Adventures With Harvey

There once was a lady from Limerick, who…

… hang on a minute, nothing actually rhymes with Limerick. Let’s try something different…

There once was a couple from Russell

Who, weary of work and the bustle

To Europe they ran

Bought Harvey the van

And visited many a castle

Of course, Limerick is actually a town in Ireland however no-one knows for sure how or why the famous 5-line humorous rhyme came to be named after the town. It’s a mystery. We passed through Limerick en-route between Galway and Killarney – and the town was shut. I kid you not, the whole of what seemed to be the main street was shuttered on a Wednesday afternoon. We still spent a lovely hour or so strolling around the town, across a bridge that looked to be at least a few hundred years old, past John's Castle, the church grounds and a fountain with a sculpture of some geese. Apparently there’s some story about the geese but for once the detail seems to have eluded your faithful correspondent. :-/

As we sit here on another car ferry, this time between Dublin and Liverpool reflecting on the last couple of weeks, we feel a tremendous warmth towards Ireland and its people. They have, without exception, been warm, welcoming, friendly, have the most delightful accents, and are generally great craic. Moreso than any other country (and for reasons we can’t entirely explain), we really wanted to meet locals, hear their stories and learn from them so with this in mind we decided that, wherever possible, we would spend evenings at the pub in whatever town we found ourselves in. Probably one oughtn’t make this a habit in one’s life generally, however we felt that Ireland was the one place this would be appropriate… and we haven’t been disappointed! The most interesting people have come across our paths, our 2 weeks here have really flown by and it’s with a degree of sadness that we leave the Emerald Isles today.

Last edition your editor-in-chief was a little critical of your author’s poor chronology.

“You can’t jump all around the place like that” she scolded.

“But it’s all about the stories, no-one cares about the order” I protested…

Anyway, to avoid further admonishment, allow me to start from the beginning this time (with apologies for the Limerick story that was almost the start 😊).

Shortly after leaving Derry we passed into the Republic of Ireland. You wouldn’t notice the difference except that the road signs became bi-lingual, the speed limit signs (and of course our faithful google maps gps) changed to km/h and the price boards outside the gas stations were in euros. The roads would remind you very much of New Zealand, not many dual carriageways, mainly one lane each way through rolling, green countryside. There are loads of fat, healthy looking sheep and few of any other animals however, as reported in the previous edition, we suspect that all the dairy and beef cattle are away in their sheds for the winter already. The main difference from a typical NZ vista was the fences – here they are made pretty much exclusively from either stone or hedgerows. In some areas, there are stone fences as far at the eye can see and you suspect they have been there since before the turn of the century before last. In fact, if you use your imagination, you may perhaps visualise a tenant farmer tending his field of potatoes 200 years ago. Oh yes, potatoes… do I have a few things to tell you about potatoes!!

Many of you will have heard about the Irish potato famine, but do you know when, why or how it occurred and what transpired as a result? Let me start by telling you what the life of a tenant potato farmer in the mid 19th century looked like. Firstly you probably had a very small holding, it was possible to grow enough potatoes to feed a large family for a whole year from just a single acre of land. And along with some buttermilk, this would pretty much be your entire diet! A grown working man would consume approximately 14lb of these tubers per day and, although it wasn’t known at the time, pretty much all that’s needed for a reasonably well balanced and healthy diet is contained in the humble potato. However, your life would have been extremely tough; in addition to your potatoes, you would also use some of the land to grow wheat or some other crop which would be sold to pay your rent. You would live in a small, usually one room stone ‘hovel’ with a thatched roof with your whole family and likely also whatever animals you owned. You would have few possessions, be cold a fair bit of the time (and wet when it rained as thatch wasn’t always the most weather-proof), and probably be heartily sick of eating potatoes. You would often live life with with a degree of sorrow because, although you would probably have a large family, infant mortality could be as high as 50% and adult life expectancy was low. However you would have a strong faith to sustain you, friends and family living nearby, and life would be bearable – at least you weren’t hungry. That is until the crops failed.

No-one knows where it came from but somewhere along the line potato blight arrived in Ireland and, in 1845 the crops began to fail. Most folk were hardy enough to get by for the first year or 2, and there were some government work schemes building roads etc which provided a pittance so that people starved at least a little more slowly. At the start there were also work-houses however this meant families would be split up, and the conditions there were purposefully horrendous to deter people from taking up this option. By the second year many landlords began to evict their (by now penniless) tenants and, horrifically, many died on the side of the road. You’ll hear more shortly about the famine ships because we visited one of these in the town of New Ross, but thankfully some landlords were good enough to pay the passage of their tenants and their families to look for a new life in North America. However, the crime in all of this was that Ireland continued to export grain throughout the famine - there was actually enough food being grown to feed the people however greed and political inaction allowed this absurd situation to continue throughout. We’ve heard several people say that the famine actually amounted to a genocide and we can certainly see why this view is prevalent in places.

The upshot? Over the next 7 years out of a population of around 9 million people, over a million died from famine or related diseases. Depending on who you listen to, between 1-2 million further people emigrated to other countries, mainly the USA, large numbers dying en route – some of the famine ships therefore becoming known as coffin ships. To put this into some context, the population of the USA at that time was around 18 million and, even more unbelievably, the population of Ireland today is less than it was in 1845! I can’t think of another country on earth where that would be the case – let me know if you can think of one!

Galway was lovely with a charming little Christmas Market on the square, we enjoyed a walking tour with Connor who gave some most interesting history of the town. In the evening we found a delightful little pub or 2 where we enjoyed a pint and some craic with the locals. Next morning we passed through Limerick en route to Killarney which is the launch point for the ring of Kerry which a number of people have mentioned to us that we really shouldn’t miss.

Hi it’s Harvey here.

Lately I’ve been receiving lots of encouragement and positive reinforcement. People have been telling me I’m a good boy, my behaviour has been excellent, and people have stopped complaining about my unreliability and general sub-par conduct. But I have to be honest, I’m a dual carriageway kind of a guy, I’m built for comfort and not speed, and the roads of Europe are most certainly not my natural habitat.

In particular roads which are steep, winding or narrow are not to my liking. I puff and blow uphill and my brakes complain and smell bad on the way down. I have the turning circle of the Queen Mary so anything even resembling a hairpin ends up being a 3-point-turn. And don’t get me started on these narrow roads I get subjected to in this part of the world, they simply weren’t designed for Harveys, I often have to pull over and stop for oncoming cars and can you imagine the difficulty if my oncoming brethren is a lorry or bus?

If you want me to continue behaving well, you’ll have to be cognisant of my competencies and proclivities!

Regards… Harvey.

Blog author back again.

Being aware of the matters outlined above by our travelling companion, there was no way we were going to drive him the 200km or so around what we had heard were just the type of terrain he dislikes. However luckily at this time of the year there are almost no tourists around so we were able to procure a little rental car for the day for the princely sum of £21.64 (less than a quarter of what the same vehicle would have cost in the summer) so with Harvey parked up safe for the day (and, it turned out overnight) at Kerry airport, off we went to do the loop. To say it was well worth it was an understatement, you’ll have to take a look at the photos to get an idea of what I’m talking about. Adjectives fail me to some extent but definitely windswept, tussocky, remote, and stunningly beautiful. There are a multitude of old abandoned stone hovels in various states of dereliction and all roofless. There are stone walls everywhere, and in a few places you can even see the horizontal ridges in the land which were typical of the typography of a 19^th century potato farm! We even stopped at one reasonably large derelict stone building and were able to wander through and try to imagine the life of the farmer and his family living there at some time in the past. The views were stunning but it was COLD and we’re only just into the first week of winter!

Speaking of which, we’ve chosen the perfect time to leave Ireland – the weather has been mainly fine or cloudy however in recent days it’s been getting progressively colder. The last couple of nights we’ve had the absolute pleasure of staying on the farm with Tommy and Breda who are the parents of one of my best mates back home, so not sleeping in Harvey however this morning when we left early to catch the ferry there was a decent sheet of ice covering his windscreen after an overnight low of -1. However, the low tonight is forecast to be -4!!! It's predicted to be somewhere in that vicinity for the next week or so in the areas we’re travelling through so it will be an extra blanket on the bed at night from now on, that’s for sure!

After the ring of Kerry our next destination was Cork, a university town with a delightfully youthful feel to it, in fact at just 11%, it has the lowest percentage of over-65’s of any city in Europe. We arrived a bit later in the day however there was still time to visit the English Markets which have been there since 1788 – sadly, there was one empty stall, the notice saying that the butcher who used to occupy that space had ceased trading in August after 124 years at the market ☹

The penultimate stop on our anti-clockwise route around this beautiful island was at Waterford. Your author will own up at this point and say that:

a) he had heard of Waterford Crystal, but

b) he didn’t know it was made in Ireland, nor that

c) Waterford was a town and that is, indeed, where the fancy crystally stuff originates

What a fascinating place! The guided tour was one of the best we’ve done and you got to see craftsmen creating actual pieces of crystal up-close and personal. Each and every piece is made by hand, the crystal starting life in a furnace before being hand-blown and otherwise crafted into the famous pieces with which the name is synonymous. Trophies for many of the world’s premier sporting events are made right there on site with many other pieces being bespoke and made to order. Often their craftspeople will make an item which, if it sells, can be recreated as required, one piece we saw was a little astronaut which started off as a one-off which has now been produced a further 8 times. Of course if an item is made-to-order, it will always be a ‘one off’ (except for the couple of spares they always keep for reference or in the case of breakage. Some of the pieces in the showroom sell for upwards of €40,000, the intricacy has to be seen to be believed!

Heading north towards Tommy and Breda’s place our final stop was New Ross to see the replica famine ship, the Dunbrody. Rebuilt to the exact specification of the original ship and meticulously researched, this is an attraction not to be missed if you happen to be visiting the southeast of Ireland. The shipping company who owned her still exists, so the curators of this museum have obtained all the passenger manifests for each of her voyages which typically transported between 170 and 300 steerage passengers. We’ve talked above about the horrendous famine conditions that many of these people left behind, however 6-12 weeks on a ship such as this can’t have been a whole lot better. Bunks measure 6’ x 6’ and each contained 4-8 passengers for the duration of the journey. Each family was allocated rations once per week and one member was allowed 1 hour per day on deck to cook the food (in addition each person was allowed half an hour per day of exercise, both activities weather permitting). However, if the weather was poor, all hatches were closed and the conditions below became suffocating, often with too little oxygen even to light a candle. It was commonplace for deaths & burial at sea to occur on these voyages and in one case on another ship when the hatches were opened after 2 days of poor weather, more than 70 of the passengers had perished due to suffocation. However, the Dunbrody had a better reputation than most, and the vast majority of her passengers on each voyage lived to tell the tale and settled successfully in the USA. What a sobering but fascinating insight!

Out final day of exploring was with Tommy and Breda who took us on a tour of some sights nearby to their home in County Meath. Again, much of the countryside was rolling and lush and not dissimilar to NZ however at home we don’t have the likes of an ancient ruined Benedictine abbey (built between the 13^th-15^th century) such as the one we visited in the tiny village of Fore. We also went for a lovely walk up a hill to see the remains of an ancient cairn and burial grounds which have been there longer than the pyramids! Cairn H on the hilltop has a little opening into which sunlight flows during the spring and autumn equinox. As mentioned above, it was just lovely to meet and be hosted by the parents of our good mate Tom and check out the ‘hood where he grew up. We enjoyed their hospitality immensely and also managed to squeeze in dinner in Dublin with some other friends, Richard and Jane.

All of which brings us to the end of another missive, we hope you’ve enjoyed our tales from Ireland, this bringing our country count on this trip up to 17. We’ll shortly be disembarking in Liverpool and look forward to some time checking the town out before beginning our cross-country England trek tomorrow. We have a handful of stops to make on the way before sailing back to Calais on Saturday morning and a weekend visiting our friends near Antwerp (followed by a physio appointment for the patient on Monday). Thanks for sticking with us, we’re having an absolute blast, your author also taking much pleasure in compiling the report you have just read.

With much love as always!

The Travelling Woodies