Field and ditches, ditches and fields

Last weekend I found myself headed toward County Louth and the conference of the Agricultural History Society of Ireland. I was encouraged to do this by the founder of the organization, Matthew Stout. I had never met Matt but our mutual friend David had been suggesting I contact Matt for two years and I thought it was about time I did. The conference sounded intriguing. I would learn perhaps more than I needed to know about early farming practice in Ireland, but the program looked low-key, with an afternoon field trip and all-inclusive meals and lodging. This would also give me the opportunity to stay at An Grianan, the complex run by what is left of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association, a long-standing organization that, like the Women’s Institute in England, was the place that farm women could practice their domestic skills on a more public and communal stage.

            An Grianan is as quaint and lovely as I hoped. I am given a large corner room with a great bath (I half feared that the bathroom would not be en suite) in the old part of the house. The fact that the shower doesn’t work the first morning is a bit dispiriting, but the housekeeper simply lets me into the empty room next door, a nearly unthinkable scenario in the US. Since the two rooms are on a corridor by themselves I can go back and forth in my robe. We are fed like Irish gods the entire weekend, with huge slabs of either meat, fish and chicken, vegetables drenched in cheese sauce, and two kinds of potatoes for each meal save breakfast, which is porridge and toast. There are always white and brown breads at the tables, and the metal teapots are replaced half a dozen times throughout the meals. The desserts are smothered in whipped cream, even the cupcakes. Luckily it is easier to refuse dessert, or leave most of it on the plate, than it is do that for the main meal; sometimes here I have been tempted to tip some food into my napkin when no one is looking and dispose of the mess later, thus saving myself the embarrassment of not being able to clean my plate of all this food in the Irish fashion.

            To my delight I discover that the conference, which comprises only about 40 people, includes several farmers. I had expected the usual academic crowd (Matt and his wife are archaeologists) but found myself sitting next to two sisters at breakfast the first day, retired farmers who always come to this annual conference ‘because they’re interested’. The conference papers center around the farm of a man named Foster. Everyone but me is utterly familiar with this Foster, so he is never even given a first name. (It was John.) He was a large property owner in the eighteenth century who pioneered many innovations, including the establishment of a private plant nursery for the farm and the regular planting of a variety of trees in the hedgerows. On Saturday afternoon we would travel to the remains of his farm, part of which is now a Cistercian Abbey, with much of the farmyard in decay.

            Over the two days of the proceedings the farmers would remind the scholars about the practical implications of what they were saying. This was most apparent with regard to the issue of ditches. Now, a ditch in Ireland is not the same, or not only the same, as a ditch in the US. Where I grew up there were plenty of ditches, including the shallow one that ran in front of our house in Saxonburg for a number of years and which I seem to remember sometimes carried raw sewage, although this hardly seems credible to me now. At any rate, the ditch was a channel dug into the land, pure and simple. In Ireland a ditch can be both a channel and a hedge (or less often a wall), that is, anything that divides property or acts as a boundary. In the course of the discussion the farmer asked the cogent question as only someone who has actually dug a ditch might do: Where does the dirt you remove end up? In other words, if you dig a ditch you pile the dirt up next to the ditch. The resultant mound will over time, in this fertile environment, sprout plants, which eventually form a wall. So the discussion goes.

            The trip home on Sunday included a stop at Mellifont Abbey, a ruin in County Meath that has a superb example of a lavabo, the monastery’s communal shower room. Matt and Geraldine have done some digging at this monastery, so know a good deal about it. Geraldine is greeted by the staff at the abbey like the royalty she is in OPW (Ireland’s Office of Public Works) circles, where she is employed. The Stouts had gone to the Abbey to show it to two other guests at the conference, the incomparable Loebers. Rolf and Magda are a Dutch couple who run one of the largest psychological experiments ever done in the US out of the University of Pittsburgh. In their spare time they have become experts on most things Irish, simply out of love for the place. Magda has reputedly read every work of Irish fiction ever written (or at least written in the nineteenth century) and has compiled a definitive bibliography. Rolf is currently working with the government on an encyclopedic history of Irish archaeology. This, mind you, is what they do on vacation. I am tagging along with these four charismatic people because I cannily offered to drive the Loebers’ luggage, which didn’t fit in the Stouts’ car; luckily their car was also dusty from the dig they are currently involved in, so Magda opted to ride with me in my relatively cleaner rental car (they are flying back to the States in the morning and she needs to keep her wardrobe clean). I am in heaven, hearing about lavabos from some of the most expert people in the country. Finally, though, I had to surrender the luggage at the train station in Drogheda, and, after promises to stay in touch, head back to Edenderry.

            An hour after I arrived at my gatehouse, I was back on the road, this time to Deirdre O’Sullivan’s farm. It was the night before the solstice, and Deirdre had invited 40 or so people for a cleansing and meditative evening to welcome the longest day. Having heard about the history of farm and pastureland all weekend, it was refreshing to simply experience it without explanation. We lay in the wheat fields, took our shoes off and walked along the plowed furrows, nipped leaves from newly planted beets, celery, cauliflower and greens to taste, and finally stopped in a small copse of beech trees. As we lay on the ground under the trees a woman named Helen led us on a meditation. Afterward we ate elderflower pancakes; the entire flower and stem were dipped into pancake batter and cooked over an open fire. There were candle lanterns everywhere; as we walked out of the woods just after midnight the sky was so bright that we didn’t need the lanterns in the open fields and even the ditches held some residual magic.            

The saddest woman in Ireland

This morning I walked down the road to Hoopers, the closest shop to my little house in Monasterosis, to buy a newspaper. The walk is about ten minutes or so, all on a sidewalk, which is unusual for Ireland. But the sidewalk is for the most part narrow, and since it is only on one side of the road, the way to Hoopers is fraught with the worry of traffic at your back, whizzing by at a maniacal speed. I can’t help feeling that one of the ubiquitous white vans that are on every road here could clip my shoulder if I should happen to venture too far toward the roadway.

When I got to Hooper’s a woman—I would have to say an old woman--with a wrinkled countenance and the thin face of the perpetual worrier was behind the counter. This is the first time I had encountered her; the handful of other times I had been in the shop I was waited on either by the owner, a man who appeared to be in his sixties, or someone I assumed was his daughter, an outgoing and cheerful young woman with the easy way of the Irish with strangers.

This woman was not shy, either. When I took my paper to the counter she began to speak immediately, leaning her arms on the counter as if she were ready for a good long gossip. Well, I thought, this woman is the auto-pilot shopkeeper with the long-standing obligation of that profession to chat up her customers, even if she doesn’t know them.

  Of course she began with the weather. Weather here is like traffic in Los Angeles; it is impossible to be in a room with a group of Angelinos for more than five minutes before they begin to discuss the best routes to drive from any given point to any other given point, never mind that no one wants to go there. The Irish begin with the weather—sure, it’s a lovely day today (rare) or, foul evening out there (much more common)—even though we are both standing out in it and can tell quite easily what is going on weatherwise.

As the woman spoke I was counting out change for the paper and, as is usually the case in my conversations with most Irish people I am meeting for the first time, picking up every third or fourth word. Gradually I became aware that she was talking about some of the most intimate details of her life: how she was nearly 76 and was frantic with stress and worry when she should be able to relax in her old age, how terrible business was and how she and her husband—the shop owner, it transpired, older evidently than I thought—had discussed not getting out of bed to open the shop early because, with school out, no one would be there anyway. She wasn’t well, and had pains in her shoulder. There were no jobs to be had in the whole area, and without jobs what was the point of opening the shop, since no one could buy? Her daughter was her biggest worry. She was also unwell, in fact she was very ill (I couldn’t understand the cause), and what can a mother do, even though her daughter was far past childhood? There is never a break from a mother’s worry. (On this I could agree; I also realized that the young woman I had seen behind the counter was probably a grandchild.) How, she asked, could she sleep with all this worry? What would happen to her daughter? What would happen to her if there were no business? As she continued her litany of woes, I managed to extricate myself by making sympathetic noises while slowly backing towards the door.

Later that day as I drove back up the hill toward my house, I saw her outside the shop. Her chin was resting on a cement column, and her husband was standing next to her, his arm around her shoulder. Even from the car I could feel the sadness in her; she reminded me at that moment of the Dorothea Lange photo of the gaunt woman from the depths of the Depression, the one with her thin arm bent at the elbow and the children around her, and my heart went out to the shop woman as it does for everyone who sees that brave, hopeless woman in the photo.

That evening, at nearly 11 (which in most places would be night by then) I watched a fox slink across the pasture outside my kitchen window. There is no other word to describe what this animal does in the gathering dark, with his head down and his majestic tail dragging through the grass.

Hill walking on the Wicklow Way

Four of us set out on this hike (hill walk, in Irish terminology) at about 3:30 on an overcast afternoon. Una, Bernie and I meet Felicity and her dog Shadow, a mix of Corgi, collie and who knows what else, who closely tracks our progress up the mountain, at one point trying to herd Bernie, who has walked on ahead. Felicity is a banker from Dublin who is a serious hill walker and one of Una’s oldest friends; she is godmother to Una’s eldest daughter. Una and Bernie are friends from Edenderry. As is the way of things here, Bernie used to live across the road from Ballindoolin, erstwhile property of the Tyrrells and currently home to my friend Esther and her family ; her son worked there in the summers when he was younger.

 This walk is all on paths, not the kind of plunge-into-the-woods walks I took last year in the Slievebloom Mountains. The walk begins at the upper lake of the twin Glendalough lakes, a placid and chilly body of water in a large bowl of the Wicklow Mountains. The lake is surrounded by rugged boulders, which helps in its resemblance to a scene in the Scottish highlands. We half-circled the lake, then began climbing; our goal was the top of the ridge that runs along one side of the water. Our path was over the medium-sized grey rocks that cover this part of the valley. Eventually, as we climbed, I realized that we were on a pathway of stone steps; Una tells me that they are put there and maintained by a cadre of volunteers who work to maintain the walk.

There is evidence of human hand everywhere on the walk. On the first part of it we pass by the ruins of stone cottages that were built to house the miners who worked here to dislodge zinc, lead and silver from the stones until the mines were closed in 1957, although the cottages would have been vacant much earlier. The hillsides are mostly barren of the trees that were stripped for charcoal and warmth for the miners; on the back side of the mountain we pass pines planted a hundred years ago or so and still felled. And, as we climb higher, the steps become obvious; they are even gouged and roughened to make them less slippery.

Near the very top of the ridge we stop for water and a snack. The weather has turned cool and windy, and as the mist rolls in we begin to lose what view we had over the lake. When we begin walking again, still up, we encounter many more of the stone steps, quite obvious now; after that we begin to walk on wooden planks that have been lashed together to make a trail over the fragile, bog-like ecosystem of the ridge. The boardwalk, as it is called, takes us over the top of the ridge and back down the other side in a long series of awkward steps, set for someone with a big stride so that we have to walk by either stretching or mincing slightly. By now we are completely socked in with the closeness of the mist and the pines. Una says that a friend counted these downward steps and came up with 620, a completely believable number.

Very close to the end of the trail we come across a breathtaking waterfall set back in the rocks. Then we’re back in the parking lot, which on warm weekend days would be filled with tour buses and visitors, few of whom would take the 5-mile walk up the mountain, opting instead for a short stroll around the perimeter of the lake and a cup of tea and a bun from the food caravans parked near the toilets.

At this time of the evening the toilets and the caravans are closed up tight. Felicity heads back to Dublin, and the three of us opt for the closest pub, where we warm up with tea and goat cheese tart. We talk of this and that and then head back over the country roads in the still-light evening air.

The dailyness

 a treatise on why it’s difficult to get any work done in a small town

This morning, on my first day back after the Belfast trip, I made a list, packed up the computer, cleared the Ford of the rest of the aftermath of the longish car trip, and headed into town.

 9:30AM. Miriam and Martina are both in the library, my first stop, so of course we exchange pleasantries about our various weekends, which in the Republic had been a three-day weekend, called a bank holiday weekend here, possibly in celebration of something although I never heard what. I sit at my usual spot in the back corner of the small library that I am increasingly thinking of as my office, and begin the slog through nearly two days of email.

10AM-noon. Over the next two hours I do the banking, answer mail, look up reference questions, request some library books, and check on my bills—all of the work that I would have spread throughout the day in those heady times back in the US when internet access was taken for granted.

Noon. I pick out a DVD from the very small selection in the library (with no TV and no internet at home and one outrageously expensive DVD rental place in town whose selection ranges from action films to action films, the library DVDs will be my evenings’ entertainment this summer) and begin to head out the door. Martina stops me, suggesting that I might want to meet members of a book club that gathers monthly on Tuesday mornings in the library; they are just coming downstairs from the meeting room.

12:30PM. I find myself with a fat family saga novel, which I would never read in other circumstances but have somehow promised to finish in the next month, and a lunch invitation to Larkin’s, the closest pub, where I join two women named Margaret and one named Ilish for tuna sandwiches and tea.           

1:30. I leave the pub and head back to the library to rescue my car from the lot there.

1:35. As I am getting into the Ford I hear someone call my name. It’s Deirdre C., a stained-glass artist I had met last year, and one of the people I very much took to during my stay. We talk for a few minutes—her husband is starting a new business called Base Camp, a boot-camp-type exercise regime--and arrange to meet up for coffee later in the week.

2:00. I drive to Tesco, where I buy clothespins, towel hooks, a pencil sharpener and a few groceries. Since the store is large and I am still learning where things are, this takes awhile.

2:30.  Gas (Anyone buying petrol here or for that matter anywhere in Europe would never complain about gas prices in the US again.)

2:45. Back into town to buy bread and a treat at my favorite spot, the Eden Deli. The treat is for a friend who is just getting out of the hospital. Niamh is behind the counter, so of course we chat for a bit.

3:00. When I come out of the deli, Donal, my realtor (auctioneer, as they are called here) is standing in front of his office next door to the deli. I remind him about the desk he is going to loan me, and we end up talking for half an hour about two families I had gotten to know last year, one of whom is currently in a great deal of difficulty.

3:30. I head for Ballindoolin House, a ten-minute drive, with the treats for Esther, who has just had a shoulder operation. When I arrive only the dogs are there to greet me, a rather odd circumstance as usually the place is teeming with people, including the three young men from France who are helping in the walled garden. I don’t dare leave the treats because of the dogs, so after roaming around the place to see if I could spot anyone, I realize that I do not have Esther’s phone number and have no way to get it except to drive back to the library and look it up online. I remind myself to get my mobile phone numbers organized.

4:00. My second trip to the library, another brief visit with Martina, and one more internet search.

4:30. Back in the car and heading for home.

4:45. Home. Tea and some reading about the Troubles, a book I bought in Belfast.

6:00. Esther calls. I need to return there to pick up some boxes I had mailed to her address from both California and New York. One of the boxes contains the hiking gear I need for a ramble that is happening tomorrow.

6:15. Back in the car, headed for my second trip to Ballindoolin.

6:30. My boxes are waiting for me. Esther loves the treats. We stand and talk in the drive in front of the house.

7:15. Home, this time to stay.

7:30. Una phones, then I return Deirdre M.’s call.

8:00. Time to fix dinner. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get some work done before 2, when I leave for that Irish ramble (except that I have to pick the granary loaf I couldn’t get this afternoon at the deli, and of course I have to check email at the library . . . .)

Belfast

This city, like Dublin, is built on a river. But unlike Dublin, Belfast has only recently recognized the possibilities of the riverfront, and the city has slowly begun to rescue theirs from dereliction. Otherwise the city radiates out from City Hall, a huge building with streets leading from it like crazy spokes.  Smack in front is a Soviet-size statue of a stout Queen Victoria, complete with crown and scepter, in case anyone needed reminding that this was Northern Ireland, UK territory. The main shopping thoroughfare is being revived, which means that walking is precarious as you weave your way amid boulder-sized blockers and over wooden bridges that straddle the digging. On the whole, the charm of the city, which in any event doesn’t have the quaint presence of Dublin, is not readily apparent.

            Well past the center of town, beyond the shopping district, the better-known pubs, the lush grounds and leaded-glass windows of Queens University on one end and the hotels and multi-story car parks on the other, are the working class areas of Belfast; it is in these neighborhoods where you find the murals. The fact of the murals, as well as their subject matter, is a complex story, nearly as complicated as the 30-year story of the Troubles themselves, and the Troubles in turn are an outgrowth of the very history of Ireland, a Celtic knot of a tale that entangles class and religion in a boundless and possibly irresolvable space.

The first murals were painted in 1908 by the unionists (the mostly Protestant groups who want Ireland to stay part of the UK) when the availability of commercial paints made painting easier and more permanent than sewing the flags used to represent political positions. The nationalists (Catholic groups who want Ireland to end the partition and become one country) didn’t begin painting murals until 1981, when the first murals were painted to commemorate hunger strikes by republican political prisoners. Bobby Sands, the first hunger striker, and the first to die, is recognized world-wide as a symbol of the republican cause. Today the murals are painted and repainted. On the unionist side the murals tend to be more professionally done and are most often militaristic in their subject matter. Murals on the nationalist side are typically painted by amateurs, including many released prisoners. They also often focus on armed struggle, but many of them commemorate heroes both within Ireland and outside it, like Nelson Mandela and the abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

            These sectarian tensions, between Catholic and Protestant, have and have-not, help to explain why the Irish are so aware of the Israeli-Palestinian struggles. On my first day in Belfast, while searching for my hotel, I found myself at a protest in front of City Hall, the protesters guarded by a phalanx of police at the front and the placid outsized demeanor of Queen Victoria at the rear. The protest was small and fervent. The Rachel Corrie, the Irish ship carrying humanitarian supplies to Gaza, had just been blockaded and boarded by the Israeli army; all of its passengers, including the Nobel Peace Prize winner Maireád Corrigan-Maguire, were being detained and prepared for deportation back to Ireland.  Five days earlier nine peace activists on another humanitarian ship had been killed by Israeli soldiers. The radio and newspapers here had been carrying nearly incessant coverage of the ship, partly no doubt because Ireland rarely finds itself in the international news for reasons other than economic ones, but also because this is a people for whom sectarian divides have a particular resonance.

            The next day I understood much better about this when, on a bus tour of the murals, we passed one of the security walls. This 16-foot high wall of concrete, wood and wire completely separates the Protestant neighborhood from the Catholic one. Higher than the Berlin Wall and evidently strongly similar to the walls the Israelis continue to build around Gaza and the West Bank, the security wall-- euphemistically called a Peace Line-- has remained even though the Troubles ostensibly ended years before. Our tour guide, Bill Rolston, told us that the wall was there because the people on both sides of it asked that it be kept. The height is to prevent Molotov cocktails from being tossed over it. On the Protestant side the wall follows the curves of the road in front of it; on the Catholic side the wall is right up against the last row of houses in the neighborhood. To pass between the two areas we drove through a narrow checkpoint, now moribund, but during the Troubles there would have been a guard in the small booth and the solid steel gates would have been closed. Today, well over 90% of the children in Belfast go to school with children of their same religion, and 98% of the public housing estates—working-class neighborhoods—are aligned with the religious background of the inhabitants.

            That night I took a cab to dinner at the house of two friends who live near Queens, far removed from these neighborhoods. The cab driver told me that his attitude was, They should just leave it alone now; thirty years was long enough. At dinner, I found out that neither of my friends had ever seen the murals and had no desire to do so. Their concern (not surprisingly, since Bruce is an economic historian) was that the economic well being, such as it is, of Northern Ireland would collapse if the country were unified, and that Belfast’s prominence would dissipate under the greater significance of Dublin.

            After Anthony dropped me back at my hotel (I rode in the van with their massive dog Samson, a black Newfoundland the size of the bear cub Nora and I saw in the wild a week earlier—but that’s another story), I wasn’t quite ready for bed, so I went into the hotel bar for a glass of wine. On a Sunday night the bar was not crowded. There were the usual clutch of young guys watching sport on the telly, a table full of men going easier on their pints of Guinness than they must have done the night before, a couple or two hovering intimately at small round tables contemplating their next move.  And there was one group of young women, twelve of them in all, in a raucous group at the other end of the room. Over their dress-up clothes they were all wearing white plastic leis, short flamingo-pink hula skirts and a Miss-America-type over the shoulder wide pink ribbon that said, Hen Party. This, too, is Ireland.

            

Erin go bragh

Whatever I was expecting when I arrived back after a year away, it wasn’t this glorious weather. Driving through the Irish countryside in my rented Ford, I could hardly imagine a lovelier welcoming. (Even better, over the next couple of days many people thanked me for bringing the weather with me; I am much more used to the opposite response: ‘The weather was great until you arrived.’)

My first stop was at Nodlaig’s, to pick up the things I had left there a year ago. Nodlaig was outdoors on her wooden chair, the phone beside her; she could have been sitting there for a year, so little had changed. There was the smell of a recent turf fire in the kitchen stove, and the same metal teapot waited on the counter. Even the biscuits in the jar looked the same, and quite possibly were; I cannily declined one on the basis that my stomach was unsettled from the trip.

I next drove into town and met up with my landlord from last year, Donal, who had found me a place for my two-month’s stay. This year I would live in a gate lodge on the other side of town, in a rural area called Monasteroris. Donal had sent a few photos, so I had a sense of the austerity of the lodge’s façade and the sparseness of the interior furnishings. The kitchen, however, had been completely re-done and the new appliances meant that I would be able to cook.

The lodge is set back from the road just enough so that the traffic is quieted; the stone wall that surrounds the property blocks the view of cars as they drive by. At an earlier point the house might have been two tiny outbuildings that were eventually joined by the creation of a short corridor. Both the front and back doors open onto this corridor. On the right side as you enter is the sitting room and kitchen, good-sized rooms with fresh coats of paint and, in the kitchen, a new stove, the usual tiny fridge and washing machine. On the left side are the bathroom and bedroom. In the bedroom there is a new bed and mattress and a monster piece of furniture that seems to have been hauled out of a basement somewhere to serve as a desk. It is filthy and covered in cobwebs; the top is piled with nasty looking cushions and the broken drawers are filled with old junk, in stark contrast to all the new furniture.

On that first day we quickly discover that the shower, which along with the other bathroom fixtures was not replaced, is broken. After travelling on the red-eye from New York and driving three hours from Belfast, I am more than ready to bathe. Not only the shower but the entire hot water system is out of order; my first night in the house I wash by heating water in the electric kettle. The fridge is also not working; my 87-year-old landlord and I manage to coax the washing machine, next to the fridge, out of its cabinet and see that the plug just needs to be fused. In the course of this my landlord realizes that, in going for the cheapest options, he has bought a fridge without a freezer box and a washing machine without a drier (normally in Ireland these are integrated into one unit). This is bad news for him, since to be able to rent the place once I’m gone he will probably have to replace both of these.

After everyone leaves, with a promise to send someone the next day to tackle the shower, I head to Tesco to put in a few necessary supplies before a bigger shopping tomorrow. As I enter the store, I see two friends from last year, Niamh and Niall, who are packing up their shopping in the checkout line. Niamh and Niall run the Eden Deli, my favorite place in Edenderry, a charming café that serves a great lunch, typical Irish food that is perfectly prepared by Niall using local ingredients and house-cured bacon; Niamh gorgeously runs the front operation. After they tell me their exciting news—a baby is on the way--they invite me to shower at their house behind the café the next morning, an invitation I gratefully accept.

Now I’m back in the lodge house, feeling a little lonely in the small darkening rooms, tired, in need of a bath, and happy to be back in this friendly and peaceful place.