Sunday, February 3, 2008
Bangor
One sunny morning a few weeks ago I went for a walk and when I reached the main road I turned west instead of east – towards the country instead of towards town, with the idea that I would go find the Crawfordsburn village that the ladies mentioned to me when we went to lunch at the Rambling Rose. After over 2 months here it was the first time I’d taken the Crawfordsburn Road and was amazed to discover after walking for just about ten minutes that I was reaching the end of Bangor and was heading into the hilly green countryside.
Most pleasant, aside from the sheer pleasure of walking, was the presence of a sidewalk, narrow though it was, all along the way. I strolled past the big Sharman manor and the pastures, and around the curve and across the river into the lovely Crawfordsburn village which looks as if it has been preserved like a display at the Ulster Folk Museum (except for the shiny new cars parked along the street) but is in fact the home of several businesses, lots of houses, a working pottery where residents of a nearby special-needs residential community work, and a top-rated restaurant and hotel called The Old Inn where I hope we can eat once before we go. I turned around and headed back the same way I had come, marveling at the difference between rural and urban Bangor and how quickly one changed into the other.
I took Walt and Reed on this same walk a few days later and discovered that if we went just past the restaurant and turned the corner to our right (peeking in the open windows of the restaurant’s busy kitchen as we went) we came across the entrance to a pathway that wound down into the woods and across a little bridge and under a train trestle, eventually coming out after a restorative stroll at Crawfordsburn Country Park. Several other people were in the park enjoying being out of the breeze. We continued along the coastal trail towards home and got home as it was getting dark, hungry and ready for a fire after what turned out to be a 3 hour, several miles long hike.
"Burn," by the way, is an old Scottish word for river, neighbor Albert told us the other day, which explains the many times it turns up in place names here: Westburn, Bryansburn, Crawfordsburn... since the Protestant Scots were brought over by the English to colonize Ulster back in the 1600s when the English monarch got concerned about Irish (=Catholic) unrest in the region. I don't suppose they realized then how they'd be sowing the seeds of conflict for centuries to come. Now these parts are mostly Protestant, especially Newtownards just south of here which is about 97 percent Protestant, Rev. Nigel told us during our visit for coffee the other day. (Nigel, who is the same age as I am, grew up in Belfast. He has a friend that upon meeting a Jew wanted to understand if he was a Protestant Jew or a Catholic Jew. Seriously.) I doubt, although I haven't confirmed this, that old Scottish words are used much in other, still Catholic, parts of Ireland.
A big loyalist paramilitary mural painted on the side of a house in Bangor was just painted over last week as part of a new initiative to promote peaceful cooperation and forward thinking. I've seen several of these - with their acronyms UVF etc. and big fists and other provocative symbols - and wondered why something so offensive was still around - but obviously they're relics. New murals will replace them. In a place where "integrated schools" refers to schools where Protestant and Catholic children are educated side by side (and these are still not common), this is a small but positive step forward.
