This scenic route is now driving our tourism trade
IT was my last night driving the Wild Atlantic Way, and I was sitting outside Bushe’s Bar in Baltimore in West Cork watching a sunset of molten gold. The atmosphere was lively, with music playing, and the chatter all around was animated and lilting. A friend who lives locally arrived and we had a good old catch-up, and, when she left, I sat alone for maybe an hour, replaying the extraordinary sights of the previous week in my head.
Hard though it is to believe, that was ten years ago – as I have often noted here, the pandemic played tricks with our perception of time, and ten years ago feels like four, and four years ago feels like about ten. Nothing can be reliably placed in sequence anymore.
Captivated
But, yes, this was May 2014, and the office had asked me to drive the entire WAW, or the main spine of it at least, from Donegal to Cork.
My enthusiasm wasn’t exactly off the scale, because I was not unfamiliar with the West anyway, but once I pressed my foot on the accelerator, I was immediately captivated.
It helped that I started in the northwest, because it turned out I had never really scratched the surface of Donegal at all; indeed, it took the first two full days to cover it, even superficially. I had never been to Malin Head, never seen Portsalon beach, never gazed out over the spectacular Sliabh Liag cliffs. Within hours, I was captivated – it is all too easy to spend much of your time on the WAW going, ‘Wow!’
Then something else happened. No matter how used I was to parts of Leitrim, Sligo, Mayo, Galway, Clare, Kerry and Cork, no matter how many of the places I had been to before, they all felt entirely different when visited one after the other, rather than just travelling from the east coast for a couple of days at a time.
The wildness of Donegal gives way to the spectacular mountain scenery and Céide Fields of Mayo; the view from the top of the windy road on the Minaun Heights on Achill is my favourite in Ireland. It feels like if you squint hard enough, you might see Newfoundland.
From there to Connemara, passing the fjord of Killary near Leenane; then the barren karst landscape of the Burren in Co. Clare, the other famous cliffs, and the vast Atlantic expanse from Loop Head.
The ferry from Killimer takes you to Tarbert in Kerry, and from there you can tick off the finger peninsulas of Dingle, Iveragh and Beara, before West Cork opens its lush doors and invites you in.
Lunch the day I made for home was a tray of sushi eaten on a stone wall beside the sea near Castletownshend, a simple pleasure that was somehow made epic just by the beauty of what surrounded me.
It genuinely was one of the best weeks I’ve ever had in this country. The food along the way was fresh from land or sea. I met friends en route, in Ballina for coffee, in Oliver’s bar in Cleggan for chowder, in Dick Mack’s in Dingle for beers, even at a kitchen table in a cottage pulled from the front of a postcard.
I had a seaweed bath in Kilcullen’s in Enniscrone, which has been there since the 1920s. I sat in a hot tub looking over a forest in the Park Hotel in Kenmare. I slept in the Yeats room in Markree Castle in Co. Sligo, and I closed my eyes and took deep breaths a dozen times as I contemplated the next stretch of road over the Conor Pass on Kerry.
Built into all of this is genius. Linking all of these places and experiences under one banner, the Wild Atlantic Way, completely changed the way I saw the western seaboard, and it clearly worked its magic on others too. As we approach the official tenth anniversary of its inauguration, we have learned from Fáilte Ireland that the WAW now generates €3billion a year in tourism revenue. It has helped create an estimated 35,000 jobs, and visitor numbers annually have increased by two million over the figure before it was created. Just over half of all tourism revenue on the island is generated there.
Memories
The Wild Atlantic Way is the single best piece of tourism branding in our history. The signage, never a great Irish strength, is perfect, with an (N) or an (S) on every one to remind you which way to go, north or south.
Ten years on, I still relive many of the memories. Ten years on, I’d still love to do it all again, though I’d never again try to take on 2,500km in just eight days.
No, a fortnight at a minimum, but a month would be better, with no accommodation booked at all, just nosing the car onto the road, and stopping where the mood takes me.
No matter how far we often like to go to get off the island, the island is still here, waiting to be explored. And if there’s a sunset pint in Bushe’s at the end of it again, it’s hard to think of any holiday more perfect.
Happy birthday!