A love affair with west Cork

AT THE end of 1989, I returned to Ireland after 32 years absence, much of it spent in some of the most beautiful places on earth.

As I child, I had lived in some of the loveliest places on this island, in Kerry, Cork, Tipperary, Mayo, Dublin, Donegal and Kilkenny — my father was not an itinerant; he was ‘in the bank’. When I returned to Ireland, it was to west Cork. Of all the places, it had most strongly gripped my memory, or my imagination. I remembered boyhood days in Emmet Square, in Clonakilty where we spent all of eight years, the longest I ever lived anywhere until my return.

I moved to west Cork ‘objectively’ — I took a look at the world and decided there was no finer place the family and I could be. Coming here was a risk; my wife, Marie, and I had no jobs to come to — but, down the years in foreign places, we’d always ‘made out’ and we are both blessed with an optimism which some would call naivety.

Ireland was in an economic crisis, but we ignored that. Seduced by a few summer holidays in west Cork, I suggested we should up traps in London and move over; Marie humoured me and came along. We had two children in tow, and we both agreed that the education and values they would enjoy here would be better than those in metropolitan London. So, we rented out our apartment in leafy Hampstead, sold our house in beautiful La Gomera in the Canary Islands, and moved to the shores of Courtmacsherry Bay. We sold at a loss and came on an overdraft; but we were full of hope and commitment to stay.

All of west Cork is lovely; it was sheer serendipity that brought us to Courtmacsherry, although I was determined that our new home would be on the coast. Marie was born further west, towards Glandore, famous for its loveliness, but that had nothing to do with it. Long before I’d met her, west Cork had somehow imprinted itself in my mind.

I wrote in the introduction to my 2004 book, A Place Near Heaven; A Year in West Cork “from the mid-1980s, we holidayed in Ireland every few years. Skipping stones on Courtmacsherry Bay one summer evening, it came to me that here was a place as lovely, and a quality of life as fine, as any we’d ever found. We would never get rich but we might manage to make a living and, given the joy it would bring us and the children, wouldn’t that be enough?”

It has been enough and more. At the beginning, the going was hard. We sold our first house, finding it hard to get work and impossible to pay the mortgage — in the early 1990s, interest rates were 17pc. However, we were happy, the kids were thriving at school and, in time, all resolved itself — my next book, to be published by Gill and Macmillan in spring 2012, will be called The Kindness of Place: Twenty years in West Cork. Our sons, with the benefit of local education, went on to get degrees and one of them is now doing an MA. Marie, a secondary school teacher, adapted her skills, ran an English-as-a-foreign-language school, and is now an examiner for the prestigious Cambridge Board.

Week by week for over 20 years, I have penned an Outdoors column for the Irish Examiner; it is a joy to compose. I am surrounded by nature. I only have to look in the garden, walk on the cliffs, stroll along the beach or talk to my neighbours to have themes more than I have space to cover. Meanwhile, I’ve been privileged to explore byways on the mainland and islands in the course of writing a series of walking guides.

Friends from lovely La Gomera, with its forested highlands, deep, green gorges and fecund sea, visited us here a few weeks ago, and were amazed at the sheer diversity of the bird life in our garden, never mind the many species that we encountered when we scanned the cliffs and sea stacks where the kittiwakes, fulmar, guillemot and razorbills nest in their thousands.

I showed them, on the beaches, the sand so stippled with worm casts that hardly a square foot was empty of life. In the old meadows across the stream from our garden, horses stood ankles deep in buttercups, and they found orchids, fleabane and a dozen other species of flower. They saw foxes from our household windows, a resplendent cock pheasant, and rabbits hopping amongst the buttercups where the leisurely horses grazed. Children they met in the village said hello.

In the pub, they were amazed at how we could weave through the mass of bodies toward the music and not a soul gainsaid our passage or made any objection or sharp remark as we went. Nor did anyone utter anything but a welcoming word as we gained places near the band, the better to give our foreign friends an upfront taste of the music we have in west Cork, not just ceidhli and the sawing of fiddles, but electro-music with whining guitars, and jazz, with saxophones, and honky-tonk with pianos, all in the town of Clonakilty and the village of Courtmacsherry on a Saturday night. The same would apply in every west Cork community. It is no wonder we love the place, and that, after a life of nomadism, it is the place where we intend to stay.

Scenic Walks of West Cork by Damien Enright is published by The Collins Press. Damien will give a free Lunchtime Reading from Dope in the Age of Innocence in Bantry Library at 1pm on Wednesday, July 6, as part of the West Cork Literary Festival.

He will also be at the Kinsale Bookshop on Thursday, July 17, at 2.30pm as part of Kinsale Arts Week.