Ireland of the unwelcomes

Frostbite, hypothermia and savage beatings. Polar exploration or tales of conquest in the Americas? Actually, it's Ireland

Endurance - Heroic Journeys in Ireland

by Dermot Somers

O'Brien Press, €17.95

Whenever the words 'endurance' and 'journey' are used in the same sentence it's impossible not to think of Kildare-born Ernest Shackleton's legendary Antarctic expedition of 1914 in the ship named Endurance, trapped in the ice for over 280 days before being crushed, leaving Shackleton and all his crew stranded. The journey back to anywhere even resembling civilisation is probably one of the most fascinating tales of any kind of exploration, polar or otherwise. It was a failure, but an heroic one, and not one man perished. Unlike Scott's ill-fated expedition to similar territories in 1910, brilliantly documented in the The Worst Journey in the World, written later by one of the surviving members (Irishman Tom Crean was also among them), Aspley Cherry-Garrard. Cherry-Garrard wrote, with distinctive British stiff upper lip "Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time that has ever been devised".

Dermot Somer's book of heroic journeys, Endurance, at first glance seems a bit of a let down. Heroic journeys in Ireland? Surely they pale in comparison to epic journeys such as Scott's and Shackleton's?

Somers, himself a mountaineer (and a successful member of the Irish Everest Expedition in 1993) decided to stay closer to home, but tries to give this island an exotic dressing by stating "let's not forget that Ireland itself once lay as far south of the equator as South Africa today" before offering harrowing tales of struggle in a country that you could, if you wanted to, walk across from coast to coast; as Michael Fewer did, in a 180-mile trek from Dublin to Galway Bay for his 2003 book Walking Across Ireland. The difference between tales of travelling in modern Ireland – whether it is taking a fridge with you as Tony Hawks did in 1989, for Round Ireland with a Fridge, or simply dropping into pubs named after McCarthy, as the late Pete McCarthy did in his book McCarthy's Bar – is that the Ireland that Somers describes is as remote in time for readers as it was topographically 1500 years ago. Whether it is the terrain of the Wicklow Mountains, where the author describes hypothermia and frostbite in some detail in the story of Red Hugh O'Donnell's escape from Dublin Castle in 1592, or the surliness and inhospitality of most of the Irish natives that the unfortunate Captain Francisco De Cuellar – captain of one of 130 ships in the Spanish Armada that made the lamentable decision to take the long way home – stumbled upon after being washed up on the shores of Donegal in 1588.

"I escaped from the sea with over three hundred soldiers.... With them I shared extreme misfortunes: naked, barefoot the whole of last winter, more than seven months through mountains and woods, among savages, which all of them are in those parts of Ireland where we ran aground."

Somers does of course point out that the Spanish were equally capable of savagery over the pond in those times, but De Cuellar's seven-month journey across Northern Ireland to Scotland is at times gruelling and incredible (he was savagely beaten and left for dead on several occasions, saved by good Samaritans) and at times hilarious in that dark sort of way ( the 'savages' viewed anything washed up on the shore as rightful plunder, even the Spaniards themselves who were left completely naked).

Other stories in the book are the march of O'Sullivan Beare in 1602; the 'power journey' of Queen Medb and the Cattle-raid of Cooley in the Iron Age; Brian Boru's Tour of the North in 1006; and Caoilte and St Patrick in the fifth century.

Passion, sharp detail, interesting asides and intelligent conjecture make the book an enjoyable read and Somers is adept at bringing the reader closer to the territory he is describing, as he does with the plight of Red Hugh over the Wicklow Mountains. "Fit walkers who know where they are going travel at a comfortable average of three miles (five kilometres), and can maintain that speed over long distances. Fugitives move faster, of course, but it might be in short bursts, and it is hard to keep it up as an average – especially in winter darkness, virtually barefoot, on rugged terrain."

The Barnesmore Gap is described as "a gigantic vee, slashed deep and direct through the flanks of the Blue Stack Mountains" which Boru had to negotiate. "Ferns and heather on the damp hillside make it an ideal breeding ground for midges," writes Somers, "There is no way of knowing whether our ancestors suffered from midges as badly as we do today. Perhaps modern hygiene leaves us more exposed. Today there is only one effective cure for the Donegal midge: a mixture of cow dung and paraffin smeared on the skin – and set on fire." Little wonder De Cuellar thought the Donegal folk savages if such practice was commonplace when he was washed ashore.

With only six stories spanning 1500 years, Endurance, in spite of its 250-odd pages, is as much of a tease than a hearty mouthful and a follow-up is begging to be written. Whether the material is there or not is another question, considering only six were chosen from over such a vast period of time. And with modern man getting round the country quite easily with a fridge, it's unlikely Somers has much by way of contemporary tales to choose from.

Tom Galvin