Doolin

From Doolin’s harbour side you can see the ferries that ply back and forth to the Aran Islands. The rock is limestone, like the Burren, and the land beneath cut through with caves including the world’s largest stalactite and the submerged ‘Green Holes’, only discovered in the 1980s.

While the Aran Islands stretch across the sea to the North West, to the South West rise the Cliffs of Moher, 200 metres from the sea, shortlisted alongside Kilimanjaro, the Great Barrier Reef and the Grand Canyon to be one of the new seven wonders of nature. There is no beach, no sand or shingle, just sea and shear rock, but surfers travel there to ride the 35 foot wave at its feet.

The Moher visitor centre is dug and buried into the hillside with curved windows cut through the turf; Hobbit Town meets HiTech, The paved, stepped, and wheelchair-access routed area with its viewing points and wall of wave-patterned Burran limestone slabs, ends at widely ignored signs threatening danger to life and limb if one proceeds. You can see why the signs are there; it is not so much the lack of fence or wall between the cliff top path and precipitous edge, but the rock itself. The limestone of the Burran, Doolin coast and Aran Isles has ended and this is younger, softer alluvial rock, at the cliff top often little more than flakes of shale in hardened mud. The tourists peeking over the edge may be secure in footing, but the soft cliff edge itself might shrug them off to fly for a moment amongst the nesting gulls before hitting the water 600 feet below.

And out on the grass beside the forbidden cliff path, an Italian couple set up a video camera looking out towards the rocky headland, and sit in front of it to exchange rings.

Back at the visitor centre a sculptor was hard at work with chisel, angle grinder and chain saw, capturing the spirit of Maher from surfer to sea birds. Shane Gilmore‘s sculptures are found across Western Ireland, and he was commissioned to make this one in situ during the Clare Heritage Week. At Shane’s feet lay a collection of reference books; he explained that if he got some detail wrong, gave a bird the head of a gull and the body of a gannet, someone would be sure to notice.

It is only a short way from Doolin and Maher, and slightly longer of you cut back north to travel across the Burren, but worth it, for its near lunar yet surprisingly fertile landscape. Few roads cut across the limestone countryside but far beneath the ground are subterranean rivers and networks of caves left from past water courses, treacherous as they too can flood rapidly when rain falls and drains through sinkholes and caverns.

At a distance the Burren landscape appears barren, but between the clints, giant paving slabs of grey stone, the cracks, or grykes, are rich with wild flowers and lush grasses that supported communities from Neolithic times, who in turn left their traces in fire circles and ring forts. And near every parking place, each clint is topped with a tiny cairn or sculpture as visitors today still want to leave some trace of their being here, or maybe token of their hoped-for return.

Westport nestles on the far shore of one of Ireland’s great peninsulas, jutting into the Atlantic, with the Mountains of Connemara to the south and the wild coasts of Achill to the north. Some years ago we camped on Achill Island in late September. Most Irish campsites close after the first week of September but we found one campsite still open although only one other campervan stopped by in the few days we spent there. The site had several permanent mobile homes, and despite the 8 foot banks of grass-topped sand that protected the site each was held to the ground with structures of foot-wide girders to hold them down against the force of the Atlantic winds. We parked close between some of these and as the campervan shook in the night reminded ourselves that these were just mild September breezes, not the wild storms of the winter.

This time I had to set my face south cutting across Connemara to Doolin for the night. I took the coast road between Croagh Patrick and the sea, passing the car parks and coaches at its foot where the pilgrimage route begins. Although I’ll forgo the climb on hands and knees of the true pilgrim it would be good to climb it some day for the view and the sense of those who have visited this holy spot for a thousand years.

I do not have a SatNav and somehow at Louisburgh I took the wrong road. As the road narrowed to single track and then grass began to grow down the centre, I realised my mistake, but assumed it would eventually join up with the main road. In fact I was driving down a 15 mile cul-de-sac. Often when I have lost my way in a strange city, I have vowed I would get a SatNav, but now I am glad I have not. Global communications and perpetual internet offer instant information and allow us to plan every journey with printed Google maps and reviews of each tiny coffee house. But it would be a Faustian bargain if it were to rob us of the joy of just one unexpected and unplanned mistaken road to paradise.

On the far south west of County Mayo, there is a tiny nick in the coast on the map, and the indistinct line leading to it is this road, skirting the coast, looking out to islands and ocean, and ending at that nick, named like so many other simply White Strand.

Although my feet ever itch to wander, if there were a place to stop for a while and taste the ocean air, this would be it; but with many miles to go, I had just a few minutes to walk among the dunes and check where I was with three lads taking turns on a quad bike across the broad washed sand, before setting on my way again, back along the road I had come and again amazed at the way I had come and the fortune of following a ‘wrong’ path.

Through Connemara and many mountains calling to be climbed and lakes to be sailed; past Galway, the sound of tin whistle and fiddle almost audible even from the European funded ring road that bypasses the town’s old streets; along the coast of Northern Clare with the Burran on the left and sea on the right and on down, over the little bridge to Doolin and Fisher Street.

Fiona and I had camped in Doolin many years before, but we arrived late, the night was wild, and the ground in the campsite down by the harbour more like marsh than grass¹. So we stayed in the van, opened up the roof just far enough to poke out our heads, feel the wild wind whip our hair, and see the waves crash against the feet of the Cliffs of Moher. So this was the first time I had visited the legendary O’Connors and experienced a session there.

Doolin is a Mecca for traditional music: around the bar several Japanese faces, a lady from South Carolina, and a couple of hitchhikers from Lille meandering their way around the Western Ireland, cooking pasta in a battered saucepan. Perched on a bar stool, I chatted over dinner with a man who lives just 25 miles away, staying in his caravan overnight, ready for a day visit to Inis Mór, the largest of the Aran Islands the next day. He had briefly visited the islands 12 years before, but this time was planning to walk across Inis Mór to Dún Aonghasa, the huge Iron Age fort cut in half by the eroding cliff face. I was reminded of the parable “the wise man built his house upon rock”, but after over 2000 years even the limestone of the Aran Isles is no sure foundation against the buffeting of the North Atlantic waves, that can throw vast boulders up to the cliff tops from the sea 25 metres below.

At 9:30 the music group began to assemble, three men who clearly played together and others invited into the music making, an older man with no instrument who later sang, and others. It is an inclusive music, with no pretension, Guinness lubricates the beating Bodhrán and pumping accordion, and the old hands play alongside the young. One couple, maybe students visiting during the summer vacation, looked nervous but were welcomed in and a young boy, maybe 12 or 14 years old, sang and played tin whistle, gradually growing in confidence as the night wore on.