MAGAN'S WORLD:Manchán Maga's tales of a travel addict
LET ME ADVANCE the case for Co Westmeath as adventure-travel capital of the midlands. Not only does Lawrence of Arabia’s family hail from the county, but within 10km of my own humble hovel are two grand homes owned by figures who are intimately involved in travel of very different kinds.
To the east lies Tullynally Castle, owned by the renowned tree hunter, historian and adventurer Thomas Pakenham; to the west is Gigginstown House, home of the Saladin of the travel industry, Michael O’Leary. Both estates are a treat to cycle around: the care lavished on their lush meadows, artfully pointed stone walls, elegant stable blocks and lustrous-coated cattle speak of men who clearly adore their domains.
At Gigginstown one must be content with staring longingly over the fence; the estate is open to the public only on sale days, when, if one has the means to acquire an Aberdeen Angus or a retired racehorse, one might get as far as the stables. But Tullynally is open to the public all summer, and I have spent some of my most pleasurable afternoons wandering the gardens, a spread of walled enclosures and woodland groves peppered with exotic species.
The Pakenhams have been in Tullynally for 10 generations, so it’s no surprise they’ve got the garden right by now. Parts of it are unchanged since 1740. I like to lose myself amid the serpentine ponds, the Victorian paths, the jasmine and old rambler rose lined routes that wind under canopies of old beech and reveal sudden views of Lough Derravaragh, home of the Children of Lir.
Any visit is made all the richer by stumbling upon the avuncular Pakenham, the present earl of Longford (though he doesn't use the title), gazing meditatively at his beloved trees. He incites jealousy – not of his house, which, with 120 rooms and covering almost a hectare, must be a terrible burden, but of the fact that wherever I go in Africa I find his Scramble for Africastill in every airport and hotel bookshop 20 years after it was published. With such longevity, what hope have the rest of us authors got? As if this wasn't enough good fortune for one man, on his first trip to Africa he stumbled on a completely unknown medieval church in the wilds of Ethiopia. It rather casts into shadow my own discovery of a great cake shop down a side street in Quito.
O’Leary is just as great an explorer, having unearthed major European cities scores of kilometres from where they were previously thought to be. His discovery of Paris in Beauvais was a topographical masterstroke.
Both men have encouraged people to travel to places they would never have otherwise considered: Ryanair introduced us to the delights of Rovinj, Aarhus and Bydgoszcz, while Pakenham's Remarkable Trees of the World(a follow-up to his Meetings with Remarkable Trees) sparks its devotees to make pilgrimages to many of the mysterious and awe-inspiring trees that he catalogues. I've seen some of the baobabs and sequoias he describes, and a Ryanair flight brought me to the famous dragon tree of Orotava, but I'm still itching to get to the Montezuma cypress he found in Oaxaca, Mexico, or the Jomon Sugi, the oldest and grimmest cedar in Japan.
For the moment I am just proud of my expeditionary neighbours, and of the fact that for a third of the year I can stroll through Tullynally’s Tibetan garden of blue Himalayan poppies and yellow florindae primulas, which Pakenham collected in Tibet in 1996, and the Chinese garden of plants whose seeds he collected in Yunnan province in 1993.
I rest my case.
- manchan@ireland.com