Further Explorations of Kerryland

The time has come to speak of the second half of the expedition to Kerry!

I will begin just where I left off, which was up at the top of Valentia island.

I was pretty much euphoric the entire time. In hindsight, some of it probably had to do with the amount of sun I was being exposed to. We have sun in Cork in fleeting patches, but it’s usually not particularly dependable or warming. On the one mild, sunny day we’ve had so far I went on a five-mile run in the sketchy part of the city and was high on life from start to finish. I thought that everything was wonderful and charming and brilliant and quaint, but when I was gushing about how cute West Sunday’s Well was to some locals they were aghast and warned me to never run there again unaccompanied by a burly man for protection. I submit that they exaggerate. But I digress. Basically, my sudden vitamin D exposure last Saturday was like a double shot of espresso and rainbows and shiny things and all that is good.   

Just like that picture on the last post, but this time in shirtsleeves!

We took a detour from the main trail to see the Fogher cliffs (not to be confused with the (slightly) more famous Cliffs of Moher), which included an informational plaque telling of how John Paul Jones, Father of the American Navy, was anchored off Valentia during a calm with some impressed (and by this the plaque refers to sailors being forcibly Shanghaied into the Navy, not being filled with a sense of admiration, for that is the other sort of impressed) Irish sailors aboard. Jones ordered a boatload of men to attempt to tow his ship, the Bonhomme Richard, from where they were becalmed off the Skelligs until wind could be found. The clever Irish press gang volunteered to row but, under cover of darkness, cut the hawser (hawser = rope) and made for Valentia in a thick fog. They also took some gold with them and lived happily ever after, and Jones and the Bonhomme Richard went on to win an astonishing naval battle against a brand-spankin’-new British ship and Jones uttered the immortal quote I HAVE NOT YET BEGUN TO FIGHT. Which was said as his ship was sinking beneath him. And that is just awesome.

So the story had a happy ending for everyone, except the Bonhomme Richard, but I suppose it lives on in legend and all that.

Unfortunately Jones died abroad after serving in the Russian navy and his body was pickled for the long voyage back to America, and was transported there on a ship called… the Pickle. I do not lie. You can’t make this stuff up.*

But again I digress.

At any rate, all of this John Paul Jones business made me even more excited about everything, because JOHN PAUL JONES and that is why. By the time we got to the bottom of the (quote, unquote) mountain I was having simply the best. Day. Ever.

Now, you’ve been hearing about the Skelligs for quite some time without having a proper explanation from me. Now is the time for that explanation which you are owed because on our way back to the hotel for lunch we stopped at the Skellig Experience, an interpretive center with a peet bog roof.

Called colloquially Big Skellig and Little Skellig, the entities to which I refer are the two large monoliths visible in a fair percentage of my photos in the last post. They are pictured again here for your convenience:

These two rocks lie approximately twelve miles out in the Atlantic ocean. Little Skellig is the second most populous breeding ground for Gannets, which are fascinating seabirds that double-team with pods of dolphins to catch fish (more on that later). Big Skellig is crowned with the remains of a sixth-century monastery hewn from solid rock by a group that must have been made of the most intrepid monks in all of human memory.

This monastery, Skellig Michael (the proper name for Big Skellig), is what caught my attention. Imagine a group of no more than a dozen monks rowing twelve miles into a stormy sea to chip three (count ‘em, THREE) winding stone staircases from a massive rock sticking up out of the ocean, up to its barren top where they somehow eked out a living in succession for six hundred years. If the monks wanted further seclusion, they somehow managed to climb to the highest peak on the rock where they could seek hermitude and absolute isolation.

That, good readers, is inspiring.

In the summer months (those being April, May, and June here in Ireland), if the weather is clement, one can charter a boat out to Skellig Michael for a reasonable fee and climb up the hand-hewn stairs for themselves. This is something I am keeping in mind.

Our last stop before lunch was the small town of Ballinskelligs and its consequent beach and castle ruins. The day was still perfect, and the tide was out, making Ballinskelligs beach a perfect mirror.

The castle ruins, we were informed, were only mildly dangerous and could be scaled if we wished. Since I had my aforementioned adventure boots, I was in the first group to lead the charge across stream and bog to climb the castle before it was entirely overrun with Americans. At the base of its hill, though, an excited woman jogged up to us and began causing a ruckus about a bird.

“It’s big! It’s dead! It’s fresh!” she cried, gesticulating at the castle in general. “You must get a picture of it!”

"fresh"

Curious, we tiptoed into Ballinskelligs castle and there, prone at the base of the largest window, was a dead cormorant, fresh as fresh could be. It was rather beautiful, and so the poor thing was photographed to death (again?) by every one of the fifty Americans to cycle through. And that is the cormorant story. The end. On another note the castle was fantastic, and you could walk all the way round its perimeter on the crumbling battlements. I could have spent all day running around Ballinskelligs.

 

After being blown quite away by the Skelligs and Ballinskelligs and a dead bird, and being fed vast quantities of good food back at the hotel, we again set off for antiquity. This time the group headed to the Round Forts just outside of Cahirsiveen, which are nice round… forts, of about the same vintage as Skellig Michael. However, these forts are simply round walls of stone, neatly terraced I will admit, but generally not half so interesting as gnarly monolith monasteries. For a historian in the making I have little to no interest in the particulars of such structures, and that is shameful.

Whooooooooooooooooo

A couple of friends and I persuaded Tommy the bus driver to let us off outside of town and we walked in, taking in some Cahirsiveen sights such as this fancy army barracks and that nice gated estate, on which I could readily see myself living. We made our way back through town to the hotel and sooner rather than later I bundled up and trundled back into town, off to mass at the Daniel O’Connell memorial cathedral.

Fun fact: this barracks was supposed to be built in India, but the plans were switched by mistake. The same thing happened with my college, only our plans got switched with a school in California. And they were not barracks plans. 

Daniel O’Connell was one amazing human being, and this is why he is the only non-saint or –deity to have a Catholic church named for him. Long story short, he was the inspiration for the civil disobedience movements of Ghandi and MLK, successfully campaigned for Catholic emancipation in Ireland, opposed slavery and the disenfranchisement of women long before doing so was cool, and procured better rights for racial minorities in Ireland… all the way back ‘round the end of the eighteenth century. He also fought duels of honor (which I believe I spoke of a few posts back). He was called The Emancipator and The Liberator and was born in Cahirsiveen. Read up on him on Wikipedia, 'cause that's how we do!

Mass at the Daniel O’Connell was accompanied by a lovely choir and an accordion. I dearly love accordions. ‘Twas a beautiful service.

I have allowed too many historical interludes in this blog post and it is getting tiresomely lengthy, so I will summarize the rest of our trip right quick:

Tour of a slate quarry! Quiz night at the hotel bar! Further exploration of Cahirsiveen! Sleep! Baby lambs in the morning! Killarney National Park! Waterfalls! Muckross House and Gardens (and lovely people dancing polkas in the road in honor of St. Brigit’s day)! Killarney once more! Then… home to Corcaigh at last.

And THAT was my brilliant weekend.

*This anecdote is probably not even true but my really cool sister told it to me, so I shall include it nonetheless. If you are into historical accuracy, Jones’ remains were not returned to the US until the early twentieth century, and then on a battle cruiser, and it was in fact the news of Horatio, Lord Nelson’s death at Trafalgar that was conveyed on a boat called the Pickle. Nelson was later pickled himself, as all eminent naval men seem to be, but that is a story for another