‘Where are you going ta?’ the bus driver asked, and I went back in time
I’m in Cork bus station, boarding the bus to Bantry, and after traipsing around the high roads and byroads of Ireland for more years than even Mr Brennan might care to remember, I reckon I know the drill. ‘I’ve the ticket on my phone,’ I tell the driver, ‘will read out the reference number?’ ‘Tell me what type of ticket it is first,’ he asks. Adult single, I tell him (I will only later start obsessing over whether he asked because he thought I might be a ‘senior’). Ta, he says. You’re welcome, I say. There is a pause, then louder, ‘ta?’ And now I don’t know what to say. I wonder in that moment if the whole world has gone mad or just the top step of the bus to Bantry with me on it. Then, losing patience with the whole exchange, he elaborates: ‘Where are you going ta?’
Ah, the Cork accent. I grew up with it, so it doesn’t often trip me up, but I love these occasional reminders of its musicality and its distinctive take on pronunciation. I love the fact that my Auntie Binnie was almost universally known as Bennie, but if you were camping in her garden you weren’t in a tent, you were in a tint.
Of course, there aren’t that many Cork accents where I’m going. West Cork has always attracted Brits and blow-ins, but since Covid, there are so many English accents in the ether that it sounds to my ears at least that this may well be an act of recolonisation by stealth. Just as the Skibbereen Eagle once kept an eye on Russia, I think it’s incumbent on all of us now to keep an eye on Skibbereen.
But this has long been a part of the world whose certain charms have attracted our next door neighbours. We take a boat out to Garinish Island, to which Agatha Christie came to stay in 1959, and later described Hercule Poirot making the same pilgrimage — ‘somewhere near Bantry Bay’ in her book, The Halloween Party.
Garinish — or Ilnacullin, to give it its Irish name — turns out to be a little gem that I had previously turned up my nose at for absolutely no good reason across my many visits to the region. Famous for its gardens, it’s the house that really turned my head. A modest extended cottage with Big House history, the former home of the Bryce family, whose fortune came from the East India Company and who owned the island between 1910 and 1953, when it was bequeathed to the State, is one of these fascinating places whose former residents’ lives contribute to recent social history rather than ancient fusty days of yore territory.
In other words, the kind of place where you find yourself leaning into black and white family photographs from the last century instead of stifling a yawn at yet another stylised portrait of some posh antecedent who doesn’t even look human.
Anyway, in spite of being perfidious Brits who acquired their fortune through the exploitation of their colonies and worse, the Bryces seem to have been reasonably decent people. The men — especially Roland, the man whose bequest saw Garinish returned to us — were keen patrons of the arts and prolific early 20th century artists including George ‘AE’ Russell and George Bernard Shaw were regular visitors, and the women, as well as sharing the family passion for art and literature, were wild suffragettes.
The family hired a local 15-year-old girl, Margaret O’Sullivan — Maggie the Island — as housekeeper, and after Garinish was returned to the State, she remained resident as hostess to presidents, poets and world famous crime novelists alike. Our OPW guide tells us how Maggie continued to row herself from the island to the mainland for Sunday mass until well into her old age; she was the last permanent resident of the island and lived into her nineties.
It’s all intriguing stuff and reminded me that there are many of these frequently overlooked gems rich in fascinating families and recent history up and down the country. From the fabulous Overend sisters of Airfield in Dublin, through the tragic Mitchell Henry family who built Kylemore Abbey in Connemara, the Pearse family pile in Rathfarnham in Dublin, to the Herbert family of Muckross House in Killarney who bankrupted themselves with the renovations of their home in preparation for a visit by Queen Victoria — so many stories and so many people whose footprints are recent enough to still feel real and relatable. They’re all waiting to meet you, the season is only starting and the weather (for now) screams indoors. Where are you going ta?