In the summer of 1999, I drove over the Cousane Gap and, cresting the narrow mountain road, laid eyes on Beara for the first time - the glory of its mountains, valleys, forests and bays stretched all the way to the distant horizon. I was in West Cork to make a start on this thing called writing-a-book that I’d been stewing over for ten years or more. By the time I got to Eyeries at the tip of peninsula, I was head over heels in love. Huge banks of clouds roiled over the Atlantic before scudding across the shimmering expanse of Bantry Bay. In the embrace of the seascapes lay vistas that were in equal measure peaceful and inspiring as they were wild and distracting. It wasn’t long before I discovered that natural elements are the most temperamental of artists - their seasonal whims, their daily fancies, their hourly moods paint, sculpt and colour Beara with wonderful abandon.

There is something about the untamed landscape, it’s geological formations and fantastical mountains extruded like slabs of untidy Viennetta, folded, scrunched, squeezed and hewn by volcanic and glacial activity millions of years ago, that energizes from within. The precious pockets of ancient Atlantic rainforest that dot the peninsula, pristine beaches and mystical standing stones come together to form a creative cocoon. Now, twenty five years later I know that my writer’s heart and soul has lived its best life in our small mountainside cottage on the Caha range. There is a peace and quiet that frees the mind though the views are actually very distracting and my writing is usually done facing a blank wall!

Being a writer leaves you prone to periodic bouts of writer’s block. This is good because it allows you to be creative with the solutions. They don’t have to be sensible or logical, they just have to work. There is no point in telling a writer not to procrastinate - that’s like telling a monkey not to scratch. It doesn’t help to ask a writer to get a grip, we might let go of the only straw we are clutching at. After all, if you have writer’s block at least it affirms your belief that you are a writer.

My solution is to immerse myself in the Beara landscape, to let its ancient magic work on my senses. The old sash windows may be single-glazed, with stiff catches and beads of condensation glinting in the early morning sun, but beyond it is the Ireland I love. Downhill from the house, the Glengarriff river rumbles over a huge rocks, moving swiftly past banks of sally willows in a headlong rush towards the harbour at Blue Pool, a few miles away. The green collage of hillside pastures often fades away behind a fine mist and bands of rain follow, driven in sideways sheets by a whippy wind. Yet a clearance from the West is inevitable, rainbows arch across the valley and the writing begins to flow once again.

Coming from India and now having lived in Ireland for nearly four decades, a double dose of national hangups colour my writing. The country of my birth and the country I call home have a shared obsession with family, religion, politics and not making a show of yourself. Stories thrive in this heady mix of plot possibilities and for the last twenty years while I wrote and published three other books, I constantly mulled over the characters in my new novel The Inheritance. Fascinated by the tragic history of O’Sullivan Beare and his people, I was determined to work that story into a thread that ran through the book. I finally began writing it during the first few weeks of the Covid pandemic, using our own cottage as the setting.

Then, in the break between lockdowns, having decamped from Kildare to Glengarriff, I stumbled across the most incredible piece of information that literally made my hair stand on end. The narrow and remote mountain ridge on which our cottage is situated actually straddled the ancient battlegrounds of the very siege that I was trying to weave into my story! This discovery, that in the winter of 1602, the English army had camped in the swampy forests in the valley the left of our cottage, while in the valley to the right, O’Sullivan Beare and his followers had remained hidden for six months, was exactly the sort of impetus I needed to spur my writing on. From thereon, I felt that I had to and was meant to write this book, to honor the memory of those many hundreds who perished in what is now the Glengarriff National Forest.

Writing might be a solitary pursuit but I believe not much is achieved in isolation. In Beara, I’m lucky to be surrounded by friends who are very protective of my writerly ambitions. This really matters because most writers, some time or the other, are just a sentence away from throwing in the towel. My immediate neighbours have been incredibly supportive and if I headed into Caseys in Glengarriff, Donal Deasey the landlord would inevitably give me bits of information, both historical and contemporary, that added to the scaffolding of my novel as it progressed. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that a thread of magical realism runs though The Inheritance - conceived in Beara it could be nothing else!

by Cauvery Madhavan

The Inheritance publishes September 19th