MONDAY, AUGUST 26
Cleaning, laundry, packing, a hustle. There’s always so much to do before leaving…and this is the BIG leave. After rushing around all morning, Cello came over at 12:30 to walk the loop with us. Then a quick lunch and we were off to Bantry. We’ve wanted to see the town of Bantry since our first pass through last October after visiting the Bantry House and Gardens.
The drive from Union Hall to Bantry is nearly 40 minutes, through the same wide, rolling landscape we’d passed through two days before en route to Carrinagass Castle.
Bantry is a sweet, inviting little town that sits around a small fishing port, hill rising around it, and sea lapping its fringes. The houses are mostly small two-stories, quaint and colorful, each painted a slightly different color than the next, sometimes door frames painted yet another color.
But once we started walking the narrow, winding streets, looking for gifts to take back and popping into the small craft shops, we realized it has very little to offer. The town itself felt quite poor. Most craft shops are local, and honestly pretty tacky. We passed people drinking or drunk on the street, and overall the people seemed tired, like they were struggling. Not the tourist place it appears at first glance. The SuperValue near the docks was nearly empty. We wondered if it was that people don’t shop much because of poverty.
We wound our way up a fairly steep hill, topped by a large church, built in the 1830s. Then we wandered down again, stopping at the site of an old stone church in ruins which welcomed both Protestants and Catholics during the famine and today looks like it is used by local youth as a place to smoke and drink. The church was surrounded by a spooky, old cemetery, many stone crypts crumbling, holes where we could see into the darkness and imagine the bones of the dead.
I had a thought as we walked back to Fiona’s car. What if this whole year isn’t real and we will wake up at home from a long, complicated and luscious dream.
