A Jaunt Around the Lakes: Killarney Blarney
Giant Leprechaun busking for a pot - or a hat? - of gold!
When the tourist tide washes into Ireland’s tourist capital, the whole town scrambles for the jetsam. merchants chanting Cead Mille Failtes—a Hundred Thousand Welcomes—tout their plastic leprechauns and tee-shirts beaming “I Have Irish Roots!”
If you know nothing of Ireland—how to drive there, muttering Hail Mary’s with your elbow on the wheel and your hands fumbling a Saint Anthony medal and rosary beads; how to drink there, in stupendous marathon rounds; how to chat there, filibustering gossip, boasting and harmless lies—you end up on a pre-packaged bus tour bound for Killarney.
Oh you should see it! When the tourist tide washes into Ireland’s tourist capital, the whole town scrambles for the jetsam. Jaunting car jarveys quit the pubs, shave their faces, rouse their horses. Lakes of Killarney boatmen dredge up leprechaun tales. And merchants chanting Cead Mille Failtes—a Hundred Thousand Welcomes—tout their plastic leprechauns and tee-shirts beaming “I Have Irish Roots!”
Hustle, bustle, charm, inveigle, for the flood of tourists will ebb in a few hours, rolling away to the Blarney Stone and Bunratty Castle and back to the shores of Amerikay.
“After publishing my story on Inishbofin, GEO Magazine commissioned another story on Irish traditional Irish music scene, and also assigned me to write a story on believe-it-or-not Irish fairies! It was a daft idea for an assignment, but it was that kind of magazing, a real writer’s magazine, a travel-in-the-mind mag. They paid me $3,000 for each story, plus another $3,000 for expenses.
Going to Ireland on an expense account to look for Irish fairies—are you kidding? And what if I didn’t find them? I headed to Kerry, because that’s where the belief in fairies was said to be strongest. I met a man named Donal, who claimed to be the reincarnation of Columcille. Who knows who he really was, but I was fascinated by the old secrets he claimed to know. This self-styled Druid took me to sacred sites and fairy paths, on earth ley lines and showed sacred hidden wells where wounded cattle and other animals would go to heal themselves.
For this assignment I based myself in Killarney, the ridiculous tourist capital of Ireland. While there was the shamrock facade of cheap Chinese-made green souvenirs, there was, I believe, an authentic remnant of the Old Wisdom, hidden in the landscape, in the poetry, in the movements of the animals.
I lived for six weeks in a modest hotel on the High Street and hung out in Jimmy O’Brien’s Pub to gather stories. There I met a mysterious person, who offered to take me out to show me some fairy spots. He took me to see where old graveyards, nearly hidden in the high-grown hay and tall grass, that were open, had been wind-blown, rained into and had their skeletons exposed. Got me to peek inside and see the brown rotting skeletons. Then he told me how he knew them so intimately.
He was an active, gun-toting member of the IRA, wanted for killing or bombing probably, and he was hiding out from the police. He fairly lived in these old graves, apparently a place where the police would never look. He was tall, tall and skinny, lanky, balding. And I wondered how he made peace with all those skeletons down there. He knew I was a writer, yet seemed not to fear that I might give him away. The Irish love to tell stories, God bless ‘em. They can’t help themselves.
In the course of my “research” I did hear and record some spooky ghost stories. Fairies were harder to find, but a week before Midsummer’s Day I got on my borrowed bicycle and went to check out a stone circle I saw listed on the Ordinance Survey local map. Then I put a plan in place, decided to spend Midsummer’s night camping inside a stone circle, and that was where and how I had my real, own personal encounter with the Irish supernatural. Not something I suggest anyone ever go looking for!
”
“County Kerry. I was in visiting Ireland’s tacky tourist capital, on a high-end travel assignment to write about Irish fairies for GEO Magazine (a daft idea in the first place). The Irish landscape had its own travel value surely, with or without fairies. But since I was getting paid handsomely in 1982 - $3,000 in expenses and $3,000 for the finished 3,000-word article - more than most book advances today, I was determined to experience the fairies. I camped out in a Bronze Age stone circle on Midsummer’s Eve, when the energies of the earth’s lay lines are at a peak, and the fairies are most active. I was mentally shaken for two weeks after and would not recommend the experience to anyone. So I explored more typical tourist destinations, like the Killarney National Park, and the old Muckross Abbey, built in 1448. Oliver Cromwell’s army plundered the Abbey in 1652 leaving it a haunted creepy wreck. But its graveyard was an inspirational place if you were a Gothic horror writer. Bram Stoker got his Dracula story from his nocturnal walks around the tombs of the old Munster poets, whose skeletal mouths were said to be filled with the roots of the magical ancient Yew tree still growing there.
”
A stage-Irish movie?
I didn’t come to Killarney in a package. I came to see if it really was, like the Kerry joke says, a stage-Irish movie set that smells like a stable. The town does have this rich fecund aroma, a mélange of smoking turf, horse dung, and spilt Guinness, and its doo-dad shamrock shops are an embarrassment to the Irish race, and its pubs are jammed with sentimental Yanks crooning “Danny Boy.”
But the town of Killarney is only a stage-Irish façade for deeper things in the Irish psyche and a cheery Celtic camouflage for the transcendental wonders in the countryside beyond, where a bosky light descends into ancient yew forests, and ghostly tangles of vegetation hide silent ruined farms.
Ask a Kerryman if he believes in fairies
Every traveller to Ireland loves to hear fairy stories, and Irish people love to tell them. But ask a Kerryman if he believes in fairies and you'll hear shouts and protests of “God, no!”—and then the solemn aside “…but they're there.”
In the dense woods around Killarney's lakes, you expect strange things. Here the balmy wet has sprouted a shadowy Druid fantasia of stumps, moss, vines, bracken; trees towering, tangling, gnarled. Rivers of maidenhair ferns flow between moss-covered thrones, and giant lichenous stones hatch furry green beasts of trees.
A grey oak hag with withered limbs reproaches a willow sipping daintily from the lake. A holly bends in an arabesque toward an owl-faced oak split by lightning, wearing ears of fungus and a belly full of birds.
You can tramp for hours, lost in the fantastic green zoo, and see no one. But sooner or later you feel presences that hint at Irish superstition. It drones under the garrulity of the Kerry people like a dark note under a hearty jig. For lush, mountainy Munster, merrily sacred and profane, is the Irish province of the supernatural.
Indeed, the very breasts of the pagan Irish mother goddess, Anann, rise over the countryside east of Killarney, at Rathmore. These twin mounds over 2,200 feet high are odd even in a land of odd geology, and shapely even by Playboy's standards. A few years ago two lads climbed “the Paps” and toppled the ten-foot high stone cairns that for millennia had served as Anann's nipples. Locals said bad luck haunted the vandals for weeks, until they climbed back up and rebuilt the cairns.
Renowned seers and necromancers
Four thousand years ago, beneath the enchanted slopes of the Paps, the mythical race of the Tuatha de Danann, people of the goddess Anann, built Cathair Crob Dearg, their "City of the Red Claw." The DeDananns, renowned seers and necromancers throughout the Sumerian, Mycenaen and Egyptian worlds, raised magical mists with their chants, and changed their shapes at will.
They settled at Rathmore in 1981 BC. It's said that they were never conquered by the Milesians who came 200 years after them, but that they melted underground, into the raths—the prehistoric hill forts—to become Irish fairies—the “good people,” the Sidhe.
In those mystical ages, all Ireland was a forest, and an Irish squirrel could hop from Kerry to Derry without even touching the ground. But Ireland was stripped of its great stands of oak and yew, hazel, wych elm and alder when trees were felled to smelt pig iron for England, to build ships for the Royal Navy, to tan hides for new English saddles, and to clear land for farms.
A balding Irishman says of his head, "Sure the waves are gone, but the beach is still there," hoping you'll admire the beach. You admire the forest remaining in Killarney's 19,955-acre National Park because it's grand compared to the treeless terrain around it. But the Earls of Kenmare preserved the Killarney forest as a playground for their royal sport—the hunt. The trophy heads of the native red deer hang in the stately rooms of Muckross House. A scattered few of their descendants roam the Derricunnihy and Tomies Woods, where the battered cottages of evicted farmers lie in ruins.
A tramp through an ancient oak forest
The Derricunnihy oak woods, perhaps the finest in western Europe, have stood for over 4,000 years. To tramp them you need good Wellington boots, a walking stick, and some bug stuff. Paddy MacMonagle, who runs the Killarney Printing Works when he's not poking under rotten logs or meeting up with badgers, lectured me on choosing Wellington boots—“make sure they're properly sprung, with spongy soles, thick cleats, and mudguards to protect the bunions!"—on finding oak branches for walking sticks, and on meeting up with creatures.
"You can scuffle and snort, sniffle and poke with your stick—these are natural sounds. But the moment you open your mouth—they're gone!"
With Paddy's scrawled map and blessing, I take off on the track behind the old Derricunnihy Church to look for the wooden bridge, old sheep pen, mushy spot, path through the rushes, and the old Kenmare Road.
A pook of a day just sits on top of you, Paddy says, and a glaub of a day is a mess. But this day is cloudless. The brittle light fires the sessile oaks into a brassy blaze, and the veils of old moss hang on them like yellowed Cambric lace. The mountain road to Kenmare has grown back to nature. The wheel tracks of the Derricunnihy crofters who rumbled over it a century ago are sprouted with tussocks. The lazy beds where their potatoes once grew are green ripples on the hills. Stubborn tenants weren't always driven out with the battering ram, they say around here. Some landlords had a tidier means of eviction: they sent a bagpiper out around the cottages at night to play one long wailing note. If that didn't put the fear of the banshee in the tenants, a melodeon player with a screechy wheeze box was certain to do the job.
Yanks are easy to spot around Killarney in their new Aran fisherman sweaters and leprechaun golf caps. I’m not wearing any of these, but Pat O'Callaghan guesses that I’m a Yank anyway, by what I buy at his fruit and vegetable stand. “Bananas. Yanks always buys bananas,” he announces when I buy a banana, and he grins as if concealing a deeper insight.
O’Sullivan’s Cascade
The next evening, I am on Loch Leane in Pat's rowboat with his son, his brother and his hairy sheepdog, on the way to see O’Sullivan’s Cascade. Loch Leane has many moods, Pat warns, and sudden squalls keep sailboats off the Killarney lakes. But it is purple satin as we row along in the fading light, passing tiny lumps of islands named Mouse, Rabbit, Lamb and Cow, and odd-shaped rocks said to be enchanted.
We row past Library Point, where some god or another hurled stones like encyclopedic tomes in a rude stack on the shore. As the Killarney boatmen like to tell, the stones are the enchanted books that flew after the great Irish Chieftain O'Donoghue Mór when he leaped out of Ross Castle to escape Cromwell's men. One day soon, the last castle in all of Ireland to fall to Cromwell will be another tourist restaurant.
O'Sullivan's Cascade is startling, godly. A green cathedral pouring silver from its heights, thundering hymns on the rocks. A misty sanctuary of oak and arbutus, lush with the incense of decay. We sit on big rocks, faces to the spray, for a long quiet while. Then after a hike in Tomies Woods we row on to Glena, a gloomy spot fit for ghosts. Pat reckons they do be around. Hidden under a tangle of vines are the ruins of Glena Cottage, built by the Herberts of Muckross House for the visit of Queen Victoria.
The Visitor's Cottage slumbers deep in a cocoon of rhododendrons, and beside it are the remains of a once grand ballroom. In Pat's grandparents’ day, people rowed over from Ross Castle to click their heels on its famous timbered floor. Now broken mossy stones ascend to rotted timber blown with holly leaves, and a nettle-wild graveyard lies beyond.
Escape from the jarvees!
To escape from the taunts of the jarveys—"A jaunt around the lakes?—'tis too far to walk!"—you need a bicycle, or your own horse. One misty morning I cycle away from the line-up of their horse-drawn jaunting cars along Killarney’s main street, and into the Muckross Demesne. I wander into the melancholy peace of Muckross Abbey to see the graves of the hallowed Munster poets, and the fabled yew tree growing inside. It is over 600 years old, and the largest in the world. "If you touch it, it bleeds," swears a wrinkled jarvey. I want to touch it just to see, but its trunk is caged inside a spiked iron fence, and from no point on any gloomy parapet is it possible to touch any of its branches or leaves.
The Abbey has a peculiar live presence. In Jimmy O’Brien’s Pub they tell stories—about how this one's car broke down at the Abbey's graveyard one night, and how that one heard bones scraping together…“well of course…they might have been deer antlers”. But in the pub, Life is a ee-jit, everyone tells tales, and it signifies nothing. One sodden afternoon a big man with hawk-winged eyebrows turns on his bar stool and asks me if I’ve ever heard of Jackie the Scratch. He looks me dead in the eye, and a hush falls over the circle of drinkers.
Fairy tales
“Jackie the Scratch, the King of the Fairies, was last sighted in 1951 wearing a green waistcoat and cravat, gold buckled boots and a conical hat…"
"That's right," chimes in another.
“…and if you hear a scratch like this in the night,” says he scraping his nicotined fingernail against a Cara matchbox, “that's Jackie calling the fairies to a big meeting.”
Pints are laid on and the bar burlesque begins. Enter and exeunt leprechauns and banshees and foidini meara—stray sods of turf that make you lose your way when you step on them; three-legged horses and blue hounds in silver chains and things that leave cobwebs on pillows and shriek in the night. Pints and actors come and go. I am regaled with details, down to the scores of various fairy hurling matches and the sound of the rustle of the silver gossamer robes of the banshee, and I am told I will die a mermaid. They swear by all the goats in Kerry it’s the truth.
Down in Kerry they joke about fairies, but rare is the Kerry farmer who will disturb a primitive earthwork—fort, lios or rath—or a tree growing there. Neither will he build a house on a fairy path or in any other “sheoguey place.” Bad luck comes to those who dare it, they say. Sure wasn’t a planned airstrip at Shannon Airport re-routed when they discovered it lay on a fairy path?
Fairy circles
At Lissyvigeen two miles east of Killarney a bronze age stone circle is marked on the Irish Ordinance Survey map. One morning I cycle up and down the Cork Road, off side roads and into mucky booreens for hours looking for it. I nearly give up the chase when something draws me to an old farmhouse to ask directions.
“Ah, begob!” the farmer brays. “If ‘tis fairy circles yer after, the Irish Tourist Board won’t allow you to write about them. T’would keep the tourists from Killarney.” The farmer is leering at me from out of a sunken stubbly face. Greasy tatters of ripe old sweaters hang on his bones and dangle from his arms in shreds. The cowl-neck collar of one has rotted away from the sweater itself and circles his neck like a grotesque parody of a Celtic warrior’s gold torc.
"But if ye just want a look at the stone circle,’ he says “'tis over there beyant, in the circle of oak trees. What it was built for I wouldn't say. Maybe a spot for the Druids to do their dancing or maybe some actual people turned to stone. Sure those stones must be enchanted, for a man came all the way from the City of Rome just to look at them. "T'was, as he said, that he saw the stone circle all the ways from the top of some church there, in a vision. But I don't go around that place meself."
"Why not?" I challenged. "Ah…yer as well off not knowing. Good day now!"
I expect to find a circle of standing stones smothered by briars, or ignobled beside new corporation houses. But a venture through a rusty gate and muddy field, and across a windy gap brings me to two tall sentinel stones inscribed with ancient Ogham script. They guard a path down into a dark glade, where, in a peaceful nest of seven oaks, a circle of seven stones glow like opals in the tarnishing light.
That night nobody in O'Brien's pub knows much about the stone circle of "Seven Sisters" but that they are old, yes, very, and could lay on a fairy path. But when I describe meeting up with the wild-looking farmer in rags, a local fixture on a stool spouts up: “Sure, I know that farmer well. He's a millionaire. A genius. Owns hundreds of acres of valuable forests, plays the stock market, he does, and races horses. Though he never goes to the races. Never goes out at all, since the wife died 25 years ago. Plays the organ day and night, and the bagpipes, and any other instrument you can name. Sure, he's the Boris Karloff of Irish music.”
Fake Medieval Banquets in Cardboard Castles
The only paean to Midsummer's Eve going in Killarney is a fake medieval banquet in a cardboard castle erected in a conference room of the Three Lakes Hotel, hosted by a chattering representative of the Knights of Inishfallen. I decide to take my tent and pack off to the stone circle. But not without a thermos of strong tea, and Irish superstition be damned, two red haired women. My red-haired friends, who’ve spent the last weeks destroying themselves in music and dancing pubs around Sliabh Luachra, are Jan Callaghan, a genealogist from Lethbridge, Alberta, and Jane Kelton, a Ph.D. candidate in Semiotics at New York University, who divides her time between the East Village and one Irish bog or another.
We pitch my orange domed tent inside the stone circle, joking about how it looks a fairy-sized haycock. Jan decides to inspect the crystal-flecked stones for white blotches of “fairy blood” and the trunks of the oaks for “access holes.” Her father always told her that the holes were made by the beings who live in the earth, nourishing themselves with the blood of slaughtered heroes. They are big holes, and for one night you might believe anything.
Jane is waiting for signs. And I am pouring tea. Then we are babbling…about ley lines as conduits of energy…fairies and elementals… magnetometers…stone circles as time-space warps…veins of Chi dragon energy racing through the earth… geomancy…crystals and altered states of consciousness…
A scary fairy night
Then purple twilight turns to starless black and a soughing wind circles the tops of the oaks. It circles, and stops, and we slither into the tent and fumble with sleeping bags and cough to hide our nerves. My attention rivets on the wind circling in mad spirals, and becomes wildly alert. The skin of the tent is an amplifier. Raindrops tap and splat out of time. Each drop taps to get in. The zipper scratches the flap. A singing current races through the earth, gluing me to the ground. Then I feel as if I’m being pulled out the top of my head…
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” cries Jane like an Irishwoman from the bogs. “Did you hear that?”
A piercing shriek jolts me back into my body. For endless hours after, we lay awake in electric silence, until the spiraling wind stops and the earth feels still again. By dawn, a streak of Jane’s hair has turned white. Jan’s sleeping bag is soaked with sweat, and I am primed for weeks of nightmares.
Our bones creak back into town for soothing cups of tea. The next day, curiosity lures me to pay another visit to “Karloff.”
“God almighty!” he says when I proclaim our deed. “That was a foolish chance to take. “Some German campers came screamin’ out of there one night. I didn’t want to frighten ye the other time we met. You, being a Yank, would be green to certain things. But don’t be fond of fairy forts or any thing like them, because God, they are bad… One evening, ‘tis a few years ago now, I went to fetch my pony for to take her to the creamery the next morning. The pony had wandered down to the stone circle, and I followed her in anyway. But then she just disappeared, and I couldn’t escape out of there till 5 o’clock in the morning!”
“Were you lost? ”
“Lost?!” he says agitatedly. “Begod no I wasn’t lost. A big wall 20 feet high was all around me, shining in me eyes and blinding me. And it covered the whole field—the whole field! I couldn’t find a gate, I couldn’t find nothing!”
“But there’s no wall there, only trees. Were you…drinking?”
“Begod I know that and sure I wasn’t drinking, you understand me?” he says with a strange stare. “I reckon t’was some kind of vision come over a man. Them stones should all be bulldozed, but no one will put a hand to it. No, no, no. No one will touch it…. But thanks be to God ye came out all right. Because ye could a had a—what ye call it—a ring of fairies dancing around you, tippin’ the tent and there’d be nothing there in the morning.
“And if they rattled you with their bloody fairy music, ye’d go dim and dreary for years. I am telling you, never make bold with fairy forts. Yer as well off going back to Amerikay not knowin’ any more. Ye had, I'd say, foolish courage. And I'm damn glad the thing came out all right for ye. Now good day!”
“Are you really a millionaire?”
“Sure we’re all millionaires. And why wouldn’t we be?”