At the Edge of Ireland

by David Yeadon

  Tom O’Ryan

  And so typically Irish too was the fact that many of the ancient songs were almost lost. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the ruling Protestant “Ascendancy” of Britishers issued edicts banning the use of the “barbaric” Celtic language and the singing of “superstitious and silly songs” about fairies, leprechauns, and a host of other folklore “little people.” But, spurred on by the remarkable success of such books as Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a Celtic cultural renaissance began in the early nineteenth century. Thomas Croker of Cork published one of the very first books of Irish folktales—Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland in 1826.

  Later in the century Oscar Wilde’s parents—Sir William and Speranza Wilde—became enthusiastically involved in recording authentic Celtic music and stories. They in turn encouraged William Butler Yeats and his creative philanthropist-partner, Lady Augusta Gregory, cofounders of the Abbey Theatre in 1903, to publish The Celtic Twilight (Yeats) and Visions and Belief of the West of Ireland (Lady Gregory).

  Yeats also went on to celebrate Ireland’s mystical Celtic heritage in his beloved and world-renowned poems—in particular “The Wanderings of Oisin” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” The two of them also embarked on numerous “collecting expeditions” in Connemarra and Sligo and realized that the preservation of Celtic songs and poems required a renewed nationalistic retention of the Irish language. So eventually the Gaelic League was formed, and by 1906 it boasted almost a thousand branches and more than 100,000 members. The Irish government then reinforced it by creating the Irish Folklore Commission in 1935.

  “SO it was things like that, y’see, and a new pride in our land and in our ancient Celtic culture that allowed people like me to do what we do today,” said Tom, “retaining and respecting the role of the seanachai and keeping the Gaelic revival alive and well—thank you very much!”

  “KEEPING THINGS ALIVE AND well is not always an easy thing,” said Teddy Black, one of Beara’s most notable “mod’rn-day” seanachai. His name had been mentioned to Anne and me on various occasions when the old Gaelic tales were floating about during evenings of craic—tales of fairies, tinkers, lovely naked ladies on horseback, the perils of drink, vows of eternal abstinence, and the like.

  “The man’s a living miracle,” a young Teddy Black fan had gushed after a particularly raucous evening of Irish folk songs at Twomey’s. “He reminds me of m’dad—he’s got stories galore. People come alive when ’e tells ’em. Y’can see his characters an’ what’s going on in the tale. M’dad had Beara instincts buried deep inside him. He could forecast the weather for a week just by going down on the shore here an’ listenin’ t’ the sounds an’ lookin’ at the sand—the slap o’ the surf an’ the crack o’ the wind-chop, the tone o’ the pebbles growlin’ an’ grindin’ in the shallows, patt’ns on the wet sands, the way the dry grains moved higher up the beach. He was hardly ever wrong. An’ Teddy’s like that—Beara’s folk historian and much more besides.”

  So obviously I went off in search of Teddy Black and finally traced him to his home on the eastern edge of Castletownbere set on a high bluff overlooking Bere Island and the narrow channel and the town’s small, enchanting (but difficult, so they say) golf course.

  His bright-eyed wife, Ann, greeted me and invited me in. I needed no further inducement, as the hallway was full of the most delicious baking aromas. Almost every time we went to visit someone at their home, there was always some baking going on. Very odd…there was definitely some kind of grapevine messaging system here that had signaled our fondness for just-baked cakes and the like?

  “I’m hungry already—and I’ve just had lunch!” I said.

  “Good—because somebody’s got to eat these new-baked biscuits an’ it might as well be you,” said Ann with a chirpy laugh.

  “I’ll only protest through politeness. Then I’ll finish the plate.”

  “That sounds like my kind o’ fellow…” A voice boomed from the adjoining living room. And out stepped this stocky, blue-eyed, white-haired gentleman, radiating auras of energy and good humor, and I liked him before we even got to the hand-shaking ritual.

  The next couple of hours raced by in a welter of stories, punctuated by Ann’s plates of still oven-warm cookies. Apparently Teddy had sort of “slipped sideways” into the seanachai’s role after spending much of his life as an insurance salesman. “I could always tell a pretty good tale—but so could a lot of people on Beara. It was part of the local tradition, really—before the days of radio and TV and videos and a dozen other demonic distractions! Y’ had t’ find something t’ keep y’ going through those long dark winter nights, an’ I guess I learnt it through m’grandfather. He came from Oban on the west coast of Scotland and worked on some of our southwestern lighthouses. Ann’s grandfather was one of those who survived that terrible disaster at the Calf Rock Lighthouse just off Dursey Island.”

  “What disaster—I don’t really know that story. Penny Durrell mentioned it briefly to me, but I never heard the actual details.”

  Teddy’s eyes gleamed with delight and a broad grin almost made an ear-to-ear leap across his happy round face. “Oh!—so y’don’t know about Calf Rock. Ah well…I suppose I should put on my seanachai hat an’ give you the official version. Or at least, my official version!”

  And so he proceeded to do precisely that—relishing the rich details of the saga from the very first day the project was conceived in 1846 (“very stupid…you couldn’t have chosen a worse, more storm-battered place than that pathetic little piece of broken rock off Dursey”) to its arduous construction from 1862 to its first lighting in 1866. “An’ o’ course—like everythin’ else connected with this crazy project an’ all its disasters—the light rotator didn’ work and the lens had t’be turned by hand by one o’ th’ two keepers. An’ then a couple o’ years later durin’ a terrible gale someone misread the signalin’ flags from th’ lighthouse an’ thought they needed urgent rescue. So seven men set out in a small boat an’ the storm got worse an’ worse an’ finally they capsized jus’ a hundred yards or less from the rock an’ all seven men vanished in a flash, never t’ be seen again. Not a single body was ever found.”

  When the traumatic events reached a gripping climax early on Sunday morning, November 26, 1881, Teddy’s eyes were ablaze and his speech increased in speed and timbre. He was a true storyteller, telling the tale as if for the first time with none of the stagy antics I might have expected from a professional seanachai. He raced me through the deadly phases of the event—a terrifying hurricane with winds from the northwest over a hundred miles per hour; the enormous crashing waves leaping over the top of the little lighthouse; the sudden disappearance of the lantern and the whole upper level; the dash by the keepers for the tiny lighthouse cottage across the rock, and their imprisonment in a ten-by-fourteen-foot kitchen awash with stormwater for…and at this point, Teddy became almost purple with excitement…“for twelve days…can y’ imagine, twelve whole days until Thursday, December eighth…they were in that horrible dark, wet, foodless, waterless—at least in terms of freshwater—hole. For the first six days their families thought they’d all been killed. The storm was so bad the men couldn’t even open the door of the kitchen to signal rescuers. In fact, they didn’t know if there were any rescuers! But all the time they were trapped, their story was being transmitted around Ireland—and the world. And when they were finally rescued during a lull in this storm to end all storms, their names and the names of their rescuers had become almost legendary. In fact, Michael O’ Shea, a fifty-three-year-old fishing boat captain from Ballynacallagh, was so revered for his bravery in leading the rescue, that he was awarded a special medal for gallant conduct and became known locally—and proudly—as ‘Michael O’Shea of the Medals.’ And,” continued Teddy, “like I said, Ann’s grandfather—God rest his soul—was one of the men rescued by Michael and was never short of a pint at the pubs for the rest of his long life!”

&n
bsp; I congratulated Teddy on a fine tale superbly told. He laughed. “Oh, I always love t’ tell a tale—and listen to the stories of others. It started, I suppose, when I was very young. We had a boardinghouse, and over dinner in the evenings there’d be all this wonderful storytelling by the residents. I guess I learned a lot from them. I learned—most important—to adjust the telling—the pace, the tone, the punch line, the humor—to the audience. I’m not one of these rigid storytellers, but it’s still very important for me to be called a storyteller—as opposed to a yarn spinner or a raconteur. I bring in modern tales too—not just the grand old tales. Some do that and they go on the American circuit, and big names they are too. But I love Beara as much as any man and I love to tell its tales and legends here. Once a month I go to a place in Cork called the Yarn-Spinners Club and they have storytelling gatherings that bring people in from all over the country. Last time we had three from New Zealand—wonderful storytellers. I’ve done radio an’ the like an’ so I’ve been invited to join many of these kinds of groups.

  “I think if I’d taken the whole storytelling thing more seriously, I would’ve done quite well. ‘On the circuit,’ so to speak.”

  There was something about Teddy that reminded me of our folksinger friend Danny Quinn. Maybe his genuine modesty coupled with a rich bedrock soul tingling with humor and Irish benevolence.

  “I admit I like a little bit of adulation now and then, but there are others who deserve it much more than me. The real traditional seanachai—like just down the road—is Mary Madison. She reflects the heart ’n’ soul of this place—the days when storytelling was an important part of communicating at céilís and between different parts of the country. An’ it kept the old deep earthy pagan Celtic soul alive. Kept us proud. Helped us celebrate this amazing treasure trove of archeological sites we have here and all our amazing legends. A sense of entitlement to the richness of our history and all the tales and legends behind it.

  “It was hard because, when I was younger, we had a town here that had closed up completely. The mining was dead, the navy and army had pulled out of Bere Island, Dunboy Castle and the Puxley mansion had been destroyed by the rebels. We were living in what you might call the ‘tumbleweed era.’ Every second house on the street was empty. Everything was dying out, all the old traditions. But—thank the Lord—things are a lot better in that area now, and I’ve got so many stories in my head that have been passed on to me. I see myself as like a bit of a folk historian—being responsible for trying to keep them—keep the old oral traditions and the people whose lives they reflect—keeping them all alive. For us—and even for the blow-ins too. They’re desperate to identify with something and somewhere because they’ve lost their own roots—forgotten where they came from, if they ever knew. And they reach out to us and our stories, trying to find an anchor. Americans particularly. They’re very ‘rootish’—always looking for their own histories over here. Well, it’s hardly surprisin’ is it, in a country that—let’s face it—is less than two hundred years old in terms of real emergence as a power—the world power! And I don’t have any problem with that at all. We need all the stories we can get nowadays. And when I watch the faces of my audiences—when I see the stories grab ’em and carry ’em and excite ’em or even make ’em cry a little—why, then I’m a very happy fellow—a very satisfied seanachai!”

  “So you even make ’em cry?!”

  “Oh, yes—indeed! And especially lately, since my latest poem-song. It’s one of those things that came to me out of nowhere…well, no, that’s not really true. It came out of years of concern for this beautiful country of ours and all its Celtic Tiger antics. So-called progress has changed people. Tremendously. We’re in risk of losing so many of our best qualities, I think…as I say at the end of the second verse…

  “It seems that our nature and kindness have gone

  And even the Lord is finding it hard

  When it seems that He’s needed no more.”

  The conversation had taken an unexpected turn. “Teddy, could you play me that song?”

  “Here. Better still—take a CD copy with you and play it back at your cottage. Then let me know what y’think.”

  So, I did, and this is what I heard:

  We say that it’s progress

  When we’ve sold off the land

  the fish the sea the sand

  and even the gray rocks as well

  then from mountain to shore

  we have ripped up and torn

  the heart and the soul

  from Ireland

  with no time to wait or to stand at the gate,

  and chat till the cows come on home,

  our stories thecraic

  our songs and folklore all drifting away from our shore

  Chorus

  We say that is progress and just what we need

  could it be that we’re drunk on new money and greed

  and as our old country she gets up to speed

  will our people be heard anymore?

  For too many years we have cried bitter tears

  as our young were being forced from this land

  for the thousands that never came home

  and now that we’re able to have a fine table

  it seems that our nature

  and kindness have gone and even the Lord is finding it hard

  when it seems that He’s needed no more.

  30

  A Trip to Tuosist

  (and Way Beyond)

  “I WOULDN’T BE PARKING THERE IF I w’ you,” said the white-haired lady at the post office door. She reminded me of my Irish grandmother. Tightly bunned hair, frowny, strict expression hiding a reluctant smile, and a determined manner that forbade contradiction or even the slightest hint of a question.

  But I did have a question. After our dramatic nail-biting drive over the switchback challenge of the Healy Pass, I’d parked across the road from her tiny post office/grocery store at Tuosist, which despite its nebulous size, is the key parish of the County Kerry section of the Beara, stretching twenty-three miles from Kenmare to Ardgroom. I’d parked on a grass verge off the winding narrow back road and well away from the frantic antics of Cork drivers. Not that there were any around here. We hadn’t seen a car for miles.

  “You don’t think it’s okay here?”

  “That’s what I jus’ said,” she replied sternly.

  “Well—we’re just coming into your store for a minute. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

  “Is that so, y’think?” was all she replied before she vanished inside.

  We followed her, bought a couple of oranges and some oversugary Brit candies (our guilty favorites—Fry’s Cream Bar, Rowntree’s Rolos, and that Aero chocolate stuff patterned with thousands of tiny air bubbles). We explained to the lady (still unsmiling) that we were looking for Tuosist parish hall. We’d heard from Jim O’Sullivan that there was some kind of annual festival of local folklore and other regional peculiarities going on over there.

  “Well now, y’jus’ passed it. It’s barely fifty yards away,” she said, regarding us skeptically as hapless foreign tourists. “There it is.” She came to the door and pointed from the corner of the post office down a lane to a small school building with a substantial whitewashed depiction of the Crucifixion towering twelve feet over the road. “Don’t know how you could have missed that.”

  “Looks like we’re not going to miss this, though,” gasped Anne as round the corner from our parked car came a herd of thirty or so cattle swaying, lumbering, and mooing through the mud and constantly trying to break free from the two ankle-nipping dogs controlling them. The post office lady was smiling now. Her face creased and wrinkled with mirth and a defiant look of “Now didn’t I tell y’so?”

  From the cows’ point of view, our car was obviously an obstacle to be enjoyed—a way to escape the dogs. So they rubbed and scrunched against it, tried to hide behind it, or ran circles around it, all the while churning up ribbons of mud and mur
ky grime from the soggy grass verge and relieving themselves copiously along their erratic ways. When they’d finally been corralled and moved on down the lane it was rather difficult to distinguish our previously bright and shiny silver rented Opal from all the mire and muck surrounding it.

  We had to laugh. “Well—I guess your advice was good,” I said as we tried to remove the goo from the door handles. At this point, God bless her, the post office lady finally let her warm Irish heart show through her stern carapace. “No—wait a minute now. Let me be getting you a bucket and a cloth. You’ll never get all that stuff off with your fingers—the idea of it!”

  So giggling, she brought the water and cloths for us to wash it back to something recognizable as a car.

  The Healy Pass

  “Well—I hope you enjoy the Eigse—our little local folklore gathering,” she said as we left to drive down to the hall. “We have one most years in memory of Dr. Sean O’Suilleabhain…Lovely man he was…Collected all our folklore and poems and stories and whatnot around here…We all helped him…His favorite saying was ‘Neighbors—don’t let your fine talk go under the clay.’ If he’d lived, he’d be well over a hundred by now.”

  Then the postmistress smiled sweetly and sadly—quite a transformation from the battleax demeanor we’d first sensed. “But, well, of course he never really died, did he? All those tales and legends and proverbs and folk prayers and charms and songs and airs told by the seanachai. Thousands of them he collected. We called him ‘the master’—some of us were children when we first helped him collect all these things…It’s good you’re going to the Eigse. You’ll be learning a lot, I’m thinking…slán leat and Bail ó Dhia ort.”