The Girl from Ballymor. Kathleen McGurl
a full Irish breakfast was the same as a full English breakfast, I wandered around the bar, peering at the various pictures on the walls. The pub had been too crowded yesterday evening to be able to look at them. There was a fine miscellany of pictures – black and white photographs of Ballymor; framed newspaper cuttings about the pub, its food and music; signed photos of traditional musicians sitting in the bay window playing their instruments. I recognised one or two of the musicians from last night. They’d started playing around nine o’clock, with no announcement, no microphones. Just a clutch of middle-aged men, who’d pulled instruments out of pockets and cases, and played jigs and reels and ballads and old Dubliners numbers for a couple of hours until Aoife had called time. I’d meant to get an early night, tired after the long drive, but the music had made me smile and tap my foot, and I’d stayed till the end, making an experimental half-pint of Guinness last most of the evening. The music had helped me forget, and that was good.
When breakfast came it was huge, just like a full English including bacon, sausage, fried potatoes, mushrooms, toast and fried tomatoes but with the addition of a huge hunk of black pudding – the real thing from Clonakilty, just up the road, so Aoife informed me. I wouldn’t need lunch, that was for certain. It smelt divine.
With that lot inside me, I went back to my room, stuffed a lightweight fleece, fold-up mac and bottle of water in my small day sack and set off for my walk. First stop was the tourist information office to pick up a map of the town, but they weren’t open till nine o’clock and I wasn’t prepared to wait. Declan had said the path began at the end of Church Street so I found that and followed it out of town. Sure enough, as the last housing estate petered out, there was a rutted track leading off to the left signposted ‘To the Deserted Village’. I turned off on the track, enjoying the exercise, relishing the sun on my back, thinking about Michael, my ancestry, the past, and most definitely not about the future.
The track climbed steadily, weaving its way between fields of ripening wheat which eventually gave way to open moorland, covered with magnificent purple heather. To my right was a range of hills; far over to the left I could just make out the sea, shimmering in the morning sun. There was a light breeze keeping the temperature just right, and I was accompanied by constant birdsong – a skylark was up there somewhere. All in all, it was a pretty perfect day. I was working up a bit of a sweat on the hill, and stopped to admire the scenery and have a swig of water.
Just over the brow of the hill, the remains of the village came into sight. I stopped and took in the view. It was more of a hamlet than a village – a single row of cottages alongside the track, with their backs to the hill and their fronts facing the view over the moors towards the sea. It would have been a beautiful place to live on a day like today, with the sun shining and only a light breeze, but I could imagine life would have been tough here when the weather was bad. Although it rarely snowed here in the south-west of Ireland, it could be pretty stormy at times, and the village was high on the moors and exposed.
I continued walking along the track towards the village. There was a worn-out sign for tourists, showing a plan of the village and with a brief summary of the famine, but it was faded and almost unreadable. The cottages were all ruined – very few had any kind of a roof left and none had doors. I imagined the roofs would have originally been thatched. The walls were made of a greyish stone, like the church in Ballymor. Some walls were more or less intact, and others had long since toppled, leaving mossy piles of rubble.
As I approached I could see the layout of the cottages – they were all tiny, single-roomed, with a fireplace at one end and a door in the middle of the side facing the track, looking across the moors to the sea. Most had two small windows, one on each side of the door. I guessed the windows would not have been glazed but perhaps originally had wooden shutters. The first cottage I reached was one of the more intact ones, although its roof was gone, so I ducked in through the low doorway to have a look inside.
The heather had found its way in, along with a few ash saplings, some gorse and plenty of bracken, and there was a burned-out circle on the ground – evidence that someone had lit a campfire. The cottage was tiny. I tried to imagine a whole family living here – where would their beds have been? Their table and chairs? I wondered what possessions people would have had, before the famine. Maybe Declan would know more. I smiled with pleasure at the idea of sitting in a corner of O’Sullivan’s quizzing him on it. Now that I knew Michael McCarthy’s home had been abandoned during the famine years when he was just a teenager, I realised I’d need to properly research that part of Ireland’s history. I made a mental note to get hold of some books about the famine so I could fully understand what had happened. It had obviously impacted Michael’s life – how could you not be affected by something like that happening around you? And maybe that’s what had become of his mother, Kitty. Perhaps she had been a victim of the famine. But if that was true, why then had he continued to paint her, and why the rumours that he had searched for her all his adult life?
I went out of the first cottage and into the next. This had one collapsed wall and a skull of a sheep in the remains of the fireplace, with a foxglove growing up through it.
The village was an eerie place, even on a glorious summer’s day. To think that once it would have been full of people going about their business – children playing, women cooking, men repairing thatch or tending to vegetable plots – and then the potato crops failed, people starved or moved away, leaving the entire village to crumble. Some walls looked pretty unstable, listing at precarious angles as though the next gust of wind would blow them over.
I pulled out my water bottle and took a long swig from it. It had been a hot, tough walk up here. Without meaning to, I found myself thinking of Dan, the way I’d hurt him, the secrets I was still keeping from him. I knew I wasn’t being fair to him. I walked further up through the village, going in and out of every ruined cottage, in an effort to put it all out of my head, for a little longer anyway. A stream ran down the hillside behind the cottages, and crossed the track between two cottages about halfway along the row. There were slippery stepping stones to enable walkers to cross the stream. I guessed this had been the villagers’ water supply.
There was someone else up here – someone sitting on a tumbledown wall that had once been part of the cottage at the far end of the village. A man, who was staring out across the moors towards the sea. As I approached I realised it was Declan. He hadn’t spotted me – he seemed lost in his thoughts the way I’d been lost in mine a few minutes ago. I coughed a bit and deliberately kicked a few stones to make a bit of noise. It worked.
‘Well, hello there, Maria! You found it, so.’ He stood to greet me, smiling, the sun making his hair look more blond than it had appeared in the pub.
‘Yes, thanks, great directions. We could have walked up together if I’d known you were coming.’ As soon as I said the words I wished I could claw them back. That sounded like a come-on. I racked my brains – had I mentioned Dan last night at all? Declan was lovely, and I certainly felt attracted to him to an extent, but I wasn’t available. I didn’t need any more confusion in my life. Dan was my man, despite everything.
‘Ah, it was a spur of the moment decision this morning. I often come up here, to sit and meditate, and just soak up the glory of God’s creation. On a day like today it was irresistible.’
‘It’s amazing.’ I stood beside him and took in the view. The heather was in full flower, giving the moorlands a deep purple hue. Here and there stunted ash trees grew, their leaves a vibrant green in contrast to the dark heather. There was gorse too – its time for flowering was mostly over but here and there were splashes of bright yellow bloom. The sea on the distant horizon glinted gold and silver as the sun, now high overhead, reflected off it. The air was scented with summer. It was hard to believe that this place had seen tragedy.
‘So, I wonder which cottage your ancestor lived in?’ Declan said, shielding his eyes with a hand across his forehead, as he turned to face me.
I shook my head. ‘No idea, and I don’t see how I could find out. Were all the cottages abandoned at the time of the famine?’
‘I believe so, yes. Not everyone would have died, though. Some probably went abroad, to England or America. Perhaps others went to try to find work in