The magic of winter in West Cork, where music, food and drink lift the spirits
When our son was very young, we spent several Easter holidays in Baltimore, a beautiful harbour village in West Cork. We took the ferry across Roaringwater Bay to Sherkin Island and Cape Clear, where Fastnet Rock Lighthouse looms in the distance, wistfully known as Ireland’s Teardrop by mournful emigrants setting off across the Atlantic in centuries past.
Ah, yes, Baltimore. The town which was entirely stolen by Arab pirates, everyone sold into slavery:
The town was depopulated in 1631 in the Sack of Baltimore, a raid by Barbary pirates from either Ottoman Algeria or Salé (Morocco).[8] Between 100[10] and 237 English settlers and local Irish people were abducted and sold into the Barbary slave trade,[11] of whom only two or three ever saw Ireland again.
But slavery’s something that Whitey is uniquely responsible for, right?
I think it’s just that Whitey is the only one who’s deemed guilty if he did it.
It’s actually about who is likely to feel guilty enough about something they never actually did to cough up for grifters.
The Irish had Baltimore, we now get more balti.
Not only are the centuries of slave trading by the Ashanti and Dahomey rulers consistently ignored (blackwashed?) but Hollywood actually went to the trouble of making a laughable film portraying them as the good guys (good gals TBH).
Of all the grifts in the world, this is the one that probably infuriates me the most: the world’s most useless and pernicious people trying to lord it over us, on our dollar.
Go and invent your own fucking vaccines and sanitation, cunts. And at some point, pretty please for us having done that for you and decimated your child mortality, and devised the other stuff that lifts you out of your abject poverty might be… nice.
On our trip to Ireland last year we overnighted in the pub car park there on the way north. Free staying but we were expected to have a meal which was very expensive and not very good. That was one of our first nights and we quickly learned that when it comes to pubs and food that was the rule.
Lovely place though, there’s some good pictures on Google maps, and a nice coast to walk along.
Were not the Barbary pirates largely caucasian, albeit not European? Most people I know from places like Morocco and some other north African countries and the middle east, look pretty Mediterranean to me.
Thankfully the Irish never were slave traders. Eh? Patrick, how could you argue against that?
For odd reasons I’ve become connected to a village along that coast, closer to Cork, called Myrtleville. The pub’s called the Bunnykinellan. Astonishing location and that’s about it really.
The real connection for me is to Queenstown (Cobh, now). G-g Granpa was the lighthouseman there…..
Often Berber, yes. But Arab ruled.
For odd reasons I’ve become connected to a village along that coast, closer to Cork, called Myrtleville.
I don’t remember going there, but that whole coastline is impressive, which is why we went.
The real connection for me is to Queenstown (Cobh, now). G-g Granpa was the lighthouseman there…..
There’s an excellent motorhome site at Cabh, right on the waters edge just up from the terminal where the cruise liners dock, we stopped there on the way up and back. Lovely town but those hills are steep. A lot of history to the place. I was quite taken with the cathedral door, some lovely craftsmanship.
I m sure I recall hearing somewhere that the Dublin slave market was the largest in Europe at one point, hence why the French / English Normans invaded oireland to shut it down and why the oirish hate the English normans.??
Vikings ran that – Dublin was a Viking city at that point.
Pirates are why there few original towns on the Spanish Med coast apart from the defensible ports. The original town round here, which the municipality draws its name from, is 5 miles inland in the hills. Where I live was half a dozen houses & an inn in the mid 1800s. Yet it was a sizeable Roman town with industry & its castle is Moorish.
The Irish slave-raided Britain after the legions left and long before the Vikings turned up. Hence my allusion to St Paddy who was, as far as I know, the only British slave in Ireland to write about his slave days, or at least the only one whose writings survived.
When was slavery abolished around the world?
Saudi Arabia: 1962
Yemen: 1962
Dubai: 1963
Oman: 1970.
Mauritania: 1981
. . .
USA: 1865
Britain: 1834
Makes you think, does it not