This place! This island! This Ireland!
This Monday has been marvellous. Really. Full of marvels. Set out for Castlebar, then on to Newport, Mulranney, and on to Achill Island. Achill only just makes it to qualify as an island. There is an almost isthmus connecting it to the mainland, but it is broken by a very small gap, requiring a causeway for access. Every moment of the place is a miracle. There is nowhere one can be, no direction to point yourself and then open your eyes, without seeing something that is breathtakingly wonderful. The ‘scapes – land and sea – are wild, harsh, particularly under a cloud-laden sky, and searingly beautiful. There are ruins of old stone dwellings everywhere, with their 21st century equivalent often on the other side of the road. There are sheep – more sheep than people, surely. (see pics) They are multi-coloured. What can this mean? It must be a branding, surely. They all have black faces. (I asked the shopkeeper in Westport, later, when I bought a calendar featuring the sheep, what breed they were. “They are sheep”, he replied. “All sheep are the same”. ) But they do have some intelligence. Along one byway, in search of a deserted village which was never located, I came across a man on a bicycle herding his cattle with a blackthorn stick. Just prior to this I had been acknowledged and given polite passage by a herd of sheep, shepherdless. The cattle were stupid, and could not work out which way was whither. One made love to himself in the lefthand side-mirror of my Micra. Stopped to chat with the cowhand on the bicycle. Mentioned that the received wisdom in the family I married into was that sheep were more stupid than cattle, but that did not seem to be the case here. Ready agreement. Sheep own Achill Island and know how to deal – even with Australian flies. But cattle!
There are no fences of course. Sheep have right-of-way, everywhere, anytime. But they are so engagingly friendly that one is absolutely delighted to accommodate their meanderings.
Discovered Keel Beach. The Irish equivalent of Elliott Heads. I went for a walk, with a mind to discover some sea-glass, TT, but alas, nothing but rotting flip-flops. Chased back to the Micra by rain.
Driving along the Atlantic Road along Achill Island under a leaden sky which emphasised the harsh beauty of the landscape, the thought occurred that surely this land must sing when the sun shines. Not long to wait for the proof. The weather changes in a moment, and it does sing!!
(While exploring this wonderland, I hear on an RTE Lyric newsbreak that this quarter, 7% of mortgages are more than 90 days in arrears, up from 6.3% last quarter. There has been debate on the radio about government initiatives re ‘debt forgiveness’ with reminders that this concept goes right back to the Bible – the Jubilee concept of the Old Testament. People call in to talk-back radio with stories of having moved out of a house bought before the GFC for an inflated price, and now living in a flat, still having to pay the bank for the difference between what they bought the house for and what it fetched when they had to sell it, no longer able to meet the mortgage repayments. They are unable to feed their children adequately after paying the residual mortgage on a house they no longer own nor live in. They are civil servants, teachers, etc. ( I have seen For Sale signs on houses, with lures such as 'Reduced from 170,000 euros to 100,000. Where can all this go?).
Peat bogs, I had thought, were a thing of the past. Not so. On Achill, there are real, functional peat bogs. There is a pic of me in one. As I stopped to look, a local couple were there, and obligingly took it for me. (see the folder on picasa) I appreciated having seen the story of the peat bogs in the Museum of Country Life the day before. Back in the day, the whole family was involved in the business of extracting enough peat for the year. They did it at the right season (can’t remember when). Father and big sons dug out the peat ‘bricks’, using an implement which was the same in the early twentieth century as that used in the seventh century (they were side by side in the Museum, the later one not able to improve on the design of the early one). The mother and young children stacked the bricks of peat, and turned them regularly as they dried ( not-so-dry peat burned smoky). Once dried, the bricks were loaded into straw-woven baskets and carried by the women and girls back to the home to keep the fires going throughout the year.
There are few remaining peat bogs being worked in Ireland, so the man in the gift shop in Mulranney told me. On the islands, and around the Roscommon area. Nonetheless, the European Union is trying to have the activity stopped, saying the bogs take thousands of years to form, and should be left alone and appreciated. The fact that the Irish have worked the bogs for thousands of years too without running out, as it were, does not prevail. There is to be a case about this in the coming months.
And today, the moratorium on spending has been broken. MIGs will be pleased to note that coasters have been acquired (you will have to wait for details) from a delightful shop in Westport. And on Achill, a long chat with a Kieran preceded the purchase of some wonderful woollen items being sent back home because I really cannot carry anything more with me.
Struggling to stay awake to see the No 1 of Stephen Fry’s top gadgets.
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