When I Fell In Love with Ireland

Gere and me at Giant's Causeway

Ireland tales and stories do show up regularly in pieces I write here and sometimes in posts on my Facebook page. I hope you get something out of them.

This week, I'd like to tell you why I have become such a Hibernophile.

In 1993, when I graduated from Radcliffe Seminars (now Boston Architectural College) with a Certificate in Landscape Design, it seemed like a good idea to visit Italy and see all of the classic villa gardens that I had studied. Places where the history of classic garden design took root. My wife, however, had other ideas. That year she reached her significant fiftieth birthday and wanted to celebrate by touring the Emerald Isle where both sides of her family lived before fleeing the Great Famine during the mid-1800’s. For weeks we debated until coming to the compromise that satisfied us both. We would travel to Ireland but would focus on visiting as many of the country’s great gardens as we could in three weeks.

I had been to Ireland back in 1970 as part of a European tour to celebrate the completion of my undergraduate work. My three companions and I were on the way to London, but an airport delay dropped us in Shannon for an overnighter. I saw a bit of the green countryside around Limerick, but that was it. This would be Gere’s first visit to her ancestral homeland. She told me before we left that it would surely change her life. It did that for us both.

Arriving at Shannon airport on the west coast, we rented a small car and in the pre-dawn darkness, followed the compass southward through Tipperary to Cork and Kerry for several days. Then on to Waterford, Wexford, Wicklow, then Dublin. Then came Kildare, Meath, Sligo, Mayo, Galway and Clare. We even drove for a short while through Fermanagh in the North where soldiers riding atop armed vehicles waved happily to us. On that small island we drove over 3000 miles in three weeks on the wrong side of the road with me at the wheel most of the time. Accommodations at Manor Houses and first class BnB’s made us comfortable as we strolled through over twenty wonderful gardens of all styles and sizes. We ate very well.

Returning home to Charlestown, MA, the first thing we did was start planning our next trip to a country that stole our hearts. It would take us two years to return because I started a landscape design/build practice with the theme of construction that I called “Irish-style”. The goal of the second visit was to discover sources of products (sculpture, furniture, paving material, etc.) in Ireland. A business trip. One of the suppliers we found was Irish Natural Stone in County Clare. That spring we had met one of the owners, Francis McCormack, showing sundials and birdbaths carved from Irish Blue Limestone at the Boston Flower Show. When we visited his works and met his wife Mary, we left after giving an order and bonding with new friends.

The first delivery was a small heavy crate of stone dropped by DHL on our Charlestown doorstep, but soon we were ordering much larger boxes requiring a warehouse loading dock for delivery and storage. Then in 1999, when a work accident disabled me for several months, we took the opportunity to visit the McCormack’s once again, this time to become business partners in Irish Limestone, US. LTD

It wasn’t clear to us where this was leading, but if we were going to be in business in a foreign country, wouldn’t we need to set up a base of operations? Wouldn’t owning a house in Clare give us both a headquarters and a “home away from home” as the song goes. Frank and Mary pitched in and helped us find a ranch-style bungalow a couple miles down the road in Boston/Tubber and a banker friend who would risk writing a mortgage for foreigners. Even though the transaction went smoothly, more attention should have been given to the question of John, the man from whom we bought the house.

“Where is it you live now?” he asked with a somewhat confused face. When I answered “Boston”. He said “Then, how will you know where you are?”

Having a home in an area of rural Clare called the Burren, gave us the time to settle in and not rush around like tourists. The agricultural environs reminded me of the place and time when I grew up in a rural Massachusetts during the 1950s. Soon I was thinking how wonderful it might be to live once again where life was simpler and neighbors took care of each other. For the next 12 years we traveled back and forth between home number one and number two at least twice a year. There were always suitcases lying about partially packed. Aer Lingus was always holding reservations for us. We even linked up with a small car rental company who made sure to give us very good rates. The business grew slowly until warehouse space was leased to store ten foot, twenty-ton ocean freight containers arriving once each month with a-frames of stone slabs, crates of tile, as well as landscape supplies.

By 2008 we were finally a profitable operation, providing building materials for architects and designers in the Northeast states and California. The future looked very positive until the Great Recession. Our sales plummeted and our main stone quarries in Galway and Kilkenny laid off so many workers that they were no longer able to fill our orders. Still, we held on to the house and returned a few more times until dissolving the partnership and selling the place to pay off debts. It was then that we decided to retire and move to our house in Maine.

The last trip was in 2017 and, instead of staying in Clare, we again drove many miles about the countryside, visiting place we’d not had time to go to before because of the business. This time Gere finally got to discover Donegal, the place her paternal ancestors resided.  We’ve seen so many ancient sites and dramatic natural settings that sometimes, when I step out onto my snowy deck in the winter when the woodstove is burning, the smoky smell reminds me of turf being burned by our Clare neighbors only a mile or so away from the home we called Kiltacky Mor.