more immense bare limestone expanses of the Burren rose golden in the morning sunlight; Galway Bay could just be seen to the north-west; while to the south, beyond the Shannon, were the hills and mountains of County Limerick, their feet shrouded in a mist which gave an impression of almost tropical heat.
At twelve-thirty the hounds arrived in a big van, very well behaved, and soon more vans and horse boxes trundled up the hill, some drawn by Mercedes. Here, the hunt was more or less on the extreme limits of its territory. It normally hunted over stone walls on the west side of the County, and over banks and fly fences on the east and south. The rough country round us, on the other hand, might give shelter to hordes of hill foxes. Anyway, they were safe today. This was a drag hunt in which the hounds would follow an artificial scent.
By one o’clock those horses still in their boxes were becoming impatient, kicking the sides of them, and catching the air of excitement that was gradually gathering in the street outside. People were beginning to saddle up and mount now, especially the children, of whom there were quite a number. A big van with four horses in it arrived and one of their owners said to the driver, ‘It’s a lovely day! Let’s go and have a jar now in Walsh’s.’ By now the bar was splitting at the seams.
This was not a smart hunt such as the County Galway, otherwise known as the Blazers, the County Limerick, the Kildare, or the Scarteen, otherwise the Black and Tans. It was not the sort of hunt that Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who loved hunting in Ireland more than anything else on earth and was so proud of her figure that she had herself sewn into her habit every hunting day, would have patronized. Most were in black jackets and velvet caps, some were in tweeds, others wore crash helmets, and one man with a craggy, early nineteenth-century face wore a bowler. One man in a tweed coat sounded suspiciously like a Frenchman, there was an elegant American girl in a tweed coat, and
