A Photographic, Historical, & Dramatic Account of Clear
Island, Ireland by Chuck Kruger
First Published by Collins Press, Cork, Ireland,
1994; reprinted 1995 and 1999.
New publication Comharchumann Chléire Teo., Oileán Chléire, An Sciobairín,
Co. Chorcaí. 2008
This fourth edition of Cape Clear Island Magic, reprinted in 2008 by Cape's Co-op, has been significantly updated and enlarged.
Cape Ahoy!
Through historical analysis, personal experience, poems, short stories, & photographs, Chuck weaves Cape's unspoilt island magic.
REVIEWS OF BOOK FOLLOW:
Southern Star, Saturday, August 7, 1999, page 10
Magic of Cape Clear extolled
"Cape Clear Island Magic", by Chuck Kruger. (Published by The Collins Press, £7.99).
When a book makes you want to down tools and drive at illegal speeds to grab a boat to an island, it has achieved something. This sort of historical and very personal account of Cape Clear is written with boundless passion by a Yank whose enthusiasm for the lump of land in the Atlantic is refreshing.
Over the 112 pages, we are given an insight into the lives of the 140 inhabitants on this three by one mile island which incredibly at its peak, had a population of 2,000. Cape is the southernmost inhabited island off the Irish coast and long lives in the memory of any visitor.
There is a magic to island life, a heroic survival element for natives and blow-ins to live through horrendous weather in isolated locations and Kruger captures this indomitable spirit of all Cape Clearers. The book is a collection of stories, poems and photographs by an American who has become an integral part of life in this fascinating kingdom.
The author is a teacher/lecturer/counsellor from New York State who on seeing the island for the first time, "felt a rush of feeling come over me, my eyes wet, I had an ebullient sense that here, dead ahead, was a place where I could die". He and his wife ended up on Cape through a series of coincidences as if fated to live the rest of their days in this remote spot.
I liked the photos, in black and white they added to the land that time forgot image of the island and I’m being a bit picky in suggesting that colour shots would have shown its true beauty. There is a great photo of a cow being lifted onto a boat and from it you get a sense of how difficult day to day living is on Cape, "taking an animal to the Mart becomes quite a logistic challenge."
A photo of Mrs. Kruger struggling to walk on a windy day gives an idea of how often savage weather conditions dictate things. Kruger gives us a greater insight, "you don’t leave home without securing your windows, even wedging them in winter against vibration. Neighbours speak of walking at a 45 degree tilt for months."
Chuck’s description of the almost inaccessible O’Driscoll Castle of Gold is beautiful and I have vowed to risk life and limb on my next visit to reach it. For birdwatchers nationwide the island is the Mecca, the finest spotting ground in Ireland.
DOUBLE F: The double Fs, farming and fishing, remain the heart and soul of island life complemented by a rapidly rocketing tourism industry.
Kruger writes in a chatty, intimate style, very much in the vein of a storyteller and his boyish delight in the little differences of Cape, make this book a delight to dip into rather than attacking in one gulp.
The spirit of a vibrant, tight-knit community with a distinct identity roars across the pages of the book. A Krugerless Cape is now incomprehensible, they have become a critical element in its composition.
The book would have benefited from a brighter cover and as I already wrote colour photos, but who am I to criticise, it’s on its fourth reprint in as many years.
* Our guest reviewer this week is author and businessman, A. J. Cotter
The Irish Times, WEEKEND, January 2, 1999, p. 9
A list of good reasons to buy Irish, by Yvonne Drysdale
Local History/Guides
American writer, poet and Cape Clear resident Chuck Kruger’s Cape Clear: Island Magic (Collins) is a collection of essays, stories and poems telling how the island has changed over the centuries, how it differs from season to season and what it’s like today.
The Examiner: "This slim volume is a real treasure - a miscellany of history, archaeology and folklore bound together by the author's blend of poetry and story telling. The islanders' pride in their heritage and their self-sufficiency shine through....This book could well become a classic, or at the least, an indispensable contribution to island lore."
The Irish Times: "Chuck Kruger...a poet and a writer...has been reinvented by Cape Clear....The island drew him to it and urged him to put down his thoughts. He has done so in Cape Clear: Island Magic...It is...worth having, if only to enjoy the author's own and very obvious enjoyment at being where he is."
Books Ireland: "A neat and worthy production...."
Condee Reviews: "...apart from being a fascinating and beautifully written book, it is an affirmation of why he is there....This is a little gem of a book."
Of his adopted island Chuck says: "Cape's a poem I read every day,
every night. It's a point of reference, a metaphor by which I confirm my very being."
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Here
are the first three of the twenty-seven chapters of Cape Clear Island Magic.
FOREWORD
The long hump of Cape Clear rose out of the sea like
a blowing whale....
Peter
Somerville-Large’s The Coast of West Cork
A
convert to Cape, I’m what locals call a “blow-in”: I’ve blown in from
somewhere else like a seed on the wind, with the implication that I could,
tomorrow, just as easily blow on to somewhere else. But I’m afraid that
Cape’s stuck with me, for I experience myself putting down roots into this
rough sandstone island “promontory”, as it was referred to hundreds of years
back. Whether I’m the toxic ragwort, the encroaching fern (bracken), the
gentle Joseph’s Ladder – the regional name for Montbretia – or something
that hasn’t grown here before and that won’t upset the ecological balance,
this book will make the determination clear, Cape clear.
As
an outsider to Ireland as well as to Cape, my perspective has advantages and
disadvantages: I see landscapes, customs, history, even weather as if for the
first time. Thus I can respond enthusiastically but also naïvely, objectively
but also blindly, subjectively. While free of some collective cultural biases,
I’m also imprisoned by those I bring with me. Without Irish, I’m often at a
loss when islanders try to share place names, anecdotes, and stories with me.
Thus, to communicate Cape to you, I rely not merely on compiled library
research, but on photographs, poems, short stories, lore gained first-hand
through conversations in pastures and pubs, tales heard while lobstering or
building a house or mailing letters or climbing a stile. I try, then, to present
Cape not only from the head, but from the eye, the heart. As a consequence, I
vary my style from chapter to chapter and sometimes, as when a personal approach
will dramatize or clarify Cape better than statistics or bald facts, within
chapters.
People
ask how I came to Cape in the first place; others ask – especially when a
strong gale has been howling like a banshee about the gables for a week straight
– why I stay; still others ask why I left comfy Switzerland after twenty-six
years there. The following part of this foreword serves as an introduction to
Cape, to me, to my sometimes anecdotal style.
Cut
off from the mainland by eight potentially treacherous sea-miles of sudden rock
and powerful tidal currents, exposed to the ripping wind from every direction,
sometimes covered by salt and foam (some call it sea spit), practically devoid
of sheltering trees, stony and hilly, without major stores or services,
downright isolated, a last outpost, Clear Island, County Cork, Ireland, called
us – my wife Nell and me – away from our secure quiet home in Switzerland.
There we might have boasted a peaceful view of lake and mountains and castle,
proximity to field and vineyard and forest, easy quick access to what some refer
to as high civilization: fabulous hospitals, universities, ski slopes, concert
halls, opera house, indoor tennis and squash, a variety of ethnic restaurants,
people from all over the world, Joyce’s Zürich a Dublin without poverty, the
countryside clipped and pruned and as ordered as a beloved kitchen garden. So
why, Cape neighbors asked, do you want to live here? How did you happen to find
us? Just how crazy are you?
We
first visited Ireland in 1979, returned to Switzerland convinced that, yes,
rural Ireland still had a quality of living that we believed made it the most
friendly country we had ever toured. Totally pleased with our vacation, we went
back to teaching, wondering if another year we would journey to Israel or to
Spain.
Not
until 1986 did we think of Ireland again, after looking at the photographs we
had taken in ’79. I especially remember one showing a deserted cottage
(somewhere south of Valencia) that had a riot of foxglove growing randomly on
the thatched roof; the fog obscured the background. Then we came upon an old
French tourist magazine with a two-page spread, an aerial photograph of the then
quaint village of Baltimore, with Sherkin Island resplendently verdant behind
it, and a touch of something else out at sea.
The
spring and early summer of 1986 friends began to arrive in Switzerland, one
group after another, and we began to experience our tiny home as a busy B&B,
Nell the cook and me the bottle-washer. While we enjoyed our friends
individually – collectively, sequentially, they overwhelmed us: so when we saw
two weeks without visitors ahead, we packed our knapsacks before anyone else
could arrive. Two days after the idea hit we were hitchhiking in the boiling sun
from Cork Airport direction Baltimore. We had meant to rent bikes, but the day
was a scorcher, Cork was to the east, and we wanted to mosey west, so that was
that. In our late forties, we hitchhiked for the first time since our early
twenties. A priest picked us up, then a farmer, a sociology professor, an
elderly artist, grandparents with two young children. Three hours later we were
in Baltimore, wandering about and feeling that here was a gentle honest
one-street town, with a thriving low-key kid-centered harbour, but not quite
what we were looking for. Sherkin called.
For
three days we tramped Sherkin. One place caught our fancy, a small headland that
shot due south, with, we romanticized, nothing between it and the South Pole.
Every day we picnicked there, rain or shine – and it was mostly rain –
watching the breaking waves and feeling the need to stare emptily out into the
sea and to something shadowy to the southeast. After three days, despite the
magnificent Horseshoe Harbour, the charm of the Franciscan Friary, and the
enthrallment we felt on that point, we were thankful we’d gone to Sherkin but
ready to leave. Achill Island next!
Safely
back in Baltimore, we hoisted our packs and were about to set forth thumbing
when we saw a land auctioneer’s sign, and decided – as far as one can decide
to do anything – to go meet him and tell him in all innocence and silliness
that if that point ever came up for sale in five years, to let us know. The
auctioneer wanted to know what we liked about it, we talked, and finally he
said, “I know a piece of land out on Cape, and I think it might be quite like
the headland on Sherkin, though a little larger. I’m going in to Cape on the
2:15 mailboat with my wife and mother-in-law; join me if you like; I’ll show
you the property. And if you decide not to go, good luck to ye and no harm
done.”
At
2:15 we sailed on the Naomh Ciarán,
left Sherkin astern, and instead of hiking toward places north, were steaming
south toward what our guide books suggested was a haven for those twenty years
our junior, what with a youth hostel and a camp site, and bird watchers galore.
How impulsive we felt.
And
then something happened, something magical, something for which islands are
renowned. I was on the starboard side swapping sailing yarns with our gregarious
auctioneer; Nell was on the port side exchanging bringing-up-children stories
with his wife and mother. As we entered North Harbour I chanced to look up, and
there was a picturesque twelfth century ruin of a chapel, beside it a stark
homely cemetery, at the head of the harbour a holy well, and, in the middle of
hearing a yachtsman's tale, I felt a rush of feeling come over me, my eyes wet,
I had an ebullient sense that here, dead ahead, was a place where I could die. I
brushed my tears with my sleeve so that he, perhaps, wouldn’t notice anything
amiss, and went on listening to his tale.
A
few months later, back in Switzerland at a small dinner party, life savings now
into the unexpected purchase of an island property, someone asked me how I knew
Cape was where I wanted to be, and I told the story of my first entry to North
Harbour. Nell looked at me, not having heard my story before, and told hers.
She, she said, happened to look up as we entered North Harbour, saw a crumbling
chapel, saw the modest graveyard, the Virgin Mary statue by the well, and felt a
rush of feeling come over her, bringing tears to her eyes: she knew that here
was a place she could die happily. She went back to listening to a story about
bringing up fourteen-year-olds.
I
should add that neither of us is particularly anxious to die, nor are we
particularly lachrymose. But having lived in Switzerland for all of those years,
we had failed to develop any deep connection to its earth, much as we valued its
well-kept old houses, its walking paths, its museums, its trains, its carefully
farmed fields. Somehow, for us, the very order of the country muffled its
spirit. We don’t like park benches in the middle of woods or on mountain tops.
It’s too civilized by half. We prefer raggedy Ireland to well run and
manicured Helvetia.
Some
live wherever they happen to be or to have been brought up, some choose their
location, and a few have no choice but to go where they are called. Nell and I
have discovered we have no choice, for better or for worse. So that’s our
story, written in 1994, of how we found Cape – or, perhaps, of how it found
us.
And
here’s an update, written in 2008. Not much has changed. Imagine owning a car
and never once using fourth or fifth gears – and rarely third –
because
those speeds are too fast for the local roads. Imagine living in a community
that’s so relaxed, so safe, that the postman, or post-woman, delivers your
mail straight to your handiest indoor table, whether you’re home or not.
Imagine that when there’s a knock on the front door, you call out, Come on in!
rather than,
Who’s there? Imagine taking your morning cuppa, weather
permitting, to a chair beside your kitchen garden and spending the next quarter
hour checking the sea
for passing ships; the outer harbour for dolphin, shark,
and whale; the nearby shrubbery and shoreline for an easy sighting of twenty
bird species, and not
infrequently experiencing a rarity such as a recent
hoopoe, who, like many tourists, came for a day and stayed for a week.
A
bit curious, you also look around at your dozen closest neighbours’ homes for
signs of life, laundry out, car or tractor still in the drive, children at play,
potato drills dug. And you scan the adjacent pastures to make certain there’s
still a sufficiency of grass for the grazing cattle – and that, ever the
mischievous ones, they’ve not broken through a ditch and set forth on their
moseying way to An Siopa Beag.
Where
am I? While Herman Melville wrote that true places are never on the map, I must
give my mentor the lie, for I’m sure his nautical charts listed all major
islands of West Cork – Dursey, Bear, Whiddy, Hare, Long, Sherkin, and Cape,
the southernmost – and Cape’s where I live, vacation, work.
I
used to drive thirty minutes every day at a standard eighty mph on a chockablock
dual carriageway in the middle of Europe to get to work; now, after my outdoors
cuppa, I climb the steep stairs to my study. All that time and stress saved, I
now opt for a nature walk with Nell almost every late afternoon. In fact, I’d
say that the greatest change in our lives brought about by moving to a seemingly
remote Atlantic island has been a significantly increased intimacy with nature.
And
an exceedingly pure nature, as even the birds attest. Choughs, for example,
one of the most pollution sensitive of all birds, thrive on Cape but have fled
most of the
rest of Europe.
Zorba
the Greek had a philosophy that Cape has enabled us to adopt as our own: every
day we’re able to see something as if for the first time, a drystone
wall, a
flower, a combination of light and patchwork pastures. And, sure enough, every
day, even when those hurricanes are flapping the slates, Cape provides us
with a
setting where nature’s so unspoilt that sometimes we feel as though we’re
privy to the beat of nature’s heart – and see the consequences in the bogs,
the lake, the heather and gorse-covered scrubland, the sea and the sky, which
includes a nighttime firmament undimmed by city lights.
Cape
feels significantly larger than its 1578 acres because the topography’s so
uneven, the perimeter filled with all kinds of jagged points, dark caves and
quiet coves, and a host of cliffs and hills. Its primary (national) school hums
away with two teachers and around fifteen kids, speaking both Irish and English;
it has
an award-winning museum, a resident nurse, deep-sea angling boats, an
early September international storytelling festival, a library, craft shops, two
up-to-date
taxis, two Irish summer colleges.
Yet, as idyllic as Cape can be, the infrastructure is approaching a critical point. In January this year, the post office – a natural and vibrant centre for much social contact – was closed down by the state, except for Thursday mornings. And I’ve witnessed the depopulation trend of rural and especially Western Ireland hit Cape with storm force. Since 1986, when I first visited Cape, a population of 150 has fallen low as 113, a drop of close to 25% in fifteen years, though now, in 2008, it’s come back up into the 130s. Despite the environmental purity and the peacefulness, this number is still delicate. To gain perspective on it, consider the following: Cape had 1800 inhabitants in the 18th century, 1000 after the famine, 600 in 1900, 200 in 1960. Should this present 130 not be the bottom – a drop exacerbated by the fact that most island youth of the last twenty years have finished their secondary education, and many of them their tertiary, and then not been able, given the specialisation of the world, to find jobs or suitable careers except on the mainland – I fear the trend will soon affect the quality of island life, unless, as has been happening the last decade, a few more young couples discover that Cape’s the place for them.
Imagine
walking the perimeter of Clear Island and spotting a colony of nine gray
Atlantic seals basking on a rock. Imagine seeing waves mountainous shoot
over
the roof of the Youth Hostel. Imagine on a foggy night falling asleep to the
tune of the reassuring deeply muted hoot of the Fastnet Lighthouse. That’s all
a
part of our island life. Then remember that physicists theorize that a piece
of matter the size of a fist could have the weight of the entire earth; and that
Cape has
that kind of density – in an aesthetic sense. The more one comes to
know the beauty of the island, the more there is to know.
BACKGROUND
“I
thought,” he said, “that the Island wasn’t half as big as it is.”
“Ambasa,” said I, “it is much larger than one
would ever conceive.”
Conchúr O Síocháin’s The Man
from Cape Clear
Clear
Island, the southernmost inhabited land off the Irish coast, may be small in
size – a mere three miles long by one mile wide – but large in history and
picturesque scenery.
To
reach this rugged, more insular than isolated island, one boards in Baltimore
the state-subsidised Naomh Ciarán II
– which runs one of two eight-mile routes at least once a day year round
(gales permitting) – or the privately owned Cailín
Óir (summer season only). In the summer one can also come from Schull
aboard the Karycraft. Arriving North
Harbour roughly (or calmly) forty-five minutes later, returning locals are, as
the idiom has it, now “in”, having been “out”, or visiting that country
off Cape’s coast called Ireland.
Island
antiquities include Neolithic and Bronze Age standing stones, a passage tomb
with the only summer solstice alignment in Ireland (see Chapter V for an account
of the national and international significance of this tomb), an alleged ogham
stone, a boulder burial (which used to be called a dolmen, or a boulder dolmen),
a prehistoric cooking site (fulacht fiadh). Unauthenticated wedge-tombs, souterrains, and hut
foundations, which appear on no archaeological maps, await authentication and
analysis, as do possible ringforts. A replica of the inscribed Cape Clear Stone,
which scholars often compare to stones from Newgrange, and photographs of some
of the other ancient stones, may be viewed in the island’s Heritage Centre.
Other
antiquities include Bronze Age mines; St. Kierán’s Pillar Stone, whose cross
legend attributes to the saint himself, thus placing the reworked Celtic stone
in the 4th to 5th Century A.D.; the Romanesque St. Kierán’s Church (erected
in the 12th or 13th Century on the site of earlier structures), now a ruin; the
13th to 15th Century O’Driscoll Castle (see Chapter VII), also a ruin since a
cannonball attack in 1601 (or 1602 or 1603, sources vary, since the Julian
calendar was then changing to the Georgian); a British signal tower and garrison
constructed in Napoleonic days; an abandoned lighthouse (of still unblemished
Cornish granite ashlars) assembled in 1817-18; the Telegraph House, built in the
1850’s; the Coastguard Station and Protestant Rectory (now the Youth Hostel),
built about a decade earlier, though some say the oldest part of An Oige was
built in the 1600s.
Then
there are the sheer cliffs rising several hundred feet, a knoll beside the
windmills 533 feet high (from which one can view both north and south sides of
the island), a freshwater lake, reed-covered bogs, miniature hidden harbours,
blowholes, sea caves (some hundreds of feet long), stacks, small streams,
beaches, vantage points for whale and dolphin and seabird watching, miles and
miles of walking paths, lonely sailors’ graves, massive patches of lichen and
wild flowers.
One
should also mention the Bird Observatory with hostel and warden, the
Museum/Heritage Centre (with special exhibitions every summer), three pubs, a
fish farm, the Siopa Beag, two craft stores, Protestant and Catholic cemeteries,
a Catholic Church (no longer with a resident priest but a priest who comes every
weekend), a campsite and a youth hostel on the shore of the mile-long unspoilt
South Harbour.
And
everywhere one sees the quiet patchwork of over 1600 small fields divided by
drystone walls, the stone ruins of houses from days past, vistas of the distant
Mizen Head, of Roaringwater Bay, of the mountains of West Cork, including Mount
Gabriel and the often cloud-capped Hungry Hill, all defined and redefined by
ever-shifting light and atmosphere. Herds of cattle, sometimes with a goat or
two in the midst, graze the pastures. Here and there a donkey or pony
cross-grazes the land. Rabbits, thanks to some visiting minks, no longer abound
but are coming back. And we’ve plenty of cats and dogs, chickens and guinea
fowl. But I no longer know a single peacock. Occasionally one may spot a sea
otter. All this on – sources vary – 1578 acres.
In
summer the island population swells from its 130 permanent inhabitants to as
many as 700, not including day-trippers. Two summer colleges attract Irish youth
intent on polishing their Irish and experiencing a Gaeltacht area. Yachts arrive
not only from Kinsale and Dublin, but from England, France, Sweden, the United
States, and often moor for a few days in one of the two main harbours. On a
summer bank holiday weekend as many as one hundred tents may dot the campsite.
Day-trippers from the mainland, departing from Schull and from Baltimore, walk
the hilly meandering roads, bask in the sun alongside the harbours, picnic on
some upland rock, snooze in a snug heathery niche.
On
quiet days, which most summer days are, canoe (kayak) lessons are provided to
college students, island youth, and visitors. Many evenings music, spontaneous
or hired, can be heard in the pubs; often of a Saturday or Sunday afternoon a
“session” will occur in Cotter’s Yard or in front of Ciarán Danny
Mike’s Pub or beside the Club. On regatta days, and Baltimore Lifeboat days,
North Harbour fills with yachts and people. As many as a hundred yachts have
sailed in the Cape Clear Regatta (the first Wednesday after the August Bank
Holiday Monday), a fun race held annually, with prizes going to the slowest
boat, to the boat from furthest away, to the boat that didn’t race, as well as
to the winner. Set dancing, raffles, traditional music provide active
entertainment.
While
Cape’s future remains uncertain, significant changes wrought over the last
30-odd years may well have halted the depopulation trend of the previous 150
years, partly by attracting to the Gaeltacht island students and tourists who
spend money on goods and services, partly by improving the standard of living,
partly by making nontraditional ways of earning a living possible. These changes
include: establishment of the two Irish colleges; the Co-op (which used to
oversee the running of the Naomh Ciarán
II until 2007, and still oversees the petrol pumps, delivery of coal and
cooking gas, renting of heavy equipment, and one of the colleges); the Bird
Observatory (ornithologists report that Cape is perhaps the best place for
birdwatching in all of Ireland); the Youth Hostel/An Oige; Cape Clear Ceramics;
an abalone farm (which we hope will be able to continue beyond 2008); a small
cluster of holiday homes, plus a few scattered others; island-wide macadamized
roads, thus allowing cars and tractors, JCBs and diggers; water storage tanks
supplying customers by gravity-feed.
In
this cottage industry/electronic age one no longer needs to live in the centre
of a town or city to be gainfully employed at occupations other than farming and
fishing. The island too is going high tech: it now has satellite dish antennas,
computers, faxes, photocopy machines, phones in almost every house, almost as
many televisions and VCRs, broadband. Indeed, reliable electricity, and the high
tech it allows, may enable Cape to attract new settlers to its community, thus
assuring its viability.
Traditional
island occupations, fishing and farming, continue to occupy people, but mostly
on a part-time or supplemental basis. Only one sizeable fishing vessel, the Ard
Costa, goes out from the island for more than a day at a time, usually six
days at a stretch. With a complement of 3 island men on board, one ship
doesn’t make Cape – which, according to T.G. Green, in 1920 had a fleet of
43 fishing boats employing 209 – a base for the fishing industry. Other
islanders fish directly from Cape, but in open boats in fair weather, usually
for lobster and crab with strings of ten to twenty-five pots. Until just a few
years ago, one person collected and sold periwinkle. A handful shoot the
occasional mackerel or herring net. Except for one fisherman, long-lining has
ceased. To be competitive in the fishing industry, it appears that most must
operate from a major port, with transportation, ice, support facilities at the
ready. For now, the “floating fish factory” ships, which vacuum the seas,
and the large trawlers are winning, making margins so small, and capital
investment so great, that few fishermen from places like Cape can compete.
If
one wants to set up as a successful farmer, one doesn’t normally decide to
move to an often wind-swept, sometimes salt-burnt, occasionally unreachable,
rocky island without a vet in residence, without arable fields of any size,
without much topsoil in the majority of the fields. (A three-acre field, called Gort
Mor – The Big Field – is said to be one of the largest fertile plots on
Cape.) Consequently not many young couples into farming or fishing, about to
commit themselves to taking out a mortgage and to rearing a family, are prepared
to settle on Cape – and a comparatively short time later see their children
off to mainland secondary school at the age of 12 or 13. The island, then, has
not been able to attract young farmers and fishermen to settle there, nor has it
been able to provide employment for most of its own maturing youth. This fact
could account for approximately half of Cape’s farmers, both full- and
part-time, being over 60.
I
can’t think of one family which relies solely on farming for its entire
income. Most island men supplement their farming by fishing, hauling, building,
bartending, working for the County Council, the Co-op, crewing for one of the
ferries. As with the fishing industry, it’s difficult to compete with the
mainland with any degree of financial success: When mainland farmers can plow
more than ten acres without having to back up once or squeeze through one gate
or gap; can have all deliveries of seed or feed or building block or cement made
right to the barn door; can have woodland protection for delicate crops, and
mountains and miles of land to absorb the brunt of Atlantic storms; then it’s
no wonder Cape Islanders have to juggle different ways of livelihood. To emend
the proverb, Capers are jacks of many trades, masters of most.
Cape
women too juggle a multitude of jobs, including farming, running B&Bs and
self-catering establishments, crewing on the ferries, managing craft stores,
potting, painting, sewing and upholstery, delivering mail, quilting, running the
library, translating into Irish, IT work, translating into English from French,
from German, caring for Irish college students, working as publicans, teachers,
tour guides, Co-op secretary, Co-op development officer, Co-op bookkeeper,
resident nurse, bus driver, HSE home help….
Before
I determined to move permanently to Cape, I asked many islanders, men and women,
what advice they would have for me. The consensus: Learn to do things for
yourself, to be independent, self-reliant; then you will survive the rigours of
the island – and be able to appreciate its peace.
THE
SEASONS, THE PEOPLE
...[Cape] is separated from the mainland by the sound
of Gaskenane, in which is always a strong
tide, and in high winds a very heavy sea; and having, consequently, less
intercourse with it than the islands nearer the coast, the native inhabitants
have retained more of their original manners, language, and customs.
Samuel
Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of
Ireland, 1837
Cape’s not only an island of variety but of stark
contrasts, and not only from minute to minute – as when you witness half a
dozen rainbows of an April afternoon – but from season to season, century to
century. Compare its peak population of 1800 to 2000 in the 18th Century with
its 130 today; compare a halcyon windless summer day with a January gale and
gusts that hammer gables and send roof slates into the next townland; compare
the arrival of the mailboat in July with its arrival in January. And then
consider the islanders, hardy people who can withstand winter months of lashing
wind, torrential rain, battering surf, swirling draw, geographic isolation, as
well as summer months of hectic tourist inundation when the bulk of the year’s
income for many is earned during nine intensive weeks.
North
Harbour, when the Naomh Ciarán or the
Cailín Óir or the Karycraft berths of a sunny summer Saturday afternoon, has all the
makings of a festival. Cars, tractors, empty trailers line the pier, some facing
one way, some the other. Young island children splash about in the shallow water
out from St. Kierán’s Strand, Trá Chiaráin, while the older kids learn
lifesaving techniques further out, their swimming instructor shouting
instructions on how to effect a rescue; the young offspring of yachtspeople dart
here and there in their dinghies, catching fish, spinning round and round; a
local transport vessel unloads twenty tons of sand onto three trailers parked
along the edge of the adjacent quay outside the safe harbour. It’s not just a
time to collect the week’s groceries, or the food supplements for the cattle,
or a new bathtub, or visiting friends; it’s a time to people-watch and to
visit with neighbours.
Some
islanders are content to enjoy the hullabaloo from the comfort of their
“bangers”; others mingle with the crowd, or stand next to a neighbour,
who’s already standing next to a neighbour, and thus a natural line of
islanders forms well back from where they know the Naomh
Ciarán or the Cailín Óir will
berth. As the ferry docks and unloads, the chaos and the fun begin – if
you’re not in a hurry, that is.
Two
usually local lads (and ‘lads’ around here can sometimes be female) leap to
the pier from beside the wheelhouse before the boat has been made fast. Once the
ropes have been looped over bollards, pulled taut from the ship, and cleated, a
mate unbolts the starboard stern deck door, swings it open, secures it, and out
file the hodgepodge of passengers, up the concrete steps, into the mass of
vehicles (usually one or two idling, since the salt in the penetrating winds,
the consequent swift corrosion, and the general damp don't guarantee a quick
start). Visitors and islanders alike slowly thread their way off the pier or
eventually climb into one of the cars or vans or the now regular bus and wait
for the traffic jam to untangle.
Out
step islanders back from their errands in Skibbereen (often referred to as our
“Big Smoke”), the older ones assisted by one of the mates; German youth,
half helmeted, wait anxiously to be handed their bikes from off the bow deck;
Irish musicians carry their instruments, ready for a session into the wee hours
at the Club; English, Scottish, and Irish birdwatchers appear, binoculars
dangling around necks, telescopes, tripods, and luggage hanging from their
shoulders. Out step the eager parents of Irish college students; the young set
with their tents and sleeping bags wonder where the campsite is; an assortment of people hope An Oige – the Youth Hostel –
isn’t full-up; day-trippers, with their prams and picnic baskets and shiny
shoes, emerge from the passenger saloon. Out step people speaking Düütsch,
cockney, Brooklynese, and, of course, Irish. It’s hard to distinguish
islanders on these days, except maybe the farmers, recognizable by their work
clothes and their healthy weathered complexions.
If
it’s the Naomh Ciarán that’s
berthed, a large “box” – one of two small ferry containers for supplies,
with a volume of 10 cubic meters for the closed box and half that for the open
– is lifted by the mailboat’s hydraulic hoist and lowered to the pier. The
closed box is unlatched, and the friendly ferreting begins. The process has a
ritual quality and can’t be hurried. Since people are never quite certain how
many cardboard boxes their telephone-ordered goods will be packed into, they
have to examine the label on every box; and thus they can’t leave until the
last message has been claimed. Consequently, everyone awaiting supplies
figuratively, and often literally, bumps into everyone else, greetings and
banter flying.
Perhaps
because so many people have similar Christian and surnames, but more because
there’s so much stacking and re-stacking of cardboard boxes, with grown-ups
and children carrying other people’s supplies to help out, boxes do, albeit
rarely, end up in the wrong homes, and further shuffling for a box gone missing
ensues, even from one end of the island to the other.
The
boat came in at 3:00. The crowd was dispersed by 3:40.
If,
however, you wish to see the rule rather than the exception, it’s better not
to judge by summer activities: Islanders are bustling then, what with students,
harvests, tourists, regattas, lifeboat days, visiting friends and relatives. And
in the evenings, the pubs are so full, visitors cheek by jowl, that many
islanders don’t bother to have their weekly chat and pint because there’s
too much noise and crowding to contend with. Far different to observe Cape off
season.
Watch
the mailboat come in some Wednesday in mid-January – assuming there’s no
Force 10 blowing, no heavy draw in the harbour which could render the mailboat
as good as rudderless in fast-moving water, and force her to return to
Baltimore. A dozen natives along the pier climb in and out of each other’s
cars to have a chat and keep warm and dry. Periodically they scan the sea for
the first sign of the boat’s antenna. Instead of docking in the outer harbour,
the boat is deftly manoeuvered into the inner, where it’s made secure with
hawsers six inches in diameter, ropes so heavy when waterlogged that the
hydraulic hoist has to be used to lift them into place. Since there are no stone
stairs built into this side of the pier, the mate and a bystander wrestle an
aluminum railed gangway into position. It balances on the edge for a moment,
like a teeter-totter, and then the men on the pier lower it to someone in the
stern who guides it into place.
Four
local lads disembark. They’ve had a relaxed long chat during the crossing. One
had his hair cut while he was out. Because of the forecast, the trawlers on
which two work won’t be sailing, so they’ve come home.
Up
the gangway walks an intrepid birdwatcher and a professor from the University of
Cork in for his monthly monitoring of the fish farm (a monitoring later done by
post; and the fish farm now the abalone farm, since, sadly, neither the turbot
nor the ragworm trials worked). Everyone’s well bundled up, and a few wear
oilskins. Two middle-aged women emerge. An island couple who have spent a week
in Dublin are back from their holidays. An elderly woman in kerchief is handed
up the gangway, since it’s both steep and slippery and you need to gain
careful purchase on the widely-spaced wooden cross-pieces. Then those waiting
descend and return from the hold with a dozen cartons of food, some building
supplies, a hundredweight bag of supplement cattlefeed. The gangway’s pulled
up onto the pier, tied securely to a ring. The mate lowers the locking levers
over the doors to the hold, the captain locks the wheelhouse, checks the
moorings one last time.
At
3:15 the boat came in, at 3:35 the pier was empty. At 10:30 that night seven
islanders sit at the bar or on either side of the fireplace in Cotter’s and
discuss the wind, then the latest oil spill off some foreign coast. Perhaps at
4:00 a.m. the next morning, weather permitting, the captain will move the boat
into the outer harbour so that at 9:00 it’s not aground at low tide.
Who
are these people who seem to thrive on hardship? Are they, as a local historian
from Clonakilty told me, “a breed apart”?
I
have often wondered whether his comment is germane, though certain that it once
was. And I have heard it echoed in various guises throughout mainland villages
in West Cork. Indeed, some mainlanders, when they hear I live permanently on
Cape, respond, “Aren’t they the fierce independent ones?” Or, negatively,
“I wouldn’t like to be tangling with the likes of ’em.” But these are
characterisations from afar. When questioned further, most of these people admit
to never having visited Cape.
Since
Cape has utterly devoted visitors, visitors who come back year after year,
decade after decade, I have regularly asked them over a pint or on a birdwalk or
while waiting for the mailboat to come in, “What’s special about Cape, about
Cape islanders?” They generally link the place with the people. Here’s a
composite answer: “There’s no more peaceful, beautiful place, no friendlier
people. They have time for you, they get to know you. You walk along their roads
and lanes, and when you say hello, they don’t just say hello back and continue
on their way, they stop and talk; they’re genuinely interested in you, they
remember you. I know most of the islanders by name, and they know me, and I’m
here just a few days a year.”
“But
isn’t that true throughout rural Ireland?” I ask.
“No,
not as much so. It’s harder to trust people because so many have become so
mercenary.”
“Even
in the country?” I ask, just to be sure.
“Even
in the country.”
“Well
then,” I say, “why are Capers special?”
And
I receive answers like this: “Cape has kept itself free, free of development.
It hasn’t the high-speed of modern life. Here you’ve no two-way roads,
rarely can a car get out of second gear; you've no supermarkets, no department
stores, no immediate access to essential services, few of the mainland’s
modern stresses. All you’ve got is each other. And you all know each other.
There’s something basically decent about the people here, they have such a
sense of humor, they seem highly intelligent, they reflect on things. The older
people have a wisdom, and the younger people appear energetic and resolute. I
find I can relax here the way I can nowhere else. The air’s fresh, the people
fresh, and that all helps to recharge my batteries.”
As
I come to know the islanders better myself, I discover that they are a strong
self-reliant people, a proud people, hardworking survivors. The worst thing I
could do would be to talk about them individually, for that would turn me into a
spy instead of a neighbour and turn them into objects instead of private
citizens; it would be like gossiping. So I will limit myself to generalisations;
when I do present an individual, he or she is a composite, not necessarily any
one person but three or four or more...together.
I
find considerable truth in the description “breed apart”. First, most people
on the island are O’Driscolls or related to the O’Driscolls. Almost all
families – except a few of the blow-ins like mine – are related by blood.
Many’s the kitchen conversation I’ve been unable to follow once fourth and
fifth cousins begin to be mentioned, or when I discover that some people are
related to others through both parents. While infusions of new blood arrive
regularly from outside, from other islands, from Dublin, Galway, Kerry, Cork,
the O’Driscoll clan dominates the area, including neighbouring Sherkin Island
and Baltimore.
Dr
Smith, in the 18th Century, wrote of the inhabitants of Cape: they “are
generally a very simple honest people, thieving being a vice little known among
them.... Most...are strong and healthy, and are seldom invaded with disorders,
dying generally of old age, chiefly owing to their temperate living, hard
labour, and clearness of the air.”
In
Lewis’s 1837 Topographical Dictionary,
from which the epigraph to this chapter was taken, we learn that “the island
was formerly remarkable for a race of men of extraordinary stature and strength,
whose feats are the subject of many interesting narratives.” And Donovan, in
1876, wrote: “The natives of Cape Clear are distinct in a great measure from
the inhabitants of the mainland; they have remained from time immemorial as a
separate colony, always intermarrying amongst themselves; so that we must regard
them as amongst the most typical specimens at the present day of the old
Milesian race. The name of nearly all the islanders is O’Driscoll or Cadogan,
the latter being only a sobriquet for the former....There can be no doubt but
that they were the aboriginal race residing along the sea-coast of Carbery. The
isolated position of the island, and its difficulty of approach, have kept its
population in a comparatively antique state and distinct condition during the
lapse of centuries, so far as nationality and descent. Irish is still the
language spoken by nearly all. In features and complexion they bear a strong
resemblance to the Spanish race in the Basque provinces and Gallicia in the
north of Spain, from which provinces, their progenitors migrated to Carbery, and
with which country they always preserved a close communication down to the 17th
Century.
“Until
the year 1710 Cape was a sort of established monarchy, an ‘imperium in
Imperio’, and an O’Driscoll – the head of the clan – was always styled
‘King of the Island.’ They had a code of laws handed down by tradition from
father to son, and as strictly obeyed and rigourously administered as if they
had been drawn by a Solon or Justinian.....The general punishment was by fine,
unless some grave offense was committed, and then the delinquent was banished
for ever to the mainland, which was looked upon as a sentence worse even than
death.
“The
climate is remarkably healthy, none more so in the world, as evidenced by the
longevity of the inhabitants, their stalwart frames, healthy appearance, trivial
mortality, and freedom from disease. They are a quiet, peaceable, and
industrious people, and possess greater gravity of manner, more ponderous
bodies, and are built in a larger mould than the more vivacious and excitable
race residing on the mainland.”
The
most frequently cited inherited characteristic has been that of size. Perhaps
the most famous man ever to live on Cape was Conchobhar O’Careavaun. He is
reputed, writes Burke in 1908, to have been “eight feet high, stout in
proportion, and of incredible strength. ‘As strong as Crohoor O’Carevaun,’
is a prevalent saying in West Cork.”
A
story still told by islanders runs this way: In Cork Harbour, a group of men
were standing on a quay trying to pull toward them a huge anchor some yards out.
They hadn’t yet been able to budge it. Conchobhar O’Careavaun came walking
along, saw the predicament, and asked for a go alone. They stepped aside, seeing
the size of him but knowing that no one man could lift what five strong men
couldn’t. To their amazement, Conchobhar easily raised the anchor. Irritated
that what might have been half a day’s paid work for them was completed in a
matter of minutes, the men mocked Conchobhar, who promptly hefted the anchor,
threw it out into the harbour, twice as far as it had been in the first place,
and stalked off.
Another
story about Conchobhar, told by Donovan and still current, concerns his last
days. Perhaps a year before his death, he retired to the Castle of Gold, already
a ruin. He roughed it there, living like a hermit, the seas crashing around him,
until he died. For many years his shinbone, as if a relic, was exhibited to
strangers at the main cemetery gate.
While
Donovan adds that “many of the natives, even at present, by their large
stature and great strength of body, uphold the credit and tradition of their
ancestors such as we never witness in this degenerate age”, I’m afraid that
one can no longer agree with him. As recently as the nineteen sixties, it was
not unusual to drop in to Burke’s Pub and see, seated on the bench with their
backs against the wall, a group of local men all over six feet. But not today:
The island has more than its fair share of tall men, but not so tall that as a
group they attract special notice.
What
“breed apart” is left on Cape is effected by the island’s geography and
traditions rather than by its genes. To make it on Cape you have to learn,
basically, to do things for yourself; you have to develop self-reliance and
hardihood. Mainlanders have a population of tens of thousands to call upon for
immediate help, and thus have access to all the specialists that such a
population supports. But on Cape, with its tiny population cut off completely
from the immediately accessible services most people take for granted, islanders
learn not only to do a vast variety of things for themselves, but, more
significantly, they develop a mentality, indeed a psychology, that confirms in
them that they can in fact do most
things. Here, I suggest, is what makes the Caper a “breed apart”.
Back
in the sixties, for example, the first automobiles arrived on Cape. While many
islanders didn’t know how to drive, let alone how to maintain a car, within a
year most island men could strip down and reassemble any VW engine – almost
all the bangers then were Beetles – as well as a trained mechanic could.
Necessity may be the Mother of Invention, but she has other children too,
“Survival” and “Balin’ Wire”. One day, for example, back in the late
80s, the washer in a critical waterline in my house suddenly gave up the ghost;
undismayed, my neighbour calmly borrowed my penknife and shaped from the top of
his welly the requisite replacement. Now, however, in the 21st
Century, matters have again become difficult, as so many cars are computerized
and the island hasn’t a mechanic with those skills.
Islanders
have learned to make a variety of decisions that mainlanders never face, never
imagine. Each family has to establish and manage its own garbage dump, since
there’s no municipal garbage collection. Nell and I, for example, bury all our
organic garbage deep in the garden, deep enough so that no rats are attracted.
And the island, for the last few years, has been managing a number of public
recycling bins for glass, aluminium drink cans, food tins, plastic bottles,
cardboard…, bins which are hauled off the island by the Naomh Ciarán every two weeks to Baltimore to be picked up under the
jurisdiction of the Cork County Council Environment and Recreation Department.
Each
island family has to determine where its children will attend school after the
age of twelve, since the island population cannot support its own secondary
school. To go shopping requires considerable organization, and can’t be done
on the spur of the moment: the Naomh Ciarán,
our year-round ferry, leaves the island, normally, at 9:00 a.m., and for most of
the year – the off-season year – it returns at 5:30, tides and weather
permitting. If you're in the middle of baling hay, or using the washing machine,
or any of a thousand tasks, and a specialised part snaps (and so many parts
today are specialised), you normally can’t find or purchase a replacement on
Cape, and you may well have to wait several days before one can be shipped in,
as I had thought would be the case with that washer. The simplest five-minute
task, consequently, can sometimes take days if not weeks, and one has to develop
a healthy natural philosophy to handle the frustration. Many islanders develop
an attitude that enables them both to accept what would drive most contemporary
mainlanders to distraction and to get on with the task at hand even when
Murphy’s law strikes for the nth
time.
A
person from Cape, then, learns to depend on himself, herself. When there’s
some kind of an emergency, an islander’s first impulse isn’t to reach for
the phone to call the hardware store or the electrical appliance shop or the
tractor dealer, or any of the multitude of specialists technology has created,
but to sit down and figure out how to effect a resourceful solution. Thus, I
suggest, people from Cape keep using their common sense and intelligence –
usage which might just hone those attributes and bring about what one of
Cape’s regular visitors, earlier quoted in this chapter, referred to as
“wisdom” – instead of relying on someone else’s. Yes, islanders are,
perforce, a “breed apart”: They don’t simply survive the stark seasonal
contrasts, the weather, the geographic isolation – they thrive on them.
If you’d like an autographed copy of Cape Clear Island Magic, for yourself
or a friend, simply enclose a personal cheque, for €20.00 (from within
the EU), or for $21 (from USA), payable to Chuck Kruger, with the name &
address of the recipient attached, and mail to:
Chuck Kruger
Glen West
Cape Clear Island
County Cork, Ireland
(Above price includes handling and shipping.)
Alternatively, if you wish to pay by credit card, you may buy online through an island website: emara.com
And if you'd like to read about Chuck's other books, then click on The Man Who Talks To Himself , Between A Rock or Sourcing.
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