Day 16

Another day has passed successfully and I am back at the Doherty’s, feeling as welcome as ever. When I got here they sat me down and heard my story and all, and were genuinely pleased to see me again. It has given me a warm fuzzy feeling inside, but more about that later.

Once again, Iris suggested I stay an extra day. She said it would be easier to visit Derry and return in a day from here than it would be from Coleraine. It would be cheaper as well, but I have said no. I am going to stick with my original plans; the Alcock’s are expecting me tomorrow and I don’t want to impose upon these people any more, they have done so much for me and I cannot offer anything in return.

Last night, after finishing off the journal I read that Ben Elton book until 1:30 in an effort to finish it (which I did). It is called Blast From The Past, and is quite good. He ripped Americans and Greenies to shreds, so that is pretty good. After a shower and all, I wasn’t in bed until 2:15.

I woke at 8 am (thanks to the mobile phone’s alarm) and actually got out of bed, which is better than every other effort I have made so far on this trip. I finished off the rice using the milk and honey thing and also the bread. I left the half-empty honey for the next guest. I also wrote in the guest book how nice they had been to me, though I didn’t say that my stay had been for free!

The ride (in the car) to the bogs was magnificent. Christoff took me on the back road along the beach and through the hills and cliff tops which afforded incredible views of the pounding surf and the land on the other side of the inlet.

It seems Christoff has a passion for old cars. Not the classics like Ferraris and all that, but old Volvos and Volkswagons and the like. His car is an old Citreon, which he loves. A good part of the journey’s conversation, in between my exclamations of delight at the surrounding countryside and small villages, was devoted to the merits of the Citreon over other, inferior cars. Since I know nothing about cars, I kept nodding and staring out the window - which isn’t to say that the conversation was boring. Christoff is a great conversationalist and I have enjoyed his company for the last couple of days. It is a shame as well, that I haven’t had more time to speak to Maire about the history and geography of the area. I am looking forward to that tape that she is going to send me (she forgot to bring it home from her school, so she promised to send it on to Australia for me).

The wind was really strong and it has been bitterly cold all day. The weather forecaster has said there will be gale force winds in Northern Ireland tomorrow - fantastic. They have been building up all morning and now are quite outrageous. Apparently, it won’t rain until the afternoon, though. So hopefully I will be safely on a bus to Coleraine by then.

The road we took to Carndonagh turned right off the main road opposite the same phone box that I have been making my calls from for the last couple of days. It twisted around a couple of houses and cottages and finally met the secondary road that runs along the coast. When I write ‘secondary road’, I mean it is wide enough that when two cars pass, they can both stay on the road. Which is pretty good for Ireland, I think.

This country has so many little roads that wind in and out of tiny hamlets. Actually, Ireland has the most amount of roads in the world per capita (I know that thanks to Trivial Pursuit). A lot of this may have to do with the working schemes during the Famine in the 1840s. I am just guessing here, but I do know that work parties built ‘roads to nowhere’.

Next to the first road, inside many of the bends, were old stone houses - all ruins - that had been left to nature. Often, only half of the walls remained, and almost never the rooves, with the wind and rain over the centuries (?) tearing down the stones. I guessed that maybe these had been abandoned during the famine, or by people emigrating to America or other places. Christoff laughed at my imagination, but then admitted that he didn’t know – ‘perhaps’, he said.

Even down at the beach level (the hostel is about 30 or 40 metres above sea level and a kilometre away from it), the landscape is windswept. The grass is flattened, and there is a sand dune approaching the road that Christoff said is moving further inland every year. We drove slowly, the wind buffeting the car. The road turned away from the coast, and started going up a hill. The grass became shorter, and the fields’ fences were better kept. I guess sheep or something are kept there, but I didn’t see any today; maybe they are rotated from the other fields that I saw on my way into Malin Head.

We passed through a small village - Culoort, according to my map - and kept on rising. Here, the road became very winding, crossing ridges on hilltops and then looping back to stay on even ground. All the while, the merits of the Citreon were being spelled out for me. At some point, Christoff pulled the car over and we had a fantastic view of Malin Head in the distance. The village was mostly black dots, but one house stood out, being a long way from the rest of the buildings. I was told that Christoff had lived in that house for about a year. He said it was a single room house, with a fireplace and a bed. No bath, he told me. He said there were windows in all the walls and the views - during Summer - were magnificent. Trying to sleep there during a winter storm was impossible, apparently. I would love to go somewhere like that for a limited time. However it places like that which bring to mind how difficult it would have been to live in this place back in the ‘olden days’, when there was no electricity, no modern inventions or the rest of it - just a mud hut with thatched roofs and a fire constantly alight in a corner to keep the house warm. It would have been so much worse in the Famine, when farmers were forced up into the high country to eke out an existence, with the wind and rain as it was.

Dunargus was the next ‘village’, though I only remember passing three houses, built side by side along a sheltered part of the road. Two of the houses were uninhabited, except by birds, and the third looked like it was about to topple. I said that it would be great to stay in a house like this, fixing up the cottage as a hobby. Christoff laughed at this as well and said that it would be a full time job just keeping the house upright, let alone restoring it to any past glory that it may have had. He should know, he is a carpenter by trade (and is trying to get a job around here using his skills - I found that out last night). Just below the peak of Soldier’s Hill was a viewpoint and a place to park the car. This road, I found out about five minutes later, is part of the Inis Eoghain 100, hence the viewpoint on what seemed to be a rather tiny road.

I got out of the car and was almost knocked over by the wind. The spits of rain that had been coming and going stung my cheeks. I turned the neck of the Kathmandu up and pulled the elastic tight, but was still cold. The view was incredible. On the shores, about fifty metres down, the water was crashing on a sandy beach - it in itself a rather strange sight, as all the coast I have seen so far has been only rock. I could look right, back along the shore and see an old fort, guarding the entrance to the Trawbreaga Bay. The rocks that jutted out from the shoreline are known as Five Fingered Strand, according to my map. Just over the water I could see the Isle of Doagh.

We kept on going and the road descended rather steeply. At a crossroads we turned right, past Knockglass Hill to rejoin the main road at the same place where I had my banana break in the wind, looking out at the head of the bay.

We drove down the road, without stopping at Malin or Carn. As we drove it was a bit strange to flash past the places I had slogged it out just a few days ago. I recognised every place as we proceeded. Every bend in the road was familiar, every building, sign or rock formation. When we went through Malin I looked at the shop, wanting to go in and say hello to the ladies. I looked at the stretch of grass that I had that miserable breakfast on a week and a half ago. It was really sad. It seems silly now, but I was somewhat annoyed that I was in the car zooming past these places. And that sounds sillier. I am really glad I was in a car zooming past these places.

Carn was the same. We passed the road that I had gone down to pitch the tent at the building site (where the nice man invited me into his storage room), the Concrake Restaurant, the Persian and the café where I had those two coffees and scone (they are just off the main road). Past the junction which leads down to the Harkin's and the Cross of St. Patrick and finally, the Catholic church where I had spent my very first mass. Unlike Malin, where we had to at least slow down and turn right, we simply sped through Carn, this place where I spent a whole week.

We sped along the road and shortly reached the area that I had loved to ride through, the place with the stream along side the road, with the green grass, the trees next to the stream and the happy sheep. A small road was on the right and we turned onto this, opposite Galwaollie Hill (square 47 40 on the map). Up and up we drove until suddenly we were in bogland. Hill after hill of peatbog. It was great to finally see what a bog looks like. Black, muddy and wet.

According to what Maire told me the other day, each landowner was allocated a strip of bog, in which to cut their turf from at some point in the past. Off the main bog road, other dirt roads branched off, generally at right angles. The bog is on both sides of these roads, and the strips of bog (each about fifty metres wide) stretched length ways from these smaller roads. Each farmer (along the two sub-roads that we travelled along) had started cutting their turf from the southern edge of their strip, along the full length of their portion, before coming back to the road and start another row of cutting. This way, it was explained, each farmer knew where their strip began (at their own cuttings) and where their strip finished (at the next cuttings along). It took a while for all of this to sink in, but it finally did, and it all made sense, which is more that I can say for the version I have given here.

Because it is winter, the bog is just deep and muddy, not looking very solid at all, just an oozing black mass of mud. Apparently during the drier months it solidifies up a little so one can put a bogspade into it and cut out the bricks. These ‘bricks’ are about the width of a normal house brick, but about a foot or two in length. They are put length ways into stacks of three of four to dry a little and then into bigger piles a metre or more high. Obviously the drier they are, the more easily a farmer can handle them. There was more than one stack that had been left since summer. Quite a few looked quite old and were a much lighter colour than the black turf around them. Christoff - who has spent quite a few weeks cutting turf - explained the process and the difficulties that the cutting took. I couldn’t believe that after all the hard work involved in getting the turf stacked in the bigger piles, why any farmer would leave them out in the wild to deteriorate. Christoff simply shrugged his shoulders and suggested that maybe they ran out of time. He has obviously picked up a trait or two from the Irish.

Trailers or whatever then come and take the turf away to private storage to be used as needed.

In almost every junction where a road led down to the bog fields, were stacks of rubbish. People have been using the boglands as garbage dumps for years, said Christoff. Both Maire and Christoff are quite ‘green’ and over the last few days have been keen to share this spirit with me. I could not agree more. Though I have never been one of these blue-haired people that run around uni campuses with their slogans, I have never been much of a litterer, and it was horrible to see such beautiful countryside, unlike any that I have ever seen and that simply does not exist in Australia, being ruined with old desks and tires and fridges and rusted cars and beer cans and papers and every thing else that people bring up here to discard. The dumps in Ireland are very expensive, Christoff told me.

We drove along the boglands road and turned down the wee track that led to Maire’s bog (on the map, it is where vertical line 45 crosses the road). From there we returned to the main bog road and turned left to go further inland. Christoff had already remarked that it was not the day for cycling (he used to cycle 150 km every day!) and he wanted to show me some countryside before taking me to Whitecastle.

The best bit about coming up to the bogs is that I can experience another bit of the book, a bit I thought I would miss out on. I have seen an old fort (two, actually) and in the book was an old Norman fort that the young boys and girls would come down to, to play ‘kissing games’. I have seen the sea weed on the lough, to which the villagers had ‘wracking rights’ during the Famine, in Trinity. And now I have seen bogs that the men used to work in, in between the potatoes and other crops. In the first chapter of the book, on the second or third page, Conor and Seamus, aged 12 and 11 respectively, raced up to the bogs, to greet the workers coming down.

I think the fact I can almost quote the book without having one to hand is a sad testament to the fact that I have read it so many times. When I get back I will check this journal against the book.

We followed the road, which snaked around the foot of Sleave Snaght, the largest hill in Inishowen - which has been visible from all the places I have so far been in this peninsular. The peak is over 600 m high, though we never ventured much further than two hundred. Here, I am a bit unclear as to where we went, as the map (which was printed in 1993) is a bit inaccurate. There was a large man-made lake (for drinking water) that has been dammed up in the last couple of years. We drive along some new looking roads, which haven’t been added to the map. Eventually, after pausing for lots of sheep to slowly cross the road, we came to an intersection that gave us a choice to go to either Buncrana or Quigley’s Point. We chose the later, and soon passed through a village called Illies. Both the intersection and the village I have found on the map, however I think that the road that we turned off - according to the map - would have run straight through the new lake. I guess it was diverted at some point.

I noticed something about the bogs; they were covered with shrubs and grasses and rushes, even (the sort of reeds that I imagined would be growing on the banks of the Nile). I had imagined the bogs to be black, wet turf just waiting to be cut. A bit silly, really. Most of the grass was a strange red colour, but it enabled me to pick out other bogs that hadn’t been touched, yet. I don’t think Inishowen will have a turf shortage for a very long time.

After a few more turns, during which I was shown an example of a bog cut with a machine and not by hand, we hit the main Carn - Quigley’s Point road that I had already ridden on.

The last four kilometres of the road to the coast was down hill, as I wrote when I rode up them almost two weeks ago. Perversely, I wanted to ride down this stretch of road, to reward myself for the effort it took to get up it. The car, of course, flashed through this stretch of road in about three minutes. Most distressing.

We said our goodbyes at Whitecastle and the Doherty’s seemed pleased to see me fit and well and not haggard.

I had a coffee and another and we talked a bit. Billy couldn’t do any work today, he said, because it was so windy (‘everything this time of year is weather dependent, Brendon’) but was going into Moville for the banks. I asked if I could come and he agreed. On the way he pointed out the fields belonging to him and his sheep and what he grows. I was able to ask him a few agricultural type questions (ie. what crop is more profitable, does he change crops, how much does he sell each lamb for, etc. The last question isn’t exactly agricultural, I know.)

I had a brief look around Moville and spent 30p on a postcard, in the same shop that I was in before. The woman who gave me the small poster of ‘The World Famous Inis Eoghain 100’ recognised me and asked how I had been doing. ‘Fine’, I said.

In the last couple of days, I have realised that I might have a bit more money than I thought originally. Unlike Morrelli’s, Yates’s used to pay my salary into a bank account and I never actually checked to see what day the money went into it. I have been hoping that maybe my last payment wasn’t made until after I left England. Since I brought my wallet to Ireland with me, the bankcard is still in it. Sure, there is no Lloyds branches here in the Republic, but I am sure that there will be in the North. Also, the card has the ‘Plus’ symbol on it, which means I can use it at any ATM with the same symbol. I found such a machine in Moville and the card worked! However, I was only given the option to cancel or withdraw money, and wasn’t allowed to check my balance, so I cancelled the transaction. However, there is now quite a bit of hope in me that I have some excess money. Hoorah!

On the way back to Whitecastle, Billy asked me if I am interested in historical things. An enthusiastic response followed, so he took me up a small road to an old graveyard (the church in square 55 36). Although there were some fairly modern graves, most were from the 19th century. It was a Protestant church, so the headstones were all grand edifices (the Protestant farmer was that much richer compared with the Catholic farmer in the ... well ... whole 19th century, but especially the last half due to the famine and actions of the landlords. All of the graves were post-famine. Those from the 20th century seemed all to be from the ‘30s or the ‘80s, though of course there were exceptions. There were two churches. The first was a complete ruin and I found later that there were graves inside what was once the church. There was a grand plaque saying that it had been rebuilt (refurbished?) in 1747 under the supervision of a someone Carey from Castlecarey.

The other church looked more modern (only a hundred or so years old!) though as hundreds of Protestants fled Donegal after the establishment of the Free State (in 1922), it was no longer worth keeping this church of Ireland parish open as there was no one to fill the pews.

Billy’s father is buried there, so now it must be a communal cemetery, as these are a Methodist family, and have been for a little while.

A query was answered by this visit. I have wondered why Quigley’s Point is called that on Irish maps when in all the Atlases I have looked at in a futile attempt to find Ballyutogue, the town is written as Carrowkeel (all the locals haven’t heard of Carrowkeel). There was a grave from 1916 (if I remember correctly) of a someone Quigley, which seems obvious, but I wasn’t sure if Quigley was someone from folklore or a real person.

From the church we drove down to his mother’s house (she is still in hospital).

Billy told me a great history of the house, but first, the house! Wow. It doesn’t look all that old from the outside, as they renovated it about ten years ago and pebble-dashed the walls.

But inside! The walls of the house are curved, as if the house was built like some kind of fort (which, I suppose, it was). The walls on the outside - and in between rooms - are really thick; over a foot (of solid stone!) The house is well over 300 years old, and has been lived in continuously since it was built. The local landlord was called Carey, and the house was called Castlecarey - matching the name on the plaque at that church.

Someone, about 150 years ago, when it was still in Carey hands, had been an artist and had painted the panels in all the inside doors with different scenes from country life, fables and shipping lore. The paintings, made from oil paint, were very good, though faded and in some cases, chipped with age. They really belong in a museum. Billy said that in 1960 his father was offered £100 for each door (about eight or nine are painted). The outside doors and window frames are curved as well.

The cellars are massive, basically a whole floor underneath the house filled with rooms and dark passages. The flagstones and steps between each room were worn down with time. How many feet through how many hundreds of years have stepped on these stones to wear them down? In one case, a stone step in the doorframe connecting two rooms, the centre of the stone was about an inch below the edges, which gently curved down to form a wide U shape.

One of the cellar rooms had been a holding cell for prisoners on their way to Derry jail.

Billy told me that he would love to fix the place up 'real grand,' but it would cost a fortune. The British, he said, have some type of money put aside for such schemes, but it is a bit more difficult to get money out of the Irish government. ‘What happened to the Celtic Tiger?’ I asked. A quick laugh. ‘It never reached Donegal’.

The story Billy told me about the house was how his family came into possession of it.

The landlord for countless generations had been the Carey family. They would receive the rent every Autumn from the peasants (both Catholic and Protestant). One Autumn, about 150 years ago (around the same time the panels in the doors were painted) a widow with three sons called Doherty couldn’t pay the rent. She sent her eldest son, a wee lad of ten, to Castlecarey to plead with Mr Carey to let him work at the house to pay off his mother’s rent. Mr Carey didn’t give an answer, or even let the lad inside the house, so wee John set off on his way home.

While he was walking, Carey’s men passed him on horseback and rode up to the Doherty cottage, evicted the widow and her other two sons and tumbled the cottage (this was done by cutting the main cross beam that held the weight of the roof and thatching. An example can be found in the film Rob Roy!)

Wee John got home to find his mother crying outside the tumbled cottage. Like in all good stories, the boy vowed to take revenge at some point.

The people around, being a good community, put in together and built the Doherty’s another cottage in which to live and she made a living somehow (no longer having any land to farm on or even grow a wee patch of potatoes with). Quite possibly, she would have worked in the shebeen as the widows often did. (This confirmed what I had already known about these farming communities thanks to Trinity)

Some Englishmen came to the area in order to measure the land so as to make a ground map of the area. Little John got a job carrying the equipment for these gentlemen. He was a bright and cunning lad and caught on quickly to the art of measuring the various measurements, and the lead Englishman was so impressed with the lad’s skills, he offered to the widow to take him to England with him.

The widow was delighted of course, as she would have one less mouth to feed, and her boy would go ‘over the water’ to take up a profession.

Wee John left and was allowed, after a number of years, to enter Oxford University, with the grand English gentleman as his patron. He attained a degree and became an academic, earning for himself a fine reputation and the money to go with it.

He married an English lady from Kent.

Things hadn’t been faring so well for Mr Carey. He had run into some financial trouble over the years and had even begun to take in people who couldn’t pay their rent. They would work in the house to pay off their rent, just as wee John had begged to do so many years before. Usually they were female, though, and they didn’t perform the sort of work that the ten year old John had been thinking of.

After one too many loans, the bank confiscated his considerable lands and put his house up for sale. John Doherty, well into middle ages heard of this, as he had always kept in contact with his family back home. He bought the house and joyfully went back to Donegal and knocked on the door of Castlecarey, the very door that I first knocked on two weeks ago, cold and hungry and out of work.

An elderly Mr Carey opened the door and peered out, leaning heavily on his stick. John explained who he was and then he evicted the old man on the spot!

He moved in with his wife for some years but she was unhappy there. After another ten years or so of unsuccessful leaseholders, John invited his nephew to move in and to start farming the lands that belonged to the house.

This nephew was the great-grandfa of Billy.

Billy and I came back to his house and I spent a relaxing evening watching television. David Trimble has convinced his party to allow Sinn Fein to join the Northern Irish government, even though he has publicly stated that he would never allow such a thing until the IRA had started decommissioning their weapons. It was a brave and risky move on behalf of Trimble, and I personally believe that it will come back to slap him in the face. Martin McGuinness has been allowed to join the newly formed Northern Ireland Cabinet and has been made the Minister for Education. These are exciting times in Northern Ireland’s political development.

After dinner (which included Iris’ delicious mashed potatoes) and in the middle of writing this here journal, Billy invited me to the pub for a round or two, which I thought a bit strange as I have always believed that Methodists weren’t allowed to drink. Maybe I just got it wrong but then again, Billy Doherty is an Irish Methodist.

I went along and he insisted on paying, saying that when I came back to Ireland ‘all grand and famous’ I could do the shouting.

I realised half way through the evening that this is what I dreamt of. That people would take me in and tell me their stories and would listen to my stories and would buy me a pint in the pub. I told people back in England that this was my dream and they had always laughed at me. It wasn’t until I met Alex working those long nights at Alldays that someone told me that my expectations would be a reality, and he really encouraged me.

Every wish I have had about Ireland (except for the general lack of Raven Haired Celtic Beauties) has come true.

I spent 80p at the post office today and 30p on the post card.

When I told Maire, at some point during the last three days, that I would eventually be the Prime Minister of Australia, she actually said: ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, would you listen to the man?’. I thought only the Irish in American movies and the oldest stereotypes said that! I almost laughed out loud when I heard it.