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Castles, Follies and Four-Leaf Clovers
Adventures Along St Declan's Way
By Rosamund Burton Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2011 Rosamund Burton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74176-768-1
CHAPTER 1
The map
Many years ago an Irish friend lent me a map of an ancient highway which threads its way along quiet country lanes, grassy tracks and riverside paths, passing a string of castles and fairy forts, small villages and miraculous wells. Stretching 60 miles between the fishing village of Ardmore on Ireland's south coast and the town of Cashel in County Tipperary, this age-old pilgrim route was made famous by Ireland's beloved Saint Declan, who pre-dates Saint Patrick. I instantly wanted to walk St Declan's Way, but it wasn't the right time. So I photocopied the map and filed it away.
When I've all but forgotten my dream I have a small window of opportunity to return to Ireland and follow this historic way. Excited at the possibility of this adventure I take the photocopy out of the drawer where I'd stashed it years earlier. My heart sinks to see the black and white copy has faded over time. I realise I could never find my way using this sad piece of paper.
What's worse is that the friend who lent me the map originally has now died, so I have no idea how I can get hold of a copy. For a moment I fear this is just a pipedream. But I decide to ring the local Irish tourist office to see if someone there can help me.
'I've heard the path is very overgrown,' is all Norma, who answers the telephone, can tell me. She would love to walk St Declan's Way, she adds, but can't help me find a map.
As I stare at the photocopy on the table in front of me I can't think who else to ring or what to do next. Then I notice in the bottom corner the name of the company that produced the map and a telephone number. I dial it, and a man called Barry answers.
Barry tells me he did the walk ten years ago, but from what he's heard the way marks are now faded and the path has not been maintained. He remembers the map, but it's out of print. However, he gives me the number of Richard Lincoln in Ardmore who, he says, might be able to help me.
Delighted to have this lead I make the call and ask to speak to Richard Lincoln.
'He went to Africa yesterday,' the woman at the other end replies promptly. His departure sounds very finite. There is a long silence on the line. Before I hang up, in a final punt I explain that I want to walk St Declan's Way and am looking for a map. It transpires that Richard is a gas engineer working in Africa for a few weeks and I am talking to his wife Mary. She tells me that Richard's mother, an historian, spent 30 years retracing St Declan's Way. Mary owns Ardmore Pottery and suggests I drop in and pick up a map. I can hardly believe my luck. Especially when I explain I am on the other side of the globe and she offers to post a map to me.
As I ponder on her spontaneous generosity, I realise how often in Ireland people go out of their way to help others. It's one of the many traits that I cherish about this country.
Despite the fact I live half a world away, part of me will always belong to Ireland. Perhaps it is the pain of unrequited love, the way this country has of welcoming me with open arms and yet at the same time always holding me at arm's length, constantly creating within me the sense that, although it is where I was born, I do not really have a place here.
Ireland is like a lover who always gives me the most magical time, but does not believe in marriage and living happily ever after. So, despite returning again and again, mesmerised by its beauty and its people, its myths and its history, and always feeling that there is nowhere more wonderful than this, I am always thrust back out into the world.
Nothing is forgotten here. The past is always present. The numerous ruins, slowly decaying in the wind and the rain and dotted across the country's green face like small scars, stand as constant reminders of what has occurred over the centuries.
I love the vibrant greenness and rugged landscape of Ireland. I love its numerous freshwater springs presided over by the Virgin Mary or heralded for their healing properties. And the acknowledgement of ghosts and fairies and other mysterious phenomena in Ireland I think has given me a recognition of the mystical, and an understanding that not everything that occurs in life can be explained.
I adore the Irish humour and the phenomenal natural wit and ability to make conversation. I laugh in Ireland in a way I do nowhere else. People feel it is their duty to entertain you and amuse you, and also they naturally want to talk to you. I love the acceptance of people's eccentricity and idiosyncrasies here.
Whenever I'm back in Ireland I am amazed by people's intelligence and acumen, and the refusal of the Irish to conform and kow-tow. After growing up in England with its hierarchical class system, I think Ireland has given me a true understanding of equality. Whatever someone's background or social standing there is an innate self-esteem inherent in its people and despite its turbulent history, an absolute refusal to be subservient to someone just because they are in a position of power.
That said I am driven mad by the pettiness and the divisiveness caused by religion. Like many I struggle to accept the pain and misery that people find themselves in because they think they should do the 'right' thing. The loveless marriages. The young lives lost looking after manipulative parents. And then there are the intelligent, talented people who turn to drink and end up blubbering alcoholics. Sometimes I want to weep and shake people out of their pathetic complacency and force them to change.
With the period of rapid economic growth from the mid 1990s for just over a decade, known as the Celtic Tiger, Ireland became a far more vibrant place, but also a victim of its own progress. More families with two cars meant more traffic and new motorways and fewer old men in tweed jackets riding black bicycles along narrow country roads.
Ireland has changed considerably in the last 25 years, and a certain wildness has been lost. No longer are small boys riding through the streets of Dublin on the back of lorries. There are fewer street hawkers although the women with their stalls at Moore Street are still singing out the prices of their fruit and vegetables, and no doubt the candid woman on the fish stall rebuking a customer fingering the cod: 'Them's fish, not pricks. They don't improve with the handling.'
Some say people cast off tradition and savoured the taste of materialism. One woman summed it up. Talking about a local whitegoods shop, she said, 'You'd see things in there you never saw before and it would fill you with wanting.' Now the Celtic Tiger has been shot in the foot and the global financial downturn has hit Ireland particularly hard. Once again the Irish are emigrating in their thousands to find work and opportunities overseas, while so many of those who remain struggle to make ends meet.
But my journey is not just through Ireland today, but a trip back in time to a world of saints, fairies, ghosts and other mysteries, and deep into the heart of Ireland's spirituality and sacredness.
When I tell Irish friends I am walking St Declan's Way I get a flurry of emails warning me about the perpetual rain and graphic descriptions of flooded towns. I know the Irish often wile away beautiful sunny days with stories of the terrible weather, but I actually like the Irish rain, particularly if it's soft. The droplets are so fine it's like being sprayed with a light mist, which permeates every pore of your skin. Whenever I'm out in that soft rain I feel as if I'm having an expensive beauty treatment. Perhaps that is why during the wettest Irish summer for 150 years I have decided to undertake this walk.
I tell my husband, Stephen, that from all accounts St Declan's Way is in parts very overgrown, and it might mean a fair amount of hacking through brambles and nettles.
'Thank God St Patrick banished all the snakes,' he remarks. Then, despite the promise along the way of plenty of pubs serving pints of cool dark velvety Guinness, announces that he won't be joining me.
CHAPTER 2
Coming home to the castle
When the map arrives in the post suddenly my trip seems real. In the midst of planning the walk and where to stay, buying and borrowing clothing, and other preparations, I find myself thinking about my years in Ireland.
I was born in County Down in Northern Ireland. My father was land agent at Mount Stewart at the time. But when I was only six months old we moved to Herefordshire, and I grew up in England.
In 1980, soon after I left school, my father got a job as a land agent looking after the Duke of Devonshire's Irish estates in Lismore, midway between Ardmore and Cashel along St Declan's Way. Our new home was the east wing of Lismore Castle.
We set off for Ireland the day after my eighteenth birthday party. I piled into the back of my parents' car with my cousins, Sophie and Carolyn, and we headed for Pembroke in South Wales where we were catching the all-night ferry to Ireland.
It was the first of many rough trips across the Irish Sea over the next few years. People were throwing up before the boat had even left the dock. Sophie and I lay head to toe in a narrow bunk, with Carolyn in the top bunk of the two-berth cabin. I woke up in the middle of the night to hear the sounds of lorries crashing against their chains on one of the lower decks. The ferry came into Cork Harbour in the early morning, and it was an overcast December day as we drove out of Cork along the River Lee towards Lismore.
I had seen a postcard of Lismore Castle with its numerous towers and turrets rising up from the bank of the Blackwater River, so I knew what it looked like. But seeing it for the first time I was awestruck by its magnificence. It seemed surreal that we were living in such a spectacular place and to be actually driving under the arch of the seventeenth-century riding house. As we came through the high stone archway of the gatehouse tower and into the enormous courtyard, I felt I was in a dream.
Straight ahead was the impressive entrance to the main part of the castle where the duke and duchess stayed. The duchess, known as Debo, was the youngest of the six famous Mitford girls. To the right of the imposing front entrance was the east wing and a tall circular castellated tower with an arched blue wooden door at its base. This was our front door. The first floor of the east wing had been done up for my parents. My mother, Marabella, used to call it the train because it was a very long corridor with rooms off it. I later discovered that the reason for this unconventional layout was that the duchess's sister, Lady Diana Mosley, was storing her furniture in some of the rooms below. Diana had married Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, and had Adolf Hitler as a guest of honour at the wedding.
Beyond the east wing adjoining the gatehouse tower was my father's office, with a large bay window overlooking the lower garden. It had a fireplace in the corner, where, except for hot summer days, a fire was usually lit, as he felt the cold. He would sit at his very large leather-topped wooden desk, squinting through his monocle at reports on the castle's dry rot. In the main office directly below sat Miss Casey with her small antiquarian black typewriter, which looked like something from a museum. Most offices had electric typewriters, but Miss Casey refused to use one. Her machine was so old when she typed some of the letters floated above the rest.
That first Christmas holiday my cousins and I explored room after room of the sprawling castle, which had been built by the English Prince John more than 900 years before. Later it was owned by Sir Walter Raleigh, that favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, who was renowned for bringing the potato and tobacco back from America.
Occasionally on our walks along the river and through the woodlands below the castle we would meet men in tweed jackets and caps whose accents were so thick we were unable to understand more than a few words. Despite their conversation being incomprehensible I was so thrilled that they wanted to talk to us. Having grown up among the far more reserved English I was amazed by everyone's friendliness. Even going shopping in the town was a social event. Florence and Ann McCarthy who owned the Wine Vaults, and their children who took turns to work at the till, would always chat. The two Miss Willoughbys, who had the paper shop, would regale us every time we went in on the beauty of Lismore and the walks that we should do.
On the Sunday before Christmas we went to the carol service at the Lismore Cathedral. Frail Miss Nelly was on the organ. The small Church of Ireland congregation only filled the front third of the pews. Our feet and hands were numb with the cold of the huge stone building. We belted out the familiar Christmas tunes, and the sound of our voices floated up to the ornate ceiling high above us. Then on Christmas Eve we went to the little church at Fountain for midnight mass. The path from the gate to the church door was lined either side with candles. It was a cold frosty night, but inside the church was warm, and the pews full of people. I was so touched by the community spirit in that tiny church on Christmas Eve.
That first Christmas we were introduced to West Waterford's Anglo-Irish. The Anglo-Irish have a strong allegiance to both England and Ireland. Some of their families arrived in Ireland with the Normans 900 years ago. Others were given land for their loyalty to the English crown, while others again were Irish tribal leaders, who became Protestants out of political necessity. They are likely to join the Irish Guards and fight for king and country, and often send their children to school in England, yet would hate to be thought of as English. Their love of Ireland is deep and abiding.
Living in faded grandeur, with a love of hunting, fishing and shooting and with a great regard for etiquette, they are also often eccentric and delight in breaking all the rules. So although they might always change for dinner and sit down at a long mahogany table set with the family silver, they are just as likely to be found trading at a horse fair or dancing on a table in a pub. They rarely complain but carry on stoically as they did in the 1920s when the IRA burnt many of their houses to the ground. They are also known for their wry sense of humour, being fine observers of life around them and never so tedious as to take it too seriously.
Nearly every evening we would dress up and go to a drinks party, dinner party or a dance. On New Year's Day we went to an egg nog party given by an American couple over the mountain in Tipperary. I remember feeling distinctly unsure whether this warm frothy brandy-based drink full of egg and cream was easing my hangover or adding to it. After the party we went to collect a golden cocker spaniel puppy which my parents had bought. The drive back over the Knockmealdown Mountains was spent thinking of names for this little ball of fur. Egg Nog Dog was the name that stuck and for the next ten years the gardens of Lismore Castle would reverberate with one of us screeching her name.
A few days into the new year I went back to England with my cousins. As I had decided I wanted to be an actress, my mother had signed me up for a three-month secretarial course. 'So you have another way to earn a living apart from treading the boards', she said while softly singing Noel Coward's song Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage.
My parents drove us to Waterford city. It was with great reluctance that I got the train from there to Rosslare and then the ferry across the Irish Sea. I had instantly fallen in love with my new home. But belonging there was a different story altogether.
CHAPTER 3
On my way
Once in the West of Ireland I asked an old man for directions and his response was, 'I wouldn't start from here'. I don't think anyone would advise starting halfway round the world when planning to walk from Cashel to Ardmore, but that is where I happen to be. Now I live in Australia. I came to Sydney for work and instantly fell in love with this beautiful vibrant city and its sandy beaches and spectacular harbour. I started sailing, then met Stephen at Middle Harbour Yacht Club, fell in love with him, and a little over a year later we married.
It's strange arriving at Cork Airport and not being met by anyone. Even though I usually enjoy being alone, I instantly feel lonely and also sad at how our family life has changed. Normally, I would be going to Camphire Hill, the cottage 5 miles from Lismore, where my parents moved after Paul, my father, retired. But he died several years ago and the cottage was sold last year. Marabella, my mother, who now lives in the nearby coastal town of Dungarvan, is staying with my uncle in England for a few weeks. So I catch a bus from the airport to Cork's central bus station and from there another one to Cashel.
As the bus races out of Cork past the cargo ships tied up along the River Lee, I think about my first Easter at Lismore, when the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire were in residence. The morning after I arrived I was walking through the lower garden with the dogs. The azaleas and camellias were a blaze of whites, pinks and oranges. Egg Nog ran ahead and disappeared into a camellia bush. As I approached a man in a new raincoat and pair of black gumboots with a large machine gun under his arm appeared from behind it. A couple of years earlier Lord Mountbatten, the Queen's cousin, had been killed by an IRA bomb while staying at his family home in Sligo. As a result the Duke and Duchess were thought by the Irish government to require the protection of the Garda, the Irish police, while they were in the country.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Castles, Follies and Four-Leaf Clovers by Rosamund Burton. Copyright © 2011 Rosamund Burton. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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