June 7. The taste of Ireland

Carmen and I have reached Clonmany, on the north coast of Donegal, just a few miles south of Malin Head, the most northerly point in Ireland. The mountains are to my left; the sand dunes and the beach to my right. It has been a sunny day. I spent this morning exploring the area on my bicycle, and most of the afternoon on the beach, even going in for a brief swim in the clear but chilly waters. However, my enjoyment was more than somewhat impaired by a plague of flying beetles, at which I lashed out in all directions, mostly in vain – an experience with which I am not entirely unfamiliar!

There is a lot of building work going on in this part of Donegal, much of it connected with the replacement of traditional, long, low, thatched farm houses with modern bungalows, built alongside. It grieves me to have to write this, but when it comes to vernacular buildings, the Irish have no taste at all. The old farmhouses may have been primitive, but they were constructed entirely from local materials and they are ‘of the place’ every bit as much as a granite farmhouse would be in Cornwall, or cob and thatch in Devon. Their replacements, by contrast, owe absolutely nothing to the area. You could plonk them down in any badly-designed new housing development, anywhere in the British Isles, and they would look less out of place than they do here.

The worst of it is that they are all equipped, not only with UPVC double-glazing, but with my pet hate of all pet hates, UPVC front doors! And all, to my untutored eye, identical. The unworthy thought occurred to me that perhaps someone from Donegal County Council had done a deal on the side with a double-glazing company. But it is extraordinary that in the midst of so much magnificent natural beauty, the modern Irish should build such cheap and nasty rubbish. If I was being charitable, I would put it down to the fact that the Celts are more interested in spirit and soul than in the arrangement of bricks and mortar.

There was a travel feature in today’s Irish Independent on Cornwall. The writer waxed enthusiastic on how the county had benefited from “good planning”. That will give you some idea of just how bad it is over here!

Yesterday, en route from Portrush, I visited a selection of early Christian Celtic sites, mostly around the town of Corndonagh. In unremarkable fields, up narrow lanes, one would suddenly come across a ten foot high cross, carved from a single rock, dating back to the 6th or 7th century. The crosses I saw yesterday all had narrow cross-pieces, suggesting to me that they were only half a step removed from the menhirs that featured so prominently in pre-Christian Celtic religion. But consider this: here you have evidence, not just of 1500 years of Christianity, but of a religious tradition stretching back into the mists of time.

Oh yes, and I also found a link with Scotland. The stone circle that I visited at Bocan was supposedly aligned quite deliberately to fit the east-west axis that joins the highest mountain in these parts, Slieve Snagth, with our old friends, the Paps of Jura in the Hebrides (those Paps, they get in up everywhere!).

The pub culture may be being killed off in England by a combination of the supermarkets and a myopic Chancellor, but it is alive and well here in Ireland. Clonmany is only a village, with a population probably of less than a thousand, yet it has eight pubs, all apparently thriving. And that’s not counting the “Rusty Nail”, down here by the beach, where I dined tonight, most satisfactorily, on lamb chops and Guinness.

All the talk in the pubs is of the Referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. No country in the EU has done better out of its membership than Ireland. Very few countries’ politicians and diplomats are regarded as being “better Europeans” than the Irish. Yet the latest opinion poll suggests a No vote, albeit by a narrow margin. In this respect, I can see distinct parallels with Cornwall. There too, they are only too happy to take Europe’s money, and there too they would be only too ready to vote no in a Referendum, given half a chance. Put it down to Celtic contrariness.

Having said all of that, the Irish are lovely people: cheerful, gregarious and never too busy to stop for a chat, even with a complete stranger on a bicycle. Whatever the weather, and despite the hideous new farmhouses, it’s hard to keep a smile off one’s face for very long.