driving in a non-rationalized land

Tuesday:

I just put on the electric kettle to make some tea, as it is midnight and I am wheezing asthmatically. I am wheezing—as is Donald, but whiskey is his medicine of choice—because we were just laughing harder than we have laughed in ages, over a book that I bought used (at the Book Mill, of course) to bring with us, called “McCarthy’s Bar: a Journey of Discovery in Ireland,” by Pete McCarthy. Both a travel book and a seriously comic (hah!) read, McCarthy’s chapter was about what we had just gone through today, at a higher level than every other day. He was describing trying to find a stone circle in west Cork, and was having a devil of a time. He kept thinking that he had finally put Michael Collins’ (architect of the successful, if brutal, 1919-1921 Irish rebellion from England) birthplace behind him, but kept coming to it again and again. He also finally spied the stone circle off in the distance, but couldn’t for the life of him figure out how to get to it, by car or by foot. He, like us, considered giving up, but “finding it had become the moral high ground by now.” He comments that when you are looking for an Irish national monument, “you would never guess that tourism is their number one industry.”

It was gorgeous today. So we put aside our work and set off this morning for the coast. We went first to Dungarvin and visited the Norman castle-fort from the first decade of the 1200s (the first version of the fort, built 1172, was wooden and across the river) and the town churches and cemeteries—a form of entertainment we discovered we both enjoy, way back when we were first married. J The exhibit at the castle was excellent, and the guide wonderful and helpful. By the way, did you know that Sir Walter Raleigh, after being Queen Elizabeth’s favorite, was imprisoned for 13 years and executed for treason?

We then decided that, since it was such a gorgeous day, we would follow the advice of the friendly woman we chatted with in the local Catholic church, and take the coastal road north. It was beautiful, with cliffs and rocky beaches, fascinating geological sign-boards (did you know that 460 million years ago, Antarctica was near the North Pole? I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true!), and a nice chat with the 4^th and 5^th hitchhikers we’ve given lifts to (a mom and her son).

After visiting and clambering around a number of gorgeous rocky coves, we started looking for some of the local dolmens, a half dozen scattered burial cairns that for some reason have survived in a very small region of north-eastern Waterford County. We have a book that tells you where they are and, sort of, how to get to them. This is where the difficulties set in. There are a number of problems with finding ANYTHING in Ireland, or at least in this part of Ireland, if you’re on your own. If you’re here on a tour or with someone from here, then you wouldn’t notice these problems, but here’s a short list of the difficulties faced by lone American travelers, used to road signs, to roads having names or at least numbers, and to maps and roads actually matching:

1. Even good maps, such as the one I spent quite a few dollars on and that supposedly shows the back roads, don’t really have most of the roads that exist in this area (they did in Clare, where there were few roads at all, at all). Another way of putting it is that most of the County Waterford and Cork roads are not on the map.

2. The roads that ARE on the map often do not do what the map says they do. Seriously. The map shows, for instance, a road coming into a small village and turning left. In fact, no road goes to the left. Instead, the road either goes straight or right.

3. The map gives road numbers for most of the roads that it shows. But 99% of those roads in real life never say what number they are (only the really big ones, like the highways, do, and there aren’t many of them). Even the locals have no idea what number a main road is. They just say, “Well, if you want to go straight into Waterford, you take the right hand road at the second traffic circle, but if you want to go to the highway, go straight through that circle.” So you never are quite sure if you are actually on a road you wish to be on.

4. While this corner of Ireland is FILLED with hundreds of small roads and lanes, not a single one of them has a name. Or maybe they do. But those names are NEVER on a road sign. So you have to simply turn at the house with the monkey tree, or at the lane with a house at the corner, or turn west (?) after the church, or take the second left after the traffic circle. So, in other words, you never quite know what road you are on (note: city and large town streets are named).

5. Given that you never know what road you are on, the only thing you can do is take a road that SEEMS to be going in the direction you want to go in, and hope for the best. Unfortunately, all the roads do a LOT of turning and twisting, so in fact, you may end up going in a completely different direction from the one you were hoping for. We found that out the other day when we found ourselves, after driving for about a half hour, back at the same house-with-the-monkey-tree we had started from. J

6. The very few signs that exist are very confusing in multiple ways. One way is that the distances that are given seem to mean “sort of.” As in, when it says something is 2, it really means that “it is somewhere between 1 km. and 3 km., but we don’t want to put decimals on the sign, but if the sign is old it may be in miles.” Additionally, it is often hard to tell which direction a sign is pointing in. Sometimes you come to a stop sign and you are trying to follow the same road you have been on (according to the darn map, anyway), and the sign seems to suggest that the road goes straight ahead, but there is no straight ahead. Or one of us thinks it points left and the other thinks it points right (seriously). That’s how we end up back at the monkey tree.

7. Worse yet, we realized in two towns (at least) that someone (we assume 13 year-olds, please God) plays with the road signs on purpose, turning them to point the wrong way. So for instance, we could actually SEE the police station to the right, and yet the road sign pointed straight on, while the town center was clearly straight on, and …you guessed it.

8. Amusingly, the guide book we were using was a bit cavalier about how to get places. So, for instance, it gave directions such as these: “From the R685 (?) east of Tramore continue through Leperstown (my note: not on map) to the third crossroads where five roads meet. Turn left for about a mile (my note: rental car speedometers register kilometers, not miles, and anyway, what is “about” a mile?) with Knokadirragh Hill (?) on your right. The cairn is on the summit of the south eastern end (?). Take the lane up to the mast and keep going.” ??? Or this one: “About (there that is again) 4 miles south west of Waterford and 2.5 miles north of Tramore (measuring from where????). Take the R682 (no one knows which road that is) from Tramore to Waterford (she really means TOWARDS Waterford) and turn right at the first crossroads (for where??!!!). After about (!!!) 2 miles, it is signed where another road joins from the left. Just past here (?) across a field on the left (nope, it was not just past here at all), the dolmen is just visible (if you have eyes like a hawk and already know exactly where it is and what it looks like, then there is a bump in a wall). Check house opposite for access.” This dolmen we drove past over and over, and finally a local saw us and took pity on us. It was quite a hike across a very large field until we got there. The only signs for it were a kilometer away. There was no marker nearer, to indicate it was there. A second dolmen, the one we had actually set out to find, and thought was down the same road (it wasn’t), we stumbled upon accidentally, by seeing a sign out on the main road (which turned out to be the 682, I think). Here are the directions for getting to another nearby one: “1.5 miles north of Fennor church. Go west from Fennor church and take the first right. After (how far after?) 1 mile, turn right up an avenue (what the heck is an avenue? Not a road? Not a lane?) past houses (are you kidding me? there are dozens of houses here) to a T junction (that means a stop sign) and bear left (sorry, we’re still looking for that avenue). The cairn is through a field gate on the left at the top of the hill (what hill? We must have made a wrong turn a while back, but at which point? There are numerous roads out here and at this point we have no clue how to even get back to the main coastal road). It is visible from the road (really? Let’s not and say we did.)”.

So, despite our travel travails, we managed to see two beautiful, impressive, mind-boggling dolmens, which took us a good hour each tracking down, although they were within a couple of miles of each other. It was a beautiful day, and we did quite a bit of tramping around the countryside, traipsing through fields, hiking down to and on beaches, which is a wonderful way to spend half a day, for us. And then, wonder of wonders, the road we were on—it HAD to be the R682—said that the N25 was ahead (that’s the main “highway” running north-south from Dublin towards Cork and is invaluable to us, especially as it is consistently identifiedJ ). That was exactly the road we wanted!! Except that we went UNDER it, and there was no way onto it. So why did they tell us to go this way to get to it? We then saw a set of signs, with Waterford (wrong direction) listed and some other not-on-the-map town. After driving around a bit, it turned out that this obscure town to the south had an entrance onto the highway, but the sign didn’t tell us that it would. In other words, it didn’t say “X-Ville and the N25, this way. ” THAT would have been helpful. Instead, at the one well-signed (in the sense that there were large signs that said very clearly how to get to some places) spot on today’s trip, it didn’t give the one piece of information that would be most important and helpful in deciding which direction the driver who is unfamiliar with the area is going to choose.

So, basically, from a sociological perspective, what it comes down to is that Ireland has not been rationalized. No one has ever said to themselves, “What can we do to make things more efficient, run smoother, so people don’t get lost, so tourists and other outsiders can find things, so the postal service can find new people? Should we maybe make sure that the road numbers given on the map are actually on the roads themselves? Should we give country roads names, and number the houses on them, so people can tell each other—and emergency workers—where they are? Should we make sure the maps match reality? Should we make road signs less movable and more straightforward and easy to read? Should we introduce decimals into the metric system? And should we make sure that every crossroads has at least one sign telling the driver where they will end up—or which road they will be on—if they choose each direction?

The cool thing about this, of course, is that this lack of rationalization is exactly why people like us come to a country like Ireland in the first place. It is still the kind of place where strangers take you themselves to places rather than try to explain it, where the postal worker knows where everyone is, where everyone who lives there knows what they need to know and the names of everyone in town and of all the roads (and my guess is that they all know we are here, too). The shops and pubs are independent and locally owned. You can see, grazing in the fields, the sheep and cows that are providing you with your milk and meat (and, man, I LOVE that yellow-colored cream that tastes like heaven). The magical quality of the country depends on it NOT having been turned into a neatly signed, shopping mall-ed, emergency-lane-d iron cage.