Achill – Unlocking Landscapes

I’m back from my annual visit to the west of Ireland. I managed a couple of day trips to forage for photos, which will crystallise later this year into dedicated posts, all being well.

Like many people I enjoy the Blind Boy Podcast, none more so when I have the headspace to take in all that gets said in an episode. I listened to this hilarious one with Chris O’Dowd, including a couple of brilliant stories about rural island. Avoid if you don’t like swearing 😬

I also absolutely tore through A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle (1999) while away. If you need any evidence that fiction can be a great way to learn about history, this novel is it.

All the pics here are taken on my Pixel 7a (which Google tried to get me to promote FOR FREE). It’s an exceptionally good camera I think.

Ballina is a place I like to visit, built around the mighty River Moy. You may recognise this scene because Joe Biden gave a speech from the church steps.

There’s an excellent bookshop in Ballina called Pangur Ban which you must visit and support if you’re in town.

I liked this sign and admired the blue tiles. Almost Everton blue, you might say. I don’t eat seafood though, can’t cope with it.

Nearby at Killala Bay I had a lovely walk along the shore. There were sandwich terns, rock pipits, oystercatchers, and curlews here (and the wind, always.) These are the beaches I love – wild and smelling of the sea. There will be a dedicated macro blog for my finds here.

Now then, the bard of Mayo Seán Lysaght has released his latest book – Unveiling the Sun. It’s a collection of more than two decades worth of short writings, describing walks and nature observations in the Nephin Beg area near Westport. I recorded a podcast with Seán exactly 3 years ago which you can listen to here (or by searching ‘Walking to Lough Conn with Seán Lysaght’ on any podcast platform).

I’ve read the first chapter (January) of Seán’s new book and I am enjoying the insight into a part of Mayo I don’t know so well but love to visit.

And just like that, here we are in the Nephin Beg mountains of Wild Nephin National Park. There’s a fantastic café here which is open in the spring and summer, closing at some point in the early autumn. I probably have a macro blog for here as well.

From Ballycroy I continued on to Achill Island, one of the most westerly points of Europe, and the Wild Atlantic Way (more a car touring route than a footpath). I tried some isolated rock and surf photos with my macro lens which I’ll share later on. I posted about Achill a few years ago.

On the drive around the island I passed this beautiful cottage with a thatched roof clinging on. I hope they’re able to repair it, which is evidently a longer term plan. Thatch is very expensive to maintain in England but I reckon there’s some local knowledge still lingering here on Achill. It’s facing the Atlantic Ocean so it has quite a lot to cope with!

Back on home territory near the Ox Mountains I was forced to park up to allow these cattle to cross the road. I am sure that cattle have begun to replace sheep in this part of Mayo in recent years.

The number of hawthorn berries was amazing. This has been a bountiful year for wild fruit.

The bramble has had a very good year as well, creeping through doors opened by winter storms.

I saw quite a lot of red admirals around.

My aunt sent me a photo recently of a green-veined white where she lives in Mayo, and I saw plenty myself. In Sussex there have been lots of large whites this year, but in Ireland the green-veined were by far the more common pierid.

On the evening before I came home, I went out for a walk along the mountain path and found these huge moth caterpillars. They are buff-tips, the ones that look like broken twigs when they are adult moths. It was a highlight of the trip actually, watching these massive caterpillars munching on willow leaves.

Thanks for reading.

Ireland

In April 2023 I visited Achill Island in County Mayo for the first time in 10 years.

I have happy memories of a visit to Achill in March 2013 with my parents. Returning with my mum in April after the passing of my dad in 2021, we followed the same route as a decade ago, stopping at Cloughmore to see the Atlantic’s wild waves crashing against the rocks. It brought back strong memories of that last visit a decade earlier, and thoughts of dad heading out onto similar rock formations to fish, further south in Cork during 1990s summer holidays.

In the surrounding sheep-cropped grasslands pipits, likely the rock variety, skipped and flew between boulders. A man cast a drone along the coastal edge before packing his kit (and three generations of his family) into the car and went off again.

I walked around looking for lichens to add to my iNaturalist map and picked off two small pieces of quartz that came away with ease.

The power of the waves, the overwhelming sound of the sea – the hiss and crash – and the sheer beauty of the view north along the coastline silenced me. See for yourself.

If you were to head directly west from here by sea, you would arrive in Newfoundland or Labrador in eastern Canada. My relatives made similar journeys, some of them never came home but instead built lives of their own in New York City. Some were of Irish heritage and were born in America, but returned to Ireland.

I recently read Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. I’ve been on an Irish fiction streak, in some ways to try and understand the experiences of my Irish relatives, who made the same crossings and who also built lives in Brooklyn before the book’s setting of 1950. Other than Toibin I’ve read most of the Donal Ryan novels, where migration is again a key theme.

Two of my relatives who went to America are my long-lost great-grandmother Eva Sugrue (right), and her sister Eileen (left). My family have confirmed Eileen was married in the same Brooklyn courthouse that progressed one of the many cases against ex-President Donald Trump, which is nice. No one in my family today, or even my grandmother, knew Eva (her mother) or Eileen. That mystery trickles down, and it was only through the diligence and commitment of my family’s desire to find out more that the photos above ever came to light.

On our way off of Achill we stopped at a craft shop. I wanted to buy some proper knitwear (oh yes) and a few gifts for home. We got talking to a woman called Kathleen who was running the shop. She had lived in London, Littlehampton, and Winchester, the latter when her husband was working on the creation of the M3 cutting through the South Downs at Twyford. They had lived in a caravan park while the work was being undertaken, a community of Irish families cropping up with all the workers there to do the job.

In talking we covered all the major issues: English nationalism, Brexit, Trump, Putin. She had a way of saying, ‘I don’t care either way, but…’. We also discussed the ‘shock’ of living in rural West Sussex compared to most other places, how beautiful the South Downs were.

Kathleen was readying herself for the influx of American tourists expected in line with a visit from US President Joe Biden, ‘a Mayo man’, as the whole world now knows. She asked if we would be staying around for Biden’s visit, but we were already planning to leave for Dublin before his arrival. The payment machine didn’t work as the signal was so poor, and she felt embarrassed that she’d have to ask the Americans to pay in cash.

Achill has a long history of people coming and going as Biden’s family did, though particularly to England, as the video above shows.

A beautiful place, a difficult history.

Thanks for reading.

Ireland

Tag: Achill

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Achill Island and the lure of the Atlantic 🇮🇪