When I was little, my mother Lavinia didn't have much money. She never had a lot of money but when I was little she was a separated single mum in Sixties Ireland and, though her parents and friends and employers were sympathetic and kind, things were lean. Very few people that I knew then took foreign holidays - we had one epic sojourn in Washington DC, in the hot summer of 1968, thanks to the great generosity and tolerance of my aunt and uncle, who let us share their tiny flat in Silver Springs for several weeks. But air travel was a rare and expensive privilege, and holidays were mostly in Ireland. And for us, that meant Achill. Achill is the largest island off the Irish coast, an island continuation of the Corraun peninsula in North Mayo, which pushes west of Mulrany, separating the sunny waters of Clew Bay from the more sombre Blacksod.
On Achill, we stayed at the Amethyst Hotel, in the middle of Keel village. The Amethyst was owned and run by Thea and Robert Boyd. Thea ran the main part of the hotel on the southern side of the road, with many rooms and the extraordinary, almost mediaeval kitchen, and the large and beautiful dining room. Robert ran the more raffish 'Annex', which had rooms but also a bar. The Boyds were an interesting and attractive couple - highly cultured, humorous and gentle. Mr Boyd was universally known as Captain Boyd, because of his Irish Army service. Thea was an old friend of my grandmother's, and this was a draw. So too was the advice of Susan Howe - now one of America's greatest poets - a dear friend of my mother and of my beloved aunt, who stayed, and painted, at the Amethyst.
The Amethyst was the kind of hotel/guesthouse which is marked profoundly by the personality of its owners. It got a great deal of repeat custom - at one point, before the Boyds' tenure it was home to Paul Henry, the artist who maybe more than any other invented 'the West of Ireland'. People who became friendly with Thea - as my ma did, or was already - got to socialize with her around the large turf fire at one end of the dining room in the evenings. Thea and Robert were walking repositories of Achill lore and history, a Church of Ireland couple who seemed never to have identified with the Protestant community of Dugort's famous 'colony', the C of I missionary settlement set up by Edward Nangle in the nineteenth century, with its elegant L-shaped street nestled under the massive east ridge of Slievemore.
Thea was endlessly generous to me and my mother. She knew my mother had little money, and almost certainly gave us reduced rates. She would pick us up at Castlebar or Westport, when we came down by train (nearly 100 miles round trip from Keel) in her grey Cortina, and she routinely drove us all over the island. When I had little boy's questions about gulls or cliffs or basking sharks, Thea would answer them with patience and always a slight twinkle in her eye, if there was a hint of oddity or humour in what I was asking.
So, thanks initially to the Boyds (and also their son, Ruairi, to whom I owe all my early experiences of proper mountain walking, both in Mayo and in Wicklow), and then to June Fielding, and more recently (i.e. over the last 25 years) to John and Elizabeth Barrett (relatives of the original owners of the Amethyst) of Bervie Guesthouse, also in Keel, Achill is a place imprinted on my imagination and on my soul, if I have one. Its landforms, smells, buildings, village names, its weather, its rollicking roads with their every bump and rise and fall (and their terrifying Stygian ditches), its fields and bogs - these are part of my mental geography, my cognitive mapping, and returning to Achill is always like meeting an old and cherished friend.
At the western end of Achill is to be found some of its finest scenery. This is principally the mountain, or actually massif, of Croaghaun and its attendant ridges, lakes, bays, headlands and spurs. Croaghaun, about 2200 feet high, is for my money one of the grandest hills in the country - partly for the very complexity and variety of its topography, and partly because of its great northwest face, a two mile stretch of gaunt steep precipices which drop into the grim Atlantic from its very summits. I remember the first time I climbed the mountain I went up alone from the western road, on Croaghaun's southern flank, and I went for its spectacular western summit, a dramatic blocky pinnacle of quartzite leaning over the empty dark air of the northwest face. And there I met two Swiss lads, who were cock-a-hoop at having reached the summit. We chatted away, and I was very struck at their excitement - after all they came from the Alps. But they stared at me when I mentioned this, and gestured around and down to the wrinkled crawling breakers half a mile away at the base of the huge wall and said, We have nothing like this! Nothing of that combination of rough hill and big sea, which is what makes many places in the West of Ireland just so fine.
These Swiss climbers would, therefore, be aghast, as I am, at the resurrected plans of Mayo County Council for the 'development' of Keem Bay, a beautiful small cove on the southwest side of Croaghaun, sheltered under the spine of Moyteogue Head from the open Atlantic. MCC has announced plans to refurbish the old Coast Watch hut on top of Moyteogue and to build near it a ridiculous, intrusive and utterly unnecessary 'sky walk', a kind of all-glass box or tube walkway, cantilevered out from the cliff edge, so as to give visitors the sense of walking in mid-air in the most spectacular location imaginable.
Robert Lloyd Praeger, the great doyen of Irish botanists and a spiritual forefather, perhaps, of great recent writers about the West of Ireland like Tim Robinson (the finest writer in Ireland, in recent decades, if you ask me), wrote of Keem and Moyteogue in his masterpiece The Way That I Went:
... what is perhaps the finest view in Achill can be obtained without the expenditure of energy required for the ascent of Croaghaun. Take the path from Dooagh along the steep hillside to the lovely sheltered sandy bay of Keem. And from there climb up the left-hand slope to the old coastguard watch-house, and walk westward along the edge of the thousand foot-precipice; you'll obtain changing and ever-wonderful views of the wild cliffs of Achill Head which will remain long in your memory.
This is the holy place which Mayo County Council, in its Gradgrindian view of the terrains of Achill, thinks it can 'improve' with its ludicrous 'development'. It must be stopped.
Please sign this petition (possibly set up by the brilliant Saoirse McHugh):
https://www.change.org/p/mayo-county-council-save-keem-bay-achill-island-most-beautiful-beach-in-ireland-from-unnecessary-development?recruiter=false&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_initial&recruited_by_id=2de83b30-6bbc-11eb-b19e-4d6c94432ab2
Please also write to Padraig Philbin, at Mayo County Council, to express your feelings at this vandalous and philistine project: pphilbin@MayoCoCo.ie
Conor
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