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Authors: Lonely Planet
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me to every one of those spots.”
“What? I am a Wilkinson! ” she exclaimed. “Bun was my uncle!”
My, my. “This is amazing. We’re about to head over to Carlow to see Paddy, Bun’s son. He won’t believe this.”
“Well, he better! Paddy and Anne will be here in two hours! Wilkinsons are coming from all over the country for a family reunion. Put your bags down. You’re staying.”
Ireland the inscrutable, the nursery of serendipity, was at it again. So we stayed up until three o’clock in the morning – the traditional hour for the first guests to depart Irish parties – while Paddy fiddled, everyone sang, and tales were traded with characters who threw out words like DJs screeching vinyls in nightclubs. Eventually, we awoke with gasps for water and an enriched appreciation of how exquisitely such uproar had been perfected through centuries of Irish party empiricism. A little bedside reader told of glory eighteenth-century party days in grand homes like Mount Panther, Mount Venus, Mount Misery, Ballyseedy, Ballyruin, Ballydrain, and Bastardstown.
Jonah Barrington, the owner of a “pile” in the midlands, held one particularly rousing bash, featuring a hogshead of claret, mixed with a repast of slaughtered cow and chickens, bacon and bread. At 10 o’clock the next morning, the guests were discovered still crashed with insensibility around the dining-room table, with the evening’s comatose piper sprawled on the floor with a tablecloth drawn to his chin. In the stables lay four more guests who had careered toward their horses before collapsing into the straw. Two of the parched guests in the dining room had passed out against a newly plastered wall. The heat from the fire had set the goo likemarble against their hair, leaving the gone-native Anglo-Irish stuck to the wall. But the resourceful Jonah Barrington took his clicker out of his pocket and clicked it, whistling in the local wig maker to extricate the unfortunates, ultimately by ripping their muddied hair off with an oyster knife.
Our much more virtuous selves washed, dressed, and joined Paddy and Anne that afternoon for a leisurely cruise down the Grand Canal.
Nearly a decade later, we sallied around the west of Ireland and were startled by the pace of change: bicycles all but vanished, cars roaring down once tranquil lanes, garish new concrete bungalows replacing whitewashed thatched cottages everywhere.
Tick and tock went the clock to a sun-drenched August family holiday in a Georgian cottage outside Castletownshend in West Cork in 1998. Before us lay spectacular ocean vistas, with ruined castles and round towers on offshore islands and distant head-lands. In the local pub, farmers filed in at the end of the long summer evenings to chat and sing; it seemed impossible to think that dozens of mass-produced dreary holiday bungalows were soon due to double the size of this picturesque village, with its cobbled main street sluicing toward a sublimely sheltered harbor.
Scrambling through gorse-ridden pastures, we discovered an ancient stone ring fort at the crest of a hill with views of endless bays, cliffs, and mountains – one of more than 40,000 megalithic formations casually scattered about the Irish landscape, invariably with no fanfare or visible sign indicating their existence. Runic whorls had been inscribed in a standing stone, and a murky underground passageway burrowed into an infinitely mysterious past.
“What’s this, Dad?” asked Harris, forever fascinated by secret worlds.
“Who knows? Maybe an escape route from the Vikings who would lop off the heads of anyone they caught, or a chamber for killing wicked people. Go take a look.”
Jamie, not understanding the beauty of bloodcurdling visions, protested that dispatching an eight-year-old into an underground chamber indicated a deplorable lack of judgment.
Not by Harris’s lights, because he quickly squirmed out of sight. “Cool! There’s some kind of strange ancient
“What? I am a Wilkinson! ” she exclaimed. “Bun was my uncle!”
My, my. “This is amazing. We’re about to head over to Carlow to see Paddy, Bun’s son. He won’t believe this.”
“Well, he better! Paddy and Anne will be here in two hours! Wilkinsons are coming from all over the country for a family reunion. Put your bags down. You’re staying.”
Ireland the inscrutable, the nursery of serendipity, was at it again. So we stayed up until three o’clock in the morning – the traditional hour for the first guests to depart Irish parties – while Paddy fiddled, everyone sang, and tales were traded with characters who threw out words like DJs screeching vinyls in nightclubs. Eventually, we awoke with gasps for water and an enriched appreciation of how exquisitely such uproar had been perfected through centuries of Irish party empiricism. A little bedside reader told of glory eighteenth-century party days in grand homes like Mount Panther, Mount Venus, Mount Misery, Ballyseedy, Ballyruin, Ballydrain, and Bastardstown.
Jonah Barrington, the owner of a “pile” in the midlands, held one particularly rousing bash, featuring a hogshead of claret, mixed with a repast of slaughtered cow and chickens, bacon and bread. At 10 o’clock the next morning, the guests were discovered still crashed with insensibility around the dining-room table, with the evening’s comatose piper sprawled on the floor with a tablecloth drawn to his chin. In the stables lay four more guests who had careered toward their horses before collapsing into the straw. Two of the parched guests in the dining room had passed out against a newly plastered wall. The heat from the fire had set the goo likemarble against their hair, leaving the gone-native Anglo-Irish stuck to the wall. But the resourceful Jonah Barrington took his clicker out of his pocket and clicked it, whistling in the local wig maker to extricate the unfortunates, ultimately by ripping their muddied hair off with an oyster knife.
Our much more virtuous selves washed, dressed, and joined Paddy and Anne that afternoon for a leisurely cruise down the Grand Canal.
Nearly a decade later, we sallied around the west of Ireland and were startled by the pace of change: bicycles all but vanished, cars roaring down once tranquil lanes, garish new concrete bungalows replacing whitewashed thatched cottages everywhere.
Tick and tock went the clock to a sun-drenched August family holiday in a Georgian cottage outside Castletownshend in West Cork in 1998. Before us lay spectacular ocean vistas, with ruined castles and round towers on offshore islands and distant head-lands. In the local pub, farmers filed in at the end of the long summer evenings to chat and sing; it seemed impossible to think that dozens of mass-produced dreary holiday bungalows were soon due to double the size of this picturesque village, with its cobbled main street sluicing toward a sublimely sheltered harbor.
Scrambling through gorse-ridden pastures, we discovered an ancient stone ring fort at the crest of a hill with views of endless bays, cliffs, and mountains – one of more than 40,000 megalithic formations casually scattered about the Irish landscape, invariably with no fanfare or visible sign indicating their existence. Runic whorls had been inscribed in a standing stone, and a murky underground passageway burrowed into an infinitely mysterious past.
“What’s this, Dad?” asked Harris, forever fascinated by secret worlds.
“Who knows? Maybe an escape route from the Vikings who would lop off the heads of anyone they caught, or a chamber for killing wicked people. Go take a look.”
Jamie, not understanding the beauty of bloodcurdling visions, protested that dispatching an eight-year-old into an underground chamber indicated a deplorable lack of judgment.
Not by Harris’s lights, because he quickly squirmed out of sight. “Cool! There’s some kind of strange ancient
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