Ireland and England Day 9

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Day Nine



Addendum: Just as we were leaving Lawcus Farm, Anne-Marie comes running out to our car, "Just call me the knicker thief." and she hands John a pair of his underpants. Good ending as it were--we leave laughing.



We spent last night in The Glen of Aherlow, an area renown for hiking and walking. We spent the night at the Ballinacourty House in a converted carriage house and horse stable. The walls are about 3 feet thick and the ceilings are high. Just a quick aside here: everyplace that we have stayed so far has had a charm all of its own with fantastically friendly, helpful, and really, really funny innkeepers and help. And they all have stories. The story of Ballinacourty House and why we are staying in a converted horse stable and not a manor or modern house is that the holding was owned by an English lord, which, during "The Troubles," was burned down to terrorize the lord. The stables were left untouched however, so no harm was done to the horses. The Irish have their priorities.



Balllinacourty also has a decent restaurant on premises. This is lovely since we have spent the day beating a genealogical fact finding track from Carrick on Suir, on the West Coast, to Waterford, on the East Coast, and now to Central West Ireland. At every stop we have been told some variation of "The person you want to speak with is not here...." Having reservations and a table waiting for us at the end of such a frustrating day with Irish bureaucracy gives us a warm and candle-lit optimism for our quest tomorrow.



We have time to spend with our innkeeper, Mary, at breakfast the next morning. When Mary hears John's story about his ancestor search she tells us hers:
Her grandmother lives in a small flower covered hut just 20 minutes away. (Mary lives the farthest away from her family-a twenty minute drive- and misses them terribly.) Her grandmother always keeps the door to her house open and one day she is startled by a large man filling the entire door frame. "You and I are related!" he booms. "Get out of my house!" she yells. Well, things settle down and after a while the family stories are told. The man is indeed an American relation and Mary's grandmother, who had been raised in an orphanage, has a new family that she never knew of. Over the years the American family and the Irish family have grown closer and closer.



But now, we are back to bumbling about Ireland and our innkeepers are always eager to help us, usually with indecipherable directions--or maybe we just speak a different language? Such is the case when we leave Ballinacourty House. I had discovered a shrine called Saint Berrihert's Kyle and Well: a purportedly lovely mystical spot with rock carvings and waters with the alleged abilities to heal. So with Mary, our innkeeper's intricate directions, we earnestly look but blithely drive right past the blessed well and onto the road to Nenagh. Damn!



We are now in Nenagh, County Tipperary. The big difference Is that we are in North Tipp, and not in John’s South Tipp stomping grounds. We have planned to do a day of Kennedy Castle and Keep ruins search, but frankly we are tired. Actually John is tired and I am ready to not be on the move for at least 24 hours of pure rest in one place. But a moving on we go. We park in Tipperary City looking for the Nenagh Heritage Center. When we finally find it with the help of several locals and several sets of contradicting directions, we also find the personnel are very helpful in finding records of family to whom John may or may not be related. They also give us coordinates to find the Kennedy Ring Fort and Church.....or so we hope. In the back of each of our minds we are also thinking “Irish Directions.”



We dutifully drive following the given directions out to the supposed site of the ring fort and park in the hedge out of the way of all but the largest tractors. We have been told that we might have to cross a cow pasture and to be on the lookout for marauding bovines. So, of course we are, being such good tourists. We find the sign for Raththurless-the name of the Kennedy landholding-and strike out from the left side of the road across the cow pasture-a very, very well used cow pasture. Knee deep in a lushly grassed, very, very well used cow pasture, we tromp along. And we walk and we walk and we walk, but no ring fort and no church. After a long walk through cow slicks, we have to admit defeat, and then I look, as we return to our car, at the sign in front of us: there must have been, at one time an arrow striking off to the RIGHT—crazy liberals, we always think left. About this time the hired hand who has been waving to us as we stumbled about on private property lets John know that the owner of the land will be out in a few minutes to tell us where to find the sites we have been looking for. They are on the other side of the road.. While we are waiting and attempting to de-muck our shoes with sticks and grass, two teenaged boys appear who tell us that they spend lots of time out in the old church and grave yard and will guide us there.



So off we go, following the young men at quite a fast pace, through a working Irish farm and almost knee deep in cow poop. That would be very fresh, green, and slimy cow poop. “It might get a bit shitty here.” says one. “Welcome to Ireland” says the other. But we are on a quest; neither wind, nor rain, nor snow, nor cattle excrement will stop us now. We are boldly striking out to explore now. Well, mostly boldly because sometimes we almost slip and slide and worry a great deal about the consequences of falling into a deluge of such slimy dung.



And then we are there. It is hard to believe how beautiful it is: the Kennedy church. The building is in ruins held together by the vegetation and trees growing in and through the walls and out into the roofless sky. The burial ground around the church has markers from only 200 years ago, however the rest lie beneath our feet with no formal distinction. Yet we know they are there: John's ancestors to some degree are here with us. We walk through the brambles to discover the ring fort's triple earth battlements. We walk around and around taking pictures and trying to absorb what we have discovered. The sky is darkening and it is time to bid a lingering goodbye for this trip. As we prepare to leave, the young men tell us how we can find the castle just in the next lane over, but the wind is picking up and we have walked long and hard today. We tell them that we will return tomorrow to find the castle. We head out solo and confident in our abilities to retrace our steps to our car. Our guides are remaining at the ring fort to sleep under the stars of our Church tonight. As it turns out, we should have paid them to guide us back to our car.



In brief:
A very wrong turn, a herd of cows coming into the pasture who will not move if we are standing there, back-tracking, cutting through hedge to the “road" which turns out to be a deep stream bed nowhere near the road. Boxed in by hedge forcing more back tracking and stumbling upon even more obstinate cows, finally ( I WILL NOT die in this cow pasture!) we make it to the car which we lean up against while using sticks and grass to try to dig out enough of the massive amounts of fresh cow dung in and on our shoes to throw them in the trunk.



So—it was a good day, right? We found the Kennedy Church and Ring Fort, we had a good 4 or 5 mile walk, no animals were hurt in this adventure, and, in stocking feet we drive on to the Abbey View B&B which turns out to be the most pristine little B&B on our trip. We arrive on the porch in our socks with muddy/stinky boots in hand. Siobhan, our gentle and unflappable hostess, shows us to a hose, rags, paper towels, scrub brushes, and then suggests a screw driver for my deeply grooved hiking shoes. It is blustery by now, our feet are cold , red, and wet, but our disgusting boots are finally adequately clean enough to throw into the rear seat of the car in hopes of drying out.



We settle in and discreetly unplug the scented air fresheners that give both of us headaches and decide that if we don’t go get dinner now we will just curl up into the big bed and fall asleep. So we go downtown to a fairly bad pub and are waited on by the only surly waitress we encounter in our entire trip. Who cares? Exhausted and jubilant we fall asleep early. We have found an ancient 1500's Kennedy site. Maybe tomorrow we can find that castle “just in the next lane—but it's a bit more difficult to find. More overgrown.”



More on that later...

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