We knew Glendalough was going be a popular spot, the fact was obvious from Google maps which revealed, if viewed from above, the ancient monastic site's most striking feature appeared to be the number of car parks that surrounded it. Armed with this knowledge why then did we decide to visit it on a Saturday?
The place was heaving, not just with locals, we overheard animated conversations in French, German, Polish and noted an Italian motorhome drive in a few minutes after we arrived. We saw one other British vehicle. Of course I was bound to come-up with a couple of theories to explain this, declaring that it was a mixture of the effects of Brexit and the place's innate attraction as a place of pilgrimage for Roman Catholics. Equally, of course it may have been simply co-incidence.
Glendalough 's setting is lovely, a narrow wooded valley with two small lakes overlooked by mountains. It reminded me of one of Cumbria's smaller lakes, like Grasmere or Rydal Water, not just in appearance, but also the plethora of B&Bs, cafés and arty crafty gift shops lining the narrow access road. What makes it unique is the place's association with the development of Christianity in the British Isles during the sixth century.
No contemporary records exist concerning St. Kevin, only legends recorded in 'histories' written hundreds of years later. These recount that Kevin lived as a hermit in a cave in Glendalough for some years before his followers established a monastery there around 540. Like St. Francis many of the legends surrounding St Kevin concern animal and bird related miracles. The ruined monastic buildings on the site are much later, dating from the 10th - 12th century. They are ruined and quite primitive. The most impressive is the tall, free-standing round tower, originally doubling-up as campanile and look-out post. These are a bit of an Irish thing apparently.
For people of faith I can see why the Glendalough ruins are significant; for those of us happy in our doubt then the walking trails around the lake and hills offer a pleasing secular alternative. However no matter what your point of view, ancient sacred places often exude a kind of palpable quietude, but not today; if the sheer weight of visitor numbers was not enough to put paid to any sense spirituality, then Kevin's Cones ice cream stall definitely asserted the allure of the delicious rather than the divine.
The thin penetrating drizzle was hardly uplifting either. As we walked towards the larger upper lake it began to rain more heavily. We are definitely fine weather hikers these days, so we headed back to the van and had lunch.
This too promised more than it delivered. The delicatessen in Roundwood sold appetising looking pastries. We had stopped off earlier and bought a sausage roll and a spinach pie. Sadly they looked better than they tasted, Instagrammable rather than tasty; it's a peculiarly 21st century malaise.
We headed off towards Arklow, a coastal town to the south of the Wicklow mountains. Getting there involved engaging with all but one of the challenges the roads of Ireland pose for unsuspecting foreign motorhome drivers. Firstly, back along the R755 towards Roundwood. Think one of the smaller 'A' roads in Cornwall or Devon, a bit narrow, no verge, lots of dry-stone walls, quite bendy, in other words do-able, but occasionally hair-raising. Next we took R763 to Ashford, though similarly classified it was even narrower, bendier and more pot-holed, a bit of a squeeze if two medium sized vehicles met. The entire stretch had a 50kph speed limit which most locals respected. These are not easy roads. For example the route descended quickly from the Wicklow mountains to the coastal plain - an unrelenting 10% gradient with hairpin bends which snaked down a ravine with a narrow single lane packhorse bridge at the bottom. It was all somewhat nerve-wracking, I was relieved to reach the motorway.
The roads that we studiously avoid are were those with the prefix 'L' - denoting local rural routes I presume. They connect smaller settlements, they are single track and look like a complete nightmare.
We had two sensible reasons to go to Arklow, but for me at least another more fanciful one. The sensible ones were, firstly, the town has a Lidl with a height barrier free car park. Secondly, there's a well regarded and relatively inexpensive motorhome aire at Moneylands Farm just south of the town. It was in a pretty location and even better featured token free, untimed showers with water that actually notched past the luke warm towards hot. Deep joy all round!
My fanciful reason for being here is all about Van Morrison's song 'The Streets of Arklow' which featured on his 1974 album ' Veedon Fleece'. Regrettably dear old Van has proved to be a complete idiot over the last couple of years with his anti-vaxxer stance and ridiculous libertarian rants. In truth his lyrics have always been somewhat gnomic and impenetrable, deeply 'into the mystic'. However, you cannot deny the magnificence of his voice and the cool, improvised fusion of jazz and 'Celtic soul' that characterised the string of albums from Astral Weeks to Wavelength.
In this stellar run Veedon Fleece gets somewhat overlooked, but it is a great album and very special to us. Just after we got married we hired a banana yellow Citroen 2Cv6 and spent a week touring the west of England through the Malverns, Cotswolds and Chilterns. At the time, since we both hailed from the Northeast, 'the south' was unfamiliar territory; it seemed quite exotic!
Our 'deux chevaux' was very basic, lacking anything as luxurious as a radio, so we took a small portable Panasonic radio cassette with us and a handful of out favourite tapes. We played Veedon Fleece a lot. I am not a particularly sentimental person, but I do have a soft spot for the album, and if I was going to be shopping in Arklow LidI, I felt impelled to take a sentimental stroll through its streets.
The song is poetic and very romantic, full of lines like:
And as we walked
Through the streets of Arklow
And gay profusion
In God's green land
And the gypsies rode
With their hearts on fire
They say "we love to wander"
"Lord, we love"
"Lord, we love to roam..."
Having now spent an hour or so wandering Arklow's streets, it makes me wonder what substance Van was on at the time? I realise that compared to the mid-seventies, as in many country towns, Arklow's centre has declined economically. Most people will get their basics in Lidl or the big Tesco's on the outskirts. Unsurprisingly this has turned the town centre into a dead zone with lots of unoccupied shops.
The business remaining seemed to be a mixture of pubs, takeaways, betting shops, nail bars, estate agents and loads of tattoo parlours. The odd thing is, compared to similar places in England, people wandering about appeared to display less body art, not more. Maybe it is the inclement weather, so cold that people have to cover up, so their spectacular body art remains secreted beneath long quilted coats, balaclavas and woolly scarves pulled up to their noses.
Adding to the general air of dilapidation the main street was traffic choked. In their determination to make progress drivers were studiously ignoring the pedestrian crossing. I wanted to take a picture of the river, in the end I just stepped out into the stream of slow moving traffic and dashed across.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century Arklow developed from being a small fishing port on the estuary of the river Avoca into a small industrial town specialising in hemp and rope production, fertiliser and chemicals. These industries have gone now. I wondered if an attempt had been made to gentrify the river frontage with stylish apartments and restaurants, which often happens in declining seaside places. However, the old port area looked just as dilapidated as the main street.
Over the river on the north shore there looked to be more recent development. According to Google maps the signature post-modern complex over the water housed a maritime museum, a multi-plex cinema and a shopping centre containing the usual retail suspects - T K Max, New Look, Argos and Superdrug. Beyond there, by the the harbour mouth, there is a cluster of new apartment blocks. The 'Marina Village' development is styled to look vaguely art deco. This may be an admirable attempt at re-generation, and the museum will help to attract tourists into Arklow, however the adjacent shopping centre and leisure facilities will result in taking even more trade from the town centre.
Nothing illustrates this better than the crumbling art deco facade of the old cinema on the high street, now roofless and wrecked, another empty lot. Why could it not have been refurbished and a multi-plex developed there?
When first we walked down into town from Lidl we passed one new development in the town centre, a big space in front of the town hall with a statue in the middle of it had been cleared, leaving piles of rubble and soil dotted about.
The space was fenced off, Arklow council were clearly planning some kind of new public space but making slow progress - weeds sprouted from the piles of grit scattered around the site.
As we headed back to the van we skirted these public works once again. This time we got the full run down regarding the identity of the man on the pedestal from a local. The encounter also provided our impromptu introduction to the questionable delights of 'the craic' . A tall elderly man hailed us from the other side of the barriers, "Why are there no notices?" he demanded. "Don't they know old people haven't the legs to wander about, I'm nearly eighty and the knees are terrible now."
Somehow he had ended up inside the building site rather than on the pedestrian walkway beside it. He didn't seem unduly troubled by his predicament, and immediately regaled us with words of wisdom on a variety of subjects. This continued in the style of 'Just a Minute' for the next quarter of an hour, without repetition or hesitation but with much deviation. His 'chosen topic' began with a garbled account of the battle of Arklow, where allegedly a band of doughty Irishmen led by a renegade priest by the name of Michael Murphy (man commemorated on the nearby plinth) attacked and almost defeated a garrison of British soldiers based in the barracks that stood on the hill just over there (he waved hand vaguely towards the town hall)
Our new acquaintance interspersed these intriguing snippets of local history with other seemingly disconnected matters. Such as despite the predictions of malevolent and very violent school masters that he was destined "to push a wheelbarrow forever" he had worked his way up to the position of a senior engineer, responsible for the installation of turbines in power stations. These intimations were interwoven with other anecdotes about how he had worked all over the world, that many of the people who worked for him had been Englishmen, including Tim from Scunthorpe who sometimes still phoned him. We learned that he only retired when he was 73, that the foreman in the place in Donegal where worked during the troubles was a spy for the British and "no matter what they say on television today the barricades were all peaceful until the British army started shooting people dead".
We nodded weakly, slowly edging away. In an attempt to steer the conversation onto less contentious matters I enquired if he knew the date of the battle of Arklow. This seemed to flummox our new acquaintance momentarily, after a brief pause he asserted, "That would be around 1890 to be sure." At this point we managed to extricate ourselves. Glancing back, he had reverted to prowling the perimeter of the building site searching for the gap in the fencing that he had inadvertently wandered through. He may still be there.
My knowledge of the history of the latter part of the nineteenth century is somewhat hazy, after all it's over 50 years since I covered it in 'O' level history. Still, I was sure that the battle of Arklow could not have been in 1890. Whatever the political machination surrounding 'the Irish question' l was convinced that outright warfare did not break out until at least quarter of a century later. I hate unresolved questions, it was going to have to be Google to the rescue.
Two simple searches later and things became much clearer. Firstly 'statue in
Arklow' brought up this from 'The Inventory of Irish monuments'
Statue by G. Smyth of Dublin, erected in 1898 to commemorate the centenary of the death of United Irishman Fr Michael Murphy in the 1798 Rebellion.
'Visit Arklow' fleshed out the bare facts:
A Wexford man, Fr Michael Murphy was an important leader in the Irish Rebellion and figured in the Battle of Arklow between the King's troops under General Needham, and the Irish insurgents on June 9, 1798. He was killed within 30 yards of enemy lines. After his death, his head was severed and placed by the King's troops on a spike on the garrison gates in Arklow as a warning to others.
The memorial epigraphs are in three languages - Gaelic, English and French, the latter reflecting the support that revolutionary France gave to the United Irishmen during the Rebellion of 1798.
I had no idea that their had been a republican rebellion in Ireland in the late eighteenth century and really I should have done, as the Jacobite uprisings and the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were areas covered in the A level History syllabus I studied. Why those but not the Irish Rebellion of 1798? The answer is simple I think, back then political history was taught from a largely anglo-centric point of view where discussion of 'matters of state' were dominated by the interests of the Crown and machinations in Westminster. To some extent it still is, or the toppling of the Colston statue would not have been seized upon by the Daily Fail as an opportunity to pursue their war on woke.
So my visit to Arklow began with a sentimental journey inspired by a song by Van Morrison and concluded with an impromptu talk on the origins of Irish republicanism. The joy of travel lies in its unpredictability, well mostly, intriguing twists not nasty surprises is what we want.
No comments:
Post a Comment