A Taste of West Cork

 One of my sons-in-law, who is Irish, suggested we join them on holiday in West Cork for a few days last week.  So we did, and found ourselves in a powerful and beautiful landscape. 

I visited West Cork once when I was a teenager, but had not wanted to return,  because it seemed to me then a sad place for all its loveliness, and somehow haunted by ghosts.    In the Great Irish famines of the 1840s, this was the area where more people died of starvation than anywhere else in Ireland.  

This time, though, it felt quite different. West Cork is now popular with the kind of tourists who appreciate art, music and good food. The  tourist development, (such as it is), is pleasant and low key, but there's money about, and luxuries in the shops. Best of all, the feeling of being abandoned at the end of the world has vanished. It is not that the victims have been forgotten; in fact, the heritage centre in the town of Skibbereen offers a deeply moving description of those terrible times, and brings into focus the people who lived through the nightmare.  Here's one corner of that exhibition, featuring a famous folk song first sung by the West Cork refugees in the 1840s.    

The museum had a recording of an old fellow singing the song, but here's Don Stiffe's version, which I like (below), and you may also know Sinead O'Connor's.  The words are never quite the same each time I've heard it; I think they're making it gradually less angry than the original.

So the prosperity and tourism have cheered West Cork up, but haven't blighted the landscape, which is still astoundingly beautiful.  The weather can easily change every few minutes, creating a kaleidoscopic succession of colour and lighting effects over intricate scenes of water, hills, cliffs, fields and flowers. 

 So here are a few pictures I took in the corner of West Cork that starts on the tiny Sherkin Island, about ten minutes from the village of Baltimore.  

 The type of rock you see everywhere is called Devonian Old Red Sandstone, although it doesn't look very red to me. It creates this craggy landscape, great for rock pools and crabbing, where I could have spent hours as a child.  

Sherkin Island's biggest white-sand beach, Trá Bán, is dotted with coloured stones and yellow shells, which glow out of the sand like little suns.  

Here's another view of Trá Bán over some rocks - the water is almost tropically blue.  The only footprints on the sand, apart from ours,  were made by birds.   

The path down to the beach is fringed with the red fuschia bushes which are very characteristic of the area. 

This wild coast was always at the mercy of pirates and smugglers.  Sherkin Island's abbey was burned in 1537 by bad men from Waterford, although, to be honest,  O'Driscoll clan who used to rule the place didn't seem all that much better, from what I could make out.

There are a couple of simple pubs on the island. In the older one, this fireplace with Victorian lady tiles is hidden away in a back room. I am sure someone was in love with those ladies to get them brought all the way over from England, even though they look slightly neglected here. 

The ferry sets out from the mainland - a ten minute run. Can you see a faint rainbow to the right?

By the time it arrives, the weather's already changed, the fog's dispersing and the ferry's lit by sun.

It is a ten minute ride back to Baltimore, whose most conspicuous feature is the Beacon, built around 1800 as part of an early warning system surrounding the Irish coast.  It's supposedly known as "Lot's Wife" because it looks like a pillar of salt, but everyone I met called it "The Beacon."  You reach it by climbing a very steep hillside or scrambling up via streams and goat paths.   

On our first visit, the sun came out, the sea was deep blue and the wild flowers glowed red and yellow. 

We returned late the following afternoon when everything seemed to be silver and gold.

Another day, we took a stroll round Loch Hyne.  It's something of a celebrity loch among geographers, for it's a tidal salt-water lake fed by a narrow channel from the sea - so narrow, indeed, that it takes just four hours for the tide to force its way in, but eight hours to go out.  The result is that it contains all kinds of unusual creatures.  The road is public but we met only three cars in a couple of hours, and in places, the wild fuschia bushes were three metres high.

The section of road nearest the loch is heavily wooded - you see the water shining silver on the left.

All was peaceful as the clouds gathered, dropped rain for three minutes, then dispersed.    

Spotted this mischievous warning on a small jetty.  

We ended up wishing we'd spent more time in West Cork, so I hope we'll get back next year.

As it happened we arrived just too late for the annual food festival.  I took a look at the brochure and thought it looked fascinating - here's the link. 

And this is a plate of the salad I got at the Friday country market in Skibbereen, which takes place next to the Aldi car park. It has been there for years, I was told (much longer than Aldi) and is complete with the two ladies totting up all the purchases in longhand at a table in the corner. I wished I'd taken an extra bag on the plane to Ireland, to fit in all the beautiful produce I wanted to buy.