Into the West
The Tip of a Tongue, The Tip of a Spear
It’s the wild west up here. It’s early morning on the coast of Donegal and the heat has finally broken. Mad beauty. After weeks of unbroken heat, I’ve woken to cool. Wasn’t cool when I arrived. There is a wedding party in full wallop in Roarty’s bar, my digs for the week. Old men in pinstripe suits clutching pints of Guinness (taken down in three large gulps), white-gold rings, roll ups drooping, random howls emanating from the dark pub doorway. Kids, dogs, music, tarmac almost melting under the sun. A sense of friendly danger (if those words belong side by side, and I reckon they do). There’s a young girl playing an accordion and older ladies elegant as songbirds in gorgeous homemade dresses sitting in the shade by the pub door. Barely a phone to be seen. I crawl into my womb of a room, knackered from the across-Ireland drive, to toss and turn for hours.
Later I will eat fish and chips and drink whiskey from a flask the comedian Tommy Tiernan slipped in my hand as I left Galway that morning. “You’ll need this,” he whispered, “Donegal is the land of Fairies.” That evening I learn my first Gaelic – disclaimer: the below is NOT as it looks on paper or anything like, just as it sounded in my head that first time the words swam deliriously past me:
Meesha Máirtín is ush Dartmoor may
My name is Martin I come from Dartmoor
It’s a relief to know that with some authority.
But as I lie in bed later and wild whooping music roars up from the bar and through the floorboards I think – in those last psychedelic moments before sleep – my people came from here. And Mayo and Galway. And that’s it, zonk, I’m out. Dreams of white horses and steep cliffs and sea waves.
And now it’s morning and I’m nursing good strong black coffee and writing to you. And thinking about this question – where do we come from? I’ll be circling back to that, but in the meantime it is thinking about the old ones of this Ireland I’m considering. Gazing out over the higgle piggle green brown fields and hills and seeing the occasional church nestled into a fairy copse or two. There’s a bold romance to this place, a soul that no coin can buy. So let’s go back awhile.