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Walking on Eire
By Tim Cahill, March & April 2006
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Our first day's walk, in Connemara, started off pretty flat. We strolled
down a gravel road through a forest, moving past closely set trees covered with
hanging moss, which the ancient Celts, I learned, used as toilet paper. This is
one of those useless facts that will clutter my mind until the day I die.
After a mere five miles we came out onto a road where the van was waiting
for anyone who didn't want to continue. As it happened, everyone wanted to
go on, because now we were on a proper Irish lane, a rocky path interspersed
with numerous streams where horned, black-faced sheep grazed among the purple
heather and green grasses.
I walked for a time with the Hildebrand family, from Haworth, New Jersey.
Julie and Dave were strong walkers, and their 23-year-old daughter, Ellen, was
something of an athlete. They wanted to take a family vacation, and Ellen had
suggested "something active." So walking it was, and even in the
rain, they were enjoying themselves immensely. It was a soft old day.
At one point Ellen froze. She was staring at a sheep that was, in turn,
staring at her. Ellen grew up in New Jersey and went to college at
Northwestern, near Chicago, where she now worked. She had no experience with
farm animals. "That thing's got horns," she said.
And I felt the blarney rise in my soul. "Yes," I said, "and
they have great fangs and talons to hold to the hillside against the wind.
Vicious beasts. They'll rip you to shreds, they will."
Ellen edged her way past the vicious sheep.
The path we were on, Gerry told me, was a "Famine road," a path
built as a make-work project during the Great Famine of 1845 to 1849. You
cannot go anywhere in the Irish countryside and not hear the Famine mentioned
at least once a day. It devastated rural Ireland, and County Mayo has still not
recovered. In 1841 there were 388,887 people in the county. By 1851 the
population—depleted by starvation, epidemic, and emigration—fell 29
percent, to 274,830. By 1971 the numbers had dwindled to 109,525. Today the
figure for County Mayo is 117,446 and rising, as the Celtic Tiger economy has
boomed. People are moving back to rural Ireland these days.
The path dropped down to a road where Gerry's van was waiting for us.
We'd walked eight miles in the rain, and we stopped at the nearest
pub—it wasn't very far away (one never is)—where I had a hot
Powers: Irish whiskey with sugar, clove, lemon, and hot water.
I chatted with Frauka, 43, and Martina, 28, the two German women on the
trip. Martina taught school and was painfully shy. Frauka was a different
story: she was, to confound the stereotype, a very jolly German who was
inordinately fond of jokes. She'd been to Ireland three times and was
working on her already quite proficient English by collecting idioms that would
likely not be found in her grammar books.
"Bite me," I suggested, and Frauka wrote that down in her notes.
She was a musician and made her living playing and teaching the flute. I
noticed her talking a lot to Ellen, who had the best collection of expressions
young people say.
Gerry was something of a master meteorologist. He studied the weather and
picked each day's destination with a mind to sunny walking. Indeed, it
never rained on us again, and the next day, as Gerry said, was "a
peach." We left from the house, drove several minutes to a set of docks
near Westport, and took half an hour or so to cross the waters of Clew Bay in a
covered boat—a "half-decker" ferry—which dropped us at
Clare Island. As we strolled the sunny lanes, Gerry informed us that in the
early 1500s the island was one of the strongholds of the pirate queen, Grace
O'Malley, who had commanded three galleons and 200 men. Legend holds she
once fought a battle while pregnant and killed her opponent. Other sources say
she'd given birth at sea and was still nursing her newborn at the time.
Whatever happened, no one disputes the fact that Grace was in a delicate
condition when she killed a man in battle and saved the day.
We trekked toward one of the highest points on the island, ambling through
narrow rock-walled lanes and eating the ripe blackberries that covered the
stonework in absurd profusion. Eventually we reached a decommissioned
lighthouse, where we sat in the sun and enjoyed a supplied lunch of
turkey-and-cucumber sandwiches. I found some sheep droppings in the grass and
asked Ellen if she'd ever eaten one of these delicious Irish ground
raisins. Ellen laughed. "I may be gullible," she said, "but
I'm not stupid."
We had separated into two groups now, those who liked to walk fast and those
who preferred to stroll. Linnea and Karen Lancaster, who was one of the owners
of the Cross Country
International tours, brought up the rear, taking photos and chatting with
local folks. Gerry had enlisted another guide, John Kajda, a Polish gent of 75,
to shepherd the amblers. John could outwalk most people, whatever their ages.
His Irish friends called him the Walking Pole.
I felt privileged to walk over this remote land, far from
any crowd, madding or not.
Dinner that night at Gerry's was bacon loin and cabbage, which is the
way it is made in Ireland. No corned beef. The food at Gerry's was very
good indeed. On another night we had grilled salmon and new potatoes; on
another, roast loin of pork with applesauce made from the apples that fell from
Gerry's own trees. Oh, and potatoes. There was one free day in the
itinerary and everyone ate in Westport, where pub food—Irish stew,
Guinness-and-beef casserole, fish and chips—was genuinely surprising,
which is to say it was, for the most part, really good.
Most of us went to bed early the third night. We'd do the Reek the next
day. The rooms in Gerry's B & B were small and neat, with polished
wooden floors and their own bathrooms. I slept comfortably and woke early,
ready to reek 'n' roll.
The mountain stands alone, distinctive, a cone of quartzite rock commanding
Clew Bay and its environs. It is a holy mountain, and Gerry thinks people have
climbed it for the better part of 5,000 years. At the base of the mountain,
lest anyone forget, a sculpture was erected to commemorate the Famine. It is a
three-masted ship cast in bronze, with a dozen or more skeletons on the deck
and in the rigging. "They were called coffin ships," Gerry said.
"The vessels were meant to carry eight men, but back in 1847, they set sail
for America carrying 100 people or more. Thousands died."
With that thought firmly in mind, I started up the Reek, the mountain that
Saint Patrick had climbed in the year 441 and on whose summit he fasted and
meditated for 40 days. What had once been a pagan ritual became a Christian
pilgrimage. Patrick said, "All those who worship the sun go in misery and
sore punishment. We, on the other hand, worship the true Son, who will never
perish, nor will anyone who does His will." On the last Sunday of July
thousands of pilgrims still climb the mountain, some of them barefoot.
But on any given day hundreds of people will climb part or all of the Reek.
Gerry's done it innumerable times. "I want my ashes scattered up
there," he said. "The last time I go up the Reek, they'll carry
me." I made a bit of a mistake here. I'm from Montana, and a
2,500-foot mountain isn't heavy lifting for me, so I blazed up the slopes.
John, the Walking Pole, manned a turnoff point at 1,750 feet, but no one wanted
to quit. I reached the summit in one hour flat, which, I later realized, was a
mistake. The way to do it is to walk slow and easy, so you can chat with
people. It's a social affair, and there is much to learn.
Linnea and Karen did it the right way. They talked with people all the way
up the mountain. There was, for instance, a grandfather and his six-year-old
granddaughter. The man wore a suit, as if dressed for work. The little blond
girl might have been taken bodily off a poster advertising the charms of
Ireland. The two walked hand in hand and intended to go only a little way.
Another man, a Mr. Anthony Cahill of County Roscommon, leaned heavily on a
stick as he negotiated the rocky trail barefoot. I was to meet him only later,
and was honored to shake his hand. I felt one Cahill observing painful penance
on the Reek was certainly enough for one day. Karen, who'd ask anybody
anything, wondered aloud if he was atoning for any sin in particular.
"No, no," he said. "It just seemed the right way to do
it."
"Adultery?"
"No." Mr. Cahill laughed. "Just tradition, you
know."
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