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Authors: Lonely Planet
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paintings on the walls,” his muffled voice quickly called back to us. So transpired another impromptu initiation rite into our family’s ancestral past.
On the next rise stood a haunting formation of prehistoric standing stones – ten-foot-high, free-standing monoliths once known as the Five Fingers, although one has toppled over and another was dragged off long ago to become a folly in the gardens behind the mock castle of the ruling Townshend family, so imperious were the Anglo-Irish landlords of an earlier era. One could also gaze down into the estate where Edith Somerville-Ross, with her cousin Violet Martin, wrote The Irish R.M. , The Real Charlotte , and other celebrated novels describing the privileged ways of their class and an Ireland now gone. Some homicidal fools from the local IRA knocked on that door one evening in 1937, and pumped her nephew full of lead, fifteen years after the Crown’s presence had been driven out of Ireland. Senseless.
What did it matter now? The bitter religious divides and hierarchies of foreign domination have long since withered in the south of Ireland, where Vikings, Normans, and transplanted Brits – and innumerable modern wanderers like ourselves – have all been swallowed up and transformed by the island’s wily potency, and the seductive spirit that keeps hypnotizing anyone who long strays upon its soil. So I hiked the fields with the boys and took our young Laura to fling out our fishing lines in the next cove, and click, click, click. Even when we landed nothing, we hooked visions. Little did we realize that we were reeling in Ireland, and that two years later the catch would be complete.
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Chapter 6
Cork City is infested with odd characters and many speak in parables. On fine afternoons one of the street artists tapes an eight-square-foot canvas on a sidewalk to labor on a masterwork that will never be completed. His boombox swells out maudlin refrains from the movie Titanic as he begins each afternoon in art hell. Droves of tourists gawk at the near-photographic likenesses of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet reaching toward each other across a starry night while their doomed vessel sinks into the blackness beneath their ethereal forms. Leo and Kate are permanent fixtures, never to be changed by a single brush stroke. But the street artist takes pains to blacken yesterday’s details from the margins before renewing his caricature for a few appreciative dropped coins. His creativity is limited to doodling a fresh iceberg or crowded lifeboat in one of the tableau’s corners.
Watching this charade after leaving the Hi-B on a late August afternoon, I thought about how difficult it is for visitors to Ireland to resist feeding upon similarly complacent constructs. A mental canvas is unrolled upon arrival, already dolled up with visions of a timeless green land that the tourist wants to be far different from home. First-hand viewing may produce a few fresh details in the margins of the visitor’s preconceptions, but the stereotypes are painted back in at every chance.
Of course, nobody surpasses the Irish at making merry with this tendency. A few years back, there existed a kind of Cork drinking club called the Clancys, which had a loose affiliation with a similar collection of eccentrics in London. Hearing that the Brits were coming over for a tour of the southwest, the Clancys decided to show them the Real Ireland. So they recruited three local midgets, each smaller than Small Denis, and outfitted themwith elfin jackets, tricornered hats, leggings, and pointy shoes. The wee fellows were then secreted to a Ring of Kerry field that the visitors’ tour bus, with several stewarding Clancys on board, was sure to pass at dusk.
“Stop here,” one of the Clancys shouted as the coach approached the spot. “There’s a famous fairy circle just below and at this hour we might just see them.”
“Sure, mate. We’ll go see the little
On the next rise stood a haunting formation of prehistoric standing stones – ten-foot-high, free-standing monoliths once known as the Five Fingers, although one has toppled over and another was dragged off long ago to become a folly in the gardens behind the mock castle of the ruling Townshend family, so imperious were the Anglo-Irish landlords of an earlier era. One could also gaze down into the estate where Edith Somerville-Ross, with her cousin Violet Martin, wrote The Irish R.M. , The Real Charlotte , and other celebrated novels describing the privileged ways of their class and an Ireland now gone. Some homicidal fools from the local IRA knocked on that door one evening in 1937, and pumped her nephew full of lead, fifteen years after the Crown’s presence had been driven out of Ireland. Senseless.
What did it matter now? The bitter religious divides and hierarchies of foreign domination have long since withered in the south of Ireland, where Vikings, Normans, and transplanted Brits – and innumerable modern wanderers like ourselves – have all been swallowed up and transformed by the island’s wily potency, and the seductive spirit that keeps hypnotizing anyone who long strays upon its soil. So I hiked the fields with the boys and took our young Laura to fling out our fishing lines in the next cove, and click, click, click. Even when we landed nothing, we hooked visions. Little did we realize that we were reeling in Ireland, and that two years later the catch would be complete.
Return to beginning of chapter
Chapter 6
Cork City is infested with odd characters and many speak in parables. On fine afternoons one of the street artists tapes an eight-square-foot canvas on a sidewalk to labor on a masterwork that will never be completed. His boombox swells out maudlin refrains from the movie Titanic as he begins each afternoon in art hell. Droves of tourists gawk at the near-photographic likenesses of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet reaching toward each other across a starry night while their doomed vessel sinks into the blackness beneath their ethereal forms. Leo and Kate are permanent fixtures, never to be changed by a single brush stroke. But the street artist takes pains to blacken yesterday’s details from the margins before renewing his caricature for a few appreciative dropped coins. His creativity is limited to doodling a fresh iceberg or crowded lifeboat in one of the tableau’s corners.
Watching this charade after leaving the Hi-B on a late August afternoon, I thought about how difficult it is for visitors to Ireland to resist feeding upon similarly complacent constructs. A mental canvas is unrolled upon arrival, already dolled up with visions of a timeless green land that the tourist wants to be far different from home. First-hand viewing may produce a few fresh details in the margins of the visitor’s preconceptions, but the stereotypes are painted back in at every chance.
Of course, nobody surpasses the Irish at making merry with this tendency. A few years back, there existed a kind of Cork drinking club called the Clancys, which had a loose affiliation with a similar collection of eccentrics in London. Hearing that the Brits were coming over for a tour of the southwest, the Clancys decided to show them the Real Ireland. So they recruited three local midgets, each smaller than Small Denis, and outfitted themwith elfin jackets, tricornered hats, leggings, and pointy shoes. The wee fellows were then secreted to a Ring of Kerry field that the visitors’ tour bus, with several stewarding Clancys on board, was sure to pass at dusk.
“Stop here,” one of the Clancys shouted as the coach approached the spot. “There’s a famous fairy circle just below and at this hour we might just see them.”
“Sure, mate. We’ll go see the little
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