Meeting the Oracles in Mayo
The roads less traveled in Ireland are still a balm for the eye and the spirit. The last few days have taken me to the sodden wilds of Conemara with a stay in the Leenaun Bridge Hotel on the only fjord in this island or perhaps outside Scandanavia — Killarey Bay. That kindly old place offered a room looking straight into the water and the sharp little misted mountains veering up into the hills. The silence deep, the world still ancient there.
Delphi and Waters Out of Time…
Then it was to the Delphi Lodge across the bay in Mayo, a Georgian house salmon fishing retreat in its own secret valley, a place where at certain moments salmon leap at every turn of the eye. But they are sometimes difficult fellows at least when they see my fly. Yet off I went on the wild higher lake of Du Lach with a forensic psychologist and a shrewd ghillie in a boat and a succession of wild sea trout. Never the dreamed of great fish but exhiliration and renewal come at you steadily in this sanctuary of a place from way back in time.
At night all gather for drinks, canapes and tale trading in the drawing room of the big house, then retire to a giant communal table to talk of that what got away — or in some cases exploded on to hooks — and lives past in present from Paris to New York, Dublin and Barcelona and New York. A unique place is Delphi, whose original owner Peter Mantle (after the Marquise of Sligo) has a similar operation in the Bahamas now.
The charming Michael Wade runs Delphi now without missing a beat. This is a world class getaway, and there are one-lane roads in the highlands around it that will make you stop everything to become a painter or photographer on the spot.
In such regions Ireland is not unhinged at all.
