A Visit to Cong
...and the Quiet Man
Driving north of Galway, rain was threatening. We’d planned this for ages, years possibly, and were silent in anticipation. You never know what you’re getting with tourist attractions. Tacky cash ins, over-expensive rip offs. But when you turn off the main road, on to a more narrow, familiar direction, Cong doesn’t disappoint. Despite the modern car park, we could see the village over the bridge and it looked as we thought it would. Even if they were cashing in on the tourist trade, they had attempted to retain the village charm of the movie. One of our favourites, still. ‘The Quiet Man’
We left the car and the rain started to fall. It would get heavier as the morning went on so we looked for shelter. Walking round to the village of Cong, the first sight that greets you is Pat Cohan’s pub. The scene of many of the best moments in ‘The Quiet Man’. The singing, the drinking, the fighting. Where Michaleen Oge Flynn goes to ‘join me comrades and talk a little treason’. Of course, it’s not a bar and never was. It had been a grocery store forever until it was converted into a restaurant not that long ago. Still, from the outside it is unmistakably Pat Cohan’s. And we loved it.
A good crowd gathered for the tour: Americans, Italians, tourists from all over. We spent a good fifteen minutes in the small museum commemorating the movie. Genuine memorabilia, costumes, artefacts. A short movie. The usual things you would expect. But it felt magical being there. You could feel a genuine love for the movie and for the familiar characters everyone there knew. They had all travelled so far to be here. Even in Ireland we had all come out of our way to find Cong, to be in those places that Maureen O’Hara and John Wayne had been.
And, of course, the tour was predictably wonderful. Even though our guide had done this thousands of times, his humour and energy were a delight and through an hour long downpour, kept us entertained: stories of his own family connections to the movie, some behind the scenes gossip, a recollection of Maureen O’Hara’s return to Cong in her Nineties. Couples were asking to have their photos taken in that seat, on that doorstep, over that bridge. For over an hour, we walked round in a glorious fog of recognition and nostalgia, smiling quietly to ourselves.
Of course, we had to visit the gift shop and buy a memento, we had to have a bowl of soup in Pat Cohan’s and ‘talk a little treason’. But as we drove away in the rain, seeing Cong in the rearview mirror, we did so in silence, a little bit awed by what we’d experienced. We’d both been watching this move for most of our lives, it meant so much to us. Watching it now has changed us a little. Lots of pointing and recognition and ‘we were there’ moments. But Cong was – is- and absolute joy.
