Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

adventures / Friday / history / photo — Comments Off
20
Mar 26

Horn Head

This was our last stop on the day, our next to last day discovering the Wild Atlantic Way. The golden hour here is delightful. And it’s quiet, and mostly empty. At the first point two guys were briefly there. Pictures and laughs and gone. At the second stage there were three cars in the small car park, but they were getting set to leave as we arrived. The only downside was the wind, which brought in the chill as the sun retreated. But it was beautiful, nevertheless. This is Horn Head.

First is the way point, with the marker and the tourist sign. They want you to know about the seabirds. This is the summer home of the largest bird colonies in the country. Right now, the birdies are flying in, and in all they’ll be right here by the thousands. And it’s a regular haunt, the same birds, the puffins, the guillemots, the kittiwakes, come to these cliffs, which grow more than 650 feet above the sea. It was all carved by ice and the ocean, of course, and the cliff faces themselves are safe spots for nests.

The fulmars use the bare ledges, as do the kittiewakes and the guillemates. The puffins burrow into the grassy slopes. There are razorbills here, too, and when they aren’t sitting on eggs they’re diving for fish. They put on a great show for the shags, which raise their babies at the foot of the cliffs, with nests made of seaweed.

They surely picked a scenic spot.

Just a little over a mile away is the other part of Horn Head, where we saw the small parking lot, and the small group of people leaving. Once you’re parked you walk up this rock path.

Not too far away is a Napoleonic era watchtower. The idea was that the Irish were looking for French ships looking to invade. That spot was off limits. Dangerous path and old structures and all that. But there was a little World War 2 blockhouse nearby, and we walked there. It was a simple cinderblock room. A window to the front, facing the ocean, a small fireplace in the back. One door, through which some watchmen would surely have sprinted should they have seen some bad guys popping up on their coast.

The best part of the little blockhouse was that it still has its roof, and it kept us out of the wind, which was pretty intense, being just off the water as we were. We stood in there awhile and I waxed on about what those guys were doing and tried to figure out how they did it. My lovely bride was patiently waiting while I tried to figure out if the chimney was a bad idea. Probably not. Bad guys would surely assume that a watch station would be there, anyway, why waste rounds on that, and it’s better to be warm than cold. That’s why we stayed in there, after all.

Once again, the chief strategist of the trip is this one. She’s planned a great trip.

Though I prefer this photo. I can’t recall if she was laughing at me or the wind. Probably the wind.

Tomorrow is our last day out on the Wild Atlantic Way. We’ll surely make it count. Every one them has!

adventures / Friday / photo — Comments Off
20
Mar 26

Ros Goill

We continue on, passing through another beautiful peninsula on the northern side of Ireland. County Donegal is a place to see. We’ve timed the weather perfectly. If you want to go swimming, wait until June. If you come in March, bring a light jacket, and prepare for variability and the wind. But do come. It’s a beautiful place, as I have feebly tried to show you here. We’ve got one more day here, but we’re already scheming for our return. How could you not come back?

Ros Goill is heathland and bog, hill and pasture. There are nearly 800 people living here, with about a third being native Irish speakers. There’s still the weekly Gaelic football match and traditional music at night.

Across the way here is Dooey, the sandy place. Many of the places here are named after landscape features. Dinn a’ Deidadh is the cliff of the sharp teeth, for instance. Poll na Murlas is the hole of the mackerel.

You wonder how the mackerel felt about that name when they first heard about it. Dooey is just on the horizon here. Off in the distance is Sheephaven Bay, a big game fishing destination. Giant bluefin tuna is the catch of choice. Apparently, when you get off the big road and up into the peninsula here you get a taste of the traditional Ireland.

Just up from the Ros Goill marker, you round a curve and with no warning, no pull off, no parking lot, no nothing, you get this view. Click to open it in another window to get the full effect.

That’s just Ireland for you, round a bend, see something amazing. And the Wild Atlantic Way is perhaps some of the best of it. Of course we’re planning how and when we’ll come back.

adventures / Friday / photo — Comments Off
20
Mar 26

Island Roy View

This region is full of diverse wildlife habitats. Coastal Ireland has vegetated sea cliffs, grasslands (which were once ancient beaches for ancient tourists) and boasts a variety of rare species of plants, animals, and birds. But the freshwater lakes are a unique feature to this region. They generally have enough nutrients for plants, but not enough for algae. So the plants, like special ferns, don’t have competition. Somehow this ties into being an enticement for water fowl. There are ducks and sanderlings across the peninsula, as well as endangered falcons and Chough (think of crows) and plenty of other critters.

Sitting in the middle of this is Island Roy, or “the isle.” You can just see it in the background, below. Previously, this place was filled with farming, fishing, seaweed and shellfish gathering. If you were on the mainland and needed to get on to the isle, or vice versa, you crossed on stilts.

On a map it looks like a crude U, or a hand frozen in an arthritic position, with fingers going this way and that. It sits in the back of a shallow bay. The first causeways connected the island to the mainland in 1927. Finally, in 2001, the local community could officially call themselves an island. And, during high tide or particularly bad storms, it very much is one.

Here you can see the Harry Blaney Bridge, which is County Donegal’s longest span. Blaney was descendent of an IRA commander, and himself a local politician and farmer. At one time it was alleged he might have been an arms dealer during the Troubles. He denied it and the claims apparently never went anywhere. Over the years he and his brother built up a successful political machine. An Irish nationalist who resisted partition or compromising Irish sovereignty, his bio reads like he was the sort of socially conservative, rural populist man beloved by the locals who knew him, and devil have the rest. Now he has this bridge in his name. I wonder how many times he was on it between when they opened the bridge and closed his casket, four years later. He’s buried three miles away, but you have to take an indirect route, the sort so typical in watery regions, to get there.

The bridge with his name, though, turned what used to be a half-hour trip into a five minutes drive. Can you think of a better rural memorial than that?

Lovely as these roads are, anything that gives you back that chunk of time on routine trips is, you would assume, a welcome change. Of course some of the folks didn’t think the bridge was necessary.

adventures / Friday / history / Ireland / photo — Comments Off
20
Mar 26

Ballyhiernan Bay

Just to the west we found our next step. And in true local fashion, it’s beautiful, and entirely devoid of human life at the moment. Also there are a few houses dotting the area, reasonable little places, with people all at work, or tending to chores, or who knows what. It’s a sunny Friday in the spring, it’s a reasonable temperature, and no one is around.

Ballyhiernan Bay consists of a sandy beach, about a mile long, backed by low dunes and protected on its flanks by rocky points to the east and west. Directly through there, though, is the Atlantic Ocean.

The tides were well out, and the beach was pristine. There are cattle and sheep grazing behind us here, but it hasn’t always been as peaceful as all of this. The 3rd Earl of Leitrim, William Clements, a balding many of bushy hair, had all of this in his estate at one time. His family had earned it the old-fashioned way: they’d stolen it decades earlier. Also, he had a thing about assaulting girls and women, supposedly. A real tyrant. His historical pullquote has become Lord Leitrim was not a bad man – if he got his own way. He had a history of evicted people for the slightest reasons. So maybe not a pleasant man. Here, after several previous attempts on his life, the locals got their revenge. In 1878, on a windy, sleet-filled April morning, they ambushed the man’s carriage and killed him and two of his employees. A few people were arrested, one died in jail, no one was ever convicted.

And that wasn’t enough for the locals. A few days later, people tried to capture his hearse. Apparently they wanted to throw his remains into the street. In 1960, a Celtic Cross monument was dedicated to the men who killed the earl, “in the cause against landlordism.”

This took place about 10 miles away. From reading the above account it was not an easy death. But standing there, at the beach, having read the tourist marker, you only know a little a bit about this. The historical signs are selective, and bound by space limitations and public relations considerations because, hey, beach!

Off to the left side of the beach we spent some time among the rocks and the tidal pools that make up a part of the point.

It’s been almost 150 years. You wonder if any of the people living here now are descended from those farmers, or those “patriots.” You wonder if there’s any knowing slaps on the back at the pub. “My great-great-great-great-great grandpa showed him!” With history so deep, some stories would probably sound as if they knew those people, as if they were still looking for clues out on that muddy hill.

I found a piece of rusted angle iron on the beach. I wonder if it means something.

The pebbles were more interesting. I picked up a few and played with them on the way back to the car.

I should have been looking for patriots.

adventures / Friday / history / Ireland / photo — Comments Off
20
Mar 26

Fanad Head

We moved up the bay and are, here, pretty close, to the northernmost part of the emerald isle.

Fanad Point, the tip of a long peninsula, has long been strategically important, and hazardous for sailors. Today, about 2,700 people live in the area. The fishing industry has long been in decline, but livestock and salmon farming are some of the many economic drivers. Because of the dramatic coastline, and the varying salinity of the water, every lagoon is just a bit different, and so there are all sorts of different biomes.

For about a century the British had coast guard stations here and in other places around Ireland, but that all changed with the treaty in 1921. The Irish themselves took over, and this was one of about 200 lookout posts along the coast. In 1939 World War II began about 250 miles away at sea in 1939. Seventeen men kept watch here for much of the war, though the Irish managed to stay out of things. They and their counterparts listed dozens of torpedoed and ships bombed in the North Atlantic in December of 1940.

But the history goes back a bit further. The first lighthouse, a need inspired by the nearby wreck of the HMS Saldahna that we just learned about, came in to service here in 1817. This beautiful lighthouse was erected in 1886.

If you take the tour, you go into two main rooms on the ground level and learn a bit about what it meant to be a light keeper here, and about some of the experiences of the people who worked out here, which was a manual operation until 1983.

You have the great big light, of course, but for direct communication, at a closer ranger, you would use the flag system. Each of these flags serves as a letter, phrases, or codes. You’ve perhaps seen them on a ship. But you don’t often see them together historically, apparently. This complete and original set seems to be a rare thing in Ireland.

The people working here were simply the signal operators, a different setup than we had in the U.S. where the man that had to climb the steps also had to sometimes hustle out to sea to help people in distress. But, here, the key that climbed these steps just called the rescuing professionals. And those guys got help in 1969, when helicopters came to the peninsula.

The 1906 lighting apparatus was replaced in 1975 when the light was converted to an unwatched electric setup. In 1978 the assistant keeper was transferred. When the principal keeper retired in 1983 the station was re-classified as an attendant station.

Because I read, Brilliant Beacons, a book about lighthouses, I asked the host about Fresnel lenses. He immediately had me pegged as That Guy. Anyway, the light here sits behind a 300mm refractor. The light’s distinctive signal can be seen 21 miles away at sea.

And here’s a view from outside. We were just up there! That point in the distance is the other side of the bay. That’s some four miles away. So there, and well beyond, the light keeps the night.

There’s something romantic about lighthouses, we all seem to agree. And even as you learn more about them, that doesn’t necessarily go away. Maybe it becomes more mysterious. While many lighthouses the world over are now automated, and the ones still in operation can be vitally important, if a backup of sorts, we’re never going to look at a GPS system — miraculous as they are — in air, on land and at sea — with the same sort of wonder.

I think it is the style of technology. The lighthouse represents a lonely, perpetual vigil with no peers beyond the next lighthouse elsewhere down the shore. They stand there, quietly, and say a lot. And, without them, the very real possibility of doom awaits us. GPS, meanwhile, is omnipresent, and always chattering. You have how many apps on your phone that are tapping into it at any give time? And, sure, you can’t beat that functionality and the precision is quite something, but even in just a generation of everyday use we’ve come to think of it not as a lifesaver — which it clearly is in some circumstances — but merely a directional tool.

If you just sailed over here, rolled down the window and yelled to some landlubber “Which way to Scapa Flow?” you’d be no more impressed when the fellow gave you an answer.

There’s a little VR video you can watch at the lighthouse. You put on a headset and it tells the story of that 1811 vessel that sank nearby, the HMS Saldahna. The video is narrated by the captain’s parrot, which survived the wreck. Or a cartoon of the parrot. We’ll never know what the real parrot thought. The bird met it’s own grisly fate nearby soon after.

We walked along the shore and enjoyed some of the views behind the gift shop. They have three options to stay here, renting out the recently restored lightkeeper’s cabins. No phone, no wifi, it sounds delightful. Read at night, walk here in the daytime. It is probably a bit out of my price range, but if I ever disappear, add this to places you might look for me. But only after a month or so has passed by.

These are both panoramas. Click to see them in another browser, and then click them once more to see the whole image.

We got a few things from the gift shop, including dry socks. If you rent one of those cabins, make sure you take good care of your feet. The ground can be sodden here, but by no means should that dissuade you. You’ll love it here.