Bernard One

With our friendship stretched to the breaking point, my wife and I pulled into the outskirts of a town that surely had to be Dungloe at 5 in the afternoon. I had taken several supposedly short side trips that stretched much longer than my optimistic estimates. We had barely spoken since leaving Letterkenny.

I pulled off to park and walked across the road to ask a boy with a cone of swirled ice cream in his hand, "Is this Done Glow?" He looked at his cone, took a big bite which he savored before he replied, "Aye, this is dunnlow."

This good news failed to improve relations.

At the Ostan na Rosann (hotel of the Rosses), I headed straight for the bar. To my surprise, Joy joined me. I thought she would collapse in the room and sign an oath in blood, which she had taken pains to repeat several times, "Never again." But here she was on the stool beside me and of all things, striking up a conversation with the gentleman next to her. Then, she was actually speaking to me. "Paul, I want you to meet Bernard (Bear nar) and his wife Denise." I wasn't in the mood to meet anyone.

Bernard had a German accent, his wife, an Irish one. They ordered sandwiches. We sipped a so-so cappuccino and chatted pleasantly. Joy spoke of her fascination with old graveyards. I chimed in about my passion for remote coastal scenery. Bernard and Denise exchanged glances. Before we knew it, we accepted their invitation to be our guides on an excursion that would include both of these. The tension was forgotten. Our little Opal fell in behind fell in behind their Peugeot.

With the sun still quite high in the early evening sky, we set off for a place that would take me time to learn to pronounce. The closest I can get is Mahurree with an accent on the first syllable.

Would we be interested in seeing the famine or penny wall on the way? Workers during famine times were paid one penny a day. Men practiced in the laborious necessity of fences for their farms had left a network of now-meaningless enclosures impressive in their size and scale, mostly now on private land. A graveyard with black and white headstones echoed their silent tribute nearby. We stared in awe and offered ours.

A tower loomed ahead, just a tower, rimmed by an uncomfortably narrow road with a view up past sheep and gorse and weathered boulders and down past sheep and gorse and outcroppings of cracked granite and glistening white marble. When they ended, our gaze went out to sea. An Mach Aire. Maghery. The sweep of hills, surf, and ocean stopped the car in its tracks. Bernard and Denise disappeared around the hairpin bend ahead. Five hours later, before the last faint streaks of twilight fell to solid black over the Rosses, we arrived back at our hotel escorted at the insistence of our voluble and considerate guides who'd spent summers in their home on the far side of Maghery for 29 years.

Written by Joy Davis - Summer of Travel 2007