Another Life: In the time of triangular cheese

Not every man can use binoculars to gaze into the past. Looking out to north Connemara across the latest stormy sea, I meet the shadowy bulk of Tully Mountain. A notch in the surf of the far shore is the little stone pier below the cottage where I wintered half a century ago.

The one street of Tully village gestures west, towards Renvyle Hotel and the bleak, storm-cobbled cape of the peninsula. The nearest shop to the cottage was scented by a side of bacon on one counter and crusted pints of stout on another. At the far end, beyond the hanging buckets and brushes, was the post office hatch where the queue formed on dole days.

Arriving on my bike in the wake of Hurricane Debbie (easel and typewriter following on with CIÉ), I was taking a sabbatical from Fleet Street, then caught in a spell of ennui. The winter was to prompt me to switch nations. What kept me, aside from landscape and the novelty of ceilidhing, live music and ghost stories, evenings of card-playing 25 and foil-wrapped, triangular cheese, was the hint of new beginnings in which I might play a part. Ken Whitaker had published his economics in Dublin, and on New Year’s Eve, Tully’s young curate drove a carload of us to Galway, on icy roads, to watch the launch of RTÉ.

Places and people

Of the memories of Tully I choose now, living above the big strand that used to gleam at me across the bay, too many, perhaps, seem just about food. But places and people come with them.

A “sabbatical” sounds grand, but my small savings had to last a year. I lived often and gladly on potatoes and mussels, gathered in the estuary at Derryinver, where posh anglers caught their salmon. Sometimes, with more mussels in the bucket than I needed, I took some to Patrick and Maria, the elderly brother and sister to whom I paid the rent.

They were always sharing food with me – bowls of beestings (first milk from the cow, rich in nourishing colostrum) and carrageen pudding, fresh eggs, slices of barm brack. They baked me bread in a pot on the hearth, heaping the lid with turf embers, and gave me butter from a hand churn. I found them at this once, on an evening when the milk was slow to set and was appalled by the beads of sweat on their faces, their stooped exhaustion at the handle of the churn. They would thank me for the mussels and toss them out to the hens when I had gone.

I made mutton curry, lasting a week, with curry powder and garlic that I cycled to Clifden to find. You may not have heard of mutton – many butchers, at least the city sort, have quite forgotten what it is, or so say complaints on boards.ie. Mutton is meat from sheep than have been allowed to grow up, or live at least two years.

The best mutton, which is what I was eating from the village butcher, is hung from ewes in winter, after months of foraging on grass and heather. Its flavour is strong, with plenty of fat, and Prince Charles likes it enough to have founded the “Mutton Renaissance” campaign in the UK in 2004 (muttonrenaissance.org.uk), supported by the Royal Academy of Culinary Arts.

My forays after brown trout once – only once, honest – involved experiments with an otter board, in company with a young village delinquent. The board is a little wooden raft with a vertical keel mounted at an angle. Set forth on a lake, like a toy yacht, it draws a line with many flies far out into the water as one creeps along the bank, watching out for the gentry. The device is called a “fixed engine” in court, which sounds odd.

Even more regrettable, now, was my theft of a rabbit from a stoat. After sudden screaming in the rushes, the two of them tumbled on to the road at my feet, tangled in a final bite. The stoat backed off a yard and circled me. I hoisted the rabbit and checked its demise, then set off home with it. The stoat followed me most of the way, looping along the stone walls.

My drawing may exaggerate the bungalows across the bay, though a winter sun, shafting down the fiord of Killary, does catch enough gables in that fuchsia-hedged landscape to speak of great change. Nothing, however, can dent its creative allure. Among my successors, the poet Eamon Grennan spends much of his year in a cottage tucked under the mountain, the visionary artist Dorothy Cross lives on a clifftop nearby. We share and celebrate the resilient natural world and the latest stormy sea.

Michael Viney's Reflections on Another Life, a selection of columns from the past four decades, is available from irishtimes.com/ irishtimesbooks