A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (40 page)

The next day, Monday, was the day of the Fair at Spancil Hill which we had first heard about from Mr O’Hagerty while drinking at his establishment at the Crusheen crossroads in County Clare the previous December. As it turned out, it was extremely difficult to find out anything more. Although almost every Irish man, woman and child knows at least some words of the immortal song ‘Spancil Hill’ – The cock crew in the morning, he crew both loud and shrill / And I woke in California, many miles from Spancil Hill – far fewer have any idea of where Spancil Hill actually is; the most precise directions we heard were ‘somewhere up or down Limerick way, or thereabouts’. It doesn’t appear on the half-inch Ordnance Survey map of the appropriate area; that otherwise trustworthy compendium of fairs and cattle marts,
The Genuine Irish Old Moore’s Almanack, 1986
, has not a word about it, and all the other guides I had read were silent on the subject.

Eventually one of Bord Failte’s spies in County Clare came up with the information that it was held at a ‘crass’ somewhere between Ennis and Tulla, and that ‘if the parties concerned were still in Galway city they’d best get a move on as the fair had been going all night, and the latest news was that there had already been a bit of fighting, but not with sticks, so far’. We managed by a whisker to catch the Expressway Service to Ennis, 43 miles away. During this journey, while Wanda snoozed, recharging her batteries for whatever horrors lay ahead, I took the opportunity to bone up on The Divorce Question, as dealt with in a couple of reject newspapers I had found on board that had been used for packaging sandwiches. I soon got bogged down in the letter pages, most of whose correspondents were respectfully suggesting to their opponents that they should read the Gospel according to Mark, chapter 10, verse 10; while their opponents retaliated with Matthew 19, verse 9, in which Our Lord appeared to give a conflicting judgment on the subject to the wretched Pharisees. Various Irish ecclesiastics also used these columns to tell the laity that they should do what they had been told to do, and not to push their luck. All of which soon put me in a coma, too.

The bus deposited us at Ennis railway station which, like so many Irish railway stations and most Indian ones, was sited more for the convenience of the builders of railways than for the inhabitants of the towns the names of which they so misleadingly appropriated. And if you don’t believe me, try doing a four-minute mile from Ennis to Ennis station, or for that matter from Ballinasloe station to Ballinasloe
centre ville
. From here we telephoned for a taxi, which arrived like lightning, driven by a female who thought she knew everything, including the whereabouts of the Fair at Spancil Hill but, as became painfully clear, didn’t. When we found ourselves well on the way to Magh Adhair, the Inauguration place of the Kings of Thomond on the banks of the Hell River, a site we had ‘done’ back in December, I shouted ‘Whoa’ and asked her to reconsider her position vis-a-vis our proposed destination.

‘It’s not much of a thing at all, I’m told,’ she said airily, when she finally deposited us at a ‘crass’ which, if not the right one, was somewhere pretty near it, if the vans, horse boxes, lorries, cars, jeeps and trailers, all parked with fine abandon, were anything to go by. To which I would have replied if I had had my Irish curse book handy,
‘Ualach se’ chapall de chrè na h-ùir ort!’
or ‘Six horse-loads of graveyard clay on top of you!’, for being such a pain-in-the-neck. At the same time I handed her the £5 Irish she asked for, which seemed little enough considering the miles we’d travelled together, albeit many of them in the wrong direction. The only soul in sight to ask the way of was a middle-aged, horsey-looking individual with a pair of very bright brown eyes and a beaky nose, who was wearing the remains of what must once have been a gabardine raincoat with huge, padded shoulders which made him look a bit like an over-size, moulted bird of prey.

‘It’s way down from the other crass, way up there past Duggan’s place,’ he said, pointing with a switch he had just cut in a hedgerow.

This in answer to my absurd English, ‘I say, excuse me, could you possibly tell me the way to Spancil Hill, the Fair I mean,’ which, judging from the facial contortions he had to indulge in to stop himself literally falling about with mirth, must have sounded as extraordinary to him as his ‘crass, way up dere’ did to me. One of the few major pleasures of travelling is that of hearing what others do to one’s own native tongue, a pleasure equalled by the amusement they get from listening to your version of theirs.

We had a drink at Duggan’s, which was full of smoke, debris, and human beings in various stages of decay. I asked one of the barmen if it had been quiet, remembering to keep a low profile and not to call him ‘old fruit’ and he said, yes, it had been pretty quiet, on account of their having closed at 2 a.m. and only opened again when the customers could see their hands in front of their faces without the aid of lights.

Just up the road an official sign read ‘Cross of Spancil Hill’, and here the air began to be full of the sort of murmuring noises flocks of starlings make when talking to one another, in this case emanating from the punters at the fair.

There’s no hill at the Cross of Spancil Hill, just a farm building and nearby, according to the map, the remains of a castle invisible from the road. From it a lane leads off to a hamlet marked on the map as Fair Green, the principal ingredients of which consist of Brohan’s pub, an outbuilding or two and Kelly’s which, on this grand morning, was serving cooked breakfasts and, from 11.30 on, dinners as well. After this momentary flirtation with city lights it leads out into what the Germans, who, with Americans, still make up the largest number of visitors to Ireland, call the
Ewigkeit
– in this case the eternity of rural Ireland.

The actual scene of the action was the lane outside the pub, and a field on the other side of it edged with trees, and entered through newly whitewashed gateposts which acted as a navigational aid for those leaving the pub with a skinful. The ground around it was now a sea of glutinous mud. Beyond this more fields extended away gently upwards to something you might conceivably describe as a hill if you’d never seen a real one. It was a beautiful day. In a sky of indigo blue a warm wind was ushering towering masses of cumulus in across the Atlantic from the New World, as if it was moving day.

The lane itself was more or less choked with fish and chip vans, burger stalls, stalls at which quoits could be pitched and tossed, tables with roulette wheels ready to roll, tinkers finding-the-lady or playing heads-or-tails surrounded by little circles of men and boys, the players, all looking skywards when the coin went up as if expecting the Second Coming. And there were junk sellers, and little tinker boys with bleached hair, riding sixteen-hand hunters bareback up and down it, showing them off to the customers, and there was all sorts of music. And further down the lane, beyond Brohan’s and Kelly’s, there were some barrel-shaped tinkers’ carts, most of them now occupied by very self-conscious
Stonehengevolk
masquerading as tinkers, with their ladies ostentatiously suckling their offspring on the steps, some of whom looked big enough to be clamouring for second helpings of muesli. Any real tinkers living on this hard hat site would have been in sumptuous motorized caravans, their interiors ablaze with polished brass. Meanwhile, out in the field, there were any amount of stallions, geldings, mares and their foals, Connemara ponies, donkeys and mules, all waiting to change hands, either tethered, or hobbled, or being made to show their paces or display their teeth or their hocks. There were even a few goats. And there were any number of two-wheeled flat carts pulled by donkeys, and pony carts, all running around loaded with the fancy. And there were people selling tea, and sausages and saddlery, and other tack.

And there was every sort of horse-fancying man, woman and child for miles around, and further. If no mishaps had befallen them there would be Josie Kerrin from Ballyla, and Thomas Conroy and Thomas Ford from Tubber, and Paddy Lynch from Newmarket-on-Fergus, and all the Cashes, and Harold Lusk from up north, and Patrick O’Connor from Kanturk, and Michael O’Looney from Ennis, and Mick Moloney and Michael McKenna from Ogonneloe, and Mick Sheehan from Kilbane, and Michael Scanlan from Carranboy and John Ryan from Boher, and Frank Casey from Ennis and a power of others. And somewhere out there, though we never found him, must have been our old friend Mr O’Hagerty from Crusheen.

And the air was full of neighings and whinneyings and breakings of wind and the ghastly noises donkeys make when they think themselves unloved, and such remarks as:

‘Sure, and hasn’t he got a fine chest on him, like the Great Wall of China!’

‘Looks a bit narrow to me. Put a bit of weight on him and he’ll knock his legs about something terrible.’

‘He’s not narrow at all! Look at his great chest, will you! Like a barrel of porter!’

‘Looks a bit shallow to me. Shouldn’t wonder if he wasn’t short-winded.’ At the same time pinching the animal’s wind-pipe and when that failed to provoke a reaction, pinching it again – ‘See what I mean, short-winded.’

‘And what a nice eye he’s got!’

‘Looks like a pig’s eye to me.’

Occasionally, but you had to wait a long time to see it happen, like waiting for the cameras to roll on location, a sale would be made and the third party presiding over the deal would make sure buyer and seller both spat on their hands before the handshake that clinched it. Meanwhile, across the lane, in Brohan’s, which was a bit like a parish hall in urgent need of restoration, the clientele were ten and fifteen deep at the bar, all intent on ordering enough of the nourishment in one go to make it unnecessary to put in another requisition until evening. What Brohan’s did for customers for the other 363 days and nights of the year when there was no fair was unclear. They probably made enough to see them through to the following one. When it closed, at 4 a.m. on Tuesday morning, the Fair would be finally over.

Altogether it was a great day, more lively than ever, the experts said, with moderate prices ranging from £1700 for a chestnut likely to make a hunter, to £3000 in the heavy hunter class, and equivalents in the pony, donkey and mule departments. Hours later, back on our bus to Galway, we passed a solitary figure leading a horse he had bought, or failed to sell, a good seven miles from Spancil Hill.

‘Any questions?’ said Wanda, as one or other of us always does when confronted with a not very exciting water source. Now, thirty-five miles from Sligo, from where we had set off that morning, at the feet of the boulder-strewn Cuilcagh Mountains, on the border of the Republic with Ulster, we found ourselves in a muddy field, looking down into a hole in the ground surrounded by trees and bushes, into which water was bubbling up from somewhere below. To get to it we had had to break through a cordon of cattle, determined to defend to the last their right to foul it up.

What we were looking into here, 256 feet above sea level, and 224 miles from its mouth at Loop Head, was Shannon Pot, the source of the Shannon, which ends up by draining one-fifth of the entire area of Ireland.

The only guidebook I had with me was what was left of Murray’s
Guide
, 1912. Opening it at the appropriate page to read to Wanda, I immediately wished I hadn’t. ‘… The traditional source,’ wrote John Cooke, quoting a maddening but no doubt perfectly correct pedant named Hull,

‘is a tributary stream which takes its rise in a limestone cauldron (“the Shannon Pot”) from which the water rises in a copious fountain. The real source is, however, not at this spot, but at a little lough, situated about a mile from the Shannon Pot … The waters from the little lough flow in a subterranean channel till they issue forth at the so-called “Source of the Shannon”. Mr W. S. Wilkinson has proved by experiments the truth of this, having thrown hay or straw into the little lough, which on disappearing, has come up in the waters of the Shannon Pot.’

‘Do you mean to say,’ said Wanda, after digesting this information with much the same relish as one would a fishbone, ‘that after five and a half hours’ cycling here from Sligo and another half hour going up and down and round and round looking for it, this isn’t the source of the Shannon?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘not strictly speaking. That is, if Cooke, Hull and Wilkinson are anything to go by.’

‘In that case,’ she said, ‘Cooke, Hull, Wilkinson, and you, too, should bloddy well be shot.’

^*
The gear ratio (as a single figure) in inches is calculated by dividing the number of teeth on the chainwheel by the number of teeth on the rear sprocket and multiplying the result by the wheel diameter, in the case of most mountain bikes, 26”.

^*
Clints
are the blocks of limestone paving.
Grykes
are the open crevices in the clints.
Glacial erratics
are rounded blocks of limestone, some of them very large, deposited in the wake of an ice-cap.
Turloughs
are grassy hollows, sometimes created by the collapse of the roof of an underground cavern and often filled with water from below (
doline
being the smaller ones and
polje
the larger ones, the biggest of which is the Carran Depression in the eastern Burren).

^*
According to Bord Failte’s
Ireland Guide
, 1982, there are between 30,000 and 40,000 of these ringforts in Ireland North and South. No one can be sure who lived in most of them, or when: the hundred or more sites excavated in Ireland show evidence of occupation as early as the Bronze Age and as late as the Middle Ages, the most populous period being the early Christian one.