The Irish Heartland

     Kilkenny Castle overlooks the city and the Rover Nore.

Armchair Adventures

published July 15, 2012

by Paul Sullivan

The Rich History of Kilkenny

            On the morning of our third day in Dublin, my son, Tim, and I headed out of the city, intent on getting a glimpse of the Ireland we had come for.

            As so many cities have, this one had a 'beltway' to navigate but with a novel twist: tolls for using it were to be paid at service stations along radial freeways streaming outwards of Dublin. It worked through a series of computer-controlled cameras snapping images of every license on the toll road.

            If we had gone to Ireland for the narrow, winding country lanes, this 21st-century techno-stuff disappointed. Yet, as we would soon discover, that high-tech gimmickry soon disappeared.

            We would revel in many drives down narrow winding ways in the next few days. All that's needed to find them is to take the off-ramps into the past, down countless Irish lanes that even today are little more than paved paths for pony carts.

            That easy, unstrained joining of ancient and contemporary is one of the country's most engaging features. And the Irish themselves seem entirely at ease with this.

            Our immediate destination was Kilkenny, in the country's central southwest region in the county of the same name.

            Kilkenny's popularity as a tourist destination may stem from its appearance as the quintessential small Irish medieval city. Once we managed to deal with and work around the crowds it was a wonderful town, full of scenic cathedrals, friendly locals, pleasant little shops and all of it crowned by that architectural and historic masterpiece, Kilkenny Castle.

            The castle sits high atop a bluff overlooking the River Nore and the city's commercial core, itself appropriately aged to support the more prominent structures.

            We saved the serious sightseeing for the next morning and set off along John Street (could be called Pub Street) in search for food and lodging. We discovered the latter at a small B&B down an alleyway. If there is an Irish pub that doesn't serve decent food, we did not come across it.

            The choices seemed innumerable. We opted for a friendly place, nearly deserted, at the north end of John Street. It may have been for the service, as the young woman there could put a smile on anyone's face.

            Starved for food and news, we snagged a good deal on both and for stateside news, she bid me go behind the bar and use the computer. And the old news hound did just that, logging onto the New York Times to read headlines about the Supreme Court health care ruling. The 21st century certainly has its advantages!

            By the way, to continue momentarily along this line of digression, I do believe free Wi-Fi was, if anything, more widely available in Ireland than in most American towns I've been to. Got a smart phone? Don't travel without it, but be sure to bring the right charging adapter.

            Friday dawned gray and drizzling. We donned rain gear and headed for St. John's Bridge and Kilkenny Castle. Begun in the 9th century, this enormous building, like so many others, was not built over night. Instead, these Irish castles seem to go through a series of lives, expanding, being partially destroyed in some war or other, changing purposes and owning families over centuries.

            Not all guidebooks give you the straight scoop on these things. One reports that this stalwart stone eminence dates to the 12th century, but a guide told us where we could peer through a glass floor at a floodlighted section of a stone foundation dating to the 800s.

            But for practical purposes, most of the castle as it is seen today dates to the 17th century, when it was home to the Butler family, who ruled some 90,000 acres of surrounding Ireland and-essentially owned those who rented it for farmland. This, by the way, from some of the best informed guides I've ever run into. Tim and I talked to three of these historians separately, at length.

            And these were historians, carefully linking eras of British history from centuries past to the present. It was fun asking them to fit the fictional story of NPR's popular Downtown Abbey into the narrative of this castle and others like it.

            Nowhere in the Irish Republic are you likely to forget that the English ruled this land with an iron and often scornful hand for many lifetimes. It took little Ireland until 1923 to win the independence that we had won a century-and-a-half earlier.

            To this day, the Irish seem very fond of Americans. After all, in the great potato famine of 1847-49 and thereabouts, it is believed that a million Irish died and an equal number fled their homeland, most of them to America-an unthinkable toll for a small country.

            And just as Americans know from generational memories of their own Civil War, the Irish will long remember the famine and the generations they spent struggling for independence. 

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IRELAND in the 21st Century

Late evening, Dublin's spectacular James Joyce Bridge, aka The Harp Bridge for Ireland's national symbol.

Armchair Adventures

published July 8, 2012

First in series of four

by Paul Sullivan

Impressions of Ireland

            It seems unreal to think that 24 hours ago I was in the airport at Dublin, Ireland, awaiting a plane back to the States.

            Half a century of expectations went into that moment. Half a century of wondering about Ireland. We had spent eight days roaming the Emerald Isle in an effort to see just what we guessed right...and what we had all wrong about this ancient land. Right or wrong, we loved it all; would return in a heartbeat.

            We have a new dream now: to return someday and walk the legendary Dingle Way-more about in a later column.

            Impressions? Right there you have one of my fondest-talking to people who had just walked that 8-day trail among the rugged, weather-beaten windswept crags where sheep still roam the same moors where iron-age man survived elements and invaders at least a thousand years before Christ.

            That’s on a peninsula along this island nation’s west or Atlantic side. On the eastern side of this Indiana-sized country of 6.1 million, Dublin is another world.

            Ireland, as anyone who follows the news knows, is a member of the EU-the European Union. A member whose economy is not doing well. With some one million inhabitants, Dublin would seem to be the economic engine that drives Ireland. But is it? I certainly wouldn’t know, but our impressions would put it the other way around. Namely, that rural and small-city Ireland seems to be in decidedly better shape than Dublin.

            East-to-west, we saw no real evidence of dire need outside Dublin. Of course, appearances can be deceptive, but the country’s farms and independent businesses certainly gave the impression that they were not suffering.

            We both commented on what a cosmopolitan city Dublin is. Typifying this, on our last night in country, we had dinner in a Mexican restaurant sitting next to two German men, served by a Chinese waitress.

            Dublin serves up a rich stew of the very old and 21^st century. Divided by the River Liffey, the city has a lattice-work of bridges, centuries old and strikingly new, both vehicular and pedestrian. It has an excellent public transit network including light rail.

            The double-decker tour buses, with their hop-on, hop-off at will plan provided our means of getting the essential overview. We liked ‘em so much we went back for a second round.

            Even at that, Dublin has such a rich and varied mix of sites to see that we saw but a fraction of it and could have spent our entire time there.

            Favorites-different as they are-would be the Trinity College Library with its Book of Kells exhibit, and the Guinness Storehouse.

            The home of Ireland’s favorite drink is almost surely the single most popular tourist attraction in the country. I’d bet on it. This masterpiece of marketing concludes with a pint of Ireland’s favorite export high atop its brewery in a glass-enclosed pub with what has to be the most spectacular possible views of Dublin.

            Tim signed up for the Guinness Academy, a 10-minute introduction on the proper way to pour a pint. And I must say, there is a thing or two to learn, as he later showed me in a historic pub many miles way, in a part of this story yet to come.

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Berryville: Heart of the Valley

Time trip: Sammy, Bev and Margy at Berryville News Stand

Armchair Adventures

published July 1, 2012

by Paul Sullivan

Back to the Future

 in Berryville

            Here’s what I can recall about Berryville and Clarke County. It’s from way far back, mostly in the 1940s and 50s.

            Mom always said we had lots of McCormick relatives up there, in what she’d call The Valley. That means the Valley of Virginia-the upper valley not far from Winchester.

            Through mom’s mother’s side, we’re McCormicks, but the only one of them I know still living up there is cousin Bev Whiting.

            Aunt Bessie was Bev’s mom, and she was something else. Dad called her a pistol. When I was little, Aunt Bessie evoked a certain amount of fear. Not that she was mean, but she ran the big feed and grain store down by the railroad tracks. She was the boss. And nobody in Berryville ever doubted that.You didn’t cross Bessie Whiting. No sir.

            But I digress.

            I’m not sure if it was my sister, Margy, (Margaretta) or me made the suggestion we ought to drive up to Berryville and see Bev.

            And so it was that on the first day of summer-lovely day it was-Margy wheeled her Honda van westward, over the Blue Ridge, down into the Shenandoah Valley and into Berryville.

            My first reaction was that no town in Virginia could resist change, could hold back the flood of development so well.

            It could have been 1950, from that initial cruise down the main drag. I mean, had anything changed?

            There was great-grandpa Province McCormick’s last home; further along, there was the Battletown Inn, where the diminutive Civil War mounted Scout had hung-out in his final years. A few miles back up the road we had passed something with the name “Hawthorne” on it-a subdivision, I believe. That had been the old McCormick farm before Union troops burned it during a rampage down the Valley.

            Some years before she died, mom offered each of her four kids a piece of the old farm. By then we had established lives elsewhere and turned it down. Now-now that it’s way too late, I’m not so certain.

            This is unspeakably lovely, hallowed, green ground; so close to the fabled Shenandoah River. No wonder someone wrote those unforgettable lines of song, “Oh, Shenandoah, I Long to See You!”

            Back to the moment. It had been so long that neither of us could remember exactly where Bev lived. Margy turned here and there, I tried to lift it from the screen of my fone. Just then she said, “There he is!” And darned if he wasn’t-a small man dressed all in white-southerner to the core-waving us on from three blocks away.

            “Well,” I remarked, “He may be 92, but he sure has sharp eyesight!”

            Bev Whiting is the living embodiment of Old Virginia. Thoroughly decent, well-mannered, level-headed, and looking forward, with an eye on where he’s come from. But it was his sunny disposition I enjoyed most. There couldn’t be a mean bone in the man’s body.

            A child of Berryville, he’d lived his entire life in Clarke County, but for time soldiering in the U.S. Army Field Artillery during World War II.

            I don’t know if there’s a town historian, but I know who I’d nominate for the job. We could not imagine anything or anyone in Berryville worth knowing that Bev Whiting does not know.

            Bev, his stepson, Sammy Card, and the two of us sat there and “visited” (as old timers say) for awhile.

            But when Virginians get together, they eat together. Where to?

            We cruised the town’s single commercial street which offers several choices for dining. But there was only one choice for me, and I said so.

            We had to lunch at the Berryville News Stand.

            In the decades when it really was a news stand, it had been Bev Whiting’s store. The nerve center of Clarke County might have been a more accurate name for the place.

            It’s a deli now. Nothing fancy to look at, but my turkey-avocado-cheese sandwich and big glass of iced coffee was top-grade.

            After lunch, we piled back in the car and, with Bev narrating, took the best tour anyone could imagine of his little town.

            Across the railroad tracks, there was the big building that used to be the family feed and grain business; back behind that, hidden in an industrial park, is the town’s economic lifeblood, Berryville Graphics, a major book publishing house. The Winchester Star had done a story that very day on its expansion. Think books made from real trees are dead as the dodo-bird? Think again. How about 120 million copies a year?

            Those employees must live somewhere, I mused.

            Bev showed us where. And in this scenic little village of surprises, we turned here and turned there and, suddenly found ourselves in a pretty typical suburban development, complete with waving UPS driver. We were right in the middle of the year 2012, after all.             And it really wasn’t all that bad.