Gone to Earth

Coming into land on the edge of Europe……or, how we spent three weeks on a long downward flightpath, coming to rest in the evening lands of earth, stone, water and air.

“across the sands of all the world, followed by the sun’s flaming sword, to the west, trekking to evening lands (J.Joyce, Ulysses)”¹

There are three sections to this chapter in our Tour of Ireland: land; people; and literature. You can choose to scroll through to check the pictures, read all, any or none. I hope you might enjoy getting lost down the lanes and byways of the links and ideas. We should love to hear your comments, and we will respond. We all grow through contact.²

Land

We arrived at the second green field of Ireland, Munster and ‘between the reels and the jigs’ we began the process of decompression. It took a week to come into land, to rest well, to realise that what we were seeing out of our window was not a Virtual Reality headset vision but really the sea and sky, the water and the land. We were moated on three sides by Castlemaine harbour at Cromane Lower (pronounced <Cr’Mourn>). An Cromane from Old Irish crommán meaning “hook, reaping-hook, sickle”. When we drive onto Cromane Lower it feels as though we are heading out on a great arc into the sea.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Cromane_Aerial_Shot.jpg&oldid=946336142

We stayed in a house called An Sean Deuoċ, the old house, or dock or port, depending on the person you speak with (the blue star on the picture above). We rented the house from a dear friend and nursing colleague from the Whittington Hospital, London. She lives with her family in houses, farm and fishing business on their portion of the earth stretched across the spit of land that bends out to sea that is Cromane.

As the days unfolded against our loose plan, we were happy to acknowledge that it was not possible to ‘do it all’. We made time to relax, take it all in, read and reflect. We are the lotus eaters of myth and legend, swanning around in mystical surroundings, once Fiona had remotely chaired her last Quality Committee of course. Perhaps there was some guilt to manage from not having a job to plan and prepare for. It took a while before we pushed ourselves to do anything that seemed arduous, like wild swimming in the cool cool sea. And when we swam we felt even more like lotus eaters “buoyed lightly upward (ibid, p.107)” as endorphins filled the happy gaps in our heads. We toured Valentia Island, the Dingle peninsula, the gap of Dunloe, Muckross, Cork and Cobh.

Kerry’s mountains, sea and sky are Awesome. I don't use that word lightly. It seems the only way to describe what lay around us. It does not feel possible to capture this in photography. We tried all the same and the photographs that follow whilst many, are only a small sample of the whole.³ Swimming in the cold Atlantic is exhilarating, especially with these views from An Sean Deuoċ.

The Land, Rock, Sea and Sky.

Valentia Island

The Irish name for the island is Dairbhre ("oak isle”). Valentia is a phonetic anglicisation of the Irish name for ‘the harbour-mouth of the island’, from cuan Bhéil Inse to 'Bealinche' and 'Ballentia' before evolving into 'Valentia'.

We travelled by ferry to the island visiting prehistoric sites, early settlements and the Lighthouse. The first commercially successful transatlantic cable was laid in 1866 linking Foilhommerum Bay to Heart's Content, Newfoundland. Stones at the crossroads are dedicated to the cable crossing and mis-quote Éamon de Valera’s speech The Ireland That We Dreamed Of’. ‘Comely maidens dancing at the crossroads’ is not mentioned in the text, however, crossroad dances was a rural tradition and the myth runs deep.⁴

Valentia

Chill to the sounds of silence and sea below

The Dingle Peninsula

Cobh

The Gap of Dunloe

People

I became aware that in touring around and writing of our experience that we risked peering through car windows, looking down from the very top of our noses, 'walking the streets noting the qualities of people'⁵, like some former viceroy of a colony in my case. Joyce describes the viceroy's procession around Dublin in Ulysses: “The viceroy was most cordially greeted on his way through the metropolis (p. 324, ibid).” He was not. Joyce explains in the section called 'Wandering Rocks' that... “From its sluice in Wood quay wall under Tom Devan’s office Poddle river hung out in fealty [to the viceroy] a tongue of liquid sewage (p.325, ibid.)”.

I wonder if we have managed to avoid the patronising trap on this tour and in writing this Substack. We try to visit places removed from the tourist traps where we can. On the other hand, we cannot escape that writing about this is observation, commentary, witnessing and reportage. So, we buy a copy of the local paper, The Kerryman looking for things to do and arrive up at the Kingdom Country Show. Cows, sheep, goats, tractors, dogs, tractors, horses, music, tractors and dancing. The great and the good turned out to chat farming and politics. The Rose of Tralee parades with jugglers through the fields of the fine country show.

Kingdom Country Show

The Most Appropriately Dressed Lady Competition is always well attended

Kingdom Whiskey Tasting

Kingdom Whiskey sets out to support local distilleries in the Kingdom of Kerry. We went to a tasting event as part of the Tralee Food Festival. It was good to chat with fellow devotees. I was the only blow-in Sassenach. Luckily Fiona was on-hand to translate my weird English accent. It took some time through long discussions with Fiona for me to work out that my attempts to pronounce a word as I heard people say it, JAM-E-SOME whiskey, for example, in some mad attempt to pay tribute to the lovely sound of the Irish only goes to confuse the bejeezus out of people. I am better off sticking to me posh English voice and be done with it! No wonder I see people double-take when I speak. It was strange to have my turn at feeling a stranger in a familiar land. Everyday is learning.

Tralee Food Festival threw up some interesting characters along the way.

Munster Reds at Cork C.C.C.

I joined Cricket Ireland for the craic. We combined our visit to Cork with a game at the Cork County Cricket Club, hidden away at the Mardyke by the River Lee in Cork City. We saw the Munster Reds, my new favourite team, vs Leinster Lightening, watching players from Ireland’s international team put leather to willow. Given the low profile of the game in Ireland strolled in to prime positions in front of the pavilion to picnic in the sun at their beautiful cricket ground for no fee.

Literature

We were given splendid tour of University College Cork to see the Honan Chapel, Harry Clarke's stained glass and the observatory before attending the Cork international Poetry Festival. We booked a couple of readings, including The Farmgate Café National Poetry Award where we managed to get ourselves photographed for The Irish Examiner! I highly recommend the thoughtful and provocative poetry and films of Pat Boran, especially ‘Immigrants Open Shops’.

UCC and Honan's Chapel

A bit of Cork and Rory and that Irish Examiner Exposé!

Three Short Poems

I dabbled in a few short poems inspired by some of what I had seen and heard.⁶

The Centra Cafe
Women laughing 
Strong culture 
Silent I see them through the glass at the petrol station
All angles and movement and laughs
Like a cubist painting from earlier times 
The women of Eire are the Celtic futurists of our time. 

Rites of Passage
Doughnuts on the roads again, 
rubber circles at junctions for the run up, 
boys burble, tuned on crackle maps,
straight pipes burp, 
no backbox, borked,
A rite of passage.

Cork
Plastic bins and poverty housing
drug deals and arms shown
speeding sweaty boys scarpering down lanes
the eastern and the western
got caught in the pub by the Belarusian bar keeper,
Anton with the russo-Corcaigh accent.
At the buger menu in the hotel
the nose looking-down class 
from the southern states 
aristocracy gone rotten
still relying on the kindness of strangers.

Reflecting on Touring and Writing

Living in Cromane for three weeks was longer than any holiday we have had. This allowed us time to reflect on how we want to live as well as the purpose of this writing project on Substack. I recognised that I had started to put pressure on myself to produce and that did not feel good. I imagined I had made a promise and that people were waiting for the next post. Apart from acknowledging that you have more important things to do with your lives I needed to find a motivation for myself to carry on with this project.

Stephen Dedalus reflects as he strolls along Sandycove strand south of Dublin, closing his eyes to hear his boots “crush cracking wrack and shells” he says…

“I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space (ibid., p 45)”.

Odyssey

I started (re)reading James Joyce’s Ulysses as soon as I arrived in Ireland, determined to make more than my previous 50 pages and all before Bloomsday in Dublin on 16th June. I worked out at some point the number of hours I had to do each day to compete the task and I tick them off each day as people who increase their reps in the gym.

Joyce wrote Ulysses systematically as a complex, complicated piece of language art and I find the rewards are huge. Each time I read I delve into dictionaries and encyclopedias, falling down rabbit holes, relying on the excellent Joyce Project for notes and analysis. This is my kind of fun. What luxury it is to read.

Ulysses is funny and bawdy and the language is poetry. Irish/British history runs through it like the Viceroys procession through Dublin on that one day in which it is set, 16 June 1904, the day Joyce met his great love Nora. I won’t go into the details of the framework I have chosen for my own amusement for writing this Substack unless you ask me to and also to avoid my own drift to pretentiousness. Suffice it to say that each section of Ulysses has a different theme, symbol, body part, philosophy and literate style that has motivated and inspired me in this writing project.

We moved from the east coast of Ireland to the west coast ‘banner’ and ‘rebel lands’. From the field of Leinster to Munster’s Kingdoms. From the rising sun to setting in the stony waters of the sunset lands. Wexford faces Europe. It loves opera and some say it has ‘notions’. Its Norman invaders and Anglo Irish castles are still in one piece. The strangers who invaded left a stain through massacre in Wexford and Vinegar Hill as elsewhere. Whilst Leinster’s field of Ireland⁷ is rooted in old land and stories the urge is always to 'look to the West' for the heart of the tribes of Gael, pushed West as they were. The Kingdom of Kerry is rebel country with rocky outcrops and Skellig retreats at the edge of the world, far enough from the Field of the Cloth of Gold that is Europe to seem distant. We went to earth where the sun first sets to swim in the briny sea.

Moving On: The Death of an Irish Poet

It was announced that the great Irish poet Paul Durcan had sadly died on 17 May 2025. In the following poem he sets out beautifully the experience of moving through the fields of Ireland, from East to West and back again.

I wonder what might be in store as we look forward to the next part of our journey, Ennis' Fleadh Nua and Listowel Writers week. What themes will arise from the land, the people and the art.

Going Home to Mayo, Winter, 1949 - Paul Durcan.

Leaving behind us the alien, foreign city of Dublin

My father drove through the night in an old Ford Anglia,

His five-year-old son in the seat beside him,

The rexine seat of red leatherette,

And a yellow moon peered in through the windscreen.

'Daddy, Daddy,' I cried, 'Pass out the moon,'

But no matter how hard he drove he could not pass out the moon.

Each town we passed through was another milestone

And their names were magic passwords into eternity:

Kilcock, Kinnegad, Strokestown, Elphin,

Tarmonbarry, Tulsk, Ballaghaderreen, Ballavarry;

Now we were in Mayo and the next stop was Turlough,

The village of Turlough in the heartland of Mayo,

And my father's mother's house, all oil-lamps and women,

And my bedroom over the public bar below,

And in the morning cattle-cries and cock-crows:

Life's seemingly seamless garment gorgeously rent

By their screeches and bellowings. And in the evenings

I walked with my father in the high grass down by the river

Talking with him - an unheard-of thing in the city.

But home was not home and the moon could be no more outflanked

Than the daylight nightmare of Dublin city:

Back down along the canal we chugged into the city

And each lock-gate tolled our mutual doom;

And railings and palings and asphalt and traffic-lights,

And blocks after blocks of so-called 'new' tenements -

Thousands of crosses of loneliness planted

In the narrowing grave of the life of the father;

In the wide, wide cemetery of the boy's childhood.

(from Poemhunter.com).

1. http://m.joyceproject.com/notes/030117eveninglands.html (pp.59-60, Ulysses, J. Joyce, The 1960 Bodley Head text offset and reissued with introduction by Declan Kiberd 1992, reprinted in Penguin Classics 2000).

2. We are all in-relation to one another and our environment and we grow through contact. “…contact is creative adjustment of the organism and environment…aware response is the agency of growth (p.230, Perls, F.S., Hefferline, R.E. and Goodman, P. (1951) Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. Dell, New York.)”

3. Fiona and I have a shared album of photographs and all pictures are attributed to both of us.

4. The crossroad dance died out as the church supported the restriction of all dancing to licensed establishments through the Public Dance Halls Act of 1935. The great tension between the show bands of the dance halls from which emerged greats like Rory Gallagher and Van Morrison and the pull to the Gaelic music of the past is a source of creativity still with us today.

5. From Shakespeare: “Tonight we’ll wander through the streets and note the qualities of people (Anthony and Cleopatra, W. Shakespeare, Act I, Scene I, line 61-62)” says Anthony. Ignoring all earthly responsibilities headlong into midlife crisis. And we know where that ends up.

6. All poetry unless stated ©Adam Julius Smith.

7. I refer to my earlier post Across The Peaceful Sea for an explanation of the phrase ‘the four fields of Ireland,’: the provinces of Munster, Ulster, Leinster, and Connacht.