led up to a long, treeless ridge; immediately below it, and on either side, the ground was rougher, with outcrops of rock – a wilderness of gorse and heather interspersed with stunted, windswept trees. Out beyond this a vast landscape opened up: the level plain, part of which we had travelled through with so many setbacks the previous day. Its innumerable loughs, now a brilliant Mediterranean blue, blazed among green fields of irregular shape, bogs, woodlands and tracts of limestone, with here and there a white cottage or the tower of a castle rising among them.
And beyond all this, the far more immense bare limestone expanses of the Burren rose golden in the morning sunlight; Galway Bay could just be seen to the north-west; while to the south, beyond the Shannon, were the hills and mountains of County Limerick, their feet shrouded in a mist which gave an impression of almost tropical heat.
At twelve-thirty the hounds arrived in a big van, very well behaved, and soon more vans and horse boxes trundled up the hill, some drawn by Mercedes. Here, the hunt was more or less on the extreme limits of its territory. It normally hunted over stone walls on the west side of the County, and over banks and fly fences on the east and south. The rough country round us, on the other hand, might give shelter to hordes of hill foxes. Anyway, they were safe today. This was a drag hunt in which the hounds would follow an artificial scent.
By one o’clock those horses still in their boxes were becoming impatient, kicking the sides of them, and catching the air of excitement that was gradually gathering in the street outside. People were beginning to saddle up and mount now, especially the children, of whom there were quite a number. A big van with four horses in it arrived and one of their owners said to the driver, ‘It’s a lovely day! Let’s go and have a jar now in Walsh’s.’ By now the bar was splitting at the seams.
This was not a smart hunt such as the County Galway, otherwise known as the Blazers, the County Limerick, the Kildare, or the Scarteen, otherwise the Black and Tans. It was not the sort of hunt that Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who loved hunting in Ireland more than anything else on earth and was so proud of her figure that she had herself sewn into her habit every hunting day, would have patronized. Most were in black jackets and velvet caps, some were in tweeds, others wore crash helmets, and one man with a craggy, early nineteenth-century face wore a bowler. One man in a tweed coat sounded suspiciously like a Frenchman, there was an elegant American girl in a tweed coat, and what looked like several members of the scrap metal business. A cosmopolitan lot.
The hounds were released; there were eight and a half couple of them, which is a hunter’s way of saying seventeen. After a brief period in which they were allowed to savour delicious smells, one of the Joint Masters, who was wearing a green coat with red facings and black boots with brown tops, took them up the road to cries of what sounded like, ‘Ged in! Ged in!’ and ‘Ollin! Ollin!’ Then they were suddenly turned, and ran back down the street through a press of people and out through the village, down and over the flanks of Derryvoagh Hill and into the eye of the now declining sun. Soon they were lost to view to us and other followers, watching their progress from one of the rocks below the village.
‘By God,’ someone said, ‘the next thing we’ll be hearing of them they’ll be in America.’
I left Wanda to take the long downhill back to Crusheen and the farm, where Tom was very kindly waiting to take her to Ballyvaughan, on the shores of Galway Bay, where we were going to stay for a few days. Then I, too, zoomed downhill bound for the Monastery of Kilmacduagh, which we had failed to see the previous day. I was so exhilarated by the fast cooling air that I almost felt I was flying.
Six miles out as the crow flies from Ballinruan, I zoomed past the site of a ruined castle on the shores of Lough Bunny, then right, past a field in which a small boy was trying to catch a wild-looking horse and bridle it, the Burren blue-black against the setting sun, the plain close under it already in shadow, and on, having missed the road to Kilmacduagh, through the bare, limestone karst from which black and white cattle were somehow scratching a living, spotting an occasional small white farmhouse in what was effectively a limestone desert. Suddenly, there was the monastery, far off to the right across a wide expanse of limestone pavement riven with deep, parallel crevices that looked like an ice floe breaking up: a collection of silver-grey buildings with the last of the sunlight illuminating the conical cap of its enormously tall round tower – 112 feet high and two feet out of the perpendicular. This was the monastery founded in the sixth century by Guaire Aidhneach, King of Connacht (I was now just in Galway and therefore in the old County of Connacht) for his kinsman St Colman Macduagh, on the very spot where the saint’s girdle fell to the ground. The girdle was preserved in the monastery until the seventeenth century.
I pedalled on for another four or five miles through the bare limestone plain, the only visible living things in it now blackbirds and rooks. The last of the sun on this beautiful day was shining on the high, treeless tops of the Burren mountains, so convincingly sculpted by nature into the forms of prehistoric camps and forts that it was difficult to know whether I was looking at the work of nature or of man.
At the intersection of this loneliest of lonely roads with the main road, I nearly ran into the car in which Tom was taking Wanda and her bicycle to Ballyvaughan, together with Gary, the infant prodigy. A signpost still showed thirteen miles to Ballyvaughan and I cycled on, a bit tired, through a landscape by now an improbable shade of purple. I passed a wild-looking girl on a bicycle, and saw two young men in an enclosure full of rocks pushing them to one side with a bulldozer, the only way in the Burren, which is Ireland’s largest rockery, in which you can ever create a field. Until the invention of the bulldozer the inhabitants of the Burren removed all the rocks by hand, either using them for building walls or forming great mounds with them, which are still to be seen. In those days it would have required the help of many people, possibly an entire community, to make a field; now most of those people are either dead or emigrated or both.
The road ran close under the Burren mountains now and along the side of Abbey Hill, which conceals within its folds the beautiful, pale, lichen-encrusted ruins of Corcomroe, a Cistercian abbey built by a king of Munster. High above it, on a saddle, are the three ruined twelfth-century churches of Oughtmama, all that remain of yet another monastery of St Colman Macduagh. To the right, fields of an almost impossible greenness ran down to the shores of Aughinish and Corranroo Bays, long, beautiful, secretive inlets from Galway Bay. Then a delicious descent to a little hamlet called Burren, beside a reedy pond. Then up and down again to Bell Harbour on Poulnaclough Bay; the water in it like steel, with the mountains black above it and above that cobalt clouds against an otherwise pale sky in which Venus was suspended. When it comes to thoroughly unnatural effects it is possible to equal Ireland, difficult to surpass it.7 By the time I got to Ballyvaughan I had covered forty-five miles and it was dark.
CHAPTER 5 Land of Saints and Hermits
Stony seaboard, far and foreign,
Stony hills poured over space,
Stony outcrop of the Burren,
Stones in every fertile place,
Little fields with boulders dotted,
Grey-stone shoulders saffron-spotted,
Stone-walled cabins thatched with reeds,
Where a Stone Age people breeds
The last of Europe’s stone age race.
JOHN BETJEMAN. ‘Sunday in Ireland’,
Selected Poems, 1948
The whitewashed cottage we were to stay in (looking at it no one would have guessed that it was built with breeze blocks), at which Wanda had already arrived in Tom’s car, with her bike strapped precariously on top, had a thatched roof and a green front door with a top and bottom part that could be opened separately so that if you opened the bottom and kept the top