We drove into Ballyvaughan on June 24, and saw a sign for a Craft Fair in the Village Hall. I thought, that sounds familiar. When I drove home yesterday, I passed a bannered tag sale along Route 102 in West Stockbridge. I have just spent two weeks with my family in counties Clare, Kerry, and Cork in southwest Ireland. It is a cool, damp place that never freezes, and the air is filtered by 3,000 miles of open Atlantic.
We visited the rural Ireland that is still cattle and sheep country, though most farmers have side businesses to support the farms. They sell strawberries from roadside stands, and give guided hikes or rides in horse-drawn carts. They pen in cattle with quickly stacked stone walls that one winter of frost here would topple. A ruined tower, megalithic tomb, Stone Age cooking site or holy well graces every other cow pasture. The weather is shifting mist and occasional sun. Sound familiar? It was raining all down the Mass ’Pike as I drove back.
We began in the Burren, which means “rocky place.†The Burren covers about 100 square miles of bare limestone hills. Overgrazing and erosion have scoured the hilltops to paving stone with meadow in between. Clints, the stones are called, and the cracks between them, the grykes, are lousy with orchids. Botanists come to the Burren because alpine, arctic and tropical flowers grow there all together. The combination is rarer than the flowers themselves.
We walked a guided hike on the Burren with Shane Connelly, a local cattle farmer. He told us the traditional uses of orchid roots, milk wart, lady’s mantle. He talked about the machinations of the abbots of a ruined monastery in the valley, the geography of the hills, the archaeology of forts and cooking sites. The Irish have traditionally raised grass-fed cattle. Connelly explained that on the drier hillside pastures, grass stays green all winter, so Irish farmers have always had fresh fodder for their cattle all year round.
The Burren now has no trees taller than blackthorn and hazel bush, but Connelly said its trees are coming back, as its main industry turns from farming to tourism. Ballyvaughan is a one-street town, a T intersection with tea shop, craft shops and pubs, and comes alive with the tourists. We went riding on the coast and galloped on the beach there, as people can gallop across hilltops all across Berkshire County, and biked across the Aran Islands.
We walked into an example of limestone geology as well. The Ailwee caves, a very young limestone cavern, have evidence of hibernating bears, a thousand years old. They have waterfalls, and stalactites, stalagmites and straws beginning to form. The much advertised caves just over the border in New York may be more advanced, and the local blue cheese and goat cheese may be a match for the black pepper farmer’s cheeses made and stored in the Ailwee caves. The New York caves probably do not have a potato bar, however, with ads for different potato varieties in the window, and a menu full of rooster potatoes and cheddar cheese.
W.B. Yeats had a tower near Lady Gregory’s Coole Park, just over the edge of the Burren. He lived there for over a decade during the Irish civil war. Yeats was part of the Irish nationalist movement and the Irish cultural revival as a young man, though he later spoke for the Protestant land holders, in the Senate. We listened to voices that read Yeats’ poetry aloud in each room. A kestrel had left a nest and one abandonned egg at the top. The houses of Berkshire wits and lyricists have fewer spiral stairs, but poetry in plenty — Wharton, Melville, Edna St. Vincent Millay — and a Noh play appears annually in Lenox, written in the style Yeats used for many of his plays at the Abbey Theatre.
From Ballyvaughan, we drove south and hit the coast again at Kenmare. This is still a small town, but another the Berkshires might recognize: the cross streets in the town center serve plentiful restaurants, galleries, small grocery stores and hand lettered signs. One large inn at the top of the street competes with a network of bed-and-breakfasts just outside of town.
Pottery, silver jewelry and hand knitted sweaters filled galleries and workshops, cousins to the fleet of galleries here. Though the Berkshires may be more famous for Shaker boxes, black ash baskets, and hand-woven llama wool, a summer explorer can very likely find a potter here like the Doolin potter who left a sample of his wares for sale on a stone wall by his door, when he happened to be out during business hours.
We continued to explore different modes of transportation: we hiked over the waterfall at Inchequin park, between two links in a chain of lakes. We drove around the Ring of Bhaera, down the Bhaera peninsula and back. Down narrow roads in green country, we passed an occasional church or tiny village, and once a peacock on a wall. The stone walls and streams along the road could have run here, except that the scrub along the banks was heather, gorse and holly. It was empty and beautiful. We left the sea, cliffs and water-carved stone arches, and drove back over a mountain pass. And we got back to Kenmare in time to pick up our laundry from the dry cleaner.
The next day, we rode a jaunting car around Muckross Park. This is a small, open cart. Ours was really a sidecar, a cart with seats facing outward, pulled by an Irish cob. The line of horsecarts around Muckross Lake is nothing as elegant as the tub parade, but we decided that cart was clearly the vehicle that the narrow sea roads were built to handle. At Muckross (which means “peninsula of the pigsâ€), we walked in the last remnant of Ireland’s old oak forest. Almost all the country was as deforested and overgrazed as the Burren, or Hopkins Forest. And we walked in the gardens.
We found several old gardens that belonged to former estates, and are now open to the public. They were planned as carefully as the Edith Wharton Restoration, and nursed with exotic specimens: Japanese rhododendron, fern trees from Australia. At our third base camp, the Southern port of Kinsale, we walked the old carriageway along the bay, to Charles Fort. Later, we wandered through the grounds of Adair Manor. The turreted house is now a hotel, complete with calf-high hedge mazes, gargoyles and chimney pots.
But the trip’s greatest pleasure was listening to people. Our Kenmare B&B hostess told us that many Irish emigrants from her area settled Montana, and she has recently had several Irish Americans come to stay while they searched for their families. One woman found her first cousins and had lunch with them. She walked to the crossing where her grandparents said goodbye to her mother, and talked to the postman who delivered her mothers’ letters from America. “There was nothing like a letter from America,†our hostess said, “because it always had a couple of dollars in it.†During the famine, that was riches.
A woman at the Bunratty folk park demonstrated butter churning in a restored farm cottage like the one in which she grew up. The farm always went to the oldest son then, and the rest of the children routinely worked outside the family, and then came to America. She had six children in the Bronx. She talked about charms to ward off lightening, putting out fires in thatch roofs, cleaning her teeth with soot, about the old women who told stories of Biddy Early.
We listened to fiddle, penny whistle and bodhran too, though outside the pub, and a ballad singer with his guitar, and a pianist, inside one. The Berkshires are thick with Irish music. Between the Greenfield, Bennington, Vt., North Adams, Sheffield, Williamstown and Pittsfield dances, there are dance festivals in Montague and in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Mountain Laurel, Spare Parts, Rude Cider, Rhubarb Pie, the Flying Garbanzos have sprung up in this county. Sometimes, for want of a pub, one will play casually in a coffeeshop.
In Kinsale, with a view over the rooftops to the bay, we puttered and picnicked at our B&B. We gathered our bedside tables into a row by the window, arranged odd chairs around them, and passed around chicken, salad, potato salad, strawberries, tea, chocolate biscuits and chocolate covered rice cakes. At Bunratty folk park, we celebrated our last night with a banquet in a restored 15th-century castle. It was not on so different a scale from tea in a restored Golden Age mansion. We drank good tea too, often, in Ireland. The country in known for a different welcome cup, of course. Short of Smithwick’s Ale or Murphy’s Irish Stout, mead is probably available in the Berkshires. Failing that, it only takes honey and yeast to brew it.
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Winter Storm Warning Issued for Berkshires
Another snowstorm is expected to move through the region overnight on Friday, bringing 5 to 8 inches of snow. This is updated from Thursday's winter weather advisory.
The National Weather Service in Albany, N.Y., has posted a winter storm warning for all of Berkshire County and parts of eastern New York State beginning Friday at 4 p.m. through Saturday at 1 p.m.
The region could see heavy to moderate snowfall rates of 1 to 2 inches per hour overnight, tapering off Saturday morning to flurries.
Drivers should exercise caution on Friday night and Saturday morning, as travel conditions may be hazardous.
Saturday night should be clear and calm, but warming temperatures means freezing rain Sunday night and rain through Monday with highs in the 40s. The forecast isn't much better through the week as temperatures dip back into the teens with New Year's Eve looking cloudy and frigid.
Samuel Currence served his country in the Air Force with distinction, professionalism and unparalleled humility from 1962 to 1985, retiring as a technical sergeant. click for more
Many homeowners are showing their holiday spirit by decorating their houses. We asked for submissions so those in the community can check out these fanciful lights and decor when they're out.
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