Atlantic Britain Read Online Free PDF Page B

that you cannot see it with your watching eye, but only if you look away and catch its flickering on a distant screen. Is that something? Is it? Yes,it must be. Fastnet! The Fastnet light! Again and again it smeared its paleness over the northern sky. Then another, over to the northeast, the Old Head of Kinsale. For hours they remained the two sentinels guiding me in. Lights! Land! Shore! Sleep! Home!
    On the
Auk
drove, the Volvo engine beating steadily beneath me, George asleep, clearly very deeply exhausted. In the end, no more than his face appeared at the companionway steps. ‘Cup of tea?’ he said. The dark bulk of the land on either side was drawing us in on 340. The land now had shapes, a blacker outline against the black of the night. Ireland was a place, not a fantasy of arrival. Still an hour from the harbour entrance at Baltimore, I saw the light, marked on the chart, that I had been looking for over the previous hour. ‘I’ve got a flashing green,’ I shouted down to George. ‘Make for that,’ he said. The ocean slowly stilled. We reached the green, then the red beyond it, curving into the harbour calm, the lights of the village, the fishing boats against the quay, the ripple of harbour water against the
Auk’s
worn sides, the sea, as Auden once wrote, ‘as calm as a clock’. We dropped the anchor at four in the morning, forty-three hours out from England, and the
Auk
lay to her chain likea stabled mare while George and I drank whisky until the sky began to show the first streaks of a green Irish dawn.

3
The Islands
    We drank our Murphy’s and sank into the lush of southwest Ireland. The place oozed comfort, salmon on every plate, scallops for every dinner. We took the
Auk
in and out through the maze of islands in Roaring Water Bay: to one side an English actor’s castle, on the other an American sculptor’s island. A deep change had occurred: there were now more ex-pat Europeans living here than native Irish. I went to buy some fish from the cutting shed on the quay in Schull. Eight young aproned women stood around the steel table, knives in hand, the bodies of the fish flipped and sliced in front of them. They stood in total silence. I asked the manageress, a white-skinned woman with hennaed hair and a creased face that had once been beautiful, why no one spoke. She was from the Loire valley, outside Tours, and had lived here eight years. ‘We donot speak,’ she said, ‘because none of us can speak the same language.’ Lithuanians, Estonians, Germans, Portuguese and Poles: they were all here. In Baltimore, sixteen different nationalities now lived and worked. Or so the French grocer told me. The southwestern corner of Ireland had shifted from edge to centre, filled to the brim with organic veg, face creams and lovely ‘Irish’ knitwear. It was scarcely the place I had left home for.
    Something else lay glowing in my mind. Eight miles off the coast of Kerry, in the far southwest, were one of the beacons of my Atlantic island world. You only had to glimpse them from the mainland, or from the boat at sea, to be drawn out there. The Skelligs, a pair of tall, crocketed rocks, are strange in themselves, more upright than islands, the bigger of the two 700 feet tall but only 44 acres in extent. They hover somewhere in the middle ground - not quite islands, more than rocks. On some days, eight, ten, even twenty miles away off the Irish coast, they looked purely sculptural, as if the sea were a desk and they lay decorating it as symbols of the remote. Or when the last of the sun glazed the Atlantic yellow they seemed to be a pair of cathedrals, a black double Chartres seenfrom the cornfields around the city, but with their naves and chancels sunk beneath the sea, a pair of Gothic roofs. Their scale was difficult to gauge and at times, when the west wind blew, streamers of cloud tailed away from them, the summits of mountains in a distant country. These two islands are more literally attractive than any