John Crowley was seduced by the village of Eyeries on a day-trip he took
with his family to the Beara Peninsula in Breathtaking West Cork.
It’s coming up to two years since five Crowleys of various ages and sizes
squeezed themselves into a battered, hired Peugeot.
Our destination was the village of Eyeries on the Beara Peninsula, the
home of an in-law, where buttered scones and lashings of Barrys tea awaited
us.
Our two-hour journey would take us through the spine of west Cork. It’s
known (only to myself, mind) as The People’s Republic Of west Cork. There
are several salient reasons for this. The only hold-up a driver is likely
to come across is at a road bowling score. The people are friendly, funny,
free-spirited and ever-so-slightly eccentric. The vistas are stunning. And
there’s some that whisper with a chuckle that you can hear the air crackle
with magic when you put your ears to the breeze.
The family clan set off in a relaxed mood. I was on holiday. We didn’t
have to be back any time soon. This was to be a leisurely, awe-inspiring
drive. We were leaving west Cork for Beara and running on Cork time, boy.
It was just as we were leaving Castletownbere that the car first stalled.
To call the road we were on a hill would do a disservice to a grassy knoll.
“I’ve had problems here before,” chimed my aunt in sympathy as we sat immobile
at a 30-degree angle. Her soothing words did little to comfort me when I
looked around (and down) to see a car behind, its driver impatiently tapping
an index finger on the steering wheel. I recoiled in horror. Had I brought
about the first-ever incident of road rage to these parts?
Thirty seconds later I was bathed in sweat and neither the car nor I
had moved. “Just relax,” said my remarkably placid 14-year-old cousin in
a hypnotic voice. “Just feel the clutch.” Suddenly, the car sprang to life
and we were off. Half an hour later we were there.
The village of Eyeries sits on the north side of the Ring of Beara, probably
one of the most barren and beautiful parts of Ireland, let alone Cork. The
peninsula — a patchwork quilt of wedge tombs, stone circles and rough -hewn
mountains — stretches for a distance of 30 miles from Glengarriff to Dursey
Island and takes in parts of both Cork and Kerry.
The first thing that strikes you about Eyeries is that it would make
a great location for a Tourism Ireland commercial. I later discover that
the tourism bods from up the country have already been here, bought the
T-shirt — and shot the resultant film.
So have their counterparts at RTÉ and BBC Northern Ireland, who used
the ridiculously picturesque hamlet as the scenic backdrop for their adaptation
of Deirdre Purcell’s novel Falling For A Dancer, set in 1930s Cork. During
the filming in 1997, aerials were temporarily taken down and each house
was given a new lick of paint. Today, you can can tot up the colours of
the rainbow along the pretty timber shopfront facades on the main street.
By mid-afternoon and feeling like fattened calves we decided to have
a nose around the town. Our first port of call was the Anam Cara Writers’
and Artists’ Retreat, a year-round haven for creative folk perched on a
promontory overlooking Coulagh Bay. Its inhabitants cannot fail to be inspired.
From there we strolled to St. Kentigern’s Church, the scene of my uncle
and aunt’s wedding. The place was familiar because it had been captured
on a grainy, home video. It felt odd standing in the same spot where my
youthful dad had gurned at the camera. The church looked spotless as ever,
and yes, there was still a pub less than 10 drunken steps away from the
porch.
As best man to his brother, dad had been sternly warned not to touch
a drop before the bride arrived. And even though the pair had changed into
their wedding outfits in a room above the pub, they swear to this day that
they were sober as judges when my aunt walked up the aisle.
It would have been sacrilegious not to enter the church (and the watering
hole as well, now called Harringtons). A huge window that stretches from
the ceiling to the floor at the back end of the pub offers stunning views
of the bay. The scenes seemed to fire my dad’s imagination as he launched
into a series of anecdotes about the wedding nuptials 20 years before. One
included how scores of well-inebriated folk had piled themselves into cars
as night fell for the return leg of the journey we would make an hour later.
But before we took our leave, there was still time to pay our respects
at the town cemetery. Only the Atlantic stopped us from being encircled
by the granite-like Caha mountains in the distance. Resting in the graveyard
were some of the local fishermen whose bodies had been claimed by the sea
years before.
The scene called to mind a sentence once uttered to me many years ago:
that the Irish always bury their kith and kin in beautiful spots. I couldn’t
have agreed more.
For more information on the Beara Peninsula, phone West Cork Tourism
on 00353 28 22812.
