Old Ireland - The Longest Way Home

     My heroes, my inspiration, were never actors (well, maybe Montgomery Clift, when I was a young actor myself). I’ve always found writers a more interesting, romantic breed, and once I discovered travel writing—I mean good travel writing—sometime in my mid- twenties, I thought that was the best profession I could imagine. I still do. People like Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin really seemed to be searching, uncovering, revealing something, not only about where they went, but about themselves, about all of us. And, isn’t that why we travel, for that sense of discovery, both of our world and of ourselves? 

      I met Keith Bellows, editor-in-chief of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELER magazine a few years back and we started talking about all this. On a whim, I suggested he let me write a piece for his magazine. Instead of laughing it off, he stopped and looked at me curiously. We talked a bit more, and he asked me what place I most felt ‘that sense of illumination’ while traveling.

      I’ve had that experience many times—in Southeast Asia, in Africa, going down the Amazon,  walking the Camino de Santiago, but the place I first experienced it was in the west of Ireland , in County Clare , years ago. I mentioned I had just been back to Ireland for the first time in ten years, to Dublin , to direct a film, and found it a changing place. He suggested I return to “my Ireland ,” to County Clare , and report back on how Ireland ’s prosperity had changed that rural part of the country. I did just that. The story I wrote for NG TRAVELER appears in the November/December issue.

         A kind of an open secret, County Clare lies in the west of Ireland . Its tourist season lasts seven months or so compared with the year-round seasons of its more famous neighbors, Kerry to the south and Galway to the north.  I based myself in a beautiful old 12-room, family run hotel called Ballinalacken Castle House, just outside Doolin, in the west of Clare. Ballinalacken had become a kind of touchstone for me over the years. Countless times, when I was stuck in traffic, or taking out the garbage, or just looking out the window I would think of the place, the long drive, through the gates and up to the house on the hill, the peat fires, the view to the sea.

      I had discovered Ballinalacken on my first trip to Ireland in 1986 and I had returned every year for a while, but as I said, I had not been to the west in nearly a dozen years and I wondered how it might have changed. 

    “Jesus, look who it is”, was how Denis O’Callahan, hotelier and family patriarch, greeted me at the door. “You’re welcome here.”

     And I was back.

     The best way to get to know a place, or even reacquaint your self with it, is to walk the land. And that’s just what I did.  And there is no more interesting land to walk in Ireland than the Burren, a hundred-square-mile area of limestone exposed by the last ice age.

      The Burren means “barren spot” in ancient Irish, and at first glance, that’s what the place seems. But on closer inspection, it is bursting with life, both plant and animal. I hiked up Black Head Mountain with Shane Connolly, a local farmer by trade, and botanist, geologist and teller of tales by vocation. It was a “soft,” wind-swept day, and the perfect way to get “back in”.

       After a day on “the rocks,” a little music goes down easy. Irish traditional music has made a roaring comeback in Ireland over the last 10 to 15 years, and there is no better place to hear the locals go at it than in Doolin, a tiny coastal village and epicenter of the traditional music scene in Ireland . There are three pubs in town, and if it’s a night out with good drink, good company, and burning music you’re looking for, you can’t go wrong walking into any one of them, on any night of the week.

       My window from Ballinalacken looked out across the sea to the Aran Islands . The islands are still remote, Irish speaking, and insular. A 40-minute ferry from Doolin or Rossaveel, across Galway Bay , is the best way there.  Although catering to the “day tripper,” the place rewards the traveler who spends the night.  I lingered at Kilmurvey House, adjacent to the “main attraction” on the island—Dun Aengus, an ancient ring fort sitting high atop the cliffs dropping over 300 feet into the sea. Sunset from inside the walls of Dun Aengus, looking back across the water toward Clare and the west of Ireland , with only the wind and rock for company is a haunting memory. 

          Back in Clare proper, there’s a spa town called Lisdoonvarna, a few miles inland, and if you find yourself there at the right time of the year, and you’re looking for a date, you’re in luck. The annual Matchmaking Festival runs for a month every autumn, and thousands of people converge on this tiny village and make it the place to be (or avoid). I found the experience not dissimilar to my feelings for Las Vegas . On arrival, it’s all: “Wow, this is great” only to be replaced at some invisible point by “I have got to get out of here, NOW.”  What started over a century ago as a way for farmers to meet prospective mates has evolved into big business, with the dancing and the drink flowing freely.

      There’s a lot more to this tiny area in Ireland ’s west—the Cliffs of Moher, surfing in Lahinch (and world class golfing), the annual Oyster festival in next-door Galway . Check it out in the November/December issue of NATONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELER and go.