If you are in the mood for some rustic countryside and Scottish castles, just before March and after August are the best times to go, writes Ellen Creager
Breda met me in front of the butcher shop and led my car down a road so narrow a moonbeam would need daylight to find it.
Then we arrived at Thomas Lynch’s whitewashed ancestral cottage.
It had stone floors. It had horses out back. It had branches scattered in the courtyard because of a recent fitful storm. February clouds marched across the pale sky.
“It’s nice in the summer, oh, it’s nice,” she said, standing in the cold 200-year-old kitchen.
I nodded at the caretaker. I could see that it already was.
This place, a muse for Milford poet, essayist and funeral director Lynch since 1970, has made him a lifelong fan of County Clare in this magical part of western Ireland called the Shannon region. He inherited the cottage in 1992 from an aunt.
“To have a little house smack dab on the peninsula between the Atlantic and the Shannon estuary has never lost its romance for me,” says Lynch, who visits two or three times a year. “The idea that I can look out the window the same as my great-grandfather did and see the same landscape ... there are maybe a few more lights, but it’s the same.”
Most breathtaking is the Cliffs of Moher, Ireland’s biggest natural tourist attraction.
The coastal towns of Doolin and Kilkee, the golfing mecca of Lahinch and the Burren town of Lisdoonvarna all are easily drivable. Bunratty Castle Folk Park with its 15th-Century castle is just 10 minutes from the airport.
I also made a side trip to nearby Limerick to see the newly renovated visitor experience exhibit at King John’s Castle.
I stayed at the famous Old Ground Hotel in the market town of Ennis for $120 a night. I stayed at the pretty Bunratty Castle Hotel for $100. Crowds were few. I was one of only about 20 visitors at the Cliffs of Moher.
The mid-February temperature? About 50 Fahrenheit, windy and mostly sunny.
Best of all, Ireland’s notoriously treacherous driving was easy. I saw few other cars, which was probably lucky for the other drivers.
High tourist season in Ireland is now through the end of August. But go a few weeks before or after, and you can see what the place is like when it’s not putting on a show.
When Lynch’s friends come to visit County Clare, he urges them to take a drive from the Loop Head Lighthouse all the way north along the Atlantic Ocean to Galway.
“You won’t find a better drive,” says Lynch, whose favourite months here are September and October, when crowds thin and the weather is mild. “I’ve known it for 45 years but just tried to stay quiet about it.”
Ironically, many of Lynch’s secret sights are part of a new tourist trail in Ireland called the Wild Atlantic Way, which encourages tourists to drive the majestic sections along 1,500 miles of Ireland’s rugged west coast — including spots about a mile from Lynch’s cottage.
What souvenirs does he recommend? Does anyone actually wear a warm, wool cable Irish sweater when they get home? “They look really nice on kids,” he says. He also used to bring porcelain Belleek china home to his mother and grandmother, “and I loved it for its frailties,” he says. “But you know what really is a gift to me is a block of turf thrown in a fire in northern Michigan, and Knock holy water.” Turf is a block of peat that is often burned for fuel in Ireland, and Knock Shrine holy water is known for its healing powers.
In this land of Irish football, where, in my opinion, the best foods are cream, whipped cream and brown bread, Lynch feels at home. Back in Michigan, people do know him as a poet, mortician and a runner-up for the National Book Award. But in Ireland, poets have special standing.
“Everyone in the United States is glad we have poets in the same way as they are glad we have clean drinking water,” he says. “But in Ireland, being a poet is considered good, honest labour.”
This part of Ireland is famed for its music and fiddling, its rugged landscape and its wild coastline — all variations of poetry.
“You know that last scene in the movie when Dr Zhivago dies and the brother has the funeral for him in Moscow, and they say, ‘No one loves poetry like Russians, and no one loves poets like Russians’? You can say the same thing about Ireland,” Lynch says.
In fact, when he used to visit his Aunt Nora, who lived in the family cottage before she died and left it to Lynch, Nora told the neighbours they were welcome to come visit — but not during the day, because her nephew the poet was working. — Detroit Free Press/MCT
MAJESTIC: Doonagore Castle ruins overlooks the wild Atlantic in Doolin.
