At the Edge of Ireland by David Yeadon Page A

soon!”)—in places like Beara you still sense a timeless quality in those great elemental aspects of shattered mountain ranges, sea-gouged cliffs, black water lakes, vast moors, and miasmas of peat bogs. These have always been the true touchstones of this strong and ancient land—this haven of great poets, artists, and writers, whose works resonate with primal energies and the ancient pagan rhythms of long-forgotten languages and legends and the horrors of their decimated, diaspora-plagued heritage.
    No matter how capsulized you make these Irish histories, how euphemistically you paraphrase the sequences of ethnic “displacements,” cultural annihilations, endless centuries of occupations and Troubles, heart-shattering poverty, the terrible famines, the mass emigrations, the constant battles against the state and the Catholic church for freedom and liberation—the emergence of the “peaceful and prosperous” nation of today is a nonfictional gothic melodrama far more complex and convoluted than any novel could ever be.
    The recent transformations here have been miraculous and yet tinged with ironies. In a land now flush with new affluence and with more Mercedeses per capita than any other country on earth, including Germany, you can still see the Angelus bells being rung on TV twice a day and people pausing to pray in the street to the Blessed Virgin. And out in the wilder parts of Connemara, Donegal—and Beara—visitors still seek out scenes and experiences of the “old ways”—the ashling —of simple sustenance lives lived close to the earth and the ocean and within their own remote, close-knit communities.
    It’s always fascinating to see how our tastes in and reactions to landscape and travel in general have changed over the centuries. Today’s first-time “touchstone-seeking” explorers of Beara are invariably enchanted by its bold, burly mountains, its wild heather and gorse-strewn moors, and that magical sense of discovering secret Brigadoon valleys glowing with that iridescent sheen of green that is pure Emerald Isle.
    But it was not always so. Even a superficial search of reactions from celebrities and historical figures over the last couple of centuries reveals far less rosy-hued accounts and opinions. While today, for example, most of us are bemused by the little, narrow, winding, and vegetation-crammed boreen lanes here, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau portrayed his journeys around Beara in 1828 as “indescribably difficult.” And William Wordsworth, whose purpled poems often exceeded the normal bounds of adjectival and emotional restraint, limited his comments on Beara roads to a single word: “Vile!” Sir Walter Scott, however, was far more enthusiastic, describing the scenery of Beara and County Kerry as “the grandest sight I have ever seen.”
    And then, of course, there’s the weather. The plans of poor old Theobald Wolfe Tone, who attempted to harness a French armada here to drive the English from Ireland in 1796, were decimated by Beara’s notoriously fickle climate. “Dreadfully wild and stormy and easterly winds which have been blowing furiously and without intermission since we made Bantry Bay, have ruined us,” he wrote before being captured and executed in 1798.
    Similar outrage also pours from countless early “travel memoirs,” although one of the less voracious commentaries by the novelist Marie-Anne de Bouvet (1889), attempts a more balanced summation: “The climate of Ireland is vexatious rather than absolutely bad, and it has consolations the more delightful because they come unexpectedly.” A splendid example of damning with faint praise.
    And then came such social commentary as this 1818 description by Georgiana Chatterton of the local Beara people in her best-selling travel book, Rambles in the South of Ireland: “They were the wildest-looking people I ever