Awakening the Celt Within

I had heard of this wonderful cliff walk at Aughris Head on that bit of coast between Sligo city and Ballina heading out towards Mayo .However I had never managed to find it despite driving down to Aughris Head several times. Eventually I gave up looking for it.

Then  I was chatting to someone who started to tell me about this wonderful cliff walk out at Aughris Head. I laughed exasperatedly and told the tale of how it had almost become like a search for the Holy Grail on my part and I had never been able to find it. It was made even more tantalising by hearing that it was a great palace to spot different seabirds. She told me to look for a path between the slipway down at Aughris Head and a house.  And so I made my way down to Aughris Head yet again. It was  a brisk , mercurial  March day with flashes of sun followed by  frowning cloud. I parked at the Beach Bar a cottage like whitewashed pub perched on the sea front . The  beach stretched  out to the right towards Dunmoran Strand and the fabled cliff walk ostensibly stretching out towards the left  although  I could not see  it.  I walked down  to the little slipway at the head which marks the end of where a car can go apart from into the sea.  And there it was – a small, unsigned, unobtrusive, grassy path sandwiched between the slipway and a bungalow. Unless you were looking for it, you would never know it was there.

Since moving to Northwest Ireland ten  years ago  I have met this situation so many times –  stumbling upon magically beautiful places  hidden away, unmarked and unheralded. In many other countries these places would be uncovered, signposted, marketed and themed according to our expectations of  different countries when we go to them. It would have been twittered, googled,  photos taken and globally mapped. Recently I was looking at a one page spread of an advert by an international air line showing a photo of the famous Twelve Apostles rocks along the Great Ocean Road in Southern Australia. It showed a vista of white ocean and serene never ending sky with a back drop of rugged coast and the famous rocks arising out of the sea. For a split second I had a pang of yearning for the wild, desolate and vast emptiness the photo represented. Then I suddenly remembered that I had actually  been to that very spot. And fantastically beautiful though it is – behind where that photo had been taken   there is a wooden walkway. Although it had been a weekday , low season and raining when I visited the  Twelve Apostles ,there had still  been hordes of people filing along the walkway, taking photos, milling around – a world away from the vast, peaceful emptiness pictured in the one page photo  spread.However on this particular March day – St Patrick’s Day as it turns out –  as I stepped onto the grassy path I experienced what was trying to be sold in that airline  photo spread – a sense of peace and oneness with Nature.

Start of Walk

The air was still and the first creamy yellow primroses had appeared, tempted out by the sun. Although the walk is not signposted there had been a lot of effort put  into fashioning the grassy path – the grass had been kept short and it was fenced off from the cliff. The sea stretched out ahead alternately blue and grey depending on where the sun was at a particular time. I continued along this secret path all hushed and still and was almost relieved to see someone fishing down on the rocks below – a sense that I was still in the real world and had not stepped through an invisible wardrobe and into Narnia.

Views of Knocknarea

 

Benbulbin Mountain

A hare rushed in front of me on the path bug eyed with fear and sped off into the fields on my left. A rich burbling call coming from somewhere in the sky had me craning  my neck and I spotted a curlew – that elusive and now endangered bird – that wistful, solitary  sound that  always inspires  a pang of  sympathetic  solitude in the walker down below.  The path continued southwards hugging the cliff edge the vast, lurching Atlantic to my right,  Knocknarea and Belbubin Mountains behind me.I came upon small secluded coves where  rock pipits  pipit darted amongst the rocks and in the fields on my left – meadow pipits wheeled upwards into the sky disturbed into carrying out their crazy kamikaze flight pattern – diving downwards – trying to divert attention away from their nests.

A flock of birds wheeled past – I almost thought they were a flock of curlew or whimbrel but they were too small and their beaks turned upwards as opposed to the long sloping downward curve of the curlew beak. I had brought my binoculars which I produced somewhat sheepishly. Living so near the border with Northern Ireland makes me a bit wary of brandishing a pair of binoculars in isolated areas.  I always feel that a helicopter or some other sort of military/police presence  is going to swoop down from the sky and berate me for looking so suspicious.  In fact the birds seemed to be bar tailed  godwit that had joined a flock of oyster catchers.

And so on this  auspicious day I rounded  the head  and  came across a holy well appropriately  called St Patrick’s Holy Well. A simple wooden cross stood upon a cairn made of smooth round stones.

St Patrick's Well

Scraps and tatters of material had been attached to the cross and fluttered somewhat bleakly from it. I had heard that St Patrick had walked across the north west  leaving signs of his presence along the way. I  had always wondered  if he had a tendency to be accident prone  as he seemed  leave bits of himself rather clumsily strewn across the country – the makings of future relics. For example there is a church in Strandhill  over by the airport called Killyaspugbrone that St Patrick had visited/set up. On arrival he tripped  on the threshold and broke off a bit of his tooth  as he fell.This bit of tooth had since been preserved and now resides in Dublin somewhere. There is another place on Coney Island also near Strandhill where there is a rock formation fashioned into the shape of a chair where St Patrick is meant to have sat . It is known as the Wishing Chair and if you sit on it  you may have a wish but only one per year.   In the Tobernault Holy Well in Sligo there is also evidence of St Patrick where he was meant to have left  his hand imprints in a rock. To this day it is said that if you stand with your back against the mass  rock it cures back problems.  I imagined St Patrick walking along the same path I was on stopping at the spot  near the cross where a spring had sprung into a shady pool. I imagined him stooping for a drink before striding onwards towards Strandhill to trip and lose a bit of tooth and then to sit awhile in Coney Island in  his wishing  chair.

I continued on and after about an hour the cliff walk started to become narrower and  a bit too near the edge for my liking. But I was tempted forward by the sheer s cliff face with the seabird colonies  in the distance ahead of me.

The path veered suddenly to the left at a right angle angle and there was the cliff face.  A flood of adrenaline  made my heart pump a warning into my ears and I decided to stop  there. Seabirds wheeled to and fro from the cliff face buffeted by the wind. I could see them all snuggled together  in  pairs busy with that  perennial life cycle of raising young.  My bare eye spotted the usual gulls -  herring and common gulls. I sank into a tussock of grass onto my stomach and whipped out my binoculors once more.  I nearly fell off the cliff edge with delight as  I spotted what I thought were hundreds of penguins on the  cliff face. They were of course guillemots. I stayed mesmerised for about half and hour until I am sure I had  permament goggle imprints from the binoculors embedded into  my eyes. And then reluctantly I retraced my steps and  headed back to the car  shaking my head questioningly  at yet another  gem hidden away  – instead of being part of a photo spread in a newspaper like the  Twelve Apostles in Australia.

And  I pondered  that question of why so many heartrendingly, beautiful spots in North West Ireland are unmarked, unheralded, unmarketed. You know, maybe in all of us who have ancestors in this North Western corner of Ireland -  there is a smidgeon of reluctance in our blood  to renounce all this wildness, a tad of wistful Celtic longing , even a sort of ancestral photograph of ourselves imprinted in our genes,  standing at the cliff edge at Aughris, looking out to sea . A tenacious, wiry, independent people who never gave into the Romans who kept pushing the Celts further westwards until all they had facing them was the vast, empty peace of this ocean.  We  stood   here in the North West at Aughris, the crashing power of the Atlantic relentlessly facing us and the threat of the would be conquerors behind us.  And  standing there, wanting to keep our feet firm   in this most remote of far flung   Celtic bastions, maybe centuries later   we still have a mind to keep this last corner of the European continent to ourselves……. untwittered, unthemed, unmapped  and unvanquished