Tea

Sunday is a day for walks, and in this area the closest walks are in the Slieveblooms, the hill range that is the Irish Midlands’ excuse for mountains. Hill walking here means trekking up and down the higher mountains; in the Slieveblooms the Sunday treks are called more simply walks. No one should be fooled, however, by the gentle sound of these excursions. What the Slieveblooms lack in altitude they make up for in terrain. This past Sunday I met up with a group of 30 or so people who gathered in the car park in the village of Cadamstown. Our leader, Paul, headed us up a gentle rise. Walking on the spongy grass, we were lulled into thinking this might be a pleasant amble along the Silver River. Paul quickly disavowed us of this by plunging into a plantation area of partially cut timber where we tripped and trudged over the hillocks left long ago by the plows while climbing up the side of Spink Mountain. At one point we passed a cottage, now empty, in which a legendary woman named Maree lived in rough circumstances until her death in her late eighties. Paul told us that Maree was known for offering tea to any walker that passed by her door, and that many of them took advantage of this hospitality, no doubt hearing her stories while they drank. We passed two other cabin ruins even higher on the mountain than Maree’s cottage. These stone cottages must have been nearly inaccessible despite the rather arbitrary logging roads that ran through the mountain.

We stayed off the trails for nearly the whole walk, only picking them up at the beginning and the end. The best part was the walk along the riverbed, although in the States we wouldn’t call this narrow stream a river any more than we would call the Slieveblooms mountains. River or stream, it was a gorgeous bit of water, running fast and spilling over several short falls. We forded it half a dozen times or more, and I was again grateful for my dry and sturdy boots and the ash walking stick that someone had kindly fashioned for me last summer in these same mountains (and mad I had forgotten my camera). By the end of the walk nearly all of us were struggling to lift our exhausted legs over the last few stiles.

Back in Cadamstown I decided to have tea before I headed back. My Little Tea & Craft Shop was housed in a simple bungalow right at the curve of the road as you head into Cadamstown, which is itself a tiny blip of a place with a church, a pub and a very pretty mill ruin. The Silver River runs through the village; there are even three or four picnic tables along its bank. I expected to be the only person in the teashop since it was late for tea, nearly 5:30. But when I entered three men were sitting at one of the four tables, chatting with the owner, a straight-backed thin woman with steel-grey crimped hair. One of the men instantly began a conversation with me, and, in the Irish way, had gotten my background and current whereabouts from me within a minute or so. He guessed that I was from Los Angeles, which was a bit surprising, and surmised that I was a writer. He asked how far we had walked, and when I told him we were out for four hours, he said they had been out for six.

As I waited for my tea the conversation the same man asked me how I would feel, as a walker, if there were a wind farm on the ridge. I told him that since a great deal of the area had already been devastated through clearcutting a windfarm would scarcely make much of a difference and would at least be doing something positive for the environment.

After naming a few other potential schemes for the land, the most unlikely being the building of holiday time shares for wealthy Americans, the conversation turned to Maree’s cabin, where, as it happened, the men had ambled and then gone no further. The man, who as it turned out owned all the land on which we had been walking, said that the tea shop owner, who was of course in on the conversation by now, should open up a branch of the shop in the cabin, carrying on the tradition of tea for walkers. No, she said, I have been in this shop for 26 years and I wouldn’t do anything else. After a bit more discussion about the cabin—he would tear it down, he would open a teashop himself, he would turn it into a romantic rental—the subject switched to the bronze chalice that he had found on the site. It was, he claimed, from the first century, and had healing properties. He next named a sum of money that he had been offered for this chalice that was so astronomical that even a gullible person would be skeptical. The chalice was currently locked away, and he would never give it up. No one had seen it, except the two men who were with him, whom he kept turning to for validation, which they cautiously gave (‘It’s like that you did find something up there, alright’); they and the few people who had drunk from it and been miraculously cured of various ailments were the only ones who knew about its power. What did I think, he asked, but before I could tell him he had moved to another subject. The bemused expressions on his friends’ faces never changed, and only one of the two ever opened his mouth except to put a scone in it.

We all left together, me back to Edenderry and they to their home a couple of hours to the southwest, if even that were to be believed. The teashop owner closed her door as we walked away, with the braggart calling out after me to wish me a safe journey home.