DATE: Saturday 26 August, 1995
PLACE: Ballycastle to Renvyle
WEATHER: Wet
 REMARKS:
We get away about 1030 and make for Derry; here we're diverted
because of a march in the centre of town.
Strabane provides us lunch, and Bundoran a Republican march,
commemorating hunger-strikers. We pause to watch and become
the object of minor pushing between a marshall and the Garda
- the latter wanting us to move on (and thereby compress the
march to one side of the road), the latter to stop (so they
can fill the road). Clearly the locals are much practised
at this sort of thing, and it has all the hallmarks of a regular
Saturday afternoon pastime.
 We
shop at Sligo, and then take an hour to get out of a deadlocked
traffic jam in the supermarket carpark!!
We still have some distance to go and it's getting late.
The countryside becomes dramatic -steep hills stark and barren
as in Scotland, with lowering skies. Narrow glens with small
streams, readily pictured as gushing floods. The road deteriorates
and narrows (we were warned!) into Leenane, where Rose Knox
was born, on the shore of Ireland's only fjord. In contrast
to the tamed and cultivated Ireland we have been in, this
is truly a 'wild west’ of changing weather and dramatic
landscapes. And yet it is not challenging or intimidating
in the same way as the West Coast of New Zealand or Fiordland.
Rather than (oppressive) silence one feels echoes and hears
whispers of the past.
The cottage we have is one of a group built by a local development
agency. It has a thatched roof; thick walls, and bedrooms
upstairs. It also has a large open fireplace, with peat to
burn! The Edies arrive later and are at the other end of the
group.
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