Chapter 6 the WEST Counties Clare -- Galway -- Mayo – Sligo
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Chapter 6 THE WEST counties Clare -- Galway -- Mayo – Sligo LIMERICK - CLARE Castleconnel What the Limerickman, Michael Hartnett , calls 'the celebrated Anglo-Irish stew' was to a large extent cooked in the West. There are many reasons why: among them the survival of the Irish language in this remote part, and the fact that many of the gentry who devoted themselves to the Irish Literary Revival -- Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde, Edward Martyn, and others -- lived in the West. The Shannon is the great divide, the West begins beyond it, and one place to cross it is at O'Brien's Bridge north of Limerick, near Castleconnel , where William Wordsworth went in 1829. Many of Wordsworth's letters from Ireland are frustrating; he says he has had an interesting time, but will tell them about it when he gets home -- 'it is late, and I will not enter into particulars'. An exception is a description of his taking a boat on the rapids at Castleconnel. These are not so fierce now, because of the hydro-electric scheme up-river, but they are still turbulent enough [1] : [We] breakfasted at Castleconnel, a very agreeably situated village on the banks of the Shannon... the Shores of the River are sprinkled with Villas and gay pleasure- boxes. On a bold limestone rock stand and lie the remains of an old Castle overgrown or richly hung with ivy -- the whole landscape exceedingly pleasing. Here we took boat perhaps a little incautiously, and soon found ourselves in the noisy bed of the Shannon among water breaks and wears for the catching of salmon. We were hurried down the foaming bed of the river among waves that leapt against the stream and on one side was an eddy which would have swallowed us up had the Boatmen been wanting in skill to avoid it. But they understood their business... On each side were groves and Country houses -- but what were we going to see -- the falls of Doonas -- falls they scarcely are -- but tremendous rapids which as we saw them today would have swallowed up any vessel that should venture among them. We disembarked and walked along the margin of the magnificent stream to a limestone Rock that rises abruptly from the bed of the river and makes part of a pleasure garden. Here we stood and saw a curve of the agitated stream of at least five hundred yards... From the sides of the rock grows a large Ewe tree which extends its branches some yards over the stream, and in hot weather the Salmon are accustomed to take shelter in numbers from the beams of the Sun... It is unsurprising that his 'old Castle' is still there, or that he describes exactly the box-like houses near it. But a 'Ewe' tree is still there too, and among its many fallen but still vigorous boughs are the walls and parterres of the old 'pleasure garden' and a ruined, folly-like tower. 6/ 1 Kilkee Another nineteenth-century English visitor (though with Irish blood) was Charlotte Bronte . She spent part of her honeymoon, in 1854, at Kilkee on the south-west Clare coast. It is still a popular resort and, except for a new hotel like a barracks on one side of the horseshoe bay, is not much changed from her day. The Atlantic breaks and roars on a reef at the bay's mouth, the shore at the headlands is smooth stone, gently stepped, leading to jagged cliffs, with close-cropped turf on top of them; a place of domesticated wildness. She and her husband had, until then, spent little time alone together [2] : My husband is not a poet or a poetical man -- and one of my grand doubts before marriage was about 'congenial tastes and so on'. The first morning we went out on the cliffs and saw the Atlantic coming in all white foam, I did not know whether I should get leave or time to take the matter in my own way. I did not want to talk -- but I did want to look and be silent. Having hinted a petition, licence was not refused -- covered with a rug to keep off the spray I was allowed to sit where I chose -- and he only interrupted me when he thought I crept too near the edge of the cliff. So far he is always good in this way -- and this protection which does not interfere or pretend is I believe a thousand times better than any half sort of pseudo sympathy. I will try with God's help to be as indulgent to him whenever indulgence is needed. It is good to learn, what she perhaps did not know, that her husband, Arthur Nicholls , was appreciating it too. He wrote to a friend: Kilkee, a glorious watering-place with the finest shore I ever saw -- Completely girdled with stupendous cliffs -- it was most refreshing to sit on a rock and look out on the broad Atlantic boiling and foaming at our feet. The place where you can sit and have the Atlantic 'boiling and foaming' at your feet, is just round the corner from the 'West End' of Kilkee. 'Here at our Inn', writes Charlotte, splendidly designated "the West End Hotel" -- there is a good deal to carp at -- if one were in carping humour -- but we laugh instead of grumbling for out of doors there is much to compensate for any indoors shortcomings; so magnificent an ocean -- so bold and grand a coast -- I never yet saw. The West End Hotel is now a modern building, but to the side of it are two 1850s Haworth-type houses and it seems probable that their 'inn' was like one of these. Ennis At Ennis , on the main road through County Clare, you may wonder if literary associations drive people mad. The pleasant town doubtless has them: Sean O'Faoláin was a schoolteacher there, and the Rimbaud-like prodigy Thomas Dermody (1775-1802) went off like a rocket from there, spurning Ireland [3] -- Rank nurse of nonsense; on whose thankless coast The base weed thrives, the nobler bloom is lost: Parent of pride and poverty, where dwell Dullness and brogue and calumny -- farewell! -- and died of drink in England, at twenty-seven. But James Joyce , in Ulysses , has Leopold Bloom's father commit suicide in Ennis, in the Queen's Hotel; which consequently has a Bloom Bar, a Joyce restaurant, and a plaque in the foyer, of engraved brass, with the relevant quotation: In sloping upright and backhands: Queen's Hotel, Queen's Ho... 6/ 2 Cliffs of Moher -- Liscannor North from Kilkee along the coast are the spectacular Cliffs of Moher . Anthony Trollope , stationed for a time on Post Office duty nearby at Milltown Malbay, in 1845, used the cliffs and the region around Liscannor for his late short novel , An Eye for an Eye (1879). The plot, a young man torn between his love for someone 'unsuitable', and his sense of his own social position, is very like that of Griffin's The Collegians (1829). Trollope is at first English-deprecating about these cliffs: It may be doubted whether Lady Mary Quin was right when she called them the highest cliffs in the world, but they are undoubtedly very respectable cliffs, and run up some six hundred feet from the sea as nearly perpendicular as cliffs should be. They are beautifully coloured, streaked with yellow veins, and with great masses of dark red rock; and beneath them lies the broad and blue Atlantic. Lady Mary's exaggeration as to the comparative height is here acknowledged, but had she said that below them rolls the brightest bluest clearest water in the world she would not have been far wrong. Trollope may tease about their height but it is on them he puts the high-point of his novel: The peril of his position on the top of the cliff had not occurred to him -- nor did it occur to him now. He had been there so often that the place gave him no sense of danger. Nor had that peril -- as it was thought afterwards by those who most closely made inquiry on the matter -- ever occurred to her. She had not brought him there that she might frighten him with that danger, or that she might avenge herself by the power which it gave her. But now the idea flashed across her maddened mind. "Miscreant," she said. And she bore him back to the very edge of the precipice. "You'll have me over the cliff," he exclaimed, hardly even yet putting out his strength against her... Iris Murdoch , in The Unicorn (1963), rather than 'brightest bluest', shows the sea below the cliffs as sinister, and the beach frightening. Her novel, filled with descriptions of the cliffs and their surroundings, also has room for a full-rigged description of something most visitors to Ireland must have wondered about: what it is like to be sucked into an Irish bog. She takes her time over it, perhaps the real time it would take, from the first observation that, 'the ground had become very mushy and was coming up over his shoes', to the first fall, and first realisation that he is stuck, and sinking. The effect is horrific [4] : At that moment something seemed to give way under his left foot, as if it had entered some watery chamber, some air bubble of the bog. He lurched, tried to take another step, and fell violently on his side. The ground gave and gurgled all round him.