craic addict

The weather in Ireland is great. It switches at ten-minute intervals between sunny, cloudy and rainy. The rain's not so bad--it's just vertical mist, really. By the time you've stuggled into your mac, which in my case is a large piece of cling wrap with a head hole that was given me free with a ferry ticket--it's switched back to sun again. There are places on earth where you'd feel rather silly setting out for a day's walk under a bruised and spitting sky, but here it's just a waiting game.

My first stop was Doolin, a one-street town on a bleak and marvellous stretch of the Atlantic coast, where the thin soil and its carpet of turf often gives way to naked rock. The Cliffs of Moher rise 200 metres out of the sea to the south, and to the north-east, the three Aran islands sit low and flat on the water. I went out to the smallest, Inisheer. It is so densely criss-crossed with stone walls it looks like the locals have just piled up all the loose rocks to keep from tripping over them. I walked to a church so old it is now sunk up to its arches in the surrounding earth, and to a sacred well; I stained my fingers picking blackberries; had a pee in a seaside cave with only an off-shore seal colony as my witnesses. I hope. I also eavesdropped on a couple of jaunting car drivers who were having a long conversation in Gaelic. That night I went to a couple of pubs in Doolin to hear some Irish music. The best was produced by four old guys sitting around a booth, picking up one or another of the instruments on the table--bodhran, fiddle, tin whistle, flute, guitar--as the song dictated, or sometimes just singing in English or Irish.

The next day I set out very early for a walk along the Cliffs of Moher. I had a hand-drawn map given to me by a man in the pub who told me it would be an unforgettable experience. He wasn't wrong. Did I mention those cliffs are 200 metres high? Yeah. Well. The path was a ribbon of yellowy-silver trodden-down grass that insinuated itself along the edge of the cliff, on the outside of the fenceline. For a long while I thought that was awesome. I was in one of the most beautiful places I'd ever been, savage, bright green deep grey, with the gulls riding the currents around my feet. I was scrambling up and down hillocks of turf so thick and soft it was like a green pelt, scaling rogue bits of fence, and jumping across little streams--well, the tops of waterfalls really. Then I thought, no one will ever believe I did this, I'd better take a photo. Thus:



If you look carefully you can see that the grass stops being horizontal and starts being vertical about a trainer sole's length from where my toes stop. It hadn't bothered me to see that with my own eyes, but when I saw it through the viewfinder I was struck with the sudden and unwelcome conviction that I. Was about. To die. I edged along for maybe another kilometre, gibbering softly to myself, until I came to a point where the path ahead of me had collapsed. There was a neat hole, about fifty centimetres across, where ground should have been. On my landward side there were three strands of rusty barbed wire separating me from a bog and a herd of belligerent-looking cows. I considered the jump. I contemplated the fence. I chose the fence. Hiking my knee up toward my left ear, I managed to get one leg over the wire. Then, folding up like an extremely complicated and terrified clotheshorse, I gymnasticised myself over to safety. I struck out through the field, angry cows be damned, until I found a road where I thumbed it back into Doolin. I sat down in the first pub I could find and put a load of hot food into the strange hollow where my insides should have been, and picked up three mars bars for a chaser. I only intended to buy one, but I absent-mindedly managed to buy it three times. Which says something about the role of chocolate in a crisis. And then I caught the bus to Killarney.

Killarney's the tourist hub of Kerry, a supernaturally lush corner of the south-west of the country, and it seemed kind of tame to me after the wind-scoured County Clare. Mind you, I stuck to the flat land for the most part. Lakeside strolls. A little cycling, with stops for coffee and scones. Nice things. Touristy things. Things that weren't likely to see me plunging to a splattery death. I saw two grey herons and two eagles (that is to say, about a seventh of the eagle population, so I think I was pretty lucky), and some bambi-cute red deer. I later met, leaning on a scythe in a field, an old man who in his park ranger days had done a lot to protect them. He told me all about rangering, and about his niece in Melbourne, which he'd heard was quite a cosmopolitan city, but he couldn't live there because he was acclimatised to Ireland, though he was aware that Seasonal Affective Disorder was a serious affliction for some, and in America they prescribed special mirrors with lights around the edge. He offered to teach me to scythe too, claiming it was excellent for the back muscles, but I had a Dublin train to catch. Plus, he was very possibly mad as a brush, and was wielding a blade as long as my forearm that he claimed was sharp enough to shave with.

He was nice though, as was the farmer in the next field over who marvelled that pretty girls should always be hiding their eyes behind sunglasses, as were the musicians in that pub in Doolin, who gave me their cards and offered me a lift back to the hostel. There's still something about Irish people that I can't quite put my finger on. Something remote behind the affability. It's not so true of the younger people, I guess, but with a lot of people over about forty it's there. Not hostility or falseness or anything like that. Just--something apart. It's like a child of Lir gazing out at you through a swan's eye. And tomorrow I leave, so I'm not going to get to the bottom of it now. Next time, maybe. Maybe never.