Following the coast from Westport, we drove north around the Nephin Ben Range. This country was very different to what we have experienced so far and impossible to capture in a single photo, so I took a video instead - see my fb feed. For 70kms, the road took us across a tundra like plain, with the land running almost flat to the Atlantic coast to the west and massive treeless rock faced mountains to the east, rising in a sweeping uniform arc from the
plain, 600 - 700 metres high. It was as if the land plate had been pushed up from the west to create the steep face and the land behind then sloped gently away to the east. It was like being on a valley floor but where there was only one high side. Running at right angles to the face were more deep valleys than ran back further than we could see, cut no doubt by ancient glaciers. Either side of the road were deep trenches cut into the peat leaving a face that showed the shallow depth of the grasses and underneath the black layer of peat.
At Bangor Erris we could have taken a short detour to see the remains of a Neolithic settlement, Céide Fields reputed to be the largest Stone Age monument in the world but Jean thought that there was nothing there, just stones, so we gave it a miss.
Tonight we are in Rathmullan, a small town on Lough Swilly, situated north west of Derry, but still in the Republic of Ireland.
After a good nights sleep, today we went to Derry. Fun Fact: Derry has the only city walls that have never been breached.
We started the day with a walk on top of the city walls, about 1.5kms in all and this provided a visual understanding of turbulent history of the city.
The walls, and indeed the city within were built in the early 1600s to provide a safe haven for the English and Scottish Protestant settlers (known as Planters) who came, under the protection of King James 1 of England, in an attempt to subdue and subsume the native Irish population. This further fuelled the longstanding fight by the Irish for independence from English rule that had been going on since the Norman Invasion in the 1200s and is present within living memory in what is referred to as the Troubles, a conflict that started in 1968 and ended, well the overt violence may have ended but not the division, in 1998.
As we walked around the Republican stronghold of the Bogside, it was obvious that the passion for a United Ireland has not totally dissipated, as evidenced through the various murals, monuments and flags of Republic of Ireland flying in the area. Particularly poignant were the words of the mothers and wives that have been captured on large posters and arranged on what is known as the Derry Peace Wall, each telling a story of resilience and loss by people of both sides. Sadest of all was the apparent normalisation of war in the psyche of the children of the time.
All of this was so evident in the areas outside of the city walls, whereas inside the walls there was barely a sign, it was “just” another historic city centre with an eclectic mix of architecture, totally unreflective of its history.
So on that somewhat somber note, we returned to our beautiful accomodation in Rathmullen for what will no doubt be an equally beautiful meal to sustain us on the next leg of our adventure to Bushmill, in Northern Ireland.