We saw another landmark that people use from the sea. It’s a point on the tip of a peninsula. And we didn’t see the whole of it, but we got close to Ceann Iorrais, or Erris Head.
The scenic viewpoint of Erris Head is said to give you views of the ocean and rocky cliffs. You have to go across a number of fields. Today, they were very muddy fields. It’s also a conservation area. Seabirds nest on the cliffs, included gulls and falcons, Irish crows, and more. You’ll also see geese, seals and other critters depending on the season. You can sometimes sea the dolphins and porpoises at sea.
If you could walk the route — up and off to the left from these first photos — it’s about three miles, and you’d see some old naval watch posts, and the ancient stones that make up some of the most exposed coast in this part of the world. The cliffs, made of quartzite, gneiss, and slates aren’t especially tall, rising just 295 feet above the sea.
Some of them are thought to be the oldest rocks in Ireland, dating back 1.8 billion years.
When the first people came to this area, it was native woodland, and had been since (relatively) shortly after the last Ice Age.
During the Neolithic period, about 6,000 years ago, the first people living in Ireland began to cut down the forests to clear land for growing crops and grazing livestock. Just below a thin layer of soil were those old rocks, and so erosion took its toil. When the crops began to fail, and this probably just took a few years, the Neolithic people had to clear the native woodlands further and further inland for their crops.
In the 1930s R. L. Praeger, a naturalist, described this as “the wildest, loneliest stretch of country to be found in all of Ireland … ”
Ocean and wind energy are the future around here. Folklore is a part of the past and the present. There’s one tale about a jealous stepmother who doomed her kids to spend 900 years as swans on the lakes and waters around the island. Another good one is about the mounds of the earth near a nearby village. They haven’t been explored, but are apparently not naturally occurring. The story goes that you had to pay a toll to come onto the peninsula or you were never seen again. I’m not sure if you can call that a case of highwaymen, since roads are a relatively new development around here, the first having come into service less than two centuries ago.
