Memories of Clare Island

Unable to yet switch off, I busy myself making notes on my phone on the ferry over from Roonagh, giving myself minor whiplash as I glance up and down from device to sea to mainland to the Island, jabbing away at the screen to make written records of shapes and colours and every adjective I think I might need to write about the weekend at a later date. Every island and mountain and mass of rock has its own fuzzy definition, like they each exist only in different people’s memories, some more bleached and distant than others, some clung onto and populated with all the homes and people they remember there. Turk looks like a mirage to the south, the ghost of a battleship. There’s only one way to describe today really though: hazy.

As we pull into the harbour the edges of the scene solidify into sunny HD, the white houses dotted round the hills springing to life, and I’m reminded we’re in a real place rather than a memory. Boats are being tied up and a tractor putters by transporting a couple of spare Guinness kegs. There’s a lazy school holiday atmosphere in the air, more befitting a week spent down the country with your relatives than the marketing-friendly jargon of the ‘Staycation’, a poxy term coined by our modern obsession with making everything a Thing. Absent are the productive traveller’s itineraries and enthusiastic busy-ness of visitors to Westport or nearby Louisburgh, all clad in designer rain gear on the hottest day of the summer, and action trousers with swiss-army lists of latte shops bulging out of the leg pockets. None of that here.

The wearing of masks on the ferry adds a sense of bureaucratic intrusion and anchoring in the contemporary zeitgeist but otherwise it still feels like the Clare Island I’ve been visiting since my primary school years. The relative crowds on the beach are more reminiscent of those days too, or how I remember them anyway. Since then, cheap flights and the abundance of internet information made travelling to anywhere on earth doable and hum-drum, and we made good use of them, but this summer the marketing campaigns have quickly adapted to the so-called New Normal, though maybe this is just a return to normal. In the future when the last twenty years are retrospectively reeled in, all the cheap foreign travel and wanton excursions might be looked back on as forming a surreal part of travel history, akin to travelling by zeppelin or crossing the channel in an old-timey hot air balloon.

The breeze on the front patio is warm – so often a rare summer’s day like this is harassed somewhat by a chilling wind. The view across Clew Bay has a Mediterranean filter over it, the sandy cliffs over on Achill looking like the Adriatic coast. I’ve never seen the Adriatic coast in person, but it looks like it. The persistent blaze of light rips the fabric of light out of the sky and unsettles the air so that everything seen has the air of photograph-filtered nostalgia, except in real-life and real-time. I have seen clearer views from here but this one captures, if not creates, the perfect feeling of relaxation. Even the ambient noises – usually perfectly audible activity from the harbour like boats, motors, voices – are muted and subdued by the sun; birds tweet and crake and whistle in harmony, all giving each other a turn, none are in too much of a rush.

The centrepiece of any trip to the Island is the Walk. When we’re fit for it, the Walk consists of a full lap of the island, usually done anti-clockwise: first to the white-washed Lighthouse, which in current times exists as a guesthouse and tourist attraction, before ascending the heights of Knockmore (‘Big Hill’ in the Irish language) over a series of cliffs, dropping down to the Signal Tower at the Island’s western end, and following the road back to the harbour, a circumnavigation of around 18 kilometres, plus a significant rise and fall in elevation. It takes a well-spent half a day to complete, and despite its dutiful performance over many weekend visits, the Walk is more of a time-honoured celebration than a penance for past sins.

We set off on at the hottest part of the day after a lazy breakfast, in no rush. The hollow of the grass track that cuts around Knockbeg (functionally named – like it’s bigger brother – as ‘Little Hill’) is the quietest place in the west of Ireland. Its silence flattens out the knots in my shoulders and back that have accrued over years of desk work. I leave my father at the end to complete the ascent as he cuts through the middle; we’re to meet at the top of the Big Hill. I start running with a sense of freedom of being adrift on the ocean, but still unable to fully switch off and overly-aware of an upcoming race I need to train for, I set my phone to track my pace and the kilometres I accrue as I run along the wildest landscape in Ireland.

I stop for a swim at a place not yet discovered by the writers of online brochures, though chatting to a local lady she laments the discovery of the secret spot by tourists and daytrippers. I commiserate and feel the need to assure her I’m no blow-in; I’ve known of the place for 20 years. On later reflection, I’m not even sure I have – I know I dived into the waters of the small bay a couple of years ago, though perhaps longer-term memories have built up over the years around a mental image from my brother’s grandiose descriptions of the ‘secret cove’, which himself and Dad discovered on a thorny trek around the Island’s coast two decades ago. Our own memories start to filter some things out as well.

I take photos but they don’t do the sunscape justice; in any case I’ve taken better ones, when the views were clearer and skies a deep blue. Everything today already looks like a faded memory. I make voice notes on my phone, unable to resist the fear of not being able to recall minute details of the miles of compact stone walls and burnished ferns that flank the roads, as I trek over the dotted dung of the Island’s many sheep, across grasses yellower than usual. When I listen back they tell me nothing new. I’ve seen all this before, and anything conjured up as I write comes from years and decades of trips and holidays to the Island, rather than one specific weekend or photograph. Any such memories are fading in front of my eyes through the haze.

I meet my father at Knockmore’s summit, which he reaches a couple of minutes before I do, giving him the honour of victory. We make our way over to the signal tower at the far western end and walk back along the road, the same route we’ve been hiking for years. I’ve turned off the app, the distances were internalised long ago, long before the invention of the kilometre in Ireland: three miles to the shop, and then it’s two miles home. Any sort of pacing of those miles becomes irrelevant as I enjoy the slower stroll with my father.

We stop to chat to passing islanders in work vans – all neighbours out here – people out making use of the fine weather to paint a wall or landscape tidy gardens reclaimed from the harsh rocks and bog, and of course, stop into the Shop for a well-earned Magnum ice-cream, a dessert of pure luxury anticipated through the whole Walk as a young lad, now just a nice thought that comes to mind as we reach the store, only a couple of euros tossed into the till. The hot air sucks everything out of the atmosphere before an inevitable downpour as I walk home, Dad having sent me on ahead so he could avail of any passing lifts going back that way – a feat he accomplishes within minutes – though it’s the sort of rain that only cools and relieves and amuses, and the weather resumes as it was after a short shower.

The view from the house overlooks the harbour and beach below, framed by the mainland several miles beyond it. You can see from Achill to Clifden and the islands once disputed between Mayo and Galway. Strangely, it’s the harbour that never seems to change and has remained a constant picture in my head over the twenty-five years I’ve been coming here. In that time a new pier has been built, a great storm has rearranged the formation of rocks and stones on the beach, and the tides and boats come and go on a daily basis, though the image to me always remains the same. It sits fixed and unchanging in my mind like a picture frame fixed to the wall, the only scene unaffected by the peculiar haze of this weekend, no filter of nostalgia it’s just the same as it ever was.

Instead the mountains beyond on the mainland change form every time I sit there, depending on the weather, the clouds, the light, the seasons and my own circumstances and internal goings on. The mountains and headlands – which should exist as solid earth and rocks, the foundations upon which all other memories rest – change colours and skins, as formless as clouds, they instead are the reflectors of moods and changeable seasons. This weekend the sun scorches the horizon so you can barely make out the mountains at all.

Memories get hazier as you grow older. They take on a tinge in the mind and they all look like this weekend. Sometimes they change altogether from their original form. In my younger days I could remember every trip taken out on every weekend of endless school holidays in the summer. Now they all kind of blur into one to form one archetypal whole, a composite of sketches formed over the years. I try to return at least once every year. None of the trips ever seem too far apart, whether separated by years or months or even on consecutive weekends, it always feels the same length of time, roughly a few months.

This isn’t a staycation for me; it’s a pilgrimage. From certain vantage points out of the gaze of the sun, today the soft grey sky could be any time from June to December. The mountains appear through a different lens, but the Island’s harbour looks the same as ever. I take no notes. Instead I just sit and listen to the silence below. Finally I’ve switched off and relieved myself from the mother of all stressors and modern inventions: time.

——————————-

If you liked reading this, you might also like:

Where I visit Diamond Hill – relatively close to Clare Island as the crow flies, but a world away in Co. Galway:

On Diamond Hill

More on Mayo and mountains and the feelings of returning home:

A place no-one knows exists