McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland by Pete McCarthy Read Free Book Online Page A

built an amusement arcade or fun pub, so who am I with my middle-class back-to-nature aesthetics? If the only thing spoiling the place is the mobile homes, and you’re sitting in one of them, then I don’t suppose you notice.
    But Ounahincha, just a couple of miles along the coast, is beyond justification. I know I used to come here as a kid, but I have no memories, other than that it was the seaside, and there was sand. My cousin had a phobia of feathers, so perhaps it was here that I used to conceal feathers carefully under shells, inside buckets, and in other places she was certain to find them. In my defence, I can only say that I would watch her near-hysterical reaction with fascination rather than glee.
    Ounahincha is in a beautiful setting, with an expansive beach, dramatic rocks in the water, and splendid sloping lush green landscape all around. Unfortunately, it was comprehensively buggered in the 1960s and 1970s. The Ounahincha Hotel looks as if it has been assembled from the remnants of a previous building that was demolished for being too ugly, and is a strong contender for Most Tawdry Seaside Building in Ireland. Next to it, a sign on what appears to be a terminally damaged shed screams: SOUVENIRS CHIPS BURGERS; in case you’re wondering how you’d obtain them, a smaller sign says: SHOP! At the eastern end of the mess, despoiling another hillside with a sea view, is a trailer park so big there’s a Bank of Ireland caravan. I find myself feeling sorry for people who voluntarily spend their free time here. Like me, now.
    If you turn left off the main road when you’ve crossed the causeway across the river estuary at Rosscarbery—there’s an enormous and hideous new hotel reminiscent of suburban Oslo, so you really can’t miss the turning—and if you keep your wits about you, then in ten or fifteen minutes’ drive you will come across the Drombeg Stone Circle. I’ve been there three times now and only seen someone else there once: an American family. The three children were sitting on top of the stones and shouting, though to be fair they were only up there because their parents had made them do it for a photo. Like the Collins birthplace, it’s maintained by the reassuringly antiquated-sounding Department of Works, and none the worse for it. Catering, merchandising and Computer-Generated Interactive Interpretative Heritage Experience have all gone missing. No one’s trying to sell you expensive jam or chutney. There’s just a small parking area, with nothing parked in it, and a path between fields to the stones.
    There are seventeen of them. You enter the circle between the two largest, or portal, stones, which are both bigger than you. Directly opposite, on the other side of the circle, is a stone called ‘recumbent’ or ‘axial’ by archaeologists; by which they mean it lies sideways rather than upwards. Ancient markings have been carved on its upper surface. It’s been suggested that they represent axes, and that this proves that these circles were not places of worship, but the focal points of a Cult of the Axe which existed in western Europe in neolithic times. Or the stones may have enclosed a marketplace, and the axial stone was the counter on which goods were traded.
    I have to say, though, that shopping seems an unlikely motive to me. Proponents of this undeniably imaginative theory make comparisons with shopping malls, which might be seen as the new temples. Shoppers are worshippers, McDonald’s is the sacrament, Nike provide the vestments; but the theory is of course rampant bollocks, and seems so particularly in a part of the world where there are no malls, but you can still buy a bicycle in a pub. The stone is, quite clearly, an altar stone, and something would have been placed, or celebrated—or sacrificed—on it.
    When the site was excavated in 1957, the centre of the circle contained an inverted pottery jar covering the cremated remains of a young man from 3,500 years ago.