EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALNovember 4, 1998
The English Channel
Somewhere between Ireland and France
The southwest corner of Ireland has a little, tapering finger of land
called the Hook Peninsula. At its tip, Hook Head, stands one of the oldest
lighthouses in the world. This coastal road from Waterford to Wexford meanders
through tiny villages and white sand beaches, windswept dunes and decaying castles.
Oliver Cromwell said that Waterford town would fall "by Hook or by
Crooke", referring to the two possible landing points from which to take the
area--either from Hook Head or at Crooke in County Waterford.
The journey out to Hook Head is flat, punctuated by sleepy villages and
a myriad of church ruins, towers and castles. Dunbrody Abbey on the west side of the
peninsula, near the village of Campile was built around 1170 AD by the English Cistercian
monks from in Stropshire, England. The ruins of the abbey stand in a sloping field looking
out to the Waterford Harbour and the city. It towers and sprawls at the end of a long
grassy road. Shadows of buttresses and arched facades are long and unobstructed.
Gothic windows have been filled in, and buttresses and supports that have been added to
keep the structure upright. Most of the abbey is intact.
At the head, the lighthouse stands cheerfully in the Atlantic spray.
At this site Monks lit a beacon on the head from the 5th century
and the first Viking invaders were so happy to have a guiding light that they left the
monks alone. In the 12th century the Norman Raymond le Gros erected the present
beacon.
Baginbun head, near Bannow Bay on the eastern side of the peninsula is
where the Normans made their first landings in Ireland in 1169. They captured
Wexford and the ramparts were built to fortify the headland until more Normans arrived.
3000 Irish-Norse set out from Waterford to attack the invaders at Baginbun,
outnumbering them seven to one. the commander of the Norman troops, Raymond le Gros
stampeded a heard of cattle onto the attackers and taught them a lesson in organized
warfare. Seventy of Waterford's citizens and soldiers were captured, had their legs
broken and were thrown over the cliffs to their death. And so it would be
that,"At the creek of Baginbun, Ireland was lost and won."
After the Norman leader Strongbow had landed at Passage East with 1200
more men, the Anglo-Normans gathered their forces and marched into Waterford city in
August 1170, marking the beginning of over 800 years of English involvement in Ireland.
Wexford City is where I buy my very last loaf of soda bread, or as Mary
Hall calls it, Brown Cake. And that’s just what it is. The Brown Cake is hard and
crusty on the outside, and nutty and sweet on the inside. It’s soft and dense.
I remember when I was eleven my father and I crossed the English
Channel to look for a house to rent in Brittany. It would be the summer my father
began his yet-unfinished book about the Shroud of Turin. It was summer I began
puberty, walking alone through Pont Aven's Bois d'Amour and learning how to
making crepes.
I remember my father asking me if I wanted a ferry berth with a
shower. I decided that a shower was necessary and found a drain in the floor next to the
toilet.
This room isn’t much bigger than a coffin. Rich is trying to fold
in the top bunk so we can sit down and he can charge the batteries. We’re on the
starboard side and above sea level, watching the swell roll in the nighttime blackness.
This crossing is 19 hours. Three years ago Rich and I crossed from Portsmouth and the
sailing took only six hours. Rosslare is a little further away.
There’s a drain on the floor in the WC. A curtain complements the
drain. We’re in a fancy cabin.
This ferry is empty and I’m beginning to think the crew is unaware
of the 30 or so passengers. Everyone is performing a minor electrical repair or vacuuming.
There are few services, and the coffee shop is closed. In fact, the cafeteria is closed.
The money exchange is closed. The disco is closed and the casino is closed. The bar is
open and occupied by fowl-mouthed Irishmen with smelly cigarettes.
Goodbye Patchwork Ireland! Your perfect green hills and tumultuous
skies, your dense, nutty Brown Cake and spitting rain, your muddy slopes and masticating
sheep, your castles, your ruins, your sad, wretched history, your ominous grey islands and
daily, optimistic rainbow. Autumn has been clean and unspoiled, and with my rosy
cheeks and sniffling nose, I look into the midnight blackness of the English Channel and
imagine what we might find next.
