At the Edge of Ireland by David Yeadon Page B

On one occasion a barman showed us a descriptive clipping of the town dating back to 1920 with the comment that “ah can’t see as things have changed much in nigh on a century!”
    Thirteen trawlers from Bilbao, Spain, arrived today and the streets were crowded with brown men, holy medals around their necks, deeply religious oaths on their lips, merriment and good nature in their eyes, bundles of silk stockings and bottles of lethal Iberian brandy under their jerkins. The stockings and the brandy they would barter for anything available. The dances in the hall beside the harbor were a sight to see. You wouldn’t know under God what country you were in.
    Whatever country it is, it’s certainly going “green” rapidly and responsibly. In the grocery stores you pay a fee for every plastic bag you need; NO SMOKING signs are everywhere (despite the threatened bar-boycotts by petulant puffers), and just on the edge of town is one of the most sophisticated recycling centers we’ve ever seen anywhere. This is no simple triparate glass, metal, and plastic depository. Instead there are over twenty separate collection sections for four different oils; three different glass types; five different paper bins, plus special containers for “small computers,” “large TV sets,” aerosol cans, car batteries, domestic batteries, fluorescent lights, and even plastic bottle tops!
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    E ASING EASTWARD OUT PAST the town’s modern hospital, a scattering of sedate B and Bs, a couple of enticing arts and crafts galleries, and a very appealing golf course overlooking Bantry Bay, we became increasingly aware of numerous small roadside signs for archeological sites.
    â€œIt says here in the local guide map,” Anne told me, “that ‘over six hundred sites have been identified so far on Beara, ranging from wedge graves, stone circles, and ring forts to ancient church sites and, at seventeen feet high, the world’s tallest ogham stone just outside Eyeries.’”
    â€œAnd what pray tell is an ogham stone?”
    â€œJust a minute—I’ve seen something…ah—here…it says, ‘There are over three hundred still existing in Ireland and they usually mark important graves…The vertical script carved into the stone consists of a series of twenty different incisions based on Latin. The notches represent vowels and the slanting or straight strokes are consonants. The words themselves are usually found to be old Irish and are considered proof of a literate society dating back at least to 400 AD. ’”
    â€œFascinating.”
    â€œYes, it is. And y’know, there’s something really magical about this whole peninsula. You feel as if you’re being lured into a very ancient place—a place that was possibly much more populated in prehistoric times than it is today. Presences…I can sense them. Can’t you?”
    I’m not normally very tuned in to such psychic nuances, but I had to agree with my ultrasensitive partner. There was definitely a sense of well-organized layers of historic occupation here—or maybe, as a friend of ours used to say, “a captivating casserole of primitive cultures.”

    Derreenataggart Stone Circle
    And if we’d read the guidebook a little more carefully we’d have realized that we were only a few miles from one of the most significant sites in southwest Ireland—the great Derreenataggart Stone Circle—a place we later came to know well.
    We passed the great gray bastion of Hungry Hill with its famous seven-hundred-foot waterfall (Europe’s highest) fed by two small lakes, and laced with waterfalls following a sudden rainstorm over the Caha range. Tumbling streams cascaded down the deeply gullied, elephant-hide-like strata, then split and splintered into sheened silver cascades. At the base of the mountain they surged in peaty froth and fury and raged down narrow