Tynanwoods Day Three

October 16
Day Three: Castle of the tyrant; a street with no numbers

From the driveway outside our cottage, in the hazy middle distance between us and the horizon, we can see a crumbling 17th century tower devoured by ivy. We decided to make that tower the destination for our morning walk. (Note: With jet lag still firmly in place, our mornings tend to be the Irish afternoon.) Half a mile later we'd crossed the River Fergus and hit the main road leading to town, but the tower was nowhere in sight.

On our way back we ran across a handyman standing out on the road, along with a lab-mix puppy that was literally leaping for joy at the sight of us. (We named him Fergus, of course.) He had little flecks of white paint on his fur; the hand said he'd been painting a wall the other day and the dog had gotten too close to it.

The hand, who was heavyset but probably only about 30, said he took care of the horses for the "Delphi House" down the road from us and tended the lawn for "some millionaires on top the hill." The millionaires' dog then appeared -- Mojo, a King Charles Spaniel if I have my breeds straight. Mojo was promptly set upon in a friendly way by Fergus, but he was having none of it. Mojo was the one who had peed on our car tire the day before.

The hand (who shook our hands but did not offer his name) said if we ventured up the private drive to our immediate left we could see what was left of Cromwell's castle. After dethroning and beheading England's King Charles 1 in 1649, Cromwell made it his mission to exterminate all the Catholics in Ireland and steal their land. He almost succeeded, though many of the Catholics fled to The Burren and were given sanctuary there. It turns out that the shrine we used as a roadmarker to find our cottage was the spot where the English hanged the Irish for being Irish. Needless to say Cromwell was not a popular figure in these parts.

The hand also told us an English colonel had lived in the Delphi House for a while until the IRA showed up one night and slowly bled him to death. This might have happened 200 or 300 years ago, but the hand talked about it with great relish, as if it had happened just last week.

When we finally ventured up the drive we found the towers we could see from our driveway. So that's our view: the castle of the tyrant.

After lunch we drove to Ennis, which features a small but bustling commercial district a half dozen blocks in size and a couple of crumbling cathedrals. The cathedrals are drab, gray, and imposing; on the other hand, the pubs are brightly colored, warm, and inviting. Our mission was to locate an Internet cafe and find the house where Christina's Da was born.

We succeeded in the first quest, locating two Net cafes. Both were poorly lit, overheated, crammed with computer terminals, and run by hopeless geeks. It was computing circa 1988. But we were happy to get a Net connection, even if it cost us 6 Euro apiece per hour.

The second mission was more complicated. Michael Smith, son of the meanest man in Ennis (and now possibly the meanest man in Wilmington, NC), was born 85 years ago at 10 Market Street. We found Market Street easily enough, but few of the buildings had numbers. Stranger, nobody inside the buildings knew their own address. We stopped at several shops along the street, and almost no one could tell us what their number was. We narrowed it down to a housewares store that was probably #10 and was the same type of stone house that Xtina remembered from when she first visited Ireland, when she was six.

We ate dinner that night at Brogans in Ennis, which sported both a fancy restaurant menu (starting at around 20 euro) and a cheaper bar menu. We went for the latter. The kids ordered "cheeseburgers," which were in fact rounded lumps of well-cooked ground beef covered with melted cheese and surrounded by three half domes of mashed potatoes, pureed turnips, and 'inoffensive' peas (Xtina's term). Xtina and I had roast beef with gravy, which was joined by the same accomplices. Once again I was reminded of my youth and not in a good way, though the beef was quite good. More on mad cow disease later.