Dear Maureen,
I'd like to say I'm writing this from Peig Sayers' old cottage on the Great Blasket Isle, but after our drenching boat ride, I'm happy to be penning this in my cozy room at the Castlerosse Hotel. The Blasket was eerie with the late afternoon sun peering into eyeless ruined thatches raped by the wind. But there was a funny moment when one of our tour group, an artist from Florida who dresses like a fetching Celtic huntress with wild bronze tresses and talks constantly about crystals and stones circles, grabbed one of the island donkeys and took the beast for a ride.
You wondered what kind of people would be on this trip, well ecolo to eccentric, but mostly people who're crazy about Irish music and trust Mick Moloney to show us the Hidden Ireland, profound and profane. So far, he's doing a bang-up job.
Dear Lucy,
I can't believe I climbed Skellig Michael today. What with the wild sea lashing around this hunk of rock eight miles offshore, we didn't think we'd get out. Des Lavelle (who wrote The Skellig Story ) asked Mick "What class of Yanks are they?" before agreeing to haul us out in his boat for three hours in a rolling sea to climb the jagged slippery rock path 714 feet up to where those 6th century monks lived in crude beehive stone huts. And Mick said "I'll ask." I think we passed the Intrepid Yankie Tourist Test, but we climbed Skellig on a calm day. With any kind of puff in the air, you'd be insane to do it. It's called "an island of 43 acres--mainly perpendicular."
Those sixth-century monks had all of Ireland to choose from. Why did they build a monastery on a rock with barely enough soil to stuff a clay pipe? What did they eat? How did they keep from freezing? How did they stay sane with nothing around but clouds and waves and screaming kittiwakes? This is what we're wondering as we stumble around the rocks and crude huts, and stare at the jaws of the gaping sea below. One slip and it's shark bait you are.
Like all good backpacking, hitchhiking vagabonds of the late 70's, I hate bus tours. I pride myself on having discovered Ireland through rheumatic stints in thatched cottages in Connemara, damp bedsitters in Dublin, and busking and odd-jobbing around. But when I ran into Mick Moloney at an Irish music festival in New York's Catskills Mountains last summer, and he told me about his folklore tours to Ireland, I gave the bus tour idea a second thought. I knew that tripping around Eire with this Irish folklorist and scholar, wit and crack musician, would be like doing merry old England in a yellow submarine with John Lennon, RIP. Zany and intellectually sizzling. Mick always organizes a good show, whether it's plucking his banjo and singing traditional Irish songs, or hauling Yanks around Ireland on a bus tour like no one in Eire has ever seen.
On both sides of the Atlantic, Mick Moloney is known for his expressive traditional singing and dexterity on the tenor banjo. He performs with Ireland's greatest musicians and tours with the ensemble The Green Fields of America. Since Mick emigrated from Limerick to Philadelphia in 1973, he's been recognized for the remarkable output of his contributions to the revival of Irish traditional music-producing or playing on over 40 albums, working on documentary films, organizing Irish music festivals, concert tours, and instructional music workshops all over the U.S. He obtained a doctorate in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania where he teaches, and lectures widely on an exhausting range of Irish cultural topics --all of this while gigging from Alaska to Quebec, Toronto to Tarpon Springs, Florida, to Nicaragua, Senegal and the Congo!
I hate bus tours, but Mick Moloney seems to have elevated this hackneyed form of travel to untold heights of spontaneity and hilarity. Sure it's as if we're only PRETENDING to be on a bus tour. There were the baggage tags and booked hotels and what-you'd-call an itinerary. But you got the impression it could all be tossed out the window on a whim, and instead of going off to King John's Castle or the Cobh Heritage Center, we could end up in jail!
Jail?
I'm referring to the madcap after-hours raid at Mooney's Pub where Liam Clancy was singing. But what should you expect when you park a huge white tour bus right in front of a lonely country pub? Liam Clancy ducked out the back door, leaving the rest of us, 33 Yanks of various ages and occupations hailing from Alaska to Florida, to be "found on" the premises. We stood there, under the stern gaze of the local Waterford gardai, our pockets stuffed with magic crystals from Skellig Michael and crumbs of Great Blasket Island earth, our legs broken in by romping over bogs to get to beehive clochans and learning to dance Kerry sets at Dan O'Connell's in Knocknagree.
We chugged our pints, grabbed our mandolins, fiddles and whistles, piled into the bus, and drove off into the night crooning "My Irish Molly" to an old recording of those 1930's stage Irish entertainers, the Flanagan Brothers --all the way back to the Tower Hotel.
Mick Moloney's ten-day Irish Folklore Tour is a carefully -controlled micro-environment which allows its inhabitants to survive without sleep, while being exposed to Clare fiddle tunes, Bronze Age dolmens and stone circles, rebel and immigration songs, set-dancing lessons, Irish history, politics, cultural geography, folk beliefs and mythology, with tales of Cuchulainn and Balor of the Evil Eye, and essential trivia about the Irish on the Vaudeville stage, including the life and loves of Lola Montez, the notorious 19th century Limerick beauty and third-rate dancer who seduced Hungarian composer Franz Liszt and King Louis I of Bavaria.
No ordinary Irish tour bus guide would dare call Limerick by its proper nickname "Stab City." Or chat so candidly about Irish taboos-divorce, contraception, unemployment, the Northern troubles, and the fate of Ireland's gypsy tinkers and travellers. Or entertain you with quirky anecdotes dug up in years of folklore research, musical gossip and diddled-out hornpipes and reels.
You are enlightened daily and nightly by this wit and raconteur possessed of Druidic powers of memory, and his team of archaeologists, cultural geographers, sagacious historians, dynamic dancing masters, storytellers and singers and distinguished poets.
Your nervous system, intellect, imagination, musical ear, thigh muscles and whimsy bone are so phenomenally over-stimulated that you feel like you've crammed a whole lifetime into one week.
GREAT LACKS OF SLEEP
It's only Day Six of the tour, and already we've conquered Skellig and taken a wild splashy boat ride out from Dunquin to explore An Blascaod Mor, the Great Blasket Island. This lonely windswept bog, deserted since 1953, has produced some of Ireland's most potent folk literature --including the memoirs of Muiris O'Suileabhain, Twenty Years A-Growing, (1933) Peig Sayers' An Old Woman's Reflections (1939) and Peig, (1936) and Tomas O'Crohan's The Islandman (1929). With Galway archaeologist Mick Gibbons, we've poked around ruins of the island's abandoned thatches and brushed up on our Ogham inscriptions.
At Craggaunowen we walked along an Iron Age road built in 148 B.C. and travelled a millenium back in time to a recreated crannog. The thatched huts of this medieval ring fort look like they belong in Africa rather than County Limerick. But the Irish climate was a tad warmer back then...
We've broken our legs learning to polka with octogenarian champion set dancers at Dan O'Connell's pub in Knocknagree. Explored a bronze age copper mine and the largest stone circle in the land with archaeologist Paddy O'Leary. Filled our ears with Clare fiddle tunes and rebel and immigration songs, tidbits of Irish-American history, Celtic mythology and cultural geography.
Fueled by tunes, tales, great lacks of sleep, and Mick's marvelous musical lore, the gaps in my haphazard knowledge of the Emerald Isle, gleaned from pub repartee and hitchiking from hither to yon, have gotten quickly filled in.
TO IMBIBE THE OLD MYSTERIES OF IRELAND...
At Cobh, the Cork harbour which was Ireland's main trans-Atlantic port between 1800-1950, I learned more about the 2 1/2 million Irish who came to North America in steamers, ocean liners, and squalid coffin ships. I had already seen the mass graves of famine refugee victims on Grosse Ile, Quebec (Canada's Ellis Island), where 12,000 Irish died of typhus and cholera in the summer of 1847. It was ironic to see the port from which they had sailed with so much hope.
Oh me legs! If it wasn't the bog tromping, it was the set dancing and the foot tapping, or the walking tours of Ennis, Cork, Wexford, Waterford and Dublin, or crawling under megalithic dolmens to snap photos.
Oh me head! After our crash course in Irish history, politics, folklore, geography and culture Doctor Moloney gave us a 60-question trivia quiz to test our powers of retention...
Who wrote Cuchulainn of Muirtheimhne? Lady Gregory How many players are on a Gaelic hurling team? 15 What County Clare man is credited with inventing the submarine? John Phillips Holland What industry did Charles Walker bring to Limerick in 1824? The lace industry What Irish king defeated the Danes at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014? Brian Boru What is meant by the term Shelta? The language of Irish tinkers On what day does the feast of Bealtaine fall? May 1st What U.S. city's river runs green on Saint Patrick's Day? Chicago
Months after the trip, the visuals and soundtrack are still rolling in my head. The fiddle tunes of Ed Reavey as we rounded the treacherous Devil's Elbow, and cheered at Willie our driver to drive it all over again - backwards! The biting wind that blew over Vinegar Hill...the twilight with brooding Celtic crosses at Glendalough...Moments with my travel companions like Peter Berry from Seattle, serenading us with his new wire-strung harp made from black sally, alder and 2,000 year-old-bog pine...and Dan the Postman McCarthy, who brought a U.S. postman's uniform all the way from Redlands, California to give to the first Irish letter carrier he saw, and who, one morning, showed up at breakfast proudly wearing an Irish letter carrier's uniform.
'Tis a sure thing-Mick's madcap musical tour, geared for people who hate bus tours, is a unique way to experience Ireland. You won't catch me dead on a bus tour, I said. But now I have to eat my baggage tags.###
For information on booking Mick Moloney's Irish Folklore Tours,
contact Billy Durkin at:
Hemisphere Travel Service Inc. 5 Washington Street Suite 27 Biddleford, Maine 04005 (800) 848-4364