FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 21
We’ve been traveling now for three weeks, 21 days. Hard to believe, mostly because I haven’t missed home, maybe the cats, but that’s all. Chloe feels the same. I wonder what this means about us, about our lives in Vancouver.
SAFFI’S ROCK
We went on the reverse loop walk this morning. Knowing we would leave Saffi to go to Bantry House and Gardens in the afternoon, I threw a lot of rocks for her. She picked a favorite rock as we were leaving the beach, and proceeded to carry it the entire remainder of our walk, which was most of the loop. Holding it in her mouth caused her to drool, made breathing difficult and stressed her out when she stopped, dropped the rock to catch her breath and looked around nervously as if someone might come and grab it. When we got home, she tried to hide it under her blanket, and finally was comforted when we placed it with her other favorite toys, a tennis ball and a chewed and dismembered green cloth doll, in her “private” area by the door.
Chloe and I prepared lunch and left for Bantry House and Gardens, a 40 minute drive form Ballinatona.
BANTRY HOUSE
The House (really a mansion) is at the end of a long drive and up a hill with views of the ocean on one side and gardens on the other. It’s a bit rough on the edges but in the most colorful of ways. Each room is it’s own wonder. The dining room (presumably, though it could also have been a living room) has a massive fireplace dwarfed only by the incredibly high ceilings lit by gold chandeliers that are missing baubles and hang topsy turvy. A large French hand-painted screen with all sorts of odd creatures and decapitated floating heads rests next to a large, heavy wooden table set with mismatched china. Hugging the edges of the room is a garish heavy, carved mahogany monstrosity of a cabinet/pantry. Part of walls, floors and ceilings, here, and in every room, are painted with a hodgepodge of stars, divided squares, and geometric designs.
Paintings throughout the mansion are slightly crookedly. At one point Chloe was looking at a black and white photograph and asked, “Is that mold?” In one room, there is tapestry that once belonged to Marie Antoinette; in another embossed Spanish leather frames a huge fireplace. It’s a menagerie of the odd, and off angle.
Outside, chunks of plaster are missing from the large Romanesque columns near a sitting area with table and chairs. A plastic tarp covers the inside of the high roof above, I’m guess it is there to keep rain from falling on guests while they eat and drink the offerings of the little cafe.
One wing of the house is a small hotel, and offers the guests use of a library where there are loads of rare, old books that you can simply thumb through on the tattered muted, green furniture. The books are so brittle some feel like they might turn to dust in your fingers. The color combinations can be as odd as the other decor. In the library, the walls are deep red.
AND GARDENS
Surrounding the house are a variety of gardens. Near the cafe is a Sunken Garden, dominated by giant palm trees.
We left the mansion via the library, through a giant door and down a few steps and entered an odd formal garden, Alice in Wonderland-like with triangular topiaries and labyrinths. A stable is off to one side. Sculpted horse busts hang above the doors. We thought maybe people live here because there are potted geraniums in on a windowsill and other signs of life. Possibly the groundskeeper.
Up the hundred broken, moss-covered stone stairs we climbed, leaving the garden and ascending to a view that eventually placed the mansion in a landscape of ocean, distance islands and sky.
We read bits of the house’s history as we walked around, but couldn’t put it all together. Descendants of the original owners still own and run the house and garden and B&B. They are Irish. But at one point in the family history, an ancestor who expanded the mansion and bought much of the art, became an Earl, by British hands. During times of war, the mansion housed troops — probably British troops, and during the famine years, the Earl was absent from Ireland, traveling abroad collecting art.
We made our way down the hill through the woods — the other, less cultivated natural gardens. There were also a path we followed along a stream. Somehow we ended up at the parking lot, and from there we drove through the town of Bantry, charmed by it’s lively port, the twisty streets and quaint shops and pubs.
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