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Clear view ahead
By John Crowley
 Spinning yarns is an Irish tradition, and there’s no better place to enjoy it than at the Cape Clear International Storytelling Festival this week. But there’s more to
the island than just tales,as John Crowley discovered.
CAPE Clear, Ireland’s southernmost inhabited island, lies eight miles off west Cork, but its landscapes and lanes conjure up a rural idyll that is fast disappearing on the mainland.
The charms of Cléire, still part of the Gaeltacht, are the same as they were decades ago. On an island with a few dozen cars, our roadside companions were blackbirds and butterflies rather than boy-racers in speedy coupés.
Surrounding us was a lush blanket of heather, gorse and fuchsia. There were no bungalows to blight our view and an orchestra of insects and birdlife delivered a musical hum altogether different from the screeching tyres and choking exhausts now prevalent on Irish country roads.
It felt like a throwback to a bygone era. Earlier on, our suspicions had been confirmed at Baltimore harbour as we sat on the pier watching the Cléire ferry being loaded with supplies.
Alongside the petrol and barrels of Guinness were Tayto crisps, dog food and a bundle of Irish Examiners. The only concession to modernity was a box of Pringles, which I presumed was being ferried across to feed the tourists. (As we all know, the Irish like to keep the best crisps for themselves.)
But it was the human characters on Cléire that left us feeling as if we had been transported. Sheltered coves, granite-like cliffs, near-deserted roads and megalithic standing stones were more than welcome, but hardly a surprise.
A gaggle of fashionably dressed teenagers marching out of the heritage centre singing the sailing song, Órá Sé do Bheatha Bhaile, did come as a shock. So did our meeting with Ed, a blind cheese maker from Manchester, who could only tell his goats apart by the sound of their bells.
“If there is no answer, go North and shout,” a sign said on his door. He had chased us down the road after he had heard us meekly raise our voices.
“You should have hollered,” he said disapprovingly, as he stroked his guide dog and received a delivery from the island’s postman. “I came here 20 years ago... but it is getting harder to make a living.”
Down by the pier, we found another of Ed’s contributions to the burgeoning tourist industry — goat’s milk ice cream.
This weekend the island will welcome the best aboriginal storytellers from around the world when it holds a festival of music and stories. The festival offers workshops, sessions by the fire, archaeological tours and the obligatory boat trip.
Indeed, Cape Clear is defined by its inhabitants and visitors. Weathered fisherman still brave gales on Roaring Water Bay, birdwatchers flock back to marvel at the jays and gannets, while teenagers descend on the island every summer to study matters all as
Gaeilge.
We knew the latter to be true because we heard a group of them crying “brostagi” (“let’s hurry”) to each other on a footpath. We will never know whether they were rushing back to a lesson or going for a sneaky cigarette, though it was probably the latter.
But what could the island offer to a pair of tourists — albeit with Irish roots — from London? The first thing that struck us was the gentleness of our surroundings. Even the birds seemed more welcoming and the bees more tame. One robin joined us on our picnic as a loquacious local gave us directions to the bird sanctuary. We never found it because we got lost, but we encountered a fair few more friendly species — both of the human variety and otherwise — as we completed a ring of the island. On the sole occasion where we met a car, we were greeted by a waving figure rumbling up a vertiginous hill in a rusty vehicle with an old-style black number plate.
Whatever your opinion is on West Cork’s more recent blow-ins, there are aspects that will never change. No influx of foreign denizens can erase the scars of the Famine. After our glorious day on Cape Clear we hopped back to the mainland to visit the Skibbereen Heritage Centre, located in the town’s old gasworks building, six miles from our base in Baltimore. The sensitive exhibition illustrates that the Irish Famine was no less political than the current one threatening Sudan. Video diaries showed actors playing master, servant and tenant. Time and again we were struck by the fortitude of those who had survived and the million people who did not.
Nearby, Lough Ine — Ireland’s only seawater lake — seemed a world away from the starvation and deprivation we had been shown. Another group of students on a scuba dive, seemingly visiting from Cork city, splashed and laughed on the water.
Earlier we had been told that famine-stricken locals had been too weak to put vessels out on the lake. The scene was a reminder that while modern life rolls inexorably on, there is much in the past to savour and to cherish.
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