Unsettled times

The favorite word for weather forecasters here is unsettled. It means that the day will look bright at 7am but by 8 a dull grey has set in. At 9 there is a shower, at 10 the sun is out, at 11 lashings of rain pound against the windows, but by 4 you could be having a picnic if the ground weren't soaked through. We've been having a great deal of unsettled weather over the past couple of weeks. It seems like a cosmic reflection of the general mood here. Even the sports triumphs in this sport-mad country--a young amateur from County Offaly, my county, came out of nowhere to win the Irish Open, and Saturday night Leinster (my province) beat their British rivals to win the ultimate rugby prize--have only marginally lifted the spirits. It was so quiet in Dublin on Saturday night I assumed that Ireland had lost the match.

What is causing this pall of sadness is not mysterious. The economic forecasts are beginning to use the word depression without putting quote marks around it. The government is fiddling while the jobs burn up at an alarming rate. The rains, uncharacteristic for this time of year, have devastated the farmlands and made everyone here fearful of yet another summer of merciless damp; it would be their third in a row. And this week, as if to say that a kick in the collective teeth is what you all deserve, the government released a report about the horrific levels of physical, emotional and sexual abuse carried out by priests and nuns in what were called Industrial Schools, where foster children were sent in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. 

 Many of the children  were sent to these schools to live merely because they were born to single mothers, or because their parents could no longer care for them, or because their mother had died, or for very minor offenses. The priests had such control over their parishes that they could make decisions about which children should be in the schools, then abuse them when they got there. 

A new novel, The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry, chronicles this godlike power of the priest earlier in the last century. The book is fictional, and wildly romantic. But back in real life, the children who were abused are still around, with their scars and their stories, now finally believed after all these years. Once the pure pathos of these children's stories, thousands of them, began to settle in, a far worse specter began to loom. Not only are the abused very much with us, so are the abusers. Now Ireland must look its collective shame in the face in order to seek atonement and forgiveness.

There is a lingering belief about the morose character of the Irish, as if the rain, fueled by Catholic guilt, has the power to wash off any optimism. You feel the poets and novelists fighting this depression, and you hear it sometimes in the idle conversations overheard at bus stops or in the shops. But when the rain stops and the sun comes out there is no place more glorious than the Irish countryside, nor can there be a people whose collective friendliness is more warmly felt by strangers. Living here as a guest, you just want things to start going right for this small island country, now.

Living here

Thursday afternoon, two o'clock. Having bought Eleanor her cod from the fish truck in Edenderry, I dropped it off at the farm and headed to Nodlaig's. Nodlaig (pronounced NULLig) lives in a bungalow on Ballinderry land, across the road from Ballinderry House. She and Charlie, who died in 2006, built the house after their marriage. They knew each other as children, but Nodlaig left her home to work in Dublin while Charlie stayed to work for his older brother Jasper, who had inherited Balinderry in 1956. There was another barrier to their marriage: Charlie was Church of Ireland, and Nodlaig is Catholic. But by the time Nodlaig returned to care for her ailing mother, the question of children was moot since they were both past 50, and times had changed. They married in 1973.

Nodlaig was taking me to the bookmobile, called more prosaically the travelling library here. She loves this little library, and hasn't missed a single time since it started coming. We drove in her little car to the site where the truck was parked, on what was once the Ballinderry bogland, about a quarter mile from her house. The truck was spectacular, only two years old, its shelves neatly arranged with fiction (Nodlaig's choice; her favorite is the Irish romance author Maeve Binchy) and children's' books. There is a small non-fiction section and even magazines, although you have to look at those in the truck. There is a checkout desk and a corner seat for reading. Of course everyone knows each other in this place so small there isn't even a name for it, so for its brief 30-minute stop the truck becomes a gathering spot for old friends.

Today we had to rush a bit because Nodlaig was having visitors. My cousin Deirdre, whom I had never met, her daughter and her daughter's two children were travelling down from Dublin to see Nodlaig, and she had graciously included me in the visit. When we got back to the house she had the tea things all set out: brown bread slathered with butter (the first time I ever actually understood how much butter that meant) and small, square dense bars that looked like brownies but were called simply biscuits, just like every cookie is here. The tea was already in its pot by the hearth and the room was set up with chairs for everyone. 

Nodlaig's little house is modest and cozy. The sitting room is crowded with a motley collection of worn chairs, many small gewgaws on the mantle, an assortment of dusty tables (Nodlaig loves to cook but she admits to rarely picking up a broom). The kitchen is warmed by a stove that is a far simpler version of the mighty Aga. This one burns turf, and Nodlaig keeps it lit most of the time. There is an obvious pride in the space, but no pretensions about it. Mostly it is a welcoming house, just like Nodlaig herself.

Before Deirdre got there Nodlaig's sister-in-law Reenie dropped by. Reenie is the most elegant woman I have seen here so far. She wore a calf-length gored skirt, a simple shirt with a vest and a sweater over it, all in muted shades of brown, black stockings, pointed shoes with small heels, and had a burberry scarf wrapped around her neck. Her hair and makeup were perfect. She must be 85 but looked years younger.

When Deirdre and Barbara arrived we chatted, then tea was served. Because I was given the chair of honor in the room, Charlie's chair, it fell to me to pour the tea, a task I didn't do well, since Nodlaig had to remind me to top up everyone's cup.

Deirdre's daughter Barbara has two boys. The youngest was born with Down's Syndrome, and much of the conversation revolved around his care. When she heard where I was from she asked if I knew anything about a new treatment being investigated at Stanford. I wish I could have helped her.

So this was the day: work in the morning, fish delivery, library on wheels, sitting in a circle of chairs with three generations of women, warmed by the turf burning in the hearth, drinking thick tea and eating brown bread and butter. It felt like one of the best days here so far.

Sunday, mystic Sunday

Today's plan was for another Sunday walk, this one around the lakes in Co. Meath. But last night my normally eerily quiet upstairs neighbors decided to have what sounded like a karaoke party at 3:30am. This went on right above my bedroom, and lasted for about 45 minutes. I managed to get back to sleep, but I woke up tired and achy and in no mood for a 12-mile hike, even on relatively gentle terrain. Instead I made a good breakfast, read the Irish Times, hung out some wash on this first fine day in a week or more, then got in the car and headed for the Hill of Tara.

As I drove up to the Hill, which appears so suddenly and without fanfare that you could easily miss it if it weren't for the cars lining the small road, I saw on the left the last sign I imagined on this trip: The Old Bookshop. And there, sure enough, was a tiny shack of a place, with a large poster outside that said there were 5000 volumes about Ireland. I was delirious. Completely ignoring the landscape, I parked the Ford and headed straight into the place. 

For the next hour I inhaled deeply the distinctive musty smell that only a bookshop with a long pedigree of damp books can offer. Almost every book in the place had to do with Ireland, as promised. The old man who ran the place was busy tapping away on his laptop behind an unstable pile of new arrivals, meaning perhaps sometime in the last year. People came and went; only one person bought something, a book that I heard him say was €3, and that he would be glad to sign it. A poet, mostly likely. As for me, I picked up and rejected at least 20 books, settling finally on three gems of 1950s and 60s publications with plenty of photos. The owner thanked me so profusely I began to think he hadn't had a sale this big--€22, including a €2 discount offered without my prompting--in years. 

The books safely in the car, I finally turned to the main attraction. The ice age shaped this land into a series of shallow rolling hills; today they look like a gigantesque version of the soft folds in one of Lucien Freud's corpulent portraits.  During medieval times the Hill of Tara was the spiritual center of Celtic Ireland, but when Christianity moved into the neighborhood, somewhere around the eleventh century, the hill lost its importance as a place of worship. Just in case, a statue of St Patrick was added in modern times. In 1938 the IRA added a monument to the 1798 rebellion, finishing the historical trajectory of cultural markers.

Today the Hill of Tara is surely one of the most breathtaking spots in this breathtaking country. It is easy to imagine feeling holy in a place like this, where you swear you can see across the entirety of this small island in all directions from the top of one of the rolling hills, and maybe you can.

But this is also a place for the crystal crowd. While I was in the bookshop a woman came in with a long tale about attempting to find a fortune teller she had seen on TV but whose name she had not written down. The shop acknowledged the contemporary pilgrimages by shelving its Celtic and Mystical Ireland books closest to the door. At the entrance to the Hill a young man, American, alas, was holding forth with some Irish protestors about the fact that civilization began going to the dogs the day the goddess lost her power to patriarchy. I sidled right on by, keeping my accent to myself.

The protestors are there because there is a highway being built that is far too close to this special place. They have been active for years. One of the leaders has a vinyl banner across the top of her hood. If the car is parked you can look down on it and read the whole story in four columns of text.

After my walk I got back in the car, managing to reverse amid the traffic and haphazardly placed cars; on this skinny country road jammed with cars, families, and dogs, this might have been the main miracle of the day. I drove down the hill and headed for home. When I reached the village of Kilmessen I stopped at an unassuming pub. With the soccer match on the big screen in the background, I sat at a small table, drinking a mug of tea and reading my new books. A heavenly day.

dinner, or cooking in Ireland with one tiny sauté pan, a cheap wok, 3 crappy knives & a fridge that would fit in your dishwasher

Actually, dinner is looking up. My kitchenware is the pits, but I have finally begun to crack the shopping. As soon as you know where to look, there are good ingredients everywhere. My first and still most important find is the organic farm shop (see the blog for 18 April). Tomorrow I am going again. This time the shopkeeper will have an organic free range chicken for me which she will have cut in half and wrapped as separate pieces. I'll get the lovely eggs and fill my box with produce, and, this week, I'll get some of the locally sourced cheese. I gave the last piece I bought to Alan and Eleanor. 

Another new shopping spot is at the truck that parks in the Esso station in Edenderry each Thursday. This is a portable fish shop. Today I went for the first time. It is fish heaven. There is cod, haddock (fresh and smoked), plaice, whiting, salmon, gorgeous pink trout, and mackerel whose skin looks like it was painted by the monks who make the Book of Kells. The bottom shelf holds tubsful of crayfish and mussels. I bought two huge cod fillets for Eleanor and a lovely haddock fillet for my dinner. Next week: mussels. (I didn't ask about the farmed vs. wild issue, which I'll try to get up the nerve to do next week. The fishmonger was on the phone with what appeared to be his bookie when I got there and I had to wait several minutes before he hung up and waited on me.  The phone rang again as he was getting my change and I stood there another five minutes waiting for it, while the line behind me grew. He doesn't seem to have the ethic shared by most shopkeepers here that a paying customer is a welcome sight.)

The other great find is the Eden Deli, a haven in an otherwise unremarkable collection of eating establishments. The owner bakes fresh bread daily; her granary loaf (whole wheat bread) is to die for. I finally broke down and bought a bread knife so that I could cut the bread properly (I was using a serrated paring knife and sort of circling the loaf). Her mainstay is soda bread, and even though hers is lovely, dense and sweet, I much prefer the chewy and delicious wheat bread. You have to get there early to get these loaves; her bread is certainly not a secret, and she nearly always sells out by midday. 

Below is a recipe I made recently. I bought the sausages at a local butcher who guarantees the meat is 100% Irish.

Monday night dinner

2 Cumberland sausages (pork with lots of herbs,very soft and light)

A can of butter beans, no other white beans being available

Chilean white wine

A bouillon cube of chicken stock

Fresh oregano

Some fabulous mixed organic greens (rocket, nettles, etc)

Garlic

Red pepper

Red onion

Having slowly sauteed the red pepper and onion the night before in the wok, I added them to the butter beans in the tiny saute pan, threw in some minced garlic, then poured over the chicken ‘stock’ and some white wine. In desperation at creating something that had some taste I added a large pinch of sea salt and several grinds of pepper. In the wok I cooked the sausage by browning them a bit in olive oil, then pouring some wine over them and covering them tightly with a glass cover that is way too small for the wok but nonetheless did the trick.

I cut up the cooked sausage, then briefly added it to the bean mixture. I poured the whole mixture over the greens and ate it in front of the telly. It was delicious. The next day I had the leftovers for lunch. Even better.

Slí na Sláinte

 The first thing I realized on my inaugural hike here was that this was not going to be like any hike I had ever taken in the States. An initial clue should have been the preponderance of gaiters on the walkers who were suiting up in the car park, which they tied on over their hiking pants, running the bottom strap under their boots. The second was the number of walking sticks and poles. At least half the walkers had them, and I was beginning to regret the decision I had made not to purchase a set of poles before I left. The third was the boots themselves. They were serious boots, high on their legs, sometimes full leather, with solid soles and the kind of ankle support that looked like it would do for snowshoeing.

After registering at the Slievebloom Walking Festival headquarters, the town hall in Kinnitty, we caravaned about five miles to the start of the walk (hike is not a word that is used here, where walk means everything from an evening constitutional to a full-blown days-long trek). Two novice walkers offered me a lift, which I gratefully accepted; I would have probably made a fool of myself trying to drive along the farm track that we followed. Suddenly we stopped in the middle of the lane, and the walk leader told us to leave the cars there; at the end of the walk we would reverse out, another reason for me to be thankful for my carpool.

The leader himself, Frank, stood in the bed of his pickup at the front of the long line of parked cars and gave us a brief assessment of what to expect. At the registration I kept hearing people ask, How wet will it be? At the time I wondered, if you want to hike in Ireland shouldn't you expect a bit of wet? This was probably the most naive thinking I have done here so far. Frank told us we would walk on mostly level ground for a mile or so, then start to climb, then walk along the top of the ridge before descending back down through a small forest back to the cars. Part of the walk would be through timber cutting areas on tree farms, some recently harvested and other with new planting. The walk would be about 10k, or a little over 6 miles. This sounded perfect for my first real walk here. I had roughly the right kind of gear, minus the gaiters, and had done many a 6 mile hike through various elevations. This would be fun.

 Frank, who hopped out of the truck carrying an iron pole for a walking stick, didn't bother with boots. He and his two pals walked in wellies, which should have been another clue, although at the time I thought that either their wellies were a great deal more comfortable than the ones I had bought at the street market so I could walk in the fields at the farm or they knew something I didn't. I don't know about the former, but the latter was certainly true.

No one ever took a count of the crowd, but there must have been at least 35 people on the walk. The group had slightly more women than men, but the number of young men was surprising.  The couple who had given me a lift, Rhona and Desi, had driven in, like me, for the day. There were two girls about 10 and 12 walking with their mother, clearly locals. But most of the walkers had come from Dublin. They were staying for the entire three-day festival, and they were serious walkers. For them this walk would be their second in two days; many of them would take a final walk on Monday. Rhona and Desi were the only inexperienced walkers there.

We set out along the farm track but within five minutes we had plunged down a steep and very slippery grassy slope in a small woods, forded a stream, dug our way up the other side and squished along an open meadow past some very watchful cattle that Frank shooed away with his stick. Then we began our long but gentle ascent on a road of sorts that had been dug out for the trucks coming from the sandstone quarry that we were soon to pass. The quarry has taken out a good chunk of one of the hills. It is still active, its mounds of stone obscuring what otherwise would have been spectacular views of the countryside. At the top of the hill we hit the real meat of the walk, and I finally began to understand why so many people asked about the wet. Our walk was set straight through a 

bog, a piece of nature I had been anxious to acquaint myself with, although I wouldn't have necessarily chosen this particular firsthand way of learning about it. The bog was not big by Irish standards, but it went on for miles in all directions, a dark sea of muck which at first glance offered little in the way of flora. Whatever animals might live there would not be in evidence to us, and it was difficult to imagine what could survive in this harshness. For the next few miles all you could hear was the squelch of boots in the muck as we trekked single file through the bog. Occasionally Frank or his friend would stop to help us get through a particularly mucky area. Once as I was being given a boost over a small rivulet of water running through the bog my right foot slipped in up past my knee. Pulling it out again took all my strength and the aid of Frank's powerful arm, and I realized just how dense and terrifying this most primeval of nature's material was.

At almost no point did we follow a formal pathway. This is not a walk through carefully tended ranger trails. Once we left the few tracks that had been made for farm or quarry lorries, we were out in completely unmarked fields. The occasional stick stuck into the ground were Frank's personal markers; he had walked the terrain on Thursday and marked his way so that he could re-trace his steps and get us back to the cars in the posted time period of about four hours. 

By now I was caked with mud, but my boots and socks were keeping my feet dry; thank goodness for North Face. We set out through the drier fields of heather, which I thought would surely be easier than the slippery bog. But the clumps of heather are not only tough and unyielding, the fields they grow in are full of holes hidden by the density of the plants so that your foot sinks without warning and if you're not careful you could easily sprain an ankle in one of them. This is the point when I realized that dry feet were only one necessity on a walk like this; the other was ankle support, and my lovely boots, which have served me well on the dry California trails, were no match for this pitted and deceptive terrain.

Still, the day had finally turned glorious after some sudden showers, the air was as clean as I have ever breathed, out here where no machine could penetrate the land, and the group of walkers was as friendly and amenable as any group of walkers is, with the camaraderie of a shared mission and the collective abandonment of stress. I heard about trips to the States, though rarely as far as California, I got pointers on how to find set dancing lessons and where the next walking festival would be, I spoke with a woman who might be a relative and promised her I would do some searching for Annie Tyrrell, c. 1860, although I am sure I won't have any luck with that. A barrister explained the Irish system of defense and prosecution to me, and I was offered a piece of ginger cake by Rhona and Desi in exchange for my cashews and the last of the dried cranberries I had brought with me from California.

Rhona and Desi dropped me off back at the car park, now nearly empty, as we were one of the last cars to reverse down the farm track. They headed off on a picnic. I changed out of my filthy hiking pants and into a clean pair of jeans behind the relative privacy of the open car door, then headed into Birr, a heritage town about 15 kilometers from Kinnitty. Whatever else the day had brought in the way of unusual experiences, I am positive that this is the first time I have ever wound down from a rigorous hike with a late-afternoon stroll through the grounds of a seventeeth-century castle.

Saturday night

Saturday night at home, 9:30pm. Don Giovanni is on Lyric FM, recorded from a live performance earlier this year at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, and presented in its entirety tonight.  I just finished dinner, a scrawny but delicious Irish free range roast chicken, along with some asparagus from Spain. I'm mostly packed up for my trip to the Slievebloom Mountains tomorrow, where I'll join the annual walking festival. Today I worked at Ballinderry for several hours, then visited Nodlaig, wife of my third cousin Charlie (he died about four years ago) for tea in her cluttered kitchen.

 Before dinner tonight I bought a bread knife at Tesco, as I couldn't face any more days of filing away at the marvelous housemade granary loaves from the local deli with a wholly inadequate paring knife. In the morning I'll make a sandwich from the leftover chicken to take on the walk.

Finally, I am settled here, one month to the day from my arrival.

Grange Castle

Grange Castle has been in the Tyrrell family for centuries, although just how many is in some dispute. The family genealogy claims that Sir John Tyrrell built Grange in about 1460, but other possibly more reliable  sources say that it came into the family in the early eighteenth century.

Yesterday I set out to find Grange, not always an easy job for someone as direction-challenged as I am who isn't yet fully adjusted to driving on the left. Miraculously, about five minutes out of Edenderry there was a sign pointing down a narrow road: Grange Castle. But when I got to the next T junction there was, typically, no signage at all. Thinking that a castle must logically be built on a hill, I turned right toward the gently sloping fields. A few miles later I reached another junction; still no castle.  I re-traced my steps and sure enough,  back at the first crossroad, had I just looked to the left I would have seen it through the trees.

Grange is signposted because of recent efforts by a group of local Edenderry people, none of them Tyrrells, to turn the castle into a tourist attraction. The group solicited the support of the current owner of Grange, Hugh Tyrrell, and formed The Tyrrell Trust. Hugh Tyrrell lives in England full  time, and is evidently rarely seen here, but he gave his support to the group and a massive fundraising campaign was undertaken. The Tyrrell Trust received hundreds of thousands of euros from the Irish government, anxious during the days of the Celtic Tiger to rescue its crumbling heritage. In addition, the castle itself, although not the lands surrounding it, was given to the state by its previous owner, Bobby Tyrrell, in 1988, so the state had an interest in restoring and maintaining it.

The Trust was quite successful in its efforts: in addition to a fully restored castle, the Trust developed quite a few of the outbuildings, including a re-thatched byre, a small animal barn. They installed a maze walk and hired a full-time gardener to completely revive a walled garden. A new outbuilding was home to plays and other activities, and a tea room was established. Still, by 2003 the Trust was having serious internal difficulties, and it was disbanded soon after that, the 99-year lease that Hugh Tyrrell had granted them void.

Nodlaig had told me that I could easily get to Grange by climbing over the fence, but when I turned into the grassy drive the gate was wide open. A very short drive later I was parked in front of a squat, crenellated tower house, completely intact including the diamond-paned windows. Behind the castle were several outbuildings in serious disrepair and the remnants of many stone walls. The castle itself was attached at one side to a what looked like a nineteenth-century cottage, and here is where I realized something was seriously wrong. The front door to the cottage, near where I had parked, was intact but grown over. At the back, the door was wide open. I cautiously entered the empty space. Clearly the cottage had been recently completely renovated, but vandals had ripped out wiring, pulled the frames from around the doors and moulding from the walls and of course had left trash everywhere.

On my left was a room that had evidently been the office, judging by the two file cabinets. The drawers were open and their contents rifled. Account books were strewn on the floor, and in one corner someone had tossed a large pile of files, apparently having gone through them looking for money. Since the windows as well as the doors had been left open, birds had flown in and made nests amid the rubble.

 Across the courtyard, the new building had also been broken into. All that was left were two iron chandeliers taht evidently were too much trouble to take. although the general damage wasn't nearly as bad in here. Only later, as I was driving away, did it occur to me that the buildings had probably been full of furniture,  the cabinets full of dishes and the sheds with tools when the thieves broke in.

The rest of the grounds had retreated to their overgrown condition in the very short time that the castle had been left. I found no evidence of the maze, and couldn't even tell which of the walled spaces had held the gardens.

Ironically, it was the castle itself that still intact. Aside from one broken window pane high up on one of the walls, the castle had not been violated. It was still possible to enter the ground floor of the small tower; a venerable iron gate was padlocked against intrusion into the rest of the tower and, given that there was nothing to steal in it, the gate had not been tampered with. Outside the castle a long wood ladder, made in the style of an older era, lay across the grass. Presumably the thieves had dragged the ladder from one of the sheds and climbed the castle walls looking for a way in, but aside from the window nothing was touched.

For someone who has come here looking for clues to her own past, this devastation was heartbreaking. And for a researcher who relies on documentary evidence, the fact that the entire life of the Tyrrell Trust had been ransacked and abandoned to nature left me stunned. For the people who have been here over the long term, I suspect that this current vandalization might be seen as one more occurrence in the long life of this place, a symptom of the failure of the recent plan to resuscitate it, and another chapter in a very long book with no foreseeable end.