THE DIFFERENCE A WORD MAKES….
If only I’d thought to have said I was going to kayak the ‘length’ of – and not ‘around’ – Ireland I’d have finished the trip at this point. So, popping of champagne corks, general huzzahs, some back slapping – oh, and of course the problem of getting the kayak back from the (by definition) furthest point from where I’d started. Because the kayak is indeed up at the most northerly tip of Ireland at Malin Head.
But i'm still going for the full 'around' trip. And thus ready for another month or more of plying the paddles at a fair old rate. It helps, obviously, that from Malin Head it's all down hill back to Cork. I'll probably barely have to paddle at all, in fact. Just sit there and drift southwards. Or something like that.
Malin Head is lovely.
Er, I though am actually down in Dublin, as i write this. For reasons I’ll come to later.
But anyway, a quick gallop through the past weeks’ fun and games. I was last heard from at Easky – surfers paradise and kayakers nemesis if one wasn’t careful. Some truly spectacular surf and made all the bigger, taller and bulkier by some truly Novemberish weather and high winds. I ended up in Easky for three days and three nights. My tent was a bracing half an hour walk along the coast on a small headland above a beach of amazing fossils (basically a whole herbaceous border and a bit of jungle turned to black and white stone). Every morning I got up and walked in to the village and every morning I arrived soaked from head to foot by torrential rain. I got used to it. But once there I could dry out and warm up over a full Irish breakfast and newspaper – my knowledge of Irish news is unparalleled given that on the rare occasion I find a paper I read it from cover to cover and then re- and re-re-read it over the following days.
I have – as most of you know – no interest in any kind of sport that requires grown men fiddling around with balls and writhing around in sports gear either being hurt or pretending to be hurt. But several days of finding entertainment where I could find it have turned me into a bit of a GAA fan; there were a slew of matches over that weekend and I had the joy of being the lone Corkonian in a Sligo pub, with a local man on the Sligo team to boot, as Cork ran the Sliggers ragged.
I finally set off in something that passed as sun and in a decreasing wind. I could probably have got off earlier if I hadn’t been looking at a long open sea passage to get to Inishmurray – a far and distant dot roughly in the middle of Donegal Bay – with no chance of shelter if the wind got stronger than I enjoyed. And my barometer – as it were – lay in the seemingly very expert surfers skiing in on the tops and faces of huge, tubing rollers. Even on the relatively calm days there were far more people with surfboards standing along the coast deciding not to go out than actually out.
Each night I lay in my little tent as the canvas flapped and crashed and the poles bent, and the rain pattered and drummed and thudded and the wet little wedge shape of dry space bent and flexed and distorted and contracted and expanded again; it was like trying to sleep inside some kind of asthmatic snake.
So, something of a relief to actually get back on to the water again. I nearly ended up under the water. Picking my way through the big breaking waves that were crashing into the bay and up onto the beach I just thought I’d cleared the danger area when one boomer rose up just in front of me – quite a surprise as I was suddenly paddling into a wall of water that rose high above my head. Luckily it hadn’t started breaking as the canoe rose up into it heights; when it did break I was almost at the top and so though the foam and spray and a goodly weight of water swept over me, well over me, over my head and higher I managed to stay upright. The waves were still behaving unpredictably a half mile off the shore. And the 20 mile or so paddle was made tedious by having to quarter my way across a big swell.
Inishmurray is unique amongst the once inhabited islands – the Skelligs apart – in not having any obvious landing place. There’s a sort of breakwater jutting out into the sea and a couple of deep clefts in the rock but none provide real shelter. So though it was bright sun and the island looked green and welcoming I was unsure whether I’d be able to land safely in the big swell that was crashing onto the rocks. Eventually I found a patch of water behind a big jut of rock that was breaking the waves before they hit another smoothish patch of rock running up to the dry. I waited for a lull in the waves, paddled like hell and skidded the nose of the kayak up onto the stone, jumped out and pulled it clear off the next wave coming in. Text book stuff, good luck and a resounding advert for plastic kayaks. I dumped my gear up on a patch of grass in the sun; put things – everything – out to dry and went to walk my new fiefdom. As the Simon Cowell of islands I can safely say that Inishmurray has a future. It’s lovely. Maybe the winner. Oh, and it also has a past – lots of it. So there are neat rows of abandoned cottages along the inland facing east coast; rabbits hopped out of the way, though not very convincingly, as I passed, accounting for the neatly shorn grass footpaths.
The last islanders left in the 1940s. But though roofless the houses still feel like a village and a community. I walked up to the far SW point of the island where huge rollers were shooting in great clouds of spray across the reefs and up the cliff faces. Yet in the midst of all this watery chaos a seal was happily swimming in and out of the foam, picking his moments to duck under the most immense of the breakers and popping up the far side. The island is a paradise of birds; black-backed, shags, and all the obvious seabirds crowded the rocks, the beaches, the cliff faces and the beaches. But more welcoming were the numbers of garden birds; wrens (how did they get there – its four miles or more to the nearest mainland?), blackbirds, and starlings. And a bit of a rarity; an eider duck with her single chick bobbing around off the beach.
I came back via the island’s treasure the bronze age ring fort with its round wall still higher than my head all around and still with its wide top that one could march round and ramps up to the top, and little cells and rebates and crannies. And in the middle of it a perfect little and even more perfect big bee-hive hut from early Christian monastery when this island was a hugely important centre of learning – there’s a whole lot of stuff about early saints and book copying and arguments and people leaving in a huff to set up rival monasteries which I’ll need to look up. There are slightly more modern, or less ancient, churches in their and a fine collection of cursing stones – orbs with crosses on them lined up like Andy Goldsworthy sculptures. So, I sat in the strange stillness and gloom of the bigger of the two bee-hive cells and thought worthy and spiritual thoughts like what to have for supper and why I’d forgotten to buy a bottle of wine for the trip in Easky. Then I finished the circuit of the island – it being a few miles around, with a couple of lakes in the middle – and having surveyed my estate I put up my tent and then found a barrel of water from the roof of the recently reroofed old schoolhouse and so had a full shower. The wind was still strong and chilly, but behind the wall of the schoolyard in the evening sun I was able to lounge around like a lizard.
Gosh, I thought to myself, this island is so lovely I could stay here for ever. That’s the kind of stuff the gods listen out for, isn’t it, so they can punish you by giving you what you wish for.
I woke the next morning to a stonking wind, big seas and all coming straight out of the 20 miles of big sea that I needed to get through to get across Donegal Bay and round the next headland. So had a day on my island. By staying on the east side, away from the wind I was able to cook, and even read happily in the sunshine. And I revisited the fort. And walked up and down the little street of houses. And said hello to the birds. And checked the rabbits for plumpness, and tendency to stay within a stone’s throw of a passing stone carrying fellow. And had a late lunch. And – what with food getting a little low – an interesting mix of things for supper; peanut butter, some rice, tuna, curry powder and sweetcorn boiled up and eaten with relish.
The next day the wind was if anything higher, and the seas bigger. I could have quite easily and safely slipped of the east side of the island between the waves hitting the shore and got blown across the mainland a few miles away – but that would have taken me off in the wrong direction and I prepared to tough out another night and eat rabbit. But then towards later afternoon the wind eased a bit to a 4 or so and I decided to head off and battle through. It was a long half day – close to seven hours as the headland never seemed to get closer and every stroke was a huge effort. The last miles when I was close to and running parallel to land offered no help as it was all soaring black cliffs. Then it began to get dark – bloody hell the summer really is over; ten o’clock and it was gloomy as an October midnight and I could barely see the small cove that I was aiming for. I hoped I was aiming for. Or hoped would be a small cove when I got to it, rather than more cliffs.
Well it was very close to a cliff – but there was a tiered rake of jettys and quays scrambling up seventy foot or so the steep hillside that plummeted into the water. And there was the steepest slip I could imagine actually being functional. The local fishing boats were hauled up the slip almost vertically by a winch. No such luxury for me. It was dark and I had to land everything ashore in a sucking and rising swell that banged the kayak against my shins and pulled things into the water and at one point nearly pulled the whole kayak out of my grasp and out to sea. So, understandably, and conscience free given the remoteness of the harbour and the distance of the houses high on the hillsides above their lights twinkling in the dusk, I kept up a steady stream of cursing. So it was a trifle embarrassing when I finally put my head up over the lip of the first ledge of jetty to find a small boy, and his mother, happily, or less happily since my arrival, perhaps, fishing away. She seemed very understanding and directed me to a house for water. I put up my tent had a midnight supper and fell asleep, arms aching, shoulders throbbing and generally somewhat weary.
But at six the next morning I could hear a strange sound – the sound of windlessness. Arms like damp rags or not it was time be off. I loaded up the kayak high up on the slip and then bobsleighed it down the piste and into the water. I rounded the head into the current and then it was behind me, whilst a gentle breeze freshened and that from behind me too. On that basis I made a bargain with myself; if I could keep going all day and reach Aranmore Island I would reward myself with a steak dinner, a bottle of wine, plus my post picked up from the post office the next morning, and a haircut and a massage. Suitably bribed I set off being pushed along by wind and sea over what turned into close on 30 miles of paddling – and though assisted by all this stuff happening behind me there was still a big swell and I had to stay fairly alert. And then the navigation got a bit confusing – as an economy measure I’ve stopped buying large scale maps of the coast because as I’ve mentioned before on a fairly energetic day I can cross a couple of maps, and if going around headlands or zigzagging around to follow the coastline might go through even more in a day’s journey, and at €8 a pop that’s a bit of a tax on knowledge. But still when a horizon full of tiny islands and reefs all sort of meld into each other and one can’t work out exactly where one is a better map would have been useful. But on the other hand it was fun playing hide and seek with myself.
And very finally after close on nine hours in the kayak (facilitated by a small but vital adjustment to my all in one long-john wet suit; several hours out I attacked the crotch with my knife and gave myself a rough semblance of Y-front wet suit) I arrived at the island’s town. Steak, wine, massage, shower, papers, post.
Er, no. First problem was that the place that it’s the norm to camp at according to my sources had big signs forbidding this. And I’d already wondered if putting up the tent near the town/village was such a good idea – there seemed to be gangs of boys wandering around in a Lord of the Flies sort of way. The small block-house shop at the top of the pier – selling sweets and a few other small things – had massive bars on the windows and door. The telephone kiosk had had its panels removed; it might be jumping to conclusions if I said that they’d been kicked out. I landed my kayak beneath a Garda car, and hoped that would buy me a little time. No restaurant; the two possibilities were one in the village closed because of a funeral or several miles walking to the other side of the island to the hotel. Dripping water from my wet suit I stood in the bar, that was called, according to the sigh painted on the seaward wall ‘BAR’ I tried to think of some pleasant rewards; a pint of Guinness and two packs of crisps. I didn’t bother asking if there was a masseur on the island; like the telephone kiosk I may have been jumping to conclusions but it seemed likely that there wasn’t a lot of new agey stuff going down in Aranmore. On the pier I ordered a selection of deepfried stuff from a van, that was going to be my restaurant for the evening. I ate propped up, chilly and damp, on a rock above the slip keeping an eye on the kayak as the night fell.
I opted to paddle out to a small island in the harbour that I thought I could land on and put a tent up atop. But as I passed a large and attractive yacht riding at anchor I was hailed. “Do you want a drink?” I gave this idea as much thought as I think it required; in a period of time that could only be measured by the latest in vibrating quartz watch technology I’d tied off the kayak at the stern, and vaulted over the taff rail and was settling in nicely. The yacht was the Kaparda out of Scotland. They’d passed me in the big seas the previous evening – I’d noted with envy their big red genoa and the wind behind them as I plugged through rising swell into the dusk. “Yeah, we saw you and wondered if you were okay – we nearly came over to check but then thought…no, you look happy enough.” Rups, Alastair, Kate, Nick, Alex and Olly were powering around the coast to get back to Scotland. Check those names again, assigning gender appropriately. Yes, Kate was basically the beneficiary of whatever the male equivalent of a harem is. The five lads, one her husband, were up and down the companionway to the galley, and kept busy cooking, pouring drinks, washing up and generally being useful. And I was the beneficiary of all this galley action with the drink turning into a invitation to stay on for supper (or perhaps I just imagined the invitation – whatever it would have taken a crowbar and couple of pulley blocks to have winched me off that boat). I almost asked if any of them gave massages.
The crowbar and pulley effect came in the form of Jaegermeister. I realised after a few of them that I’d either have to get back into the kayak and paddle over to the island which was now lost in the pitch dark or have a few more of them – served in urine sample test tubes, interestingly – and sleep on the deck. I skittered back into my jolly little craft and paddled off cackling happily at my reversal of fortune. The island with its low tide, long assault course of rocks sized from football to sofa and all covered in seaweed was a bit of a challenge but I got the tent up and everything – I think – onto dry land and finally leapt into my sleeping bag and fell asleep. It began raining steadily and heavily at some point in the small hours. I woke to hear a dismal forecast at six, and more rain. And then woke again to even heavier rain at nine. I needed breakfast and there was no chance of cooking it, so in a break in the rain and into the face of a force 6 (another small craft warning day) crossed back to the slip by the village. I set off to walk to the hotel – a few miles away, getting a lift from a charming farmer in a venerable and dignified Volvo. I arrived just in time to have breakfast and a read of the paper as more rain came in. Then it was sunny – genuinely sunny and what with brekkers and the rest my heart soared and all was well with the world. So I walked back to the kayak, noting that the blackberries were coming on well and that autumn was in the air.
At the slip I got into the kayak watched by a gang of underemployed children who were busy trying to dismantle a trawler against the quay side with their bare hands. They stopped to watch me getting sorted. “Will that thing fall over?” one yelled. I’d gone through something similar as a conversation with one of the children the evening before and it hadn’t been rewarding as the tyke only seemed interested in knowing whether the kayak might sink or capsize or otherwise prove dangerous to me. So I ignored the morning’s attempt at conversation. “I hope it goes over on you,” another yelled. This seemed to meet group appreciation, so they built on this slim gambit. “I hope it goes over on you and you feckin drown,” offered another. “I hope it sinks and you go under and that you die.” “You’ve got a big banana,” called out one small girl; given the kayak-s shape and colour this almost counted as Dorothy Parker-esque sparkling wit. But the original one was drowned out by a rising chorus of children who hoped I’d drown. This all depressed me.
But the wind had moderated quite a bit, though only to be replaced by a thick fog. I couldn’t see even nearby rocks or the shoreline but nothing would have kept me around Aranmore at that point so I retook my island and began packing everything up; at the critical moment when the tent was down but not everything was in dry bags the foggy sky suddenly released a great swinging deluge of rain that soused pretty much half of my stuff, and all the clothes I was wearing and all of the kayaking kit I was about to put on. It seemed the kids’ wishes had come close to true.
I navigated north by compass. The wind had dropped, and when the fog cleared after an hour or so the wind stayed dropped so I was able to trundle along with good humour restored. Being, though, a little weary from the past few days I got to the pleasing little island just south of Bloody Foreland and decided to camp up. I had water – in abundance – and food that I’d sourced in the village but lacked all but a drop of petrol. So, reader, I made camp and then I made a fine stove from rocks that allowed me to burn the scant handfuls of salty, damp driftwood that half an hour of rock-combing had offered up down into a pile of embers and then cook up soup, pasta and tea. I felt satisfied as I went to sleep.
The next day was a top day. I woke early – ignored the doom-mongering of the various forecasts, stuck a wetted-finger up in the air and deduced that the breeze was coming from the south and swinging to the west. I made a sad decision to not visit Tory Island which I could see on the horizon, its light house blazing away in the bright sun and instead set about making some distance. I rounded Bloody Foreland and had both the tide and the wind with me. I paddled mightily, knees tucked up into the cockpit in a racing position and shoulders and arms swinging nicely back and forth (the art of kayaking long distance and efficiently is to barely bend the arms at any given time but rather to swing and twist from the torso; think along the lines of doing seven hours of twist-sit-ups to get the idea).
It was lovely piling along the coast of Donegal in the sun with the wind at my back and the current rolling for six hours under me in the right direction. I stopped off in the swell to eat a tin of herrings, eat an apple and look around – though my quiet alfresco lunch was rather spoilt by the distant rumble and thump of two RIBs that appeared from behind the swell and felt it perfectly in order to come and circle me like sharks whilst shouting questions at me. I may just have been feeling curmudgeonly. But I was more charmed by three fulmars that apropos of nothing except that cheery friendliness they trade on, made a few passes and then plumped down into the sea right next to the kayak, less than a paddle’s length away and bobbed away for a while looking at me part quizzically and part with great tenderness. So that cheered me up. (I’ve written earlier of the reasons why fulmars are a fitting symbol for this trip and why I feel so warmly towards them).
I was going to stop at the head of Sheep Haven having done a very respectable distance by that point, but I was on a roll and kept paddling right to the head of Lough Swilly. So had got close to forty miles in one day, and nearly half way across the most northerly stretch of coast. There was a big sea breaking on the rocks and few attractive places to land until I saw a small storm beach under the lighthouse with a patch of green above the rocks. I staggered out of the kayak and dragged everything up onto the patch of grass and then thought that – being a polite sort of fellow – I’d just wander up to a distant farm and ask if it was okay to camp overnight. Still in wet suit and lifejacket I walked the half mile or so and found a guy mending a truck. It wasn’t his land. He didn’t know who owned it. Or perhaps he did but it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to go and ask him. But if I insisted then it was the house further up the road, next to the pub. That all sounded good.
I found the house and knocked on the door. No answer. I put my head into the pub and explained that I was down at the cove and wanted to camp and was just being polite and asking for the sake of form. There was silence and then some sucking of teeth. And then somebody told me come up and camp in a field they owned. I explained why I was bit tied by the kayak and so forth. “Really, I need to camp down there.” There was some murmuring. And then a woman got up and offered to try the man next door. It was all sounding a bit serious. She went and tapped on the door. The owner – apparently – was off on his honeymoon but she hoped his mother might be there. “She probably would let you camp, maybe, well there’s a chance she might as he’s away.” It seemed that the majority view was that the owner of the land wouldn’t want me there. It seemed to me that as it was getting on for dark and I was still wet and cold and he was off on his honeymoon that I could risk camping. So I did.
I woke up at five, tired and aching but keen to hear the forecast – there was a relatively light fingering of rain on the tent. The Radio 4 shipping forecast painted a gloomy picture of strong to rising winds and coming gales. But then it got to the coastal reports and what the Met station at Malin Head was reporting was a perfect calm. I made a hasty decision; I didn’t want to get stuck by high winds for days (and I would have been as things turned out) on a beach where a man who may or may not have had a satisfying honeymoon but who seemed unkeen on people camping on his land whatever his mood might turn up at any moment. And Sam had reported a wonderful hostel right at the head, only a few miles from Ireland’s most northerly point. The sea was lost in thick fog but nonetheless I packed quickly – breakfast was two spoons of peanut butter – and was on the water by six-thirty and paddling off into a preternatural silence. Despite map and compass the tide and the currents seemed to be running fairly strongly and only catching glimpses of distant darker ‘clouds’ that were in fact far off land left me disorientated. But keen to pull onwards. I told myself that the hostel might me another Aranmore and its imagined delights might amount to nothing, but for several hours I paddled through the early mist and tried to find the small dip that would give me the pier at Port Ronan and suddenly I had it and I was gliding into land.
I walked a little bit up the road and found the hostel. It was full! A sigh announced ‘No Vacancies.’ But I hoped that was a summing up of the previous night’s occupancy and not a prediction of the coming night. People, feel my joy when I met Rodney – with Margaret, the owner of Sandrock Hostel www.sandrockhostel.com - and he was sure that they could find me a bunk, and told me that I could put my kayak into the back and there was a shed to open my kit up in and leave it to air and dry. Not much later I was in a piping hot shower, and then shaved and clean and dressed and dry for the first time in days. Margaret bought me cup of coffee and a tin of biscuits as I sat in the picture window and looked out on the weather from the inside. This alone made the whole trip worthwhile.
And gosh, I did well to get to the hostel. Because I arrived early on Saturday the 11 August. On Wednesday I was still there – virtually a resident of Malin Head. The few brief hours each day when the current around the notorious head is suitable never coincided with the occasional hours when the wind fell below a five or six. Or a gale. There was a house guitar, which I strummed. Tens of books, which I browsed. And a constant party of people come to stay. Just up the road – a brisk twenty minute walk or so – were three pubs, all of differing atmospheres and which I tried in rotation. There was restaurant that did breakfast and a good steak. There was a selection of papers in the shop. And pleasant people to talk to. And anytime I felt a little peeved that another great tranche of poor weather was slowing my trip to standstill I just had to think that I might have spent four days huddling in my tent, running out of food and waiting for an angry landowner to come and shoot me. Truly I have many blessings to count.
Much else is there to tell about my sojurn in Malin – but it’s not over yet so will bundle it altogether. But right now I’m in Dublin, I’ve done a long day here in the office and it’s time to go and party or whatever it is people do in cities.
But i'm still going for the full 'around' trip. And thus ready for another month or more of plying the paddles at a fair old rate. It helps, obviously, that from Malin Head it's all down hill back to Cork. I'll probably barely have to paddle at all, in fact. Just sit there and drift southwards. Or something like that.
Malin Head is lovely.
Er, I though am actually down in Dublin, as i write this. For reasons I’ll come to later.
But anyway, a quick gallop through the past weeks’ fun and games. I was last heard from at Easky – surfers paradise and kayakers nemesis if one wasn’t careful. Some truly spectacular surf and made all the bigger, taller and bulkier by some truly Novemberish weather and high winds. I ended up in Easky for three days and three nights. My tent was a bracing half an hour walk along the coast on a small headland above a beach of amazing fossils (basically a whole herbaceous border and a bit of jungle turned to black and white stone). Every morning I got up and walked in to the village and every morning I arrived soaked from head to foot by torrential rain. I got used to it. But once there I could dry out and warm up over a full Irish breakfast and newspaper – my knowledge of Irish news is unparalleled given that on the rare occasion I find a paper I read it from cover to cover and then re- and re-re-read it over the following days.
I have – as most of you know – no interest in any kind of sport that requires grown men fiddling around with balls and writhing around in sports gear either being hurt or pretending to be hurt. But several days of finding entertainment where I could find it have turned me into a bit of a GAA fan; there were a slew of matches over that weekend and I had the joy of being the lone Corkonian in a Sligo pub, with a local man on the Sligo team to boot, as Cork ran the Sliggers ragged.
I finally set off in something that passed as sun and in a decreasing wind. I could probably have got off earlier if I hadn’t been looking at a long open sea passage to get to Inishmurray – a far and distant dot roughly in the middle of Donegal Bay – with no chance of shelter if the wind got stronger than I enjoyed. And my barometer – as it were – lay in the seemingly very expert surfers skiing in on the tops and faces of huge, tubing rollers. Even on the relatively calm days there were far more people with surfboards standing along the coast deciding not to go out than actually out.
Each night I lay in my little tent as the canvas flapped and crashed and the poles bent, and the rain pattered and drummed and thudded and the wet little wedge shape of dry space bent and flexed and distorted and contracted and expanded again; it was like trying to sleep inside some kind of asthmatic snake.
So, something of a relief to actually get back on to the water again. I nearly ended up under the water. Picking my way through the big breaking waves that were crashing into the bay and up onto the beach I just thought I’d cleared the danger area when one boomer rose up just in front of me – quite a surprise as I was suddenly paddling into a wall of water that rose high above my head. Luckily it hadn’t started breaking as the canoe rose up into it heights; when it did break I was almost at the top and so though the foam and spray and a goodly weight of water swept over me, well over me, over my head and higher I managed to stay upright. The waves were still behaving unpredictably a half mile off the shore. And the 20 mile or so paddle was made tedious by having to quarter my way across a big swell.
Inishmurray is unique amongst the once inhabited islands – the Skelligs apart – in not having any obvious landing place. There’s a sort of breakwater jutting out into the sea and a couple of deep clefts in the rock but none provide real shelter. So though it was bright sun and the island looked green and welcoming I was unsure whether I’d be able to land safely in the big swell that was crashing onto the rocks. Eventually I found a patch of water behind a big jut of rock that was breaking the waves before they hit another smoothish patch of rock running up to the dry. I waited for a lull in the waves, paddled like hell and skidded the nose of the kayak up onto the stone, jumped out and pulled it clear off the next wave coming in. Text book stuff, good luck and a resounding advert for plastic kayaks. I dumped my gear up on a patch of grass in the sun; put things – everything – out to dry and went to walk my new fiefdom. As the Simon Cowell of islands I can safely say that Inishmurray has a future. It’s lovely. Maybe the winner. Oh, and it also has a past – lots of it. So there are neat rows of abandoned cottages along the inland facing east coast; rabbits hopped out of the way, though not very convincingly, as I passed, accounting for the neatly shorn grass footpaths.
The last islanders left in the 1940s. But though roofless the houses still feel like a village and a community. I walked up to the far SW point of the island where huge rollers were shooting in great clouds of spray across the reefs and up the cliff faces. Yet in the midst of all this watery chaos a seal was happily swimming in and out of the foam, picking his moments to duck under the most immense of the breakers and popping up the far side. The island is a paradise of birds; black-backed, shags, and all the obvious seabirds crowded the rocks, the beaches, the cliff faces and the beaches. But more welcoming were the numbers of garden birds; wrens (how did they get there – its four miles or more to the nearest mainland?), blackbirds, and starlings. And a bit of a rarity; an eider duck with her single chick bobbing around off the beach.
I came back via the island’s treasure the bronze age ring fort with its round wall still higher than my head all around and still with its wide top that one could march round and ramps up to the top, and little cells and rebates and crannies. And in the middle of it a perfect little and even more perfect big bee-hive hut from early Christian monastery when this island was a hugely important centre of learning – there’s a whole lot of stuff about early saints and book copying and arguments and people leaving in a huff to set up rival monasteries which I’ll need to look up. There are slightly more modern, or less ancient, churches in their and a fine collection of cursing stones – orbs with crosses on them lined up like Andy Goldsworthy sculptures. So, I sat in the strange stillness and gloom of the bigger of the two bee-hive cells and thought worthy and spiritual thoughts like what to have for supper and why I’d forgotten to buy a bottle of wine for the trip in Easky. Then I finished the circuit of the island – it being a few miles around, with a couple of lakes in the middle – and having surveyed my estate I put up my tent and then found a barrel of water from the roof of the recently reroofed old schoolhouse and so had a full shower. The wind was still strong and chilly, but behind the wall of the schoolyard in the evening sun I was able to lounge around like a lizard.
Gosh, I thought to myself, this island is so lovely I could stay here for ever. That’s the kind of stuff the gods listen out for, isn’t it, so they can punish you by giving you what you wish for.
I woke the next morning to a stonking wind, big seas and all coming straight out of the 20 miles of big sea that I needed to get through to get across Donegal Bay and round the next headland. So had a day on my island. By staying on the east side, away from the wind I was able to cook, and even read happily in the sunshine. And I revisited the fort. And walked up and down the little street of houses. And said hello to the birds. And checked the rabbits for plumpness, and tendency to stay within a stone’s throw of a passing stone carrying fellow. And had a late lunch. And – what with food getting a little low – an interesting mix of things for supper; peanut butter, some rice, tuna, curry powder and sweetcorn boiled up and eaten with relish.
The next day the wind was if anything higher, and the seas bigger. I could have quite easily and safely slipped of the east side of the island between the waves hitting the shore and got blown across the mainland a few miles away – but that would have taken me off in the wrong direction and I prepared to tough out another night and eat rabbit. But then towards later afternoon the wind eased a bit to a 4 or so and I decided to head off and battle through. It was a long half day – close to seven hours as the headland never seemed to get closer and every stroke was a huge effort. The last miles when I was close to and running parallel to land offered no help as it was all soaring black cliffs. Then it began to get dark – bloody hell the summer really is over; ten o’clock and it was gloomy as an October midnight and I could barely see the small cove that I was aiming for. I hoped I was aiming for. Or hoped would be a small cove when I got to it, rather than more cliffs.
Well it was very close to a cliff – but there was a tiered rake of jettys and quays scrambling up seventy foot or so the steep hillside that plummeted into the water. And there was the steepest slip I could imagine actually being functional. The local fishing boats were hauled up the slip almost vertically by a winch. No such luxury for me. It was dark and I had to land everything ashore in a sucking and rising swell that banged the kayak against my shins and pulled things into the water and at one point nearly pulled the whole kayak out of my grasp and out to sea. So, understandably, and conscience free given the remoteness of the harbour and the distance of the houses high on the hillsides above their lights twinkling in the dusk, I kept up a steady stream of cursing. So it was a trifle embarrassing when I finally put my head up over the lip of the first ledge of jetty to find a small boy, and his mother, happily, or less happily since my arrival, perhaps, fishing away. She seemed very understanding and directed me to a house for water. I put up my tent had a midnight supper and fell asleep, arms aching, shoulders throbbing and generally somewhat weary.
But at six the next morning I could hear a strange sound – the sound of windlessness. Arms like damp rags or not it was time be off. I loaded up the kayak high up on the slip and then bobsleighed it down the piste and into the water. I rounded the head into the current and then it was behind me, whilst a gentle breeze freshened and that from behind me too. On that basis I made a bargain with myself; if I could keep going all day and reach Aranmore Island I would reward myself with a steak dinner, a bottle of wine, plus my post picked up from the post office the next morning, and a haircut and a massage. Suitably bribed I set off being pushed along by wind and sea over what turned into close on 30 miles of paddling – and though assisted by all this stuff happening behind me there was still a big swell and I had to stay fairly alert. And then the navigation got a bit confusing – as an economy measure I’ve stopped buying large scale maps of the coast because as I’ve mentioned before on a fairly energetic day I can cross a couple of maps, and if going around headlands or zigzagging around to follow the coastline might go through even more in a day’s journey, and at €8 a pop that’s a bit of a tax on knowledge. But still when a horizon full of tiny islands and reefs all sort of meld into each other and one can’t work out exactly where one is a better map would have been useful. But on the other hand it was fun playing hide and seek with myself.
And very finally after close on nine hours in the kayak (facilitated by a small but vital adjustment to my all in one long-john wet suit; several hours out I attacked the crotch with my knife and gave myself a rough semblance of Y-front wet suit) I arrived at the island’s town. Steak, wine, massage, shower, papers, post.
Er, no. First problem was that the place that it’s the norm to camp at according to my sources had big signs forbidding this. And I’d already wondered if putting up the tent near the town/village was such a good idea – there seemed to be gangs of boys wandering around in a Lord of the Flies sort of way. The small block-house shop at the top of the pier – selling sweets and a few other small things – had massive bars on the windows and door. The telephone kiosk had had its panels removed; it might be jumping to conclusions if I said that they’d been kicked out. I landed my kayak beneath a Garda car, and hoped that would buy me a little time. No restaurant; the two possibilities were one in the village closed because of a funeral or several miles walking to the other side of the island to the hotel. Dripping water from my wet suit I stood in the bar, that was called, according to the sigh painted on the seaward wall ‘BAR’ I tried to think of some pleasant rewards; a pint of Guinness and two packs of crisps. I didn’t bother asking if there was a masseur on the island; like the telephone kiosk I may have been jumping to conclusions but it seemed likely that there wasn’t a lot of new agey stuff going down in Aranmore. On the pier I ordered a selection of deepfried stuff from a van, that was going to be my restaurant for the evening. I ate propped up, chilly and damp, on a rock above the slip keeping an eye on the kayak as the night fell.
I opted to paddle out to a small island in the harbour that I thought I could land on and put a tent up atop. But as I passed a large and attractive yacht riding at anchor I was hailed. “Do you want a drink?” I gave this idea as much thought as I think it required; in a period of time that could only be measured by the latest in vibrating quartz watch technology I’d tied off the kayak at the stern, and vaulted over the taff rail and was settling in nicely. The yacht was the Kaparda out of Scotland. They’d passed me in the big seas the previous evening – I’d noted with envy their big red genoa and the wind behind them as I plugged through rising swell into the dusk. “Yeah, we saw you and wondered if you were okay – we nearly came over to check but then thought…no, you look happy enough.” Rups, Alastair, Kate, Nick, Alex and Olly were powering around the coast to get back to Scotland. Check those names again, assigning gender appropriately. Yes, Kate was basically the beneficiary of whatever the male equivalent of a harem is. The five lads, one her husband, were up and down the companionway to the galley, and kept busy cooking, pouring drinks, washing up and generally being useful. And I was the beneficiary of all this galley action with the drink turning into a invitation to stay on for supper (or perhaps I just imagined the invitation – whatever it would have taken a crowbar and couple of pulley blocks to have winched me off that boat). I almost asked if any of them gave massages.
The crowbar and pulley effect came in the form of Jaegermeister. I realised after a few of them that I’d either have to get back into the kayak and paddle over to the island which was now lost in the pitch dark or have a few more of them – served in urine sample test tubes, interestingly – and sleep on the deck. I skittered back into my jolly little craft and paddled off cackling happily at my reversal of fortune. The island with its low tide, long assault course of rocks sized from football to sofa and all covered in seaweed was a bit of a challenge but I got the tent up and everything – I think – onto dry land and finally leapt into my sleeping bag and fell asleep. It began raining steadily and heavily at some point in the small hours. I woke to hear a dismal forecast at six, and more rain. And then woke again to even heavier rain at nine. I needed breakfast and there was no chance of cooking it, so in a break in the rain and into the face of a force 6 (another small craft warning day) crossed back to the slip by the village. I set off to walk to the hotel – a few miles away, getting a lift from a charming farmer in a venerable and dignified Volvo. I arrived just in time to have breakfast and a read of the paper as more rain came in. Then it was sunny – genuinely sunny and what with brekkers and the rest my heart soared and all was well with the world. So I walked back to the kayak, noting that the blackberries were coming on well and that autumn was in the air.
At the slip I got into the kayak watched by a gang of underemployed children who were busy trying to dismantle a trawler against the quay side with their bare hands. They stopped to watch me getting sorted. “Will that thing fall over?” one yelled. I’d gone through something similar as a conversation with one of the children the evening before and it hadn’t been rewarding as the tyke only seemed interested in knowing whether the kayak might sink or capsize or otherwise prove dangerous to me. So I ignored the morning’s attempt at conversation. “I hope it goes over on you,” another yelled. This seemed to meet group appreciation, so they built on this slim gambit. “I hope it goes over on you and you feckin drown,” offered another. “I hope it sinks and you go under and that you die.” “You’ve got a big banana,” called out one small girl; given the kayak-s shape and colour this almost counted as Dorothy Parker-esque sparkling wit. But the original one was drowned out by a rising chorus of children who hoped I’d drown. This all depressed me.
But the wind had moderated quite a bit, though only to be replaced by a thick fog. I couldn’t see even nearby rocks or the shoreline but nothing would have kept me around Aranmore at that point so I retook my island and began packing everything up; at the critical moment when the tent was down but not everything was in dry bags the foggy sky suddenly released a great swinging deluge of rain that soused pretty much half of my stuff, and all the clothes I was wearing and all of the kayaking kit I was about to put on. It seemed the kids’ wishes had come close to true.
I navigated north by compass. The wind had dropped, and when the fog cleared after an hour or so the wind stayed dropped so I was able to trundle along with good humour restored. Being, though, a little weary from the past few days I got to the pleasing little island just south of Bloody Foreland and decided to camp up. I had water – in abundance – and food that I’d sourced in the village but lacked all but a drop of petrol. So, reader, I made camp and then I made a fine stove from rocks that allowed me to burn the scant handfuls of salty, damp driftwood that half an hour of rock-combing had offered up down into a pile of embers and then cook up soup, pasta and tea. I felt satisfied as I went to sleep.
The next day was a top day. I woke early – ignored the doom-mongering of the various forecasts, stuck a wetted-finger up in the air and deduced that the breeze was coming from the south and swinging to the west. I made a sad decision to not visit Tory Island which I could see on the horizon, its light house blazing away in the bright sun and instead set about making some distance. I rounded Bloody Foreland and had both the tide and the wind with me. I paddled mightily, knees tucked up into the cockpit in a racing position and shoulders and arms swinging nicely back and forth (the art of kayaking long distance and efficiently is to barely bend the arms at any given time but rather to swing and twist from the torso; think along the lines of doing seven hours of twist-sit-ups to get the idea).
It was lovely piling along the coast of Donegal in the sun with the wind at my back and the current rolling for six hours under me in the right direction. I stopped off in the swell to eat a tin of herrings, eat an apple and look around – though my quiet alfresco lunch was rather spoilt by the distant rumble and thump of two RIBs that appeared from behind the swell and felt it perfectly in order to come and circle me like sharks whilst shouting questions at me. I may just have been feeling curmudgeonly. But I was more charmed by three fulmars that apropos of nothing except that cheery friendliness they trade on, made a few passes and then plumped down into the sea right next to the kayak, less than a paddle’s length away and bobbed away for a while looking at me part quizzically and part with great tenderness. So that cheered me up. (I’ve written earlier of the reasons why fulmars are a fitting symbol for this trip and why I feel so warmly towards them).
I was going to stop at the head of Sheep Haven having done a very respectable distance by that point, but I was on a roll and kept paddling right to the head of Lough Swilly. So had got close to forty miles in one day, and nearly half way across the most northerly stretch of coast. There was a big sea breaking on the rocks and few attractive places to land until I saw a small storm beach under the lighthouse with a patch of green above the rocks. I staggered out of the kayak and dragged everything up onto the patch of grass and then thought that – being a polite sort of fellow – I’d just wander up to a distant farm and ask if it was okay to camp overnight. Still in wet suit and lifejacket I walked the half mile or so and found a guy mending a truck. It wasn’t his land. He didn’t know who owned it. Or perhaps he did but it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to go and ask him. But if I insisted then it was the house further up the road, next to the pub. That all sounded good.
I found the house and knocked on the door. No answer. I put my head into the pub and explained that I was down at the cove and wanted to camp and was just being polite and asking for the sake of form. There was silence and then some sucking of teeth. And then somebody told me come up and camp in a field they owned. I explained why I was bit tied by the kayak and so forth. “Really, I need to camp down there.” There was some murmuring. And then a woman got up and offered to try the man next door. It was all sounding a bit serious. She went and tapped on the door. The owner – apparently – was off on his honeymoon but she hoped his mother might be there. “She probably would let you camp, maybe, well there’s a chance she might as he’s away.” It seemed that the majority view was that the owner of the land wouldn’t want me there. It seemed to me that as it was getting on for dark and I was still wet and cold and he was off on his honeymoon that I could risk camping. So I did.
I woke up at five, tired and aching but keen to hear the forecast – there was a relatively light fingering of rain on the tent. The Radio 4 shipping forecast painted a gloomy picture of strong to rising winds and coming gales. But then it got to the coastal reports and what the Met station at Malin Head was reporting was a perfect calm. I made a hasty decision; I didn’t want to get stuck by high winds for days (and I would have been as things turned out) on a beach where a man who may or may not have had a satisfying honeymoon but who seemed unkeen on people camping on his land whatever his mood might turn up at any moment. And Sam had reported a wonderful hostel right at the head, only a few miles from Ireland’s most northerly point. The sea was lost in thick fog but nonetheless I packed quickly – breakfast was two spoons of peanut butter – and was on the water by six-thirty and paddling off into a preternatural silence. Despite map and compass the tide and the currents seemed to be running fairly strongly and only catching glimpses of distant darker ‘clouds’ that were in fact far off land left me disorientated. But keen to pull onwards. I told myself that the hostel might me another Aranmore and its imagined delights might amount to nothing, but for several hours I paddled through the early mist and tried to find the small dip that would give me the pier at Port Ronan and suddenly I had it and I was gliding into land.
I walked a little bit up the road and found the hostel. It was full! A sigh announced ‘No Vacancies.’ But I hoped that was a summing up of the previous night’s occupancy and not a prediction of the coming night. People, feel my joy when I met Rodney – with Margaret, the owner of Sandrock Hostel www.sandrockhostel.com - and he was sure that they could find me a bunk, and told me that I could put my kayak into the back and there was a shed to open my kit up in and leave it to air and dry. Not much later I was in a piping hot shower, and then shaved and clean and dressed and dry for the first time in days. Margaret bought me cup of coffee and a tin of biscuits as I sat in the picture window and looked out on the weather from the inside. This alone made the whole trip worthwhile.
And gosh, I did well to get to the hostel. Because I arrived early on Saturday the 11 August. On Wednesday I was still there – virtually a resident of Malin Head. The few brief hours each day when the current around the notorious head is suitable never coincided with the occasional hours when the wind fell below a five or six. Or a gale. There was a house guitar, which I strummed. Tens of books, which I browsed. And a constant party of people come to stay. Just up the road – a brisk twenty minute walk or so – were three pubs, all of differing atmospheres and which I tried in rotation. There was restaurant that did breakfast and a good steak. There was a selection of papers in the shop. And pleasant people to talk to. And anytime I felt a little peeved that another great tranche of poor weather was slowing my trip to standstill I just had to think that I might have spent four days huddling in my tent, running out of food and waiting for an angry landowner to come and shoot me. Truly I have many blessings to count.
Much else is there to tell about my sojurn in Malin – but it’s not over yet so will bundle it altogether. But right now I’m in Dublin, I’ve done a long day here in the office and it’s time to go and party or whatever it is people do in cities.
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