This Irish cruise puts legend and lore to the fore - The Times
By 10am a queue had already formed: people climbing the vertiginous steps and waiting their turn to be suspended over the battlements. But, like George Bernard Shaw before me, I felt no need to kiss the Blarney Stone.
According to one of the many legends here, Cormac MacCarthy, the stuttering 15th-century lord of Blarney Castle, saved a local witch from drowning in the lake. Out of gratitude she is said to have told him of the legend: “There is a stone there, that whoever kisses, Oh! He never misses to grow eloquent.” I went in search of the witch’s lake, wandering through 60 acres of enchanting gardens and woodlands alive with the chatter of blackbirds, chaffinches and wrens.
I was on a cruise — suitably titled Saints, Saviours and Secrets — aboard the Douglas Mawson, AE Expeditions’ new 154-passenger ship. Known for its polar voyages, the Australian-owned company recently expanded its territorial waters to the Mediterranean and around the British Isles and Ireland. My chosen itinerary circumnavigated Ireland, stopping at nine ports there before concluding in Troon, Scotland, and continuing overland via Glasgow to Edinburgh for two nights in a hotel.
Barring half a dozen Canadians, the passengers were all American and largely on the far side of 75. We boarded in Belfast after a tour of the Titanic museum — spectacular but hardly encouraging for the nervous ones. The choice of daily excursions included soft options and, if you so wished, days could be spent on lengthy drives aboard spacious, comfortable coaches, winding through glorious landscapes of green fields bordered by hedges of flowering gorse and maythorn where plump sheep safely grazed. We were never far from the Wild Atlantic Way, a 1,600-mile route along Ireland’s west coast that passes through some of the country’s most breathtaking scenery, along with Gaelic-speaking villages where cut peat was piled high for fuel and left to dry.
Given the small size of our ship, we were able to venture where larger vessels could not. We sailed up Lough Foyle to Londonderry, the last walled city to be built in Europe, then drove from there to Giant’s Causeway. Its vast, savage rocks and otherworldly hexagonal basalt columns, shot through with bands of red laterite, never fail to impress.
“When the world was moulded and fashioned out of formless chaos,” William Thackeray was moved to write on his visit in 1842, “this must have been the bit over — a remnant of chaos.” Legend offers another version, of course: that the Causeway was built by the giant Finn MacCool, and stretches underwater all the way to Staffa, to enable him to brawl with his Scottish rival, Benandonner.
I enjoyed the tales of fairies, demons and giants. They were a welcome antidote to the tangled historical narrative that prefaced most of our excursions and is indispensable for an understanding of Ireland. The standard of the local guides may have been variable but all had two things in common: a love of political discourse and a tendency to break into song.
Niamh Kennedy, who met us in Waterford — our last stop before leaving the Emerald Isle bound for the Isle of Man and Scotland — was among the best of them. She accompanied us on the drive into Co Tipperary to the place where saints, sinners, history and legend all converged on this trip: the Rock of Cashel. On this hilltop, surrounded by Celtic crosses, stood a rocket-like round tower, standing since 1101, and the frescoed 12th-century Cormac’s Chapel. Between them soared the Byronesque ruins of the cathedral, the aisle of which gaped through collapsed gothic arches into the sky.
St Patrick, it is said, baptised the king of Munster at his seat on Cashel. An eroded stone replica of St Patrick’s cross marks the spot. But there’s a colourful legend also attached to Patrick. Learning that the Devil was resting in a cave in the Galtee Hills, Patrick went off in pursuit. The Devil, enraged by his intrusion, bit a chunk out of the mountain, cracking a tooth in the process, and spat it out at his pursuer. On landing, it formed the Rock of Cashel. On this perfect, cloudless day, you could see the Devil’s Bit — a Cashel-shaped gap — in the distant hills.
The weather, alas, was not so clement for the first ten days, with rough seas preventing us from landing at the Dingle peninsula, which put paid to my visit to Gallarus Oratory. Instead, the captain sailed as close as he dared around the Skelligs, two steep, rocky islands that poke treacherously from the waves. They were ghostly on that day. Gannets wheeled and cawed, kittiwakes wailed and the beaks of wildly flapping puffins afforded the only splash of colour in the encircling gloom. The 6th-century beehive monastery of Skellig Michael, a Unesco world heritage site, was invisible.
The captain warned of four-metre waves that night. I swallowed seasickness pills and put my faith in the Douglas Mawson’s stabilisers and cutting-edge X-bow technology that would, with luck, minimise our pitch. Meanwhile, John McGroary, our delightful storyteller, who took the place of formal lecturers, regaled us with tales of his days as a policeman during the Troubles and treated us to an impromptu whiskey-tasting. It was possibly the best attended of all his lectures.
Life on board was informal. This is an expedition ship and its interiors and cabins are comfortable and functional. My favourite spot was the library, cleverly designed in the upper atrium at the bow, from where you could look out at the ocean as though through a set of shark’s teeth. As with the small gym and sauna, it was always deserted. With no designated theatre or lecture hall, we would gather in the lounge for talks and entertainment, which took the form of lively jigs and reels by the Canadian “champion fiddler” Jacinthe Trudeau and her accompanist.
Entertainment also came in the form of my fellow passengers, gathered over drinks at the bar. Among them were a former US Marine and Vietnam veteran from Florida, who arrived in the middle of a blizzard sporting a baseball cap and shorts. There was a woman who had worked at Nasa with her husband, an engineer on the Apollo 11 mission; a retired biomedical researcher who told me of a virus that could halt the single-gene mutation of Huntington’s disease; and an interesting chap who had made his fortune in Las Vegas, selling slot machines to casinos. “I knew all the gangsters,” he told me. “Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello… I knew them all.”
Food, so central to any cruise, posed a dilemma. Should I opt for the main dining room, with its extensive buffet breakfasts (piles of fresh berries), lunches (excellent local cheeses) and à la carte dinners, offering superior food and service? I enjoyed a delicious meal of Indian prawns with coriander and a perfect rack of lamb here. Or should I go for the Hut, on the eighth deck, intimate, brighter but with an unchanging — and somewhat desultory — menu of sub-par burgers and fish and chips? I found a compromise, lunching downstairs, then taking dessert and coffee up here. I was rewarded with various sightings of dolphins, a minke whale and a basking shark from the outdoor seating area.
The highlight of the trip for me was a chance encounter as unexpected as it was improbable. On a day of needle-like horizontal rain such as only Ireland can muster, we battled up to Slieve League, the highest accessible sea cliffs in Europe. Such was the mist that the summit and famous pilgrim’s path were invisible as the surf crashed below. Out of nowhere came a ghostly sound, carried away by the wind. Gradually I made out the shape of a man, sitting on a rock with a battered black guitar. His name was Eunan McIntyre. The second youngest of 16 children, he was singing a song about his childhood growing up in Malin Beg, a remote hamlet of 30 houses at the base of these cliffs, where his father had been a lobster fisherman. His soulful song recalled his happy boyhood, helping haul in the lobster pots. “Those were the days of my father,” he sang. “Those were the days full of joy.” That scene has haunted me ever since.Teresa Levonian Cole was a guest of AE Expeditions, which has 13 nights from £6,198pp, including two B&B in both Dublin and Edinburgh, nine full board on the ship, transfers, excursions and drinks with meals, on an Ireland & Scotland: Saints, Saviours and Secrets cruise departing on June 24, 2027 (aexpeditions.co.uk)
