Cahersiveen

Killarney
I made it to Killarney but with the rain still coming down strong I only stayed overnight and then carried on to the town of Cahersiveen.

Cahersiveen
Cahersiveen is a small town on the western side of the ring of Kerry. When I was checking into the campsite I got chatting to Phil, the guy on reception, who told me that he had a friend who plays fiddle and might like to meet up to play some music... so the next day at 11am I met up with a fiddler called Peter Malarkey. Peter is a professional musician, he does a lot of teaching of traditional fiddle, but has also set up a fascinating project called binneas. Binneas is a project in which Peter is trying to collect traditional tunes which have never been publicly written down or recorded. It involves meeting up with old fiddlers and with the families of musicians who have died and may have got personal recordings or some kind of written record of the tunes hidden away somewhere. He has built of a collection of hundreds of tunes that have never been heard outside of small towns here in Kerry, and many which haven't even been heard around here for a long time. His hope is that he can make a public online library of these tunes so that they do not get forgotten. Peter gave me a bit of a fiddle lesson and taught me a couple of really nice tunes which have not been played for over 80 years and have most likely never been played anywhere outside of a small area of Kerry called Drumaragh.


As it is the weekend there were no music sessions locally but Peter told me of a good one in Killarney on the Saturday night, so I drove up there and after taking nearly an hour to find parking I joined in for a few tunes in a very noisy pub. The musicians were mainly button accordion players, there was also another fiddle player, a guitarist, and a bodhran player, but with the noise it was hard to hear anything other than the accordions.

John Bronson (accordion)

Last night I cooked another meal from THE cookbook. This time it was 'spicy sausage penne' except I didn't have any penne so I used fusilli instead. This wasn't just ordinary pasta with sausages and a bit of chilli - it involved cooking things in white wine and also posh words like 'saute' (BTW you can click on the images to make them bigger, that way you should be able to read the recipes).