Day 5: A Climb Into the Family Tree

This is one of a series of entries from my travel journal chronicling my recent trip to Europe. You can click here for the archived entries.

Day 4 | Day 6

Bushe's Bar, Baltimore, W. Cork, Rep. of Ireland 10/06/08

I woke up bright and early today. I was the first to rise and I wasn't going to be left out in the cold again! After a hearty breakfast Mom and I hopped in the Focus to go on a Sullivan Family Tree tour of West Cork.

We drove back through Skibbereen and took the N71 toward Bantry (passing by or through such places as Church Cross, Abbeystrowney, and Balleydehob). We stopped in Bantry for a while to snap photos. Really lovely town on scenic Bantry Bay. We got back on the road toward Glengariff, but made a detour at Kealkill, where my grandfather's mother was baptised in the village chapel. I had actually been here back in 1991 when my aunt took me and my cousin and I remembered the small, whitewashed chapel when we drove up to it, although I had forgotten the details of its location and familial importance. We noticed that there was a sign for a stone circle nearby that wasn't on the map or in any of the guidebooks Mom had read. We ended up walking for a while up an ascending, winding road that climbed into the hills at a fairly steep incline. We got confirmation that we were headed the right way from a woman who was working outside her house as we passed it on our way up. She assured us that it was "just up the hill, through the gate" and pointed it out to us, indeed just up the hill a ways.

"Are there cows?" asked my Mom anxiously (she meant bulls, we having had some problems with their possible presence the day before on Sherkin Island).
"Cows?" asked the auburn-haired older woman, incredulously (and understandably so).
"Yes will we have to worry about any cows charging us?"
"Oh you mean the cattle. It's all me neighbor's land and he might have a sign up for cattle."
"Bulls?" queried Mom.
"Aye - but I don't think they're out today. You're young, you can run!"

Reassured thus we headed up to the gate (evidently many of the smaller stone circles reside on private farmland in Ireland). As I waited at the gate for Mom, having powered my way up the home stretch, a car came into view coming down the road from higher up the hill. The car pulled over and the woman asked me if I was waiting for a car to pass. I told her I was actually waiting for my Mom and once again confirmed that we were on the correct path to the stone circle ("through the gate and past the backhoe").

"Oh! D'ye know how to address a stone circle?"
"No..."
"Oh I wish I had time to show you! Listen to me: Walk up to the circle and try to calm yourself. Quiet your mind. Walk around it counterclockwise [or was it clockwise?] and make sure to enter ONLY through the portal stones which are at the north-northwest corner when Mars is in the acscendant."

Perhaps not verbatim but it was something to this effect. Detailed, complex, hopelessly new-agey in a communing-with-the-stones kind of way. Mom joined me, we bid adieu to the modern-day druidess, and walked up to the gate. Unfortunately it was secured so we vaulted over and approached the circle, which was somewhat anticlimactic (five small stones a foot or two high in a circle with a couple tall, thin stones of four feet or so arranged upright. Not exactly Stonehenge.). The view however was unbelievable on the hillside looking down into the valley - we could even see the chapel in the village down below. The entire time since we had hopped the gate, however, Mom had been yammering about the (nonexistent?) threat of bulls and being charged and/or gored by something (keep in mind that there wasn't even any "Beware of Bull" signage, which, in my limited experience, is put up as a matter of course and might as well say, "Farm Here").

At any rate she was making me increasingly paranoid; occasional lowing from what we would later determine to be a heifer some ways down the valley sounded like a furious monster of a bull - I could just picture the beast: jet-black with a big ring through its nose, nostrils flared with visible breath coming out in great puffs as he snorted aggressively, red-eyed and hoofing the ground in anticipation of running down some wide-eyed kid from the big city. We hurriedly snapped a few photos and scampered back to the gate, visions of a horrible bull-inspired maiming dancing in my head. It remains to be seen whether or not my pics will be blurred with the jittery movement of an irrationally terrified photographer.

After Kealkill we headed to Glengariff, which is yet another lovely Irish town. We took some pics and stopped in Quills gift & craft shop, where we picked up a few things and Mom started up a conversation with the ladies running the store about her grandmother. Evidently she, a Kennedy, had a name that "wasn't from around here." A bit of mystery added to the genealogical quest?

We ate lunch at the Hawthorne Bar, where I had a nice plate of fish 'n' chips (my first in Ireland) accompanied by a tall Bullmer's poured over ice - the perfect refreshing beverage on a hot, sunny day (as it has been for most of the week now - incredible!).

Glengariff is on the Beara Peninsula, and we did part of the so-called Ring of Beara, which is a drive around the peninsula over some hairy mountain roads but with some amazing views (Allegedly, anyway. The part we saw was definitely gorgeous, but we didn't drive far enough into the hills to get to the vertigo-inducing roads. Probably a good thing for my Mom's sanity and my life expectancy).

After leaving Glengariff we came to Adrigole, where my Mom's dad's father came from (a Sullivan). The village consisted of St. Fachtna's chapel and a square with four pubs in a row. Nary a residence to be seen... I was walking up to investigate the church and I heard, "Mike!" from a doorway to my right. I turned into this otherwise deserted pub and saw my relatives inside taking refreshment after their day's travels. Turns out they had done much the same itinerary as us although later in the day. We caught up with them as they were sitting with the older woman tending bar and an old bloke sipping on a pint at three in the afternoon. The gent was almost entirely unintelligible, although he cracked a few jokes about JFK.

It was very cool to see the cemetery outside the chapel and think, "My great-great-grandparents might very well be buried here somewhere." (My great-grandfather himself had come across the pond and died in America.) Unfortunately it was impossible to even guess at where they might be buried even if we had some relevant info (date of birth, death, first name, etc.) because literally four out of every five graves was an O'Sullivan. It was almost to the point of parody. But that's what it was like - local lineages were born, lived, and died in the same area and produced a cluster of the same surname. Along with our trip to Kealkill, I couldn't help but feel a certain connection to these places where my ancestors of several generations ago had lived.

After Adrigole we headed down to the nearby harbor - really a glorified dock with a few boats. The bartender in Adrigole gave us directions:

"Just outside town to the left."
"Will there be a sign?" asked Mom.
"Oh, yes. I should think so."
"...And will it say, 'Harbor'?"
"Yes, I should think so."
"Will there be boats there?"
"I should think so, yes."

The dock provided us with amazing views and photo ops of the surrounding hills.

Our final destination for the day was Castletownbere (also known as Castletownberehaven. I mean, why not tack on an extra couple syllables?). It's a sizeable seaport that's home to McCarthy's Bar, inspiration for the book McCarthy's Bar, by Pete McCarthy. This is a hilarious Bill Bryson-esque book of the author's travels in Ireland. Highly recommended.) Again we got a ton of great pics and headed home.

It was a fantastic, if long, day of touring. The landscape as one drives onto the Beara is breathtakingly beautiful. The road winds up into these gorgeous hills and it is incredibly green and there's blue water down below - simply amazing stuff. Description and even photographs do not do it justice - one has to experience it in person to appreciate it. I ended this excellent day as all excellent days should end - sipping on a Bulmers, watching the sun set over Baltimore Harbor while writing in my journal.

I never did get to properly address that stone circle.