Only an eejit would drive seven hours from Dublin on a Friday night, arrive wired at midnight, struggle to sleep, and then get up to cycle 90 kilometres around the Beara Peninsula. Well last weekend, ladies and gentleman, I was that eejit.
The Tour de Beara this year was pretty much a theatre piece, staged by the Atlantic with a rotating cast of weather systems. By the time I’d even made it as far as Adrigole I was already soaked through. At Castletownbere the wind whipping into my eyeballs off the Atlantic had me questioning my will to live. Climbing out of Eyeries after a feed in the local GAA hall, the rain came down in what I can only describe as ‘film-set mode’ and I started to pray that Steven Spielberg would appear out of the hedgerows and shout ‘cut’!
And then came the Healy Pass, rising on the elevation profile like the Himalayas. I crawled up, scorched by sudden sunshine, before being lashed again on the descent into Lauragh. By the time I rolled back into Glengarriff, I was drowned, sunburnt and completely exhilarated. Never again, I said at the time.
I’m already looking up accommodation for next year.
Not all rain is the same
Somewhere between the squalls and the sunbursts, I had Manchán Magan in my ear. He was on with Brendan O’Connor, speaking with that mixture of wonder and gravity that only he can bring. He was talking about his new book, Ninety-Nine Words for Rain (and One for Sun), which is a deep dive into the meteorological lexicon our ancestors crafted to survive this weather-lashed island.
It turns out there was some proper Irish terminology for my Beara cycling baptism. That wall of water that hit me outside Eyeries was múirling, a sudden heavy shower that moves like a wall of water. The spattering chaos at Castletownbere was sprais, a sudden, heavy, spattering shower. And when I could barely see the road ahead through the downpour? That was dallcairt, or ‘raining so heavily you cannot see ahead’.
Magan has collected these words like precious artifacts, each one a visceral memory of what our forebears endured without lycra or Gore-Tex or central heating.
Rilleadh báistí: streaming rain, like oats through a riddle. Gleidearnach: a downpour that seems combative or war-like.
Manchán is such an important voice in our culture, one we should treasure while we have him.
Bittersweet holidays
On Sunday, we crossed the Cork-Kerry border into enemy territory and visited Derreen House & Gardens near Lauragh. It’s one of those places that feels more like a dream than a walk. Giant tree ferns, Himalayan magnolias, rhododendrons the size of minibuses. all planted by the 5th Marquess of Lansdowne in the late 1800s, when the Victorian craze for exotic specimens was at its height.
These old piles and their gardens often rankle with the part of me that grew up hearing stories of Tom Barry, of course.
It’s a little disconcerting that while these aristocrats were importing wonders from South America and the Himalayas, the peasants outside the gates were still developing words like tuile shléibhe (a sudden shower near a hillside) because they had no choice but to endure whatever the skies threw at them.
It makes me wonder: in two centuries’ time, will people pay €50 to stroll around one of Jeff Bezos’ old mansions, marvelling at the climate-controlled biodomes, while our descendants develop new words for the extreme weather we’re busy creating?
Derreen is gorgeous, don’t get me wrong, and the reception we received was kindly and welcoming. The kids adored the treasure hunt, while we got to soak in the incredible views along the sea shore. And we had a lovely coffee and scone in the house before we left, the kids playing ‘mirror writing’ on the napkins. A hidden gem, well worth a visit, if you can handle the historical ironies.
Thoughts from abroad
Back at the holiday home, perched high over the fields outside Eyeries, I found a book from the Beara historical society filled with old black-and-black photos. Fishermen, schoolchildren, families standing stiffly in front of stone cottages.
Looking out at the glowing green patchwork below, I had a strong sense of the toil and labour it took to eke a living from this land in years gone by and felt a strong sense of gratitude for the country we have now, and for those that went before us and sacrificed so much to create our opportunities.
Of course, this is probably a regular thought passing through the minds of middle-aged lads in Dublin reg cars doing inexplicable forms of exercise across the mountains of West Cork.
We all construct stories to make some sense of the world around us. In many ways, this very column is some sort of ongoing effort to understand my own relationship with a place I no longer reside but that gives me such a deep sense of belonging. A love letter, written from exile, but still addressed to home. Next time, I’m going to take my training more seriously though.
