Boating in Eire Dolmens and Blarney, feeling of plunging Water, eXhilaration Adventure continue… July 25, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Africa, Air Tickets, Airlines, Asia, Cairo, Cars, China, Round The World, Sightseeing, Thailand, The Nile, Tokyo, Tour, Travel Gear, Travelling Bag, Trip, Victoria Falls , trackbackLooking nervously over his shoulder in case the priest should hear, he scratched his head and rolled his eyes, all the time muttering that terrible word. Then suddenly he clicked his fingers and spat the word out.
“Pagans! Dere’s an old Protestant graveyard, overgrown now, you understand, up dere, by de old crossroads, as used to be dere.”
I waited patiently while he told me forty different ways to get there. Then, thanking him, I beat a hasty retreat to the sacristy door and knocked.
The door was opened by a tall, bulky man in his late sixties. His stern, bloated red face overflowed the shining white barricade of his dog collar. Profuse amounts of grey and ginger hair sprouted from nose and ears. Above his eyes a thick, prickly hedgerow jutted at right-angles to the bone. He listened with a terrible look of disdain on his face.
Then he thundered:
“What in God’s name do ye wantta be looking at tings like that for?
I shifted uncomfortably and confessed that I was.
“A lapsed one, I suppose.” He sniffed, and oceans of hair swayed in his nose. Ignoring my mumbled apologies, he turned and conversed with a shadowy figure which had spread like a silent stain over the carpet as we talked.
The shadow appeared to have an extensive knowledge of dolmens and their whereabouts. It passed this information on in a terrible hushed whine that seemed to creep in and fill the head.
The priest relayed the directions, spitting out the words as if they were poison. I thanked him and his shadow, and hurried back to the car. The shadow’s information proved to be correct; fifteen minutes later, I found my dolmen.
It stood in the corner of a small field, larger and more impressive than any I’d yet seen. The great, grey stones seemed to be heaving themselves up out of the earth like pieces of ancient bone, to squat in the alien flesh of the present.
These majestic stones, flecked with orange and white lichen, are the last of thousands that once littered the prehistoric landscape. Most have long disappeared; many of those left have been pressed into service as gateposts on farms, or blacken slowly as lintels over fireplaces.
Late bluebells grew in profusion on the tumbled remains of the great mound. In a stream nearby, two stones from the cairn circles still stood upright. Over a hedge I could see a large stone sitting in the middle of the field, basking in the sun like a great toad.
I took some photographs; then, tired and happy, lay on the mound and watched some large, white clouds with grey bellies drift like giant manta rays through the swirling air. High above them, thin wispy cloud lay like plankton on the endless surface of the sky. The search had taken it out of me and I must have dozed off. I was woken by voices and saw two elderly ladies seated at a nearby bench, which had almost disappeared in the undergrowth. Feeling curious, I went over to say hello.
They were an odd couple; dressed in old-fashioned summer frocks, blue with white spots, their hair cut level with their chins, pudding- bowl style. Odd hairs straggled out of various warts, and the brown freckles of age gave them a strange resemblance to the stones.
“We’re sisters and spinsters,” they told me with a laugh; but, more importantly, members of The Waterford and District Friends of Ancient Monuments Society. This august body had been responsible for placing the bench we were now sitting on. It was there in order that people might have a picnic by a monument, on just such a day as this.
We talked of dolmens and stone circles. They shared their tea and sandwiches with me as the day slid away behind us. They laughed like a couple of schoolgirls, hands fluttering to their mouths like butterflies when I told them of my encounter with the priest.
“We’re Quakers, you know,” one told me, and, “Oh, we do find the antics of the natives so terribly funny!”
This statement, from two ladies as eccentric and charmingly Irish as anyone I’d met that day, just about summed up my own feelings. Towards evening I went in search of bed and breakfast; the mad rush to the west could wait.
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