1000 Miles of Ireland

Two years ago, our summer travels brought us to the American southeast on a road trip and one of my favorite stops there was at Connemara, Carl Sandburg’s estate in Flat Rock, North Carolina. Today, we left the city of Galway to drive through the land after which he named his estate, and it is equally lovely. Several people we’ve talked to here in Ireland have named a place or two that we must see and Connemara is consistently among them. It is celebrated for being rugged land, untapped, vast and beautiful. It is certainly these things. 

On the road from Galway to Cong, we stopped at the side of the road and climbed out of the car (Have I mentioned yet that Chris is like Gulliver to the Lilliputians in this country? So I mean it when I say he climbed out. He’s so much taller than Ireland.) to take some pictures because the views were spectacular. We were out of the car only a moment before a man came out of his house and approached us. He told us he talks to people from the world over because everyone stops just there to take a photo, and he asked us what we were taken with about his land. We mentioned the stone walls and he pointed out the stone wall he helped his father build in the 1960s and then pointed out another that was over a hundred years old. The Quiet Man and about his friend Nally who lives two kilometers down the road who had a run in with some Travellers who weighed 14 stone and were half his age.
He reminded me of Robert Duvall, if Duvall had ever been willowy instead of sturdy, and he told stories about being a boy and having John Wayne give him pennies for candy when he was here filming

We drove on to Cong, the primary set location for The Quiet Man and parked down the road from the house where the dying man scene was filmed. There’s a mail slot in the wall on the façade of that building that says “Tips Please” in exchange for walking past. I can’t imagine that the town will be able to capitalize on John Wayne for too much longer, but we passed groups of people on the movie tour. We opted instead to visit the 13^th century Augustinian abbey, gothic ruins set against the backdrop of a river bank and forest. The architecture itself is gorgeous and the lands surrounding the abbey are, as well. We walked a trail through the woods, passing fishermen in the river, the water of which was so clear we could see fish passing us.

We stopped in Westport for lunch and had turkey and stuffing sandwiches, something Chris has always thought the Shimons were brilliant for having invented and now the secret is out. We drove on to Murrisk which is where the National Famine Memorial sits at the base of Croagh Patrick, to which there is a pilgrimage each year in which the faithful climb the mountain barefoot. The memorial itself is a sculpture of a ship and the mast is comprised of skeletons. 

The rest of our day was an empty drive through mountains and past streams and slowed by sheep
in the road, sheep that do not move just because a car is barreling along. By mid afternoon, we had seen a thousand miles of Ireland so far on our trip. Connemara is known for being more traditionally ethnically Irish—Gaeltaecht—and in this part of the country the signs are not necessarily in English. It is also remote and there is a longer distance between villages and the villages may only have a handful of houses. So when the gas symbol on the dashboard lit in the middle of nowhere, it was cause for anxiety. And that we weren’t entirely sure where we were didn’t help. So we drove quietly for a time, both of us hoping that we would make it and we did—obviously. I can’t help but think that someone would have helped us if we had run out of gas on one of those remote roads, however, and Chris agreed.

When we got home, Chris totaled his receipts to date for his fellowship and has enough money left over to buy himself an instrument and just received email confirmation from the foundation that this is a fine way to spend his dollars so I suspect we have some shopping to do tomorrow.