Another mad Irish adventure! White sand and seahorses. Crystal clear sea
and Celtic ballads. Machair and marble. This time we’re in Connemara. LK and I
have always been free spirited and a little ‘susceptable’ to the power of the elements
and all things natural. Together we wind each other up all the more. Wild. A
decade ago, on night-time escapades, our then boyfriends would frown and mutter
in their serious 'poacher mode' as with graceful long dogs leaping and wispy
long-nets wisping we girls would dance off under the moon, pashminas flapping.
Not the serious hunters we'd been mistaken for! We rarely caught hares those times. Far too much giggling.. On the more fruitful trips and with a regular
abundance of game, we'd go out of our way to make puddings and pies of it all.
Hare homage. The hunting, kill, carcass preparation, cooking and finally the
eating was all a ritual. A sort of worshipful respect of the animal. A
sacrifice to some Pan. Now in a pan. That's when I really began to cook. The
need to make use of much flesh. An abundance of hunted haunches and all other
cuts and offal. Nothing to be wasted. I learned to skin rabbits, deer and even
sheep. And butcher them, rather coarsely, but we did it. All neatly sealed in
freezer bags marked ‘Rack of Roe’ and the like. Not just the species of animal
but the sex of it, and likely age. Thank goodness for the rise of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
at that time. His brilliant new books were a sort of what-to-do-with-a-dead-animal manual. He was Escoffier for the midnight hunters. A Beeton-type bible for
girlfriends with gallons of game. Hugh had a halo. And still has.
So now in Connemara we find empty white beaches and run with the
wayward whippets like aos sí. It's pronounced “ees shee”. We perched our pointy canvas tent so it looked like a verucca on the toe of a land-leg dipping into the Atlantic ocean. LK cooked-up scrambled eggs and wild thyme on her little camp
stove. The rough pasture was coloured purple and pink with orchids as prolific as daisies. We discovered the totally inspirational studio of potters' Seamus
Laffen and Rose O’Toole at Roundstone Ceramics. We gleaned the OS map exploring ancient cross slabs and castles and generally chased the fairies.
This photo by Laura Kerr
This photo by Laura Kerr
Clifden Castle was a ‘modern’ ruin, and all the more poignant for it.
One of the descendants arrived on a motorbike and was kind enough to show us around the rubble. Teetering
on lumps of bog grass (white Converse are not the things for walking in peat
fields) he guided us over bogs to the ruin of a 'Marine Temple'. Now it folded in on itself and into the stream that it had surrounded, on it’s silent
way back to the sea. He told us of the time his troublesome ankle was cured
forever by holding it under the fall of ‘magic water’ there. He had hobbled over the bumpy fields to
it but he had run back home! He also lilted how something mystical had warded off a destructive
neighbour mindlessly trying to dig up a much loved prehistoric
standing stone and burial site. I was reminded of something my great uncle
George Ewart Evans had observed
in his autobiography ‘The Strength of the Hills’. He
said that when he was a boy in the 1920's he used to enjoy talking to the old Welsh farmers and how they still believed in the fairies. I could hardly believe that anyone really did, even then, but now I've seen that some still do.
This photo by Laura Kerr
The sightseeing, camping and ruggedly wild back-drop to it all was made goose-bumpingly atmospheric with Clannad playing on repeat. Laugh! Being an Irish band from Donegal their music is the landscape in song. When Mary Webb, in one of her books, told of a song sounding
as if it was sung by ‘one of the
elder gods out of the daedal forest’, I imagine it sounded just like these.
You should be able to hear these much loved Clannad tracks, Caisleán Óir and
The Theme from Harry’s Game, by hovering your cursor over the top of each title and clicking. (If the link stops working, as it often does, just copy and paste into YouTube. Excuse the rubbish images that flick along in time to the music).