Travel: Ireland's Wild Atlantic Way

That was a year ago. Now I’m driving across Inishowen again with my wife, bound for Rathmullan, a pretty village on Lough Swilly. The landscape is soft, and the Atlantic at the head of the Fanad Peninsula meek as a kitten.

The so-called Wild Atlantic Way is a catchy concept, rolling readily off the tongue, lodging firmly in the mind. It is signposted frequently, leading you surely along its 1600-mile length from north Donegal to the town of Kinsale in County Cork. The journey drips with many temptations, from world class golf and eye-boggling landscape, gourmet food and soft adventure, to simply scintillating music, a feast of festivals all year round, and castles and ruins oozing history by bucketful.

Yachts are bobbing by the pier alongside the beach that fronts the Rathmullan House Hotel when we arrive. As I stroll through the wooded extensive demesne, raising an appetite for dinner, I spy a ridge of threatening cloud sneaking in from the west. The food is sumptuous and delicious, logs are crackling in the fireplace. Spatters of rain blur across the windows. My wife is an optimist. She tells me she’s packed the binoculars. “The weather will be grand. The views will be great,” she says. My fingers are firmly crossed.

And however narrow, dipping or twisting the road becomes the following morning, the signposts are there. We never falter. The Fanad lighthouse gleams in sunlight (my wife was right). We drive south west towards our favourite corner of the county—the wiggly coast around Horn Head with its stunning views of Tory Island and Muckish mountain—before pressing on to Donegal’s shoulder: Bloody Foreland in the Gaeltacht, far too early to enjoy the blood-red sunset for which it is famed.

Two hours later, we’ve cruised the length of the rocky west coast, known as The Rosses, once near-deserted and now grown prosperous thanks to EU intervention, passing Kincasslagh, famed as the home of singer Daniel O’Donnell. As evening thickens, we round Glencolmkille, sighting Slieve League, the rugged mountain majestically looming over a series of buttressing cliffs and the sparkling ocean, calm and molten.

A handful of miles away Castle Murray House Hotel provides a resting place near the port of Killybegs, the perfect location facing the ocean, ideal for making an early getaway next morning on the journey south to Westport in County Mayo.

We meet a miscellany of scenery, from the sweeping white-sands surfers’ beach at Rossnowlagh to the ruminative diversions of Yeats’s headstone in the graveyard at Drumcliff church under Ben Bulben, the table mountain of coastal Sligo. By coincidence, this morning, the Irish Times has broken the story that Yeats’s bones may be buried elsewhere. Devotees stand around the grave. “Sure, does it matter where he’s buried?” someone says. “What really matters are the poems.”

In Ben Bulben Forest Park I take a walk to enjoy the dapple and the birdsong, reflecting on Yeats’s headstone epitaph: "Cast a cold eye/On life, on death/ Horseman, pass by". As though to match the sober mood, purple clouds ride over the mountain. We shelter from rain in the café-cum-craft shop beside the graveyard. My wife wears her planning look while I polish off scones and coffee. “It says here..,” she reads from the Lonely Planet guidebook, “there’s a surf school down the coast. Think of the calories you’d kill.”

Falling repeatedly from a slipstreamed plank of wood into the freezing Atlantic breakers sounds like a reason to scream out loud. “Or maybe a seaweed bath..?” she offers. A less distressing form of drowning.

Enniscrone, on Sligo’s north coast, is the Mecca for seaweed baths enthusiasts. “Its traditional seaweed baths” (she’s reading again), “are among the most atmospheric in the country.” And so an hour later I’m slipping my togs off, crouching gingerly in a steam box, blasting my pores until they cry out, then nipping promptly across the tiled bathroom to immerse myself in a tub of deep warm brine, brownish, brackish and aslither with skeins of weed. Sliding low, I allow the seaweed’s soupy minerals to marinade my muscles and the amniotic silkiness to lull me almost to sleep.

The immediate after-effect is to make the car feel cloud-like as I drive into County Mayo, pausing briefly at Ceide Fields, the world’s most extensive Stone Age monument—the remains from 3000BC of a farming village—before exploring the Mullet Peninsula. Here the ocean assaults and batters the jutting coast. From Blacksod Bay you gaze towards the mountains of Achill Island. Belmullet town feels almost deserted and the N59 towards Westport bumps and lurches across a bog.

You could spend a day – or longer in balmy weather – on Achill Island, a landscape showpiece of mountains and beaches, seabirds and wildflowers. South-eastern Achill takes the breath away with its cliffscapes scaled by suicidal sheep. The lingering sorrow of its Famine Village, a ruin, long deserted, is hard to erase.

A positive contrast comes with pulsing, vibrant Westport, tree-lined and go ahead, with cheerful painted shop fronts and razzle dazzle. Dumping our luggage at the Knockranny House Hotel, we head out for the craic. At An Port Mor restaurant, famed for its seafood, chef Frankie Mallon makes the wild Atlantic salmon melt in your mouth. Across Bridge Street sits Matt Molloy’s pub, where the long-ago flute player from the Chieftains lays on a nightly back room ceilidh that you can hear from the open front door through the din of drinkers.

Food for the stomach, with views to lift a lagging spirit are also on tap at the Knockranny. On our second night in Westport we feast on its vista of Croagh Patrick, renowned as Ireland’s ‘holy mountain’. A feather of cloud drifts over the summit taking one’s eye across Clew Bay and its fleet of small islands which, at dusk, appear to hover above the sea. The hotel’s chef is the holder of the title Best Chef in Mayo and the Knockranny’s delicious dinner and banquet breakfasts set us up for a lengthy meander through the wilds of hauntingly lovely Connemara, across the finger tips of tapering County Galway.

This is Irish-speaking Ireland, and often signposts are in Gaelic. The capillary roads through the tourist-luring landscape are strangely quiet given the season. “The oul’ recession has sins to answer for,” says a drinker in the only pub in Carna. After a sandwich, we drive away, heading east to Galway City, the restless capital of Connaught. Long ribbons of rocky foreshore caress the ocean along the edge of Galway Bay, with fabulous views below a big sky of the County Clare coast and the bleached limestone hills of the world famous Burren.

The seaside city resembles a 1960s snapshot: kiss me quick hats, ice-cream, candy floss, amusements, a big wheel by the blue flag beach, plus fish and chips along the promenade and sunshine as warm as nostalgia.

Galway City is famed for its festivals, from film to horse racing to the arts. Eyre Square, the city’s centre, is abuzz. Shop Street and High Street, festooned with bunting, flags and pennants, are thronged with pedestrians and buskers—a genteel harpist, jugglers, a grim Charles Manson lookalike on sorrowing Irish pipes.

Amid all this, you could easily miss the city’s history: the Hall of the Red Earl in Druid Lane taking you back 900 years; the Spanish Arch across the river, a rare remnant of the medieval walls. Great food is easier to encounter and the best of the city’s restaurants includes Kai, along Sea Road, where chef Jess Murphy gives Irish ingredients a sensational Kiwi twist. We are sorry to leave after barely two days.

Our room at the Radisson gazes out towards our next destination – the beautiful Burren across Galway Bay, and the village of Doolin. We relish the journey, through Kinvarra and Ballyvaughan, (an amazing chowder lunch at Monk Bar), touching the edge of the Flaggy Shore, featured in Seamus Heaney’s Postscript. The haunting Burren’s lunar landscape of hills and foreshore is home to some of the rarest wildflowers on the planet. The road twists and trickles into Doolin, passing two of its three famous pubs, McGann’s and McDermott’s – music on tap.

Doolin ends our southward sally, leaving the southern half of the Wild Atlantic Way to be next year’s treat. We bed down at Cullinan’s Guesthouse and Restaurant overlooking the River Aille. Carol Cullinan lavishes charm the way her husband dishes up food – with style, finesse and generosity.

We indulge ourselves, grabbing tickets for a boat trip to Inisheer, then venture south toward the Cliffs of Moher where the churning sea meets the vertical wow!

At Lisdoonvarna we run into Morris Dancers from Oxfordshire performing in the square. One of them sniffs the coastal ozone and tells me he’s hooked on the drink and the music. Last night’s Guinness stains his whiskers. “Even the rain tastes good!” he says. If you mix it with stout and a spray of tunes, I say, it tastes better. He nods assent. “I’ll try it tonight.”

TRAVEL NOTES

Getting there

Easyjet (easyjet.com ) flies daily from Glasgow to Belfast from £48.98 return; Ryanair (ryanair.com ) flies from Glasgow to City of Derry airport from £29.98 return; Stenaline ferries (stenaline.co.uk) cross from Cairnryan to Belfast daily from £198 return (car and driver); Car Rental: holidayautos.co.uk (from £14.49 per day).

Where to stay

Rathmullan House Hotel (rathmullanhouse.com ) has rooms from £65 pppn.

Knockranny House Hotel (knockrannyhousehotel.ie ) has room from £65 pppn.

Radisson Blu Hotel has rooms from £125 pppn.

Cullinan’s Guesthouse (cullinansdoolin.com ) has rooms from Euro £25 pppn.

Things to do

Enjoy a Seaweed Bath: Kilcullen’s Seaweed Baths Enniscrone. Call 00353-96-36238.

Visit Inisheer with Doolin Ferries (doolin2aranferries.com) Returns daily.