Irish Details
Despite all this country’s changes, places endure in the West of Ireland that still do a beautiful dance to the music of their own sense of time and place. We just returned from a too brief trip to Mayo and Connemara and were transfixed by stops in Cong, Westport, and Lenaune Bridge, just back over the watery border with Galway. Ah, had it only been longer!
Driving Round the Bend:
Driving around Ireland’s West can be perilous, particularly if you are heading from Cork, because first you have to pass through Limerick with its eleven nonsensical roundabouts enroute. Round and round and round Jamie and I went in three, despite countless sojurns through before, because they have been rebuilt and the people in charge of a new bypass to connect to them in two months (and thus require new signage) decided to prepare for this event by taking down all currently meaningful directional signs. So God help the several thousand international tourists heading off from Shannon every day this summer — every single one pointing south is destined for Round About Madness with no direction home. Signposts for a place called Raheen are all that’s left, but nobody has never heard of it. Do you want to visit Ireland just to see the Limerick housing estate of Raheen?
Then take some tablets please. Because the wizards of the National Road Authority in conjunction with the wizards of the Irish Tourist Board have ensured that until August you will indeed be spending time in Raheen.
The Road Ahead
But quaint sights prevail as one heads west from Limerick toward Shannon Airport — hotels in such a desperate struggle to get somebody, anybody in the door (due to government tax incentives inducing the building of three times more of the new monstronsities than could ever be filled) that they are knocking down their rates in a freefall.
A thing that I love about Ireland right now is that this is strawberry season.
Growing strawberries can be a nightmate due to slugs, birds, mice, snails, cold, wet, etc. — I know, I spend weeks to harvest twelve. But the good strawberry growers of Wexford somehow magically escape all such problems and they let you know they have the most succulent, plump, plentiful, delicious strawberries in this universe. In fact they line every major roadway in the country with men holding signs saying “Wexford Strawberries.” Why all strawberries in Ireland have to come from Wexford is one of God’s mysteries to man.
.Boredom Turns to Fear
After Galway, you can finally turn off the major roads toward some renewed vision of Ireland’s fantastical beauty. We were headed toward the coastal town of Westport in County Mayo, but first had to fire along a kind of bog toboggan path that is said to be the most killing road in Ireland. In anothers words, it’s insansely narrow, dippy, and twisty.
Ah, but just a turn is all it takes to see. By Headford, lies the most magnificient Franciscan Abbey ruin in Ireland, to have a bite. The cloudy, strange half mist and sky mountains of a wilder Ireland lie beyond.
We hit Cong, an entrancing place of flowing rivers, gorgeous forest walks, ruined abbeys, a new church of grace, the famous Ashford Castle, mysterious oratories on the water, salmon being begged back into life in a hatchery. It’s quiet, it’s a dreamland village. Oh, it’s been remade to yesterday morning’s thatch for the tourists who might come to fish, to rediscover where The Quiet Man was filmed.
But it’s quite wonderful. And our next stop was just as good, being Westport in County Mayo, an always energetic hub of the west coast tourist trail to be sure but full of seekers for a better life. We are talking barristers who quit their fortunes to folk sing, sculptors who live in remote mountain gaps, and my first cousin John Hurst, who has created a wonderful second hand book shop, a small home for the spirit where you just might meet some of the Westport’s characters.
