At the first sweeping corner the scenery opens up showing off hills and valleys and I gaze down into the hazy and sunny green valley of Gragan East and across to the zigzag Corkscrew Hill. Each side of the road is lined with low walls and scrub. Early purple orchids, daisies, primroses and early flowering mountain avens line the verges, some of which are being cut up by the cars. At certain times, in the brief interregnum between races, spectators are permitted to walk quickly across the road. Some bravados follow its continuous central white line before jumping nimbly on to the limestone when the motorbikemarshals with orange flashing lights appear round a corner with their ‘get-outta-my-way’ alarm signals.
Farther along, at Cahermore, an opening beside a farm gate allows spectators to look down on the drivers rattling through the gears coming out of a hairpin spitting loose stones. Behind them, unseen and uninspected, lies Cahermore stone fort built in the early medieval period as a defended farmstead of a wealthy Burren landowner. It has two walls – a strong inner wall enclosing a circular area and a lintelled gateway with small rooms built into its side walls. A sign informs me that the gateway is not original and may have been built in the fifteenth century to replace a simpler entrance. The outer stone-walled enclosure was sub-divided by thin walls which may have held animals. Archaeology, mixed with motor sport, may seem a strange combination but I find it a racy cocktail.
Time to move on; red-flagged marshals usher the crowd back or shoo them smartly along to the next viewing point. It reminds me of a different version of the annual spectator sport of bull-running in Pamplona. Some of those here are looking frantically for a gap in a hedge or trying to high-jump a wall in a desperate scramble for safety. Hell hath no fury like a Ballyallaban Hill climber – whose every millisecond is a matter of life or death – trying to dodge a stray wanderer.
I take my life in my hands and walk quickly over to the other side before climbing higher on to the limestone terracing to look down the road at the cars and across to the wide northern section of the Burren. From this vantage point near Gleninsheen there is no human habitation – not a house in sight, not a chimney smoking, just cars at full throttle smoking their way to the top.
At Lisgoogan a white painted line with the letter ‘F’ marks the end. Here the road plateaus out before plunging downhill towards Poulnabrone. The finish line denotes the spot tucked away behind a gate in a field where, according to a sign, Paddy Nolan discovered the ‘very precious collar of gold in 1932’. The Gleninsheen collar found here is now on display in the National Museum in Dublin. A yellow Bronze Age gold collar, a replica of the shape of the original one and dated 700BC, has been carved into the stone and erected by his friends.
Ballyallaban Hill is a road rich in antiquity and full of quirky diversions that have become familiar waymarks to me. The surrounding area from Aillwee and Ballycahill, through Berneens to Gleninsheen and Lisgoogan drips with a rich past and is polished with history. Apart from some of the treasures already mentioned, you will also find adjacent to the roadside, holy wells (one for an eye cure and the other a toothache cure), megalithic tombs, several crosses and cists. In the townland of Ballyallaban near the starting line sits a bullaun stone beside a circular area of raised ground with a late cross standing on an altar-like platform. It is believed there was an early monastic settlement here but it has not been recorded.
Once a year, the road is crowded with the snarl of high-octane engines, smells and fumes producing a decibel level which, although now strictly controlled, is nonetheless uncharacteristic of the Burren. For a few hours, the peace of this area is destroyed. Birdsong is drowned, wind noise is barely noticeable, the normally still atmosphere evaporates in a cloud of smoke while bemused cattle and sheep are unsure what has happened to their world of serenity. Not a hare or stoat is to be seen, the butterflies have disappeared into a late diapause and the feral goats have wandered off elsewhere in search of tranquillity. Car sirens clear the roads and for one afternoon the hill represents 3.5 fun-loving, hair-raising, thrill-seeking kilometres of tarmac producing an adrenalin rush for drivers and spectators.
This Burren road, normally full of coaches, minibuses and camper vans as well as cyclists and walkers, gives pleasure for one day to several hundred people for a completely different reason. Like so many of the Burren’s storied roads, this one has much to tell. On this day it shares its twists and bends, its archaeological, cultural and floristic heritage, with some of Ireland’s fastest mountain men on four wheels indulging in what can only be regarded as extreme noise terror.
Corkscrew Hill © Trevor Ferris
15
Bard of Bell Harbour
How can I lie in a lukewarm bed
With all the thoughts that come into my head?
Brian Merriman, The Midnight Court
The shhh! police are on duty as the bearded musician launches into a gravelly version of ‘Sweet Ballyvaughan’. Quickly the talk dies and the raw singing voice takes over, stunning the audience into silence.
It is a wet Monday night at the end of August and the rain hammers against the windows. Inside in the warmth more than forty people, tourists and locals, are squeezed into Greene’s bar. Small knots of English, Dutch, Norwegians and Germans as well as a scattering of Americans sit at tables with pints or wine glasses anticipating the next song and watching with admiration.
A work-related conversation by two women at a table is hushed by those deeming it sacrilege to talk across a musical session. Whispered words are exchanged by two Dutchmen between songs but they break off mid-sentence as the musician erupts into full voice. They have come to hear one of thesupreme singers not just of the Burren, Clare or the west of Ireland, but of the whole country.
Seán Tyrrell is the Real McCoy, not a folksy imitation or a one-man stage-Irish performance to please the tourists; he is a singer with a unique style, crafted and honed over four decades of poetic music-making. He has a remarkable power to distract his audience from their daily worries and transport them to foreign lands. Ballads and traditional songs flow as fast as the pulling of the pints. With consummate ease and without preamble Seán moves from soft songs of love, loss and desire to impassioned five-minute cameos about vagabonds, wanderers and gypsies alongside tales of exile, longing, separation, heartbreak and death all wrapped up in a swell of melancholic emotion.
An appreciative response greets the instrumental ‘Midnight in the Burren’ while ‘Game Over’ starts with an engaging declarative opening: ‘See the blood spout, steaming, gleaming. Dark the ocean …’ The tempo is slowed down with the lyrical ‘One Starry Night’ followed by a brisk version of ‘All the Wild Young Children’.
Much to the chagrin of customers, an American woman sitting with two others punches numbers on her mobile phone and before placing it on the table insists to her friend in California – you must listen to this:
I’m just lying here dreaming about you now,
Wondering if you have found your way from last year
Your topsy-turvy friends have left you in an empty shell.
A seasoned practitioner in the art of crowd-pleasing both at home and on the other side of the world, Seán switches with relaxed versatility from tenor guitar to banjo and a repertoire of songs, new and old, interspersed with jigs and reels. For twenty-five years he has been a summer fixture in a corner of Greene’s onMonday and Wednesday nights. In-the-know locals are joined by visitors, some of whom have stumbled in by happenstance or have seen a small sign on the window advertising ‘Live Traditional Music Tonight: 9.30 p.m.’
Many have no idea of the stature of this unpretentious musical wizard performing before them contentedly, informally and almost casually but with heartfelt sensitivity. They may not be aware that he has produced five CDs and two DVDs, and is renowned and respected throughout the international world of Irish music. ‘Amazing voice,’ a Dublin man standing at the bar mutters to no one in particular. ‘I drove here especially to hear him singing and to see how he can comma
nd a pub.’
One of Seán’s strengths is reinventing songs, switching from the exuberant to the intense sometimes with a forceful urgency that can shake tourists out of their holiday lethargy. Old and, in some cases, forgotten classics, such as ‘Side by Side’, ‘Time You Old Gypsy Man’ and ‘John O’ Dreams’ may be rooted in the past but tonight he brings them alive reincarnating them with a new dynamism. The foot- and finger-tappers, hand-clappers and singalong swayers join in ‘South of the Border (Down Mexico Way’) before musical journeys to Kathmandu and the Yukon.
But mostly, the searing voice, pure in tone and immeasurably beautiful, reflects the spirit of the local environment: the limestone rocks and stones, the sea, the dancing orchids and gentians, and the wildness of his adopted part of north Clare. The chatter is increasing again but just a few bars into ‘The Lights of Christmas’ – a poignant Burren tale of emigration, hope and love – the small room falls completely silent.
During a break Seán talks across the tables to a New Yorker about life in the city where he used to live. They enjoy a joke about the Irish summer rain. He orders a drink and from his seat surveys the bar for a few minutes before a short instrumental leads into the anti-war song ‘The 12th of July’ followed by ‘TheFaltering Flame’, a song about the peace process in Northern Ireland. After three hours of sustained, high quality solo musicianship, a mellow and satisfied feeling runs through the crowd as the wall lights flash on and off signifying last orders. Six customers at the counter wave notes at the barmaid working flat out to cope with final thirst demands. Talking stops, orders are mouthed quietly and a hush returns as the distinctive voice resonates across the crowded room bouncing off the walls with the opening lyrics from ‘The Coast of Malabar’: ‘Far awaaaaay across the ocean beneath an Indian star …’
A sense of intimacy pervades and those present realise they are privileged to have spent an evening in the company of one of the great contemporary musical talents. Heads full of images conjured through the mellifluous music, they drain their glasses and pull on their anoraks, nodding acknowledgement to the figure gathering up his musical instruments, before disappearing into the dark wet Burren night. They have found that frequently elusive craic – not the clichéd craic beloved of tourist board copywriters – and will return home content that Ireland can still produce special nights of magic. And in their minds the lyrics from songs such as ‘John O’ Dreams’ echo as a takeaway memory: ‘Midnight has come and the good people homeward thread’.
Perhaps one day, heeding the admonition contained in Seán’s exquisitely haunting ‘Sweet Ballyvaughan’ ‘… they’ll return cross the sea, to the Burren, to me and to Clare’.
To find out more about his musical influences, Seán invited me to come the next day and talk to him at his house in Dooneen near Bell Harbour. His stone cottage, which is set in a hollow, looks out on to a narrow stretch of water called Poll Dubhda, ‘the Black Hole’.
He was born in Galway in 1943 into a musical family and his playing days stretch back to the 1960s when he performed in the Folk Castle club in the city. In 1968 he emigrated to America and played professionally singing in Irish bars in New York and San Francisco on what he calls ‘the-corned-beef-and-cabbage circuit’. He returned home in 1976 and went to live in Kerry before deciding to move to Clare where he was appointed caretaker at University College Galway’s research station at Carron. One day he was walking with a friend at Eagle’s Rock in the heart of the Burren when something about the place spoke to him.
‘It was only then that I began to realise what the Burren was all about. I was ignorant of its importance and the significance of it prior to that as I never came here as a child. I remember a tangible feeling came over me and I said to myself, “I have finally found my spiritual homeland.” I went up Slievenaglasha, which has many legends attached to it and had an overwhelming feeling that this is the place where our ancestors retreated to. There is fertile land up there and it had a huge effect on me. It’s hard to quantify the reason but something touched me about it. When I lived in the States I had at least four or five different homes but I knew that this was the place, and especially here in Bell Harbour, where I wanted to live.
‘One of the most immediate things I loved about it was the people. The neighbours are generous and helpful. If I need a job done farmers will bring their tractors to help out and they’ll bring you topsoil if you need it. There’s a lovely spirit about this place and I’ve been welcomed with open arms.’
Seán looks back on how his poetic-musical life took off. One night he was asked to play in a pub in Lisdoonvarna. ‘The barman said he wanted some songs so I was flicking through a book of poems and ‘Bagpipe Music’ by Louis MacNeice caught my imagination. I found it hilarious and knew immediately thiswas the song for me. I sat down and quickly produced some incredible stuff – and unquestionably being in the Burren influenced that. I started to sing poems and realised this was what I was looking for. I didn’t want to do “The Wild Rover” or “Black Velvet Band” – they’ve been done to death by some groups and have become an abomination but I wanted to find other things and that’s where the poetry book came in useful.’
That book was one that Seán found in New York called 1000 Years of Irish Poetry. It remained with him through his travels, and for many years has provided creative nourishment and sustenance. One of the poets that most intrigued him was John Boyle O’Reilly who was born in County Louth in 1844. In a CD in 2009, Message of Peace, he recounts the story of O’Reilly’s life in song and words. Beginning with dialogue, the double album includes songs invoking the poetry of Francis Ledwidge, Charles Lever, Oscar Wilde, John Lennon and Bobby Sands.
‘When I read O’Reilly’s first poem I was flabbergasted by it and couldn’t believe the style in which it was written,’ Seán says. ‘It was ideal material for songs so I set them to music and it is the trilogy on my first solo album Cry of the Dreamer released in 1994. He joined the Fenian movement and then the English cavalry hoping to infiltrate key regiments and instigate a general rebellion until they were sold out by an Irish informer.’
O’Reilly was sentenced to death which was later commuted to life imprisonment, and was sent on a convict ship to Fremantle in Australia. He escaped on a whaling ship to America. Later he became editor of the Boston Pilot, a leading Irish-American newspaper and went on to rise to a position of influence in US politics and literature. His poems on Irish and American themes mostly deal with the heroism of the common soldier.
‘His life is such a gripping story,’ Seán says. ‘He was a true internationalist making common cause with the AmericanIndian and the African-American at a time when both peoples were denied the most basic rights.’
The Burren gave Seán the chance to develop a connection between poetry and music which is his passion. The range of poetic voices that he has tapped into stretches from the eighteenth century Clare poet Brian Merriman and C. D. Shanley, through Yeats, MacNeice and Kavanagh up to Seamus Heaney and Paul Durcan. This standing army also includes Michael Hartnett, Mary O’Malley and Rita Ann Higgins.
Living in the Burren has been inspiring for Seán as he is surrounded by music and many renowned musicians. ‘Chris Droney, the great concertina player, lives near me, as well as Mike Fahy, Micko Russell and Tommy Peoples. Davy Spillane would often join our sessions so it couldn’t help but influence me and the atmosphere of the Burren began to affect me in ways I didn’t even realise and definitely coloured the music that came out of me.
‘I’m labelled a songwriter but I’m not really a songwriter as I’ve only written three full songs in my life. I always thought I would have the gift for words and not for music but was surprised when I found it was the reverse. And I was delighted that I had the gift of composition. I’m more of a thief of other people’s ideas. I describe myself as a reporter delivering and reporting what these poets and writers said.’
Like so many creative artists who live in the area, Seán has experienced numerous
special moments. ‘Everything comes into the Burren equation with me. In the days when I was oyster farming I would be up to my belly in water with a wetsuit and I remember that a swan used to come and visit me at Muckinish. It would stand and look at me, then wander off again, and return and do it again. The sea bed is fascinating and the different colours of seaweeds never cease to amaze me. One summer’s day I was coming in by boat and noticed the whole sea floorcovered in incredibly beautiful white lace which was like a sea mushroom. I had never seen anything like it.
‘Along this boreen where I live when you reach the sea at Bell Harbour there’s a bed of the most magnificent mussels. There is something special about picking them and carrying them up to the house. I used to sell mussels for years and supplied them to some of the best restaurants along the west coast. It was extremely hard work but I still like going there. The very smell of my hands when I come back is like perfume to me even though it is muck and dirt but I just love eating them with friends after I’ve picked them fresh. I enjoy walking along different parts of the shore and discovering places where you find seaweeds, razorfish, cockles, oysters, or different types of scallop. The oysters from here are famous – in fact Henry VIII used to demand his oysters came from Poll Dubhda.’
Seán has been working on a new show in Irish and English called ‘Who Killed James Joyce?’ Again this weaves together the muse and music tapping into a rich poetic spectrum.
‘In a BBC interview that I came across, MacNeice read his poem “Prognosis” and I’ve included it in the show. It was written in Galway in 1939 and he said it was like a children’s rhyme but with foreboding. When he read it I recognised the internal rhythm and tune. I’m also using a Heaney poem simply called “Poem”, and a Mary O’Malley poem “Hormones”. I discovered the best way of doing it is to break down the individual parts of the poem. Some such as “Bagpipe Music” fall readily as it is like a variation of the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel”.’
Burren Country Page 19