gallivanting (moonshine and chowder)

We spent the night in an old world mansion that has been converted to a hotel. Before breakfast, I wanted to take a walk but couldn't find the exit. Or rather, I found two exits marked by green exit signs, but they were both locked. Finally through trial and error I found a completely unmarked door that led to an unlocked back exit. Good fire hazard and/or horror game setting.

Our journey took us through the Healy Pass in southwest Ireland. It's a winding narrow one-lane road, but traffic goes two ways. If two cars are approaching each other, one (usually us) will pull over to let the other pass. At one point we encountered a couple of sheep on the road. We both stopped and looked at each other for a while. Then the mom(?) trotted over to the shoulder, and her lamb(?) followed, and we went our separate ways.

We stopped at the top of the pass to admire the view from both sides. Spectacular mountain landscape, with the road coiling serpentine through the mists.

It was a lore-filled day. We saw the Derreenataggart Stone Circle, a druidic place of power nestled in a hollow with mountains on all sides. We discussed which of us to sacrifice (one teen immediately volunteered the other). A short distance from the clearing was a hawthorn tree with all manner of small items tied on its branches: ribbons, bracelets, a feather, a US dollar bill, even a child's shirt. It is said that fairies live under hawthorns, and one may leave an offering and make a wish. Farmers will avoid chopping down hawthorns on their lands so as not to incur bad luck. There was an incident where a highway was planned to be built over the location of an important hawthorn tree; locals lobbied to save the tree, and eventually at great cost the highway was built to curve around the tree.

For lunch we stopped at McCarthy's Bar for seafood chowder and tuna sandwiches. The bar's proprietor told us the tale of her father, Aidan McCarthy, who was an Air Force medic during WWII and was taken prisoner by the Japanese. He was brought to Japan as a slave but was saved due to the dropping of the bomb and the end of the war.

Dave said that bars were traditionally social centers in rural Ireland. You'd often have a combo bar & grocery store. Farmers would come to buy groceries every few days (since fresh produce didn't stay fresh for long) and then pop over to the bar to have a drink and a chat and catch up on the local news. Mail would also sometimes be delivered to the bar for farmers to pick up.

In the afternoon we went to the cottage of Molly Gallivan, a farmer and entrepreneur in the mid-1800s. She was widowed with seven small children, so she opened an illegal moonshine (poitin) (pronounced "pacheen") bar to make ends meet. (The British tried taxing whiskey, and the Irish weren't paying it, so the British banned it outright. It did not work.) Molly also supplemented her income by selling souvenirs to rich travelers along the Prince of Wales Route, so, you know, not too different from the place now. The owner told us a bunch of dubious stories, all of which were highly entertaining. For instance, did you know the word "gallivanting" was coined because the boys would be out drinking all night at the Gallivan bar? I can't find any sources that corroborate this tale, but it sure sounds good.

Back then, Molly (and any farmwife) would have baked bread three times a day to feed the family. A big loaf for eight people. There wasn't much else to eat. Butter and eggs were too precious to use in the bread (they could be sold), so it was made with buttermilk, the leftover milk in the churn after making butter. We got a breadmaking demo - just a griddle cake instead of a full family loaf, cooked over a peat fire - and then went out back for samples of poitin. The guy showed us the proper way to toss the first shot over one's left shoulder for the fairies before drinking any oneself.

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Pictured: Views from the Healy Pass and a hawthorn tree