We woke up in Dublin on Sunday, which was great, because that’s where we went to sleep on Saturday night. The conference was over. I had spent time grading and working and finishing and delivering presentations. My lovely bride had spent her time running the conference and presenting and generally being awesome. (I never have that last requirement, which comes as some relief.) So, come Sunday, we were ready for a day with less to do, which meant, of course, we packed up our things, hailed a cab, and drove to the airport. There, we rented a car and departed the airport, reacquainting ourselves with driving on the left.
It’s an alien thing, and we’re now taking bets on who messes this up first by driving on the wrong side of some road. Also, we’re working on the terminology for the turns, which is the real challenge. Driving on the left and turning left makes sense, but you still have to wind up in the right correct spot. So it’s “tight left.” Driving on the left and turning right is fundamentally at odds with gravity, religion and the economy. So far, we are using “wide right” as our reminder to one another.
Anyway, we drove through some real countryside, heading across the island to Galway. Roughly, this route.
In the middle of nothing we found the need to satisfy hunger pangs and happened across a gas station that had a miniature food court stapled on to it. It was crowded because the local villages were holding weekend St. Patrick’s Day. While we waited — and waited — for your our food, St. Patrick himself wandered in. Good outfit, giant staff, clean white synthetic beard, awfully modern sneakers.
We arrived at our hotel, The Twelve, a fine modern hotel suite experience, where we stayed for approximately 17 hours, all of which was working, or sleeping. Before dinner I bent over the computer working on my TRP contract for work. It’s your self-report. Your what-have-you-been-doing-these-last-few-years report. I’ve been writing all of this for weeks and it’s actually a useful exercise. There are places where you can be reflective and philosophical and, if you allow for it, you can perhaps learn something about what you’re doing. Its the creative process of writing and self-discovery. Those parts were what was already done. Last night I was just putting all of the parts together, creating the internal links, making the PDFs. And then it was dinner time. We set out to meet our friend Sally Ann, her husband, and her student who presented at the conference. We went to a fish and chips joint and had a lovely time. Then it was back to the hotel, and back to work. After a few more hours I realized that the entire day’s work was for not. All that I have been coached to do is not what the CMS demands. That was a little moment of joy. Well, gather yourself, jot off a few emails, tear down the product you’ve made and send it in its individual parts. This document has grown to 88 pages. That’s what I’ve done the last two years. And much of that time felt like it was working on this. But it is submitted. One more thing off the list. And no small thing. Happy to have done it, happy to be finished with it. Wish I’d timed the whole effort, just to see what it took.
I didn’t even think about it at all over breakfast.
A good Irish breakfast is a fine thing. Lots of flavors. Some of them make no sense to my American sensibilities, but all of this was good. And it’s filling. I didn’t want anything until dinnertime, which is good, because after breakfast, after getting out of the room (hampered by a broken shower and solved by going to the room right next door) we were in the car and on our way.
We are driving about the northern portion of Ireland to see The Wild Atlantic Way. Here is a little video montage of the day. More below.
First, we hit Silverstrand Beach, which might not be on the Wild Atlantic Way. It’s about 250 meters of beach, meeting Galway Bay and stiff winds out of the west. Also, on the other side of a jettied pile of rocks lies this lovely cliff face.
(Click to embiggen.)
We’re finding a lot of shells with holes in them like this. Maybe we should make a necklace.
We stopped by Trá an Dóilín, Coral Strand, a beach filled with the remains of a seaweed called maerl, which has been pushed ashore, crushed by the water and bleached by the sun, it looks like coral. Maerl, when it is living, is a nice purple-pink color and in large quantities creates a spiky underwater floor. Scallops shelter in this prickly little carpet.
In the summer, this place will be dotted with snorkelers, looking for jellyfish and wrasse in these clear, cold waters. Historically, vessels called hookers would be at sea here. The shallow draft of the hookers meant they were good for the bays and the inlets, shallow waters and rougher seas. They’re not work boats these days, but for the last 50 or so years they’ve been pleasure craft. They host regattas for the hookers these days. It’s a small three-sail boat, with a lot of heart. One sailed all the way to New York in the 1980s.
Here’s a wider view of Trá an Dóilín.
(Click to embiggen.)
Then, we visited Glinsce. Not big enough to be a village, but important enough for a quick stop. The nearby sign had a helpful pronouncer, “gl – EENSH keh.” This area is important for its local fishing economy. The coastline here is quite rugged, and there are piers sprinkled along the coast up and down. We’re at one of them here.
Fishermen went out on row boats called currachs, simple wooden framed vessels that had a hide or canvas stretched over it. During the Drochshaol the Great Famine of the mid-19th century, the government encouraged more production out of the fishing industry, and so they built these piers and boat launches and the local boatbuilding industry took off.
The fishermen named their boats after saints sometimes, like Caillin, a 6th century Irishman. He is said to have studied in Rome, returned home, to this area, and started a monastery. Every other thing you can find out about him is fantastical, but scholars are apparently certain he was actual person. The boat builders put a little bottle of water from St. Caillin’s holy well into the keel off the vessels.
Let’s go see a castle!
No, that’s not it. That’s just some modern piece that’s meant to hide the house and BMW just behind it. Only kidding, this medieval-style gate dates back to 1815. The castle, about a half a mile walk down a sodden, muddy path, was built between 1812 and 1818. (There was a house and a Beamer right behind the gate, though.) Please stare at these cattle we passed on our way down that path as I tell you the tale.
She was not pleased with me getting so close and kept throwing hay at me until I got the message. It takes me a while to get the message.
Anyway, these castle ruins are near the town of Clifden. It was built for a man named John D’Arcy, whose family had owned thousands and thousands of acres in this area for centuries. Indeed, the original estate of Clifden Castle originally covered more than 17,000 acres. D’Arcy, a balding man with a prominent nose and worried eyes, grew this little area, and government funds helped the impoverished. By 1832, some 1,257 lived in 196 houses in Clifden, which also boasted schools, churches, a brewery and other industries. But a lot of this came at great personal expense. He died in 1839 and the land passed to his son, who wasn’t quite as good at managing things as his old man. Then again, it might not have been entirely the younger D’Arcy’s fault. The Great Famine came along just a few years later. Many of the people living on the lands fled or died, and the family went bankrupt.
Some wealthy Englishmen bought the castle, and it was a holiday escape for their family for several decades. Ultimately, it fell into ruin before the Great War. A local butcher bought the land for grazing, but that leads to an entirely different story we don’t tell around the cattle.
We walked carefully down the rutted tractor path, downhill and up, curving this way and that, trying in vain to keep water from seeping into our shoes. And then, at the final bend, we were stopped by water that was shin deep. I know this because I watched a man in rain boots walk back up from the castle toward his car. He said it would not be worth walking the rest of the way down, and I trusted his advice. This was our best view.
And then we headed on up Sky Road.
We’d been on Sky Road for a bit, but just after the castle it forks and you can take the Lower or the Upper Sky Road. Guess which one we did. And I don’t know that the steepness gives the road it’s name, but I don’t know that to not be the case, either. Up here, you get a grand view from up here over Clifden Bay and the offshore islands, Carricklahan East.
And you get the wind. Big gusts. All day long the wind would move you around. When we got here, the car was pointed downwind, and the breeze ripped the car door out of my hands and very nearly off its brand new hinges. This, believe it or not, was a relatively calm moment near the top of Sky Road.
It tops out at about 492 feet above sea level, which is, of course, just off to your left as you drive in this direction. In addition to the Atlantic, and the islands, you can also enjoy views of the fields, cut up into patches of heaths and grasses. The shoreline gets rugged here, as we are drawing a bit closer to the northwestern corner of the island, and the seabirds are making themselves ready for the spring. They’ve been told the sun may come out this week.
Improbably, especially given today’s wind, we saw a sign that described a growing national cycle network and this area has four loops, ranging from 16 to 40 kilometers. Today, the wind was blowing at close to 50 miles per hour. There were no cyclists, to be found … but only because we couldn’t find a place to rent bikes.
Our last stop, in the day’s dying light, was at the Aasleagh Falls, a picturesque place between where we’d been and where we were going. I was driving, following the GPS, and missed the turn. But I took the next turn, which worked out better because we went through a parking lot and down a path that went from charming country villa access to deeply rutted single track road, surprisingly quickly, before meeting an equally eroded path at a severe angle. You could only turn right. The GPS recalculates, and it wanted me to go left, but there’s no way I was making the angle in a car I’d only just met, while also driving on the wrong side of the car. So we got out and walked that direction while I pondered how I was going to back a car up out of the mess I’d just put us in. And then we found that there was a gate that was locked on that original road, so this worked out better anyway. So long as we could exit. And so long as no one locked the other gate.
We have a bag full of protein bars and warm clothes and a tank full of petrol. We could rough it.
The falls were lovely, you saw them from the side in the video, above, and you can see them in the distance here.
This is the Erriff River, which flows into Killary Harbour and then the Atlantic Ocean. So, if you come at the right time of year, you’ll see salmon jumping those falls. But I know you want to know how we got out of there. We didn’t! I am writing this from the back seat of the car! Guess who is mad at me?
No one, because we did not get stuck. I drove to the right, found a turnaround spot, and then gunned it back up that rutted path. We traveled on to the fabulous Knockranny House Hotel, an incredibly charming place in Westport. The only problem was getting in, because we timed it such that just before us in came a group of people who were very drunk, or who had never stayed in a hotel before, or quite possibly both.
I don’t know what the Irish version of “Count to 10 customer service” is, but the poor woman at the welcome desk was doing just that. Fortunately, those people got situated, after much trouble and deliberation, and went to the right. We checked in in under three minutes — I timed it — and went to the left. Here at Knockranny they have a restaurant that, a few years back, was somehow judged the best hotel restaurant in the world. This sort of honor seems silly and exclusionary. (There’s a lot of hotels in the world, and there’s a great little diner attached to the side of one in Tangier you just have to try …) But let me just say, this restaurant, The Fern Grill, was quite extraordinary. We’ll eat breakfast there in the morning before we set out for more adventures.
But, first, I have to write some students. I wonder if I should tell them where I am.
