A Visit to Derrynane, Co.Kerry.

by Cecily Lynch 

Cecily Lynch

( Home of Daniel  O'Connell, The Great Liberator)

On a sunlit August afternoon I approached the rugged beauty of Derrynane, a national park on the famous ring of Kerry.  A winding road,  heavy gates, an avenue -  and there was the house, well preserved and  lovely to behold.  To the right was a glasshouse where  was displayed the golden coach which carried Daniel O'Connell, an activist for the poor Irish peasant in the mid-nineteenth century through the streets of Dublin in  a triumphant  parade.  To the left lay the lawns and sand dunes, behind which lay the golden sands and crystal clear waters of a lovely beach. Near it perched on an island was the ancient abbey cemetery, still in use.  It is most dramatic to see a funeral cortege wend its way across the sands, the coffin held aloft over the shallow waters.

Beauty of landscape lay all around.  The groves, the bays, the coves and inlets, the long stretches of golden sand and the rocky promontory of Lambs Head, delighted the eye.  The islands in the bay, Deenish and Scarriff, glistened in the sun.  The curving range of mountains was a background to the little groups of holiday homes among the bare rocks.
The history of Ireland lay before me near Coomakista, a steep incline facing the Scelligs.In the foreground were megalithic tombs, dating from 3.000 BC.  They faced the sea and the setting sun illuminated them.

 Nearby a stone circle pointed  towards the solar and lunar events, a place of religious worship for megalithic peoples.  Some yards away lay a perfectly preserved ring fort dating from  the early middle ages.  Still further,  scattered remains of famine villages, told the tale of hardship and deprivation.  Between these lay the stout farmhouses of perhaps two hundred years, still strong. And near them were the modern bungalows and beautiful holiday homes built during the Celtic Tiger years. I walked on, hunched under my knapsack and thought of  the harsh times gone by when people lived in and loved this dramatic landscape, people of my own race whose genes I carry on into the twenty first century.  May I carry the torch for them.

Cecily Lynch

A Week on the Beara Peninsula, West Cork, Ireland

by   Cecilia Lynch  ©  2013

July 2013  

I stood on the deck of the trawler facing the receding land.  Huge mountain peaks dwarfed the homes clinging to the lower slopes of the Mishkish range.  Ahead lay the Sceilg, austere and rugged, last outpost of the ancient monasteries.  The restless ocean  was alive with dolphins and whales.

View from Travara.           Photo © Victor Sullivan

I stood inside ancient stone circles, built as places of sun worship three to four thousand years ago.  The huge stones were weathered with age, some had fallen but they still pointed to significant solar and lunar events. They faced the rising sun and had also a view of the sun as it set over the ocean.  In the centre was the Altar stone, where perhaps dark deeds were done.

I explored rocky coves, unspoiled and untouched, where fish were plentiful and human presence had no influence.

I walked to isolated villages, where the houses were coloured in rainbow hues and no human was to be seen in the vicinity.  The mountains towered all around.

I watched the small fishing boats attend to the fish farms and oyster beds from my vantage point on the cliffs.

I attended the  Village Festival Country Show,  Irish dancing in the streets, set dancers in the Hall, stalls selling home-made bread, honey, cakes, wine, cheese, bric-a-brack, art and crafts, home knitting.

It is another world, a place apart from the grimy city.  It is a place of peace and serenity, unchanging, elemental and heartbreakingly beautiful.

Thanksgiving: How our American tradition has evolved during five years in Ireland by E. Alana James

Thanksgiving

How our American tradition has evolved during five years in Ireland.

By E. Alana James - 11 November 2010

Illustration by Marie Guillot

Having adopted life in Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland, over five years ago now we have become adept at managing the celebration of a holiday specific to one country when living in another. Upon reflection, the changes we have experienced are instructive of our settling in and making connections within our community.

The first year I remember both celebrating and ruing the differences in what it took to get things done. On the one hand, there were no lines in the markets and we could purchase a range fed turkey with no bother because few others wanted them in November. However, we had to do without pumpkin pies as there was no filling to be found and the real pumpkins had all been sold earlier in the season. Our guests were neighbors, older gentle and interesting folk who had graciously included us in the small gatherings that happened in the neighborhood. Much of the conversation around the table made little sense to us, and in truth the Cork accents were often so strong as to render us incapable of reply.

The second year was an experiment in mixed cultures, one that perhaps did not lead to the best entertainment experience of our lives. We had sorted the pumpkin pie issue by simply bringing cans home in a suitcase after travel to the US. The turkey was the best we had ever had, coming as it did from the local butcher. Our guest list included a younger couple who we knew from the town, the older gentleman who manages the works of our village, and an American who had rented one of the houses close by. Unfortunately the American was of the sort who felt that his way was the best way and “What was wrong with the locals that they didn’t...?” Take your pick: answer their emails being at the top of his list. The one brief moment of connection for me was when I explained to him what I had learned from my Rotary group in Cork - that people here are so closely connected that they seldom resort to emails, at most texting. Why move to the impersonal when you can go downtown for lunch and run into everyone you need to see? What we were experiencing was our lack of connection rather than their rudeness. The Irish couple concurred and I felt as though I had won a prize in multicultural understanding. When the older gentleman fell asleep at the table it seemed a proper comment on the evening.

Our third year felt as though we were finally at home and Thanksgiving modeled much of the lessons we had been learning. We were flexible, resulting in a bigger dinner on the Saturday while we took the heart of the celebration of our holiday to our multicultural group meeting on the Thursday by sharing pumpkin pie. Having built real homey connections with people, our guest list including the folks with whom we walked our dogs, worked, and lived close to, all of them people who shared other events regularly with us. We understood 95% of what was said throughout the evening, only really breaking down at the end when our guests fell into politics and sports. There was only one man whose accent was strong enough to cause me to have to ask him to repeat himself so I could answer a question. And best of all people stayed, talked and laughed until well after 1am. Great craic.

It wasn't until the fourth year that we unpacked the China, and rolled out the bits and bobs that truly make the celebration one with historic memory by including grandmothers silver, the tablecloth we picked up in Hungary, and the centerpiece that included the little bits of handmade crafts from Africa. Perhaps that is the greatest gift of moving to Ireland for us, that we become increasingly part of the world culture because travel is easier and the community norm allows for greater multicultural mix.

This year we are taking Thanksgiving to a new high, and now that we have a regular group of friends who will join us for the feast, we can stretch the tradition a bit. We found that it didn't work for us to have a meal on any day but Thursday so we are back to the traditional day while being adventurous instead with the food on the table. Our friend from China, Tina, will be making the feast and we are adding Chinese traditions to our American norm. It is bad luck to have an odd number of main dishes so we will have a small amount of soup and then six dishes to be shared together: a couple of types of dumplings, a vegetable and potato salad, and a couple of meat dishes. Tina and her friend Grace will teach us how to make all these, thus adding to the repertoire of our lives.

Thanksgiving continues to teach us many things as it helps us to reflect on our lives, and how much we have to be grateful for in our adopted home echoing the original Thanksgiving feast.

Those settlers long ago had found warmth and helpfulness in their new neighbours. Those puritan settlers were not prepared to make their way in a wilderness and had it not been for the helpfulness of the native people they found there their crops would not have been successful. They had neighbours who literally kept them alive in that first winter. While nothing in our journey has been so extreme, we continue to find the connections with other people in the appreciation of the wide world in which we live as sources for our deepest gratefulness.

Visitors of the Night: Are all Georgian houses haunted? | Marie Guillot, October 2010

Visitors of the Night

Are all Georgian houses haunted?

by Marie Guillot, © October 2010

A scream. Then we hear Lina trying to force open the door of the old library where we are sitting. In a state of frenzy, she finally succeeds and enters the room. She is white as a ghost.

“I knew your house was haunted. They all are when they are so old, especially in Ireland.”

Having lived for 12 years in that tri-centenarian Georgian house, I thought I knew it inside out.

Lina and Garry, our American friends, are visiting us for the first time this evening.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I saw a ghost. I know you won't believe me, but I saw it moving.”

I offered:

“Let's retrace your steps, Lina. You'll show me where you saw the ghost.”

Reluctantly, holding my arm, she leads me back through the dimly lit lobby, towards the kitchen.

Then she turns around.

“Look over there. That's where I saw it.”

We are now facing the front door of the house; actually an inside glass door, preceding the final porch which has another door, the one visitors would come at.

Both of us are staring, holding our breath.

In a flash, I see a shadow moving behind the glass.

“Did you see it Marie?” she shouts. “Now you believe me.”

We were warned: there are stories about the house. Among them, a ghost soccer team playing on the main lawn; a stain of blood that does not come off a wall; a carriage coming to the front door, heard but not seen.

Since then, we have added our own stories to the repertoire. Namely a ghost dog on a Halloween night; the moaning of a child, audible only in one precise spot upstairs; and, of course, various unexplained rumblings during the winter nights. Not to mention that a piece of gutter fell down shortly after we moved in, as well as a large portion of one ceiling.

As French people, brought up from birth with la raison pure (rationalism), my family was rather excited about those stories. The game was to find a proper explanation for each incident.

Until, one day, or rather, one night...

Back from a late outing in Cork, exhausted and eager to crawl directly into bed, I made my last stop in the upstairs bathroom. There, in the quietness of the place, I heard distinctly a double tap at the window. I froze, looking blandly at the closed curtain. Tap Tap again. I have to admit that I left the room without further exploration.

Against Lina's will, I open the glass door. There, we see two bewildered crouching creatures.

“Martine, Pierre!” I exclaim, “que faites-vous la?” (what are you doing there?)

The young French couple are our guests for the week. Having no English, they had decided to stay out tonight, so as not to interfere with our visitors.

They were only trying to enter quietly without bothering anyone. Now, they are deeply embarrassed by the turmoil they have created. Lina relaxes a little bit, but says that she can still feel something strange about the house. So do I. It's a matter of interpretation... and of pulling the curtain.