As I was going over the Cork and Kerry mountains, recently, I didn’t meet Captain Farrell, counting his money. Nor did I run into any highwaymen of the kind who, in the song, held him up.
But like the captain, I was stopped in my tracks, if only figuratively, by the series of beautiful rock tunnels that cut through the Caha Mountains between Kenmare and Glengarriff. Unlike most road tunnels, these were hand-hewn, so that the walls remain rough.
And the drama of the longest one is added to by the fact that it straddles the county boundaries. You emerge from the dark to be greeted (when southbound), by a sign saying “Welcome to Cork”.
The actual borderline, I’m told, is back in the tunnel. And I know exactly where, because when my kids and I explored it on foot, we were drawn to a shaft of sunlight coming through a hole in the roof at one point.
Mystical
Not that there was much sun that day. It was pouring rain outside. Even so, in the gloom of the tunnel, the rain came bathed in light. The effect was mystical. And sure enough, I learned afterwards that this is the point beyond which, according to ancient tradition, the respective county council road-menders of Kerry and Cork do not go.
Officially the route is the N71. Unofficially it’s “Mecredy’s Road”, after Richard Mecredy, a Galway man who pioneered motoring in Ireland during the early 1900s, and is credited with having it upgraded from a mountain pass.
If you were driving in certain parts of Ireland then, you really must have felt like a pioneer. A measure of how untamed the terrain was then is that, in 1912, Mecredy published a map of the roads that were steam-rolled. It sold well.
Boundary
Were you to believe the lyrics of
Whiskey in the Jar
, the highwayman who held up Captain Farrell must have operated in the Caha Mountains, or the Derrynasaggarts, which cross the county boundary further north.
But then again, the song long predates the Dubliners and Thin Lizzy, and there are many versions. In one, the scene of the crime was the “far-famed Kerry mountain” – no mention of Cork. And it has been set in several other places, including Sligo and Kilkenny.
It also crossed the Atlantic, to the American colonies, where its subtext (the highwayman was probably a Rapparee, a freelancing Jacobite who, specialising in robbery of the ruling English, could claim political status) found a sympathetic audience. There are American versions too.
But in the absence of rapparees, these days, the most common robberies in the Cork and Kerry mountains appear to be of road signs, which also have a tendency to cross the Atlantic, to Irish bars in New York and beyond.
Signs
A few years ago, Kerry County Council lamented that its signs were especially valued by the “industry”. After one raid, according to Michael Healy-Rae, almost all signs on the Caha Pass had disappeared. The exception, he noted (with a hint of pride) was the one that said “Welcome to Cork”.
Whatever about the tunnel itself, the area to its north is certainly mystical. It's called Bonane (on no account to be confused with Bohane, Kevin Barry's disturbingly plausible vision of a futuristic mixture of Cork and Limerick, descending into anarchy). And some of its many ancient stone works are aligned with astronomical purpose, framing solstices and the rising of moons.
A star attraction is the “Bullaun Stone”, a flat-topped rock embedded in the ground, and perforated with a series of portentous-looking holes in which smaller, rounded stones sit. In the middle of these is another flat stone, like the lid on a churn.
Saint
The Bullaun is thought by some to have been used by druids, as a “cursing stone” of the kind with which King Cormac MacArt was punished for converting to Christianity. But like a later sect, Mecredy’s motorists, the Christians were here to stay in Bonane. And a legend attaching to the Bullaun concerns one of their saints.
It’s said that a woman stole milk from a neighbour here and was using it to make butter. Then the local holy man, Fiachna, caught her and petrified the butter rolls: hence the oval stones. But that wasn’t all. Where the highwayman of the song escaped with a prison sentence, the contraband dairymaid was not so lucky. She went the same way as her butter and remains frozen, to this day, as a standing stone.