MAGAN'S WORLD:I HAVEN'T been off this island since a trip to Borneo in November, nor have I any great wish to leave at present. Ireland is providing me with quite enough moments of transcendence as it is – epiphanies striking me with the frequency of Padre Pio's bouts of stigmata in haphazard spots throughout the country.
First, there was Glenshelane River walk outside Cappoquin, a beech and oak forest that originally belonged to Molly Keane’s family and is now a Coillte forest of larch, Scots pine and cedar. I had been strolling along the river for a few hours and had just paused to eat my second blaa, baked that morning in the 124-year-old Scotch brick oven of Barrons Bakery in Cappoquin, when a fawn appeared on the track before me. It stared into my eyes for an age, attempting to communicate something profound, before suddenly levitating straight up like a Harrier jump jet and shooting off into the woods. The way it defied gravity for a split second before leaving reinforced my suspicion that deer, like hares, are not fully part of this world. They span the dimensions. I can’t prove that, but I know it’s true.
Barely a month later I was in Kilkenny, following a visual arts trail from the former Bishop’s Palace behind St Canice’s to the mesmerising Heath Robinson installations of Ian Burns in the cellars of Kilkenny Castle. Around noon, I strolled out along the Nore Valley trail to Bennettsbridge for a scrumptious lunch in Nicholas Mosse Pottery, and as I was returning, having just passed a particularly Elysian bend in the Nore, I heard an otherworldly sound and an owl came swooping down at me from an old mill. Owls are totemic too, of course, and this particular one was full of potent messages for my higher self from the realms beyond.
The following week I was in Wexford where the epiphanies were more sociological than spiritual. The Georgian mills and barns huddled over crystal rivers around Enniscorthy, bewitched me – so finally wrought, so perfectly renovated. How come the vernacular architecture of Wexford is so well maintained – all natural pigments, lime plaster, hand-crafted ironwork? Is it racist to suggest that heritage is valued more in the southeast and that this might be due to the civilising influence of Normans and Quakers? Wexford feels like Ireland would feel were it not haunted by centuries of colonisation; had we not been zombified 50 years prior to independence by losing a quarter of our population.
In Wexford town I stumbled upon an oratory of epicurean delights called Greenacres that was so perfect I felt I might have slipped through a tear in the continuum and astral travelled to California, Provence or northern Italy. It’s basically a large, roomy cafe surrounded by shelves of the world’s best wines and a delicatessen serving some of the finest foods from tiny European producers – shelves of hand-baked Swedish crispbreads, rare preserves and even a Swiss raclette stall. It was the sheer assurance of the place that astounded me, and the lack of that smug sense of entitlement that pervades such places in Dublin. The cafe is open as a French patisserie all day, but is also a bistro run by an Avignon chef, Jacques Carrera, who, if my lunch is anything to go by, recognises the sanctity of fresh herbs and fine olive oil. It was a gourmand’s eucharist.
Somehow these revelations must stop, and yet later this week is Dingle’s inaugural Tradfest which includes a monster polka session on the summit of Mount Brandon. Everyone is invited to bring an instrument with them and play on top of the mountain. Can I resist succumbing to the rapture? Better to keep away. Perhaps I ought to go abroad, just to get a break from the splendour.
- manchan@ireland.com; discoverlismore.com; trailkilkenny.ie; and dingletradfest.com