The Famous Five On Crack

I’m standing, hands on hips, with the kids and their cousins staring at twenty or thirty geranium pots outside the front door of our castle. 

“Jesus, when they said the key would be under the flowerpot, they could have been a bit more specific,” I whine, like a castle renter locked out of his castle.

“We’ll just have ti look under them all is all,” a niece throws out with youthful good humor, and pragmatism. 

The kids launch into the search with kids’ boundless energy and enthusiasm for the adventure of staying a week in real castle.

“Shouldn’t a place like this have a hunchback-butler who just appears out of a crack in the wall, and glares through his one good eye at us to let us know that we don’t belong here?” I posit to my brother-in-law.

“Awh, would ye’s quit ben borin’ ould adults, an’ help us with the scavenger hunt,” the pragmatic child snaps.

After a lot of toppling over of geranium pots, we crack the code.  The key was not under a flowerpot, but was under a small piece of concrete that, along with quite a few companions, had separated themselves from the façade of our rented castle.

Of course, we should have known there’d have been trickery involved – the castle crowd couldn’t have ruled Ireland for eight hundred years without the use of trickery!

The castle’s setting could hardly be more idyllic.  An imposing promontory, overlooking the grassy, dotted with sheep, islands of Clew Bay.  At the mouth of the Bay lies Clare Island, half mountain, half lowland, it’s rocky coastline sculpted by countless Atlantic storms.  Across the Bay, a conical mountain dominates the skyline, and psyche, of west Mayo: Croagh Patrick.

On that mountain, a devoted Christian, from France, or maybe it ‘twas Wales, or maybe he was son of a Roman fish and chip shop owner in Glasgow  … well, he had to come from somewhere foreign anyways, cause the Irish were too busy killing one another over who owned what piece of bog to be thinking of anything spiritual.  Anyways, up that mountain this fella, fasted for forty days and forty nights before coming down, stopping in for a pint in Campbells in Murrisk, copyrighting the name Saint Patrick (he probably had to do it by fax, it ‘twas long ago,) and then going on to drive all the non-human snakes out of Ireland.  Good man yourself Paddy!

Creaking open the appropriately heavy castle door, we launch into our adventure:

Once inside, we’re greeted by the obligatory grand stair sweeping into the Front Hall.  It’s important to note, I know this as the(one week) kinda-sorta owner of a castle, that castle room names are always capitalized to distinguish them from the rooms in peasant homes – and by peasant homes, I simply mean all non-castle dwellings. 

With an American twist, that we narcissistically imagine is for us, there’s moose head mounted above the front door.  Just for record, as moose were last recorded as living in Ireland around about the year never, it can be safely assumed this stuffed moose was just more of the castle dwellers’ trickery.

On we go, into the Living Room, a large, high ceilinged, used furniture warehouse, with a fireplace the size of a Galway flat.  The Dining Room sits twenty at the table, has its own large fireplace, and a two-person breakfast table by bay windows that perfectly frame Clew Bay.  Off the Dining Room, runs a Servants Corridor to the kitchen, which is a full production affair; an eight-burner stove, with an oven the size of a Galway …, you get the gist: Everything is castle sized! 

Out the kitchen door is the sort of high-walled yard in which once upon a happy-for-a-few-miserable-for-most time was likely a kitchen garden, but now it’s just an overgrown mess, and a series of rambling sheds for the storage of ‘castle stuff:’ Vats for boiling oil, spare parts for the portcullis, wooden stocks for punishing miscreant servants, cans of anti-sapper spray.

We stomp up the sweeping staircase, to find there’s enough bedrooms to sleep a small village, and a series of dodgy bathrooms with early 1900’s plumbing fixtures by “Maguire & Gatchell, Ltd., Sanitary Engineers” – an old firm from Dawson St, Dublin.  The kids chose the servants quarters, which have a plethora of beds to choose from, all at odd angles, perfect for pulling all-night-movie-watching-tall-telling sessions.

As one does, we occupy the castle – also known as bringing in our luggage.

That evening, decidedly non-period, disposable grilles flare up under copious amounts of starter fluid.  Soon the smell of meat – beef from the Centra in Newport, not moose valiantly hunted in a mythical time – fills the castle grounds, which happen to mainly used for parking cars now.  After a veritable feast, washed down with a rich sampling of the best-of-the-West’s craft brews, we retire to our enormous bedrooms like feudal lords and ladies: fat, happy and drunk!

The next morning, with my internal clock unable to reset itself to holiday mode, I’m up at six rambling, Quasimodo style, around the castle.  I stare out the Living Room window, the sun is well up over Clew Bay.

Inside our castle, my senses sharpened by a mild-trending-to-severe hangover, I start to “notice” things:  Like the door of the fridge needs a broom jammed against the opposite wall to keep it closed.  Last night, retrieving yet another brown bottle, this was hilarious; this morning, it’s a pain in the arse.  The Dining Room floor creaks, a lot – so much that, to avoid an unscheduled visit to the basement, I unconsciously start to use a circuitous route to get from the Servants Corridor to the breakfast table.

The Servants Corridor is quite simply a crime against humanity: Part symbol of the dark life of the downtrodden Irish, forced, by the threat of starvation, to smilingly serve their colonial masters; part public health hazard, arising from years of food pounded under servants’ feet into the blackened carpet; part architectural insult, an unlit, dangerously uneven floored passageway, that separated the “have-nots” from those who “have” by virtue of forceable taking.

Two cups of strong coffee and a walk on our beach later, I’m feeling a little more positive.  The listing agent indicated that we could “tell anyone we wanted to leave the beach, after all, it is private!” 

I’m imagining that I’m a few reincarnations away from having the stupidity or arrogance (if there is in fact a difference) to tell an Irish person that they have leave a beach because, “after all, it is private!”

Kids, with their magical sense of wonder and fluid imaginations make the most of their castle.  With them, we explore further, finding a staircase leading to a tower roof – sadly, and badly, shut off from access; “DANGER” a handwritten sign taped to the piece of wood, not-blocking our access, warns.  In the Games Room we uncover a trove of old games, play darts and billiards, check out an aged tourist map of Ireland. 

Behind an odd sized door, the kids find the motherlode – kayaks, a standup paddle board (of sorts), an inflatable canoe.  With the sun, now high in the sky, transforming Clew Bay into a tray of glistening diamonds, the kids don bathing suits and head for the water, which is a little colder than advertised by the glistening; actually, a lot colder!

Undaunted, the kids wear out Clew Bay, living the “The Wind in the Willows” maxim that “there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” 

The adults spend the day engaged in the uniquely human activity of finding fault with that which previously impressed them.  We discover ourselves to be smarter than we thought, perhaps even “raaather smart!”

As the sun sets slowly on our castle; the not-yet-disposed-off disposable grills get pressed into savory service once again; the broom-handle-jammed-close fridge stocked with the finest west of the Shannon ales, ciders and lagers; we tipsily damn our enemies; marvel at the size of the moon; scream at a World Cup Soccer game being played thousands of miles away in Russia; eventually stumbling off for our feudal bedrest.

The castle, it turns out, is not really a castle.  It’s more a manor built in the castle style of architecture.  About one quarter of the footprint was a real castle, as evidenced by the narrow-slit windows, and the tower with its winding stair badly blocked off.  The rest of the building is a landlord’s house, built to mimic a castle. 

The kids, keen on the killing parts of history, had wondered how you’d keep Vikings out of this castle.  Turns out our castle was temporally saved from such a fate: The Vikings had stopped their trademark raping and pillaging a solid thousand years before our castle was even built.  And lucky we were too, as even the most obese Viking, Sigurd the Stout, would have easily clamored in the Dining Room windows, his great sword held aloft to slay all before him, until he tripped in the dark of the Servant’s Corridor, and impaled himself on the sword blade.   

Trickery, I tell you.  They held this country by trickery!

We get used to castle living. You get to burn off half your breakfast calories repeatedly toing and froing along the Servants’ Corridor for forgotten items.  Dining formally turns out to facilitate wine consumption.  We learn to tell visitors to go around to servants’ entry. 

When out and about in the local area, and getting ready to go home, the kids revel in loudly proclaiming, “Awright now, time to go back to our castle.”

And then of course, seven sunsets over Clew Bay are worth everything.

Friends and family visit, sitting in deck chairs, imbibing, marveling at the beauty of the island dotted Bay, Croagh Patrick, Clare Island. 

Some want to know the history of the castle – we don’t know it, and don’t have good enough WiFi to discover it just then, but we suspect it won’t be favorable to the Irish. 

Some want to poke around and get a feel for the castle.

“Ya know,” one of the poker’s says.  “This is sorta like one of dem Famous Five books.  Do ya remember Enid Blyton’s books.  Where the five young ones, they must have ben only twelve or so.  Somehow, they’d end up at Auntie Gertrude’s manor for the summer, an’ they’d find some stupid mystery to solve, a stolen chalice or a missin’ cat.  You know completely pointless, but fun.”

“Yeah, maybe they could solve how to keep the fridge closed without the broom,” I brattily suggest.

“No, no, no you’re just being your cynical self.  This is just like a Famous Five book.  You should write a new one.”

“I will: The Famous Five On Crack!”