CO. KERRY: In a continuing series in which writers reflect on the county they call home, NUALA NÍ DHOMHNAILLconsiders how the landscape of Kerry has held a place in her heart and her life since she first arrived there as a child
KERRY, THE HOME that is not home. Always, and especially when we were very far away from it, it was home. We were always either going to it or coming from it. In the beginning, from Lancashire in the 1950s, it was a three-day journey. First by mailboat to Dublin, then a long train journey that culminated in a very long tunnel out of which we emerged into Cork, and finally by large black car back to my granny’s farm in Paddock, near Baile Mór, west of Dingle. There my mother walked the cliffs above Coosheen with Moll Griffin, an old friend from school. Around us a soft breeze, its understorey laced with a tang of salt and seaweed, beneath a sweeter overtone of thrift, or sea pinks.
A woman walked out of a house across the inlet. She was wearing a billowing 1950s dress, white cotton with huge red flowers, roses or peonies. Beside her walked her daughter, wearing a smaller version of the same dress. How I longed to have a dress like that, to be a smaller version of my mother. Her comment, “Ni foláir nó is meaintín maith í” – I understood most of it. It means she must be a great – what is a meaintín? A dressmaker. She must be a great dressmaker, the woman who has made the same dress for herself and her daughter.
Down below, in the Coosheen, my father is swimming. He is doing the breaststroke, his head out of the water, but the rest of him, undersea, looking green and strange, for all the world like a giant frog. I am three years old, and a bit. The bit is important, as it is a sizeably large percentage of my life to date. This is Eden, before the Fall. My uncles Seán and Eoghan are still alive. They take me on their shoulders, and carry me up the hill, after sheep. They put me in a gap to stop the sheep and when these enormous animals appear and I take to my heels, they laugh and laugh at the little townie English girl, an cailín beag Sasanach, who is, of all things, afraid of sheep.
Next summer they are drowned in a lobster boat, in Cuas an Bhearraigh Bhuí off my Auntie May’s land, in Cahiratrant. As an indirect result of this my mother finally decides to give up her GP practice in St Helens, Lancashire, and follow my father back to Ireland. But what is to be done with the little townie English girl, an cailín beag Sasanach, who only knows a little Irish? Try an experiment. Send her back to the Gaeltacht.
And so after the holidays, my parents go away and I am left in Kerry on a more permanent basis. It is a huge change. I remember the house being very cold. It faced northeast, with a direct view of the long and varied ridge of Mount Brandon, but from an unusual angle. There was no electricity or running water. Cooking was done on the cast-iron Stanley range, except for the breakfast of porridge, which was boiled up quickly over a Primus stove with a paraffin flame. The lighting of the Aladdin lamp at evening, disengaging the long chain from the ceiling, trimming the wick, filling it up with paraffin, and pulling it up to the ceiling again – this was all one of the more interesting rituals of the day.
Three of us five-year-olds, my cousin Betty, our neighbour Nuala Long and myself, walked over a mile back to school every day, down An Bóithrín Dorcha. We were quickly dubbed “the day-old chicks” by some county council men working on the road. We got six gallon sweets from Mártan’s shop for the penny we shared between us, instead of the usual rate of five sweets a penny. This was put down to Mártan’s love of Cahiratrant, his mother being from there. And anyway, how else were the three of us going to share out the gallon sweets between us without recourse to higher mathematics?
I arrived back in Lancashire at Christmas with a personal mythology, announcing to all and sundry that in Ireland there were three kinds of rabbit: coinín, giorria and patachán. So strong was this conviction that it took me years to work out that actually a patachán was a leveret and it was the young of the hare, and not a special species all of its own. But at the time personal mythologies were paramount and faute de mieux, I identified hugely and obsessively with the landscape. Sitting on a ditch outside the house I would insist on Betty naming all the townlands we could see stretched out across the parish: Cill Mhic a' Domhnaigh, Cathair Boilg, Baile an tSléibhe Mór, Baile an tSléibhe an Treanntaigh, Cill Uraidh, Baile an Liaigh, Com an Liaigh, Rath Fhionáin, Baile Beag, Láthair Fraoigh, Mám an Óraigh . . .
From Cahiratrant, you had a notable view of Mount Brandon, skew-ways but extraordinary, as the two smaller peaks of An Géarán Mór and An Géarán Beag, were viewed as if they were lined up side by side like the two horns of a bull. Perfectly aligned with them, and just in front was Cnoc na Leataithe or An Bhinn Mheánach, crowned with its megalithic tomb, Leaba an Fhir Mhuimhnigh, The Bed of the Munsterman. This view etched itself on my sensibility long before I read in The Earth, the Temple and the Godsby Vincent Scully that this alignment of the horned double peak in the distance with the soft belly of a hill close-up, was the preferred siting for temples of Ceres or her more chthonic aspect Demeter, in the archaic Greek period. Etched itself long before I was to learn that the very old road through the village running deep beneath the level of the fields on either side was called Bóthar Rí an Aonaigh, or The Road of the King of the Fair. This road must have been a veritable via sacra,down which processed the whole community, with the king of the fair at its head. It leads from Cuas Crom, named after the chthonic side of Lugh, the most important god of the Celtic pantheon, and faces directly towards Mount Brandon, called now after the most important local saint, St Brendan. But to this very day the mountain is still climbed on the pattern day, called Domhnach Chrom Dubh after the older god, and many stories still alive attest to the great difficulties the saint had in wresting power over it from Crom Dubh and his famous bull.
This is a landscape so charged with numen or otherwordly power that it was not for nothing that a medieval monk writing in an Irish cloister in Regensberg, Germany, could plonk a great Fenian story, Cath Fionntragha or The Battle of Ventry, right down in the middle of it, structuring the story around what was for him a well-known topography. No wonder that I too still dream of it.
Years of coming and going followed that initial immersion in Kerry. When we lived in Nenagh it was a five-hour car journey, singing all the way, that took us home each summer weekend through corridors of scarlet fuchsia. We built a holiday home there and later again, in the early 1980s I was to spend three years living permanently again there, with two small children. I had a car, a white Renault 4, my little chariot of freedom. With it we got to explore the peninsula intimately, especially my father's side of the mountain, over the Connor Pass, An Leitriúch, the half-barony "below the hill". I got to learn the habits of the birds and the names of the plants. The weather was mostly awful. In retrospect it seems like it rained solidly for 15 months non-stop. Any break in the clouds saw me down tools and declare the day a holiday as we set off to explore everything from megalithic tombs and early Christian sites to the Neolithic field patterns turning up 20 feet under the blanket bog at Loughadoon. My husband was sure I had gone slightly mad and was more than once heard to murmur in his own language (Turkish) the first lines of the classical poem Asik'a Bagdat sorulmaz, "Don't ask a poet directions how to get to Baghdad, their imagination runs beyond the horizon".
As a result of one especially memorable occasion he added “and you will get lost in the bog”.
The inevitable move to Dublin was very difficult. I was so lonely not just for the language and the people, but for the landscape as well. But my discovery of the folklore collected from these very people and archived in University College Dublin’s Department of Folklore collections went a long way to assuaging my misery. I not only knew intimately the landscape in which all this material was situated, but I could put faces to a lot of the names of the informants and collectors as well. I had found another home away from home, and once again it was deeply connected with Kerry.
On a recent sciúrd there I asked myself what it was that drew me to this landscape. I worked out that it was early imprinting but also a need to tell the myriad stories that it contained for me. Even now, especially when I am far away from it, it is home. I am still always either going to it or coming from it. Always. Always.
