Category: Writing and Thinking Aloud (Page 2 of 5)

Continuing my inspection of the colonies, over the past month I have visited two of the great walled plantation settlements of Protestant Ireland: Bandon in County Cork and Londonderry in County Derry.

They were built in the same century and for broadly the same purpose. Today, however, they present their history very differently.

Bandon

I went to Bandon with specific intent to walk the line of the old city walls.

Unfortunately, I was about 350 years too late.

Most of Bandon’s fortifications were dismantled following the Siege of Bandon in 1689. The official guided walk was nevertheless interesting because it showed where the walls had once stood and pointed out the fragments that remain. Parts have been incorporated into later buildings and boundaries, and the old line can still be followed through the town.

There is something I like about history surviving in this way. Not reconstructed and presented behind glass, but sitting awkwardly inside the modern town.

Bandon itself surprised me. Much of the centre has the solid appearance of an early nineteenth-century market town, with numerous buildings dating from around the 1840s and earlier. In places it reminded me of Alnwick in Northumberland.

The Protestant inheritance is also difficult to miss. Churches remain scattered through a town deliberately established as a Protestant settlement in Catholic Munster.

By good fortune, I was allowed up into one of the church bell towers and even got to ring one of the bells.

There are worse ways of announcing the arrival of an Englishman inspecting the colonies.

Another thing Bandon has lost entirely is its railway.

For a town of its history and size, that seems a considerable act of neglect. The railway once connected Bandon directly with Cork and continued west into the country beyond. Today the tracks are gone and the journey from Cork has to be completed by road.

In this respect, the colony has not been particularly well looked after.

First they took down the walls. Then they took away the railway.

Bandon also brought me unexpectedly close to another piece of history I have been following: the Allman family and their whiskey distillery.

Allman’s had been a huge exporter of Irish whiskey to the United States, only to become another victim of the economic crash of the 1930s.

The family story produced something rather less predictable than whiskey. A Catholic former servant married the considerably older Protestant Allman in 1925, despite an age difference of around thirty years. They had a child the following year and subsequently spent several years in France.

Catholic and Protestant. Servant and employer. A thirty-year age difference.

There is a story in there somewhere.

Londonderry

I contrasted Bandon by taking the train north from Dublin on the well-travelled route to Belfast, before continuing on to Portrush and Londonderry.

It was only when I visited Londonderry that I finally understood why it is called Londonderry.

The city was founded by the Corporation of London as part of the Plantation of Ulster. London was not simply added to the name as some later political affectation. The connection was there from the beginning.

London created Londonderry.

That led me to another interesting thought.

The City of London itself has always occupied a peculiar position within the United Kingdom. It has its own ancient corporation, its own privileges and its own traditions. Even the monarch has traditionally had to seek permission to enter the City.

So if London is itself effectively a city-state within a country, and Londonderry was created by London, perhaps Londonderry is itself an independent city-state within Northern Ireland.

An English colony inside an English colony.

I rather like that idea.

There was another striking contrast with Bandon.

In Bandon I had walked around looking for walls that were mostly no longer there. The line of the old fortifications could still be traced and fragments survived inside later buildings, but I had arrived about 350 years too late to see the town as it had once been.

Londonderry was different.

Here the walls survived.

Unlike Bandon, Londonderry was successfully defended during the Siege of 1689. The walls did what walls were supposed to do.

They kept the attackers out.

And more than three centuries later, I could still climb onto them and walk around the old Protestant plantation city.

From the walls I could look down over the Bogside, across the old city and out towards the surrounding country. The geography suddenly made sense in a way that it never could from reading about it.

By chance, I also discovered a second-hand bookshop immediately beside the walls and came away with another James Bond book.

This seemed entirely appropriate.

An Englishman buying a book about an agent of the Crown while inspecting the colonies.

Sometimes a journey provides its own jokes.

Bandon had left me following the ghost of a wall.

In Londonderry, I walked on it.

As I walked around the walls, I found myself thinking about several of the coins I have recovered while metal detecting, including a Charles II penny dated 1681.

It is a small, battered piece of copper, but somebody once carried it as money. Somebody lost it. And while it was still circulating, the events that would shape places such as Londonderry were unfolding around them.

I wonder what the original owner of that penny thought of the news arriving from elsewhere in Ireland.

What rumours had reached them? What did they know? Which side did they believe? Did any of it seem particularly important at the time?

We now compress the seventeenth century into kings, sieges, rebellions and dates.

The person who dropped my penny did not have that luxury.

They were simply living through it.

More than three centuries later, I picked up their coin from the sand.

And then I walked the walls.

The Journey Home

The journey home took four trains and a bus.

I had the option of waiting two hours for the direct train home, but decided against it. In retrospect, I almost wish I had waited, if only to complete the sequence properly.

The Enterprise from Belfast was something else.

By three in the afternoon, half the carriage seemed to have cans in hand. It had the atmosphere of a travelling pub.

At one point, a disagreement over seating directly opposite me came close to becoming an altercation. One man was from Belfast. The other was from Dundalk.

I suppose some border disputes are not fully resolved even now.

I liked it.

Real life. Real people. Real history still alive in the genes.

After Bandon and Londonderry, perhaps that was the right way to finish it. Not in a museum. Not with a plaque. Not with somebody explaining what Ireland had once been.

On a train, with two men arguing across the old frontier.

Now, what colony to inspect next?

There are trips where you visit history.

Then there are trips where history starts arranging itself around you.

Staying in Cork, in Room 115 at the Imperial Hotel: the Michael Collins Suite. It sounds almost too neat, as if someone had written the itinerary after watching the film.

The Imperial is not just another old hotel with a plaque and a story. It sits in the heart of Cork, close to the streets that burned in 1920, close to the world Collins moved through, close enough that the whole period stops feeling like a chapter in a book and starts feeling like a physical place.

That is the strange power of staying in a historical room.

You do not simply think about Michael Collins.

You imagine him arriving.

You imagine the conversations that took place in the space you are sitting and sleeping.

You imagine the footsteps in corridors, the meetings behind closed doors, the pressure of being hunted, admired, used, opposed, and needed, all at once.

Was there anything spiritual there?

Yes.

Or at least something close to that. A sixth sense. A pressure in the room. A sense that the place had stored more than furniture, wallpaper, and hotel stories.

Was it Collins?

We do not know.

That is the only honest answer.

Maybe it was the room. Maybe it was Cork. Maybe it was the fact of knowing who had been there and what followed. Maybe it was the city itself, with its layers of rebellion, fire, empire, commerce, and memory pressed tightly together in a few streets.

But there was something.

Two nights mattered.

One night would have made the Imperial a curiosity. Two nights made it a base. Time to walk Cork, look around properly, take in the streets, the river, the old commercial city, the rebuilt city, the Cork that survived and the Cork that had to be made again.

Then began the drive west.

Not as a solemn pilgrimage. Not as a checklist.

Through the country roads slowly towards Macroom, then back down towards Bandon.

That was enough.

The story arrived through bends, fields, hedges, old houses, railway ghosts, small roads, and the slow pull of West Cork.

In Bandon, the Munster and a snack. Just like Collins himself that fateful day.

That mattered too.

History is not only plaques and monuments. It is also food, weather, roads, rooms, jokes, dogs, conversations, and half-formed thoughts.

There was no stop at Béal na Bláth.

By then, the road had already done enough.

The known story is simple.

Collins travels through Cork during the Civil War. His convoy is ambushed. He stops. There is firing. He is hit. He dies.

But driving that country does not make the story feel simple.

It makes it stranger.

Why that route?

Why that level of exposure?

Why stop and fight?

Why did a man whose whole reputation had been built on intelligence, secrecy, movement, and avoiding predictable patterns end his life exposed on a road in his own county?

And why does history so often give us the same image?

A powerful man.

A public route.

An open-topped car.

Gunfire.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

John F. Kennedy in Dallas.

Michael Collins in Cork.

Different men. Different countries. Different causes. Yet the shape repeats.

It proves nothing.

But it catches.

There is something almost theatrical about the open car. It turns status into exposure. It makes a man visible from a distance. It says: here he is. Watch him pass.

Maybe that was just how things were done.

Maybe security was primitive.

Maybe Collins trusted Cork too much.

Maybe he thought former comrades would not kill him.

Maybe the route was ordinary and only became strange because of the ending.

Maybe.

But the details remain.

The open car.

The road.

The decision to stop.

The low casualty count.

The political consequences.

The man who survived the British intelligence war did not survive a road in West Cork.

None of this gives certainty.

That is not the point.

The point is attention.

History smooths itself after the event. The rough edges get planed down. The narrative becomes clean. The questions become impolite. The dead become statues, then lessons, then slogans.

But the ground resists that.

Room 115 made Collins human.

Cork made the struggle physical.

The slow road west made the ending unresolved.

Bandon placed the story back inside ordinary Ireland: a town, a hotel, a snack, the road continuing beyond.

No need to stand at the memorial.

The trail was already there.

Sometimes history is not found by arriving at the final place. Sometimes it is found by moving through the country slowly enough for the questions to rise.

And sometimes the most honest sentence is not:

“This is what happened.”

It is:

“Look at this carefully.”

The Hill of Tara had been waiting for me since last year.

I had read about the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny, said to cry out beneath the true king of Ireland. Some places are sights. Others are summons.

Tara was a summons.

We drove there through Meath, through low green country that felt older than the official story. Four thousand years is the number usually given, but the ground seemed deeper than that. I had felt the same at Baltinglass, where the neglected remnants of a bygone age seemed too large for the explanation placed around them.

I touched the Stone of Destiny.

No sky opened.

No thunder crossed Meath.

No voice named me ruler of Ireland.

A pity. Ireland could use help now. Not from Brussels, policy, or another consent-manufacturing committee. Something older would be required. Something beneath process. Something that remembered what a people is.

Perhaps no king was there.

Perhaps the stone has learned discretion.

Odysseus did not announce himself at every shore.

The church stood nearby, turned into a visitor centre. I did not go inside. There was an entry fee, and the stained-glass windows had been completely removed. That was enough. A sacred building emptied of meaning does not become more sacred because someone charges admission.

The churchyard was better.

Fewer people went there. That is usually a sign. It felt older than the church placed over it. A Bronze Age enclosure perhaps. There were quiet stones there, unexplained and overlooked. One of them could have been the real Stone of Destiny.

That is not a claim.

It is what the hand thinks when the eye has finished.

I touched them anyway.

Still nothing.

The stones kept their counsel.

After Tara we drove to Bective Abbey. An ex-colleague from more than twenty years ago had mentioned it to me, out of nowhere. Strange how these things happen.

Bective was lower, heavier, quieter. A ruin, but still coherent. Sometimes a ruin remembers its purpose better than a living institution.

That was enough.

Tara did not cry out.

Bective did not explain.

The stones kept their counsel.

And I went on.

There are evenings that feel borrowed from another life.

I left home expecting little more than dinner and conversation, and somehow found myself standing beneath the lamps of the Irish Parliament while chants and drums rolled through the Dublin air outside the gates.

Flags moved in the wind beyond the barriers. Protestors clustered beneath speakers and banners, their voices carrying across the street in waves of anger, rhythm and conviction. Nearby stood two quiet watchers who I instinctively suspected were plain-clothes police, their eyes drifting casually across arrivals and faces while I waited to be invited inside.

Soon afterwards I passed through the security gates, exchanged my name for a temporary badge and crossed quietly into the inner world beyond the barriers.

There is always something slightly surreal about entering places normally reserved for the machinery of the state. As children we see such buildings through television screens and distant ceremony. They exist symbolically long before they ever exist physically.

Yet once inside, symbolism faded quickly.

The first thing that struck me was not power, but humanity.

The old guards at the doors carried themselves with the calm confidence of men who had watched governments rise and fall for decades. Staff members spoke warmly about the building as though it were a living thing they had spent years protecting.

One security man casually quoted Oscar Wilde to me.

“A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

He had no idea it was already one of my favourite quotations.

That somehow made the moment even better.

Outside, only a short distance away, stands Wilde’s former home. Dublin has a habit of folding history quietly into ordinary conversation when you least expect it.

The deeper into the evening I drifted, the more the atmosphere softened. Formality dissolved into conversation. Politicians spoke openly over drinks, sharing stories not of ideology, but of pressure, campaigns, close calls and moments they had stood their ground when events turned hostile around them.

At one point, a senior political figure moved swiftly through the restaurant with the practiced instinct of someone accustomed to constant movement and constant demands.

And yet even that moment felt strangely human rather than grand.

That was perhaps the strangest thing of all.

Inside the Parliament itself, the surreal quickly became normal.

You shake hands with ministers.
You wander corridors lined with history.
You eat in the restaurant and share drinks in the bar with politicians.
And after a while it simply feels like another gathering of human beings trying to navigate the age they were born into.

There was, at one point, a sense that the night had reached its natural conclusion. I had already wandered the corridors of Parliament, eaten in the restaurant, shared drinks in the bar and stepped back out into the Dublin night.

That alone would have been enough to remember.

Yet life occasionally opens a second door after the first has already closed.

An invitation came almost casually — a suggestion that the night continue elsewhere, this time in a Dublin pub accompanied by three politicians.

And so naturally, I went.

Away from Parliament itself, titles loosened further. The conversations became warmer, funnier and more reflective. Stories emerged not from prepared political language, but from lived experience — campaigns fought, moments of pressure endured, strange encounters, narrow victories and private doubts.

The deeper the evening drifted, the more Ireland itself seemed to reveal its character not through institutions, but through people.

Only later, stepping back out once more into the cool Dublin night, did the unreality begin to settle in properly.

The chants were gone. Dublin carried on around me exactly as before, indifferent to who had passed through which rooms only an hour earlier.

And I found myself thinking how strange life becomes once you begin moving again.

A few years ago my world had narrowed into obligation and repetition. Yet here I was — wandering through parliamentary corridors, listening to old guards dispense quiet truths while politicians traded stories over whiskey and wine deep into the night.

Life does not return all at once.

It arrives in fragments.

Autumn in Odessos.
Christmas Eve in the heat of colonial Georgetown.
A church in Tangier.
A windswept beach at dusk with a metal detector humming softly from finds beneath the sand.
An unexpected invitation.
The sudden opening of a gate.

And one day you realise the current has begun flowing through your world again.

Tangier had lived in my imagination long before I ever reached it.

As a boy I used to stare at old British stamps overprinted with a single improbable word: Tangier. Small imperial artefacts from a vanished world. Something about them haunted me. Britain, but not Britain. Europe, but not Europe. A frontier city where the edges of empires touched Africa and then slowly dissolved into dust.

Years later I finally arrived there myself by train from Rabat.

Not into the old city, of course.

Modernity rarely enters through the old gates.

The new station now sits outside the ancient heart of Tangier, functional and detached, while the beautiful old Art Deco station nearer the port survives like a forgotten actor after the audience has gone home. Rail-less now. Disconnected from the line that once carried diplomats, merchants, officers and travellers directly into the old international city. One more elegant relic stranded by time.

Tangier is full of such things.

Ghost structures.

Fragments of abandoned futures.

I stayed inside the Medina, where the old Arab city still breathes beneath the noise of modern Morocco. White walls reflecting afternoon light. Narrow passages winding endlessly downhill towards the sea. The call to prayer floating over rooftops as gulls circled above the Strait.

There are cities which feel built for commerce.

Tangier feels built for memory.

One walks through it with the strange sensation that history never fully departed. It merely withdrew into the walls.

By day I wandered through the old Medina. By evening I walked the Rue d’Italie, absorbing the remnants of the European Tangier that once existed alongside the Arab one. Faded balconies. Colonial façades. Cafés that seemed to belong to another century. Spanish voices still drifting through the streets long after the flags themselves disappeared.

Tangier was once an international city where empires overlapped rather than ruled outright. British, Spanish, French, Arab, Jewish, European and African worlds collided there beside the sea.

And traces of all of them remain.

On Sunday morning I attended service at the old Protestant church built by the British in the early twentieth century.

That hour stayed with me.

Not because of doctrine, but because of continuity.

For a moment it felt possible to step backward through time and glimpse the old British Tangier community exactly as it may once have existed. Merchants in linen suits. Naval officers. Consular staff. Families carrying hymn books through North African sunlight while believing, as all civilisations eventually do, that their presence there might somehow endure.

Afterwards I walked slowly through the church graveyard.

War graves.

Empire builders.

Forgotten surnames carved into weathered stone.

People who once stood confidently at the edge of empire, believing history itself moved in their direction.

Now most lie unvisited beneath palm trees and Atlantic light.

Tangier teaches a hard lesson quietly.

Nothing remains at its height forever.

Not empires.
Not languages.
Not influence.

Not even memory itself.

What fascinated me most was realising how close Tangier came to becoming something else entirely. In many ways the city feels as though it should have become Spanish. Even today Spanish lingers everywhere beneath the surface — in speech, architecture, rhythm and temperament. It remains the city’s second language long after the age that created it has passed.

Yet even that influence now feels impermanent.

Perhaps nowhere more so than in the enormous modernist Spanish cathedral built during the late 1950s. A brutal concrete declaration of permanence. Spain, it seemed, still imagined itself rooted there indefinitely.

But today the building already carries the melancholy of a future that failed to arrive.

That is Tangier.

A city where every civilisation eventually becomes an echo.

Arab.
Spanish.
French.
British.

One layer settling quietly upon another beside the sea.

And perhaps that is why I loved it so much.

Because Tangier does not flatter modern illusions of permanence.

It reminds a man that all power is temporary.
All empires recede.
All railways eventually stop at another station.

Even the ones that once printed their names upon the stamps of the world.