We have arrived at the Carrig House Hotel, a countryside hotel of the type they do particularly well across the British Isles, it seems: an old converted mansion in a beautiful spot (here, on the shore of a lake in County Kerry), with wallpaper and old baths, supremely comfortable beds but two taps instead of one, creaky floorboards, and little sitting rooms with fires jumbled together on the ground floor, and excellent, hearty food with local ingredients (though here the chef has a great fondness for yuzu).
I am feeling much better, and even my appetite has largely returned, which was good as our dinner was massive. I had a nice roasted quail to start, followed by a spectacular lamb and decent sticky toffee pudding.
In the morning, still in Cork, we visited the Blarney Castle, arriving five minutss before the tour groups, so able to walk around the castle and kiss the Blarney stone before the queues became an hour long or more. It was an enjoyable castle, nicely crumbling and with murder holes and oubliettes, and the Disneyfication stopped short of the toothaching. I didn’t kiss the Blarney stone myself, feeling no desire to change my habit of silence, but the Gentleman Friend topped up his gift of the gab.
Then we strolled around the really beautiful gardens. There was a strong smell of wild garlic in the air (admittedly not my favourite scent), and the flowers were in bloom. Particularly beautiful was a fern garden at the foot of a small cliff in the middle of a forest, so the path opened out into a small valley with a waterfall to one side and cradling ferns and tree ferns, under the green shade of towering trees.
A rock garden had a dolmen and a cave that once people lived in, though the interpretations here were rather irritatingly focused on witches and making wishes, etc. So I don’t know if the so-called druid stones were actual druidic stones, believed to be so by locals, or dubbed so by Victorians.
After a bus ride to Killarney, we took a taxi the final leg to our hotel, which lies on the shore of Lough Caragh. It is beautiful country, green and peaceful, of course, and ringed with misty hills. Our taxi driver was a very large gentleman (there are many very large people in this part of Ireland) who seemed profoundly uncomfortable in his self. He told us a long, rambling, slightly anxious anecdote about how a visitor asked him to drive him to visit one site and then another, and he said it was not possible as the journey time was three hours and it would be dark by the time they arrived at the second place. The visitor was outraged at what was perceived as an attempt to thwart what she wanted, and insisted. At the end, he said, he turned around to find her fast asleep in the back of the car, in the dark. And so, the exchange between us:
‘So what do you do in London?’
‘I’m an editor’
With a nervous laugh: ‘Don’t use me as one of your characters then!’