We continued westwards. The area around Bantry has several places to stay. We decided to head for Eagle Point Camping a few kilometres north of the town. It had positive reviews and looked to be in a scenic spot right by Bantry Bay. Our Ireland road atlas is useless for journey planning. It's not the fault of the mapping but reflects the idiosyncrasies of road categorisation in the country. We joined the the N71 trunk road at Clonakilty which at that point accords with what you might expect a major road to look like, not a dual carriageway, but wide and smooth with a hard surfaced hard shoulder. At the quirkily named town of Ballydehob the route turns north, the green pastural countryside of Ireland's south coast quickly becomes more rugged.
The road narrows, grassy verges disappear to be replaced by steep banks and dry-stone walls, the speed limit drops from 100 to 80kph. Given the bendy road I rarely achieved that. It becomes a tad alarming as trucks bomb towards you, whooshing past with less than a foot to spare forcing you uncomfortably close to the dry stone wall on the passenger side. Gill showed true fortitude only intermittently squeaking in alarm as tankers, bulbous wheeled tractors, delivery trucks and every white van man from Cork and Kerry hurtled past. To make matters worse the road surface deteriorated too, pot-holed sections that jangled the crockery and cutlery followed by a few hundred metres of imperceptible undulations, the rear suspension creaking in complaint as we bounced along.
Then you top a rise and drop down, the blue expanse of Bantry Bay fills the windscreen, rugged mountains ranged beyond, in the far distance, half lost in cloud, the summits of Macgillycuddy's Reeks. A fair trade-off, iffy road for epic view.
We squeezed through Bantry's narrow streets, slow going, but everyone knows the score; to get past the parked cars you need to take turns, give and take, everyone bides their time, no-one gets hot under the collar. It seemed like a pleasant town, albeit somewhat traffic choked.
Eagle Point Camping is a few kilometres further on, we were glad to arrive. We had only driven 60 miles but the roads made it seem much longer, time to stop for a day or two. The place is undoubtedly the best Irish site we have been on so far. It is extensive, spread across an entire peninsula towards the eastern end of Bantry Bay. Though there are lots of static caravan, the site is zoned into a dozen or so smaller enclaves, each divided by trees or rock outcrops.
There are wild areas in-between them, you can even find a bit of solitude, wander down tracks and find grassy banks covered in wild flowers.
I paused to watch a thrush hop across in front of me, it paused, cocked it's head to one side and stared back. It's a nice, quiet place.
So far as practicalities are concerned, the shower block is excellent (and token free), the drive-through motorhome service area well designed, the access roads wide and the pitches generous - most positioned so you get a view of the bay.
What is not to like? Here's the odd thing, in the previous post I observed, "it is perfectly possible to feel miserable even when visiting somewhere amazing." This is exactly what began to happen to the pair of us the longer we stayed on the site. The question is, why? As I say, it is a perfectly nice place in a beautiful setting.
I think it this was all to do with the location. Although the place is called Eagle Point Camping, really it is designed around the needs of caravanners, not just the scores of statics dotted about, but tourers too.
The ideal caravan site is in a pretty rural location, with a nice view that you can admire from your 'outfit's" big lounge window. Not too remote though, well enough connected so you can have 'grand days out' visiting nearby attractions and local beauty spots. With direct access to the N71 then many of the delights of southwest Ireland from Killarney to Mizzen Head are within an hour's drive by car from here. So far as 'grand day's out' go, Ireland specialises in creating visitor attractions, from sub-tropical gardens to opportunities to go kayaking with seals.
However, for us the place was far from ideal as we like to park-up and explore our surroundings on foot or by bike. The nearby area is quite inaccessible without a vehicle, the N71 is certainly not suitable for walkers or cyclists with a nervous disposition.
I toyed with renting a kayak - there's a watersports centre on site - but in the end we took to mooching about, pausing from time to time to use Google lense in the hope of identifying unfamiliar wayside flowers, stopping to simply admire the view, or entertaining ourselves by people watching.
By day two I progressed, and combined two activities from the previous day by observing other people admiring the view. The entire site might be described as being vista orientated. White benches are scattered about so inmates, um.. guests might rest a while and appreciate the glories of the scene before them.
It's a a big site, and being early in the season half empty. Given choice you might think that people might park close to the facilities, but no, they clustered together on small knolls, low outcrops and gentle slopes, surreptitiously competing for the best spot to eat a perfectly scenic breakfast or a short stroll from a romantic sunset.
A Dutch couple went one better. They erected a kitchen tent next to their van, but instead of it housing a cooker it contained a small picnic table and two chairs. Three of the sides were zipped up, the fourth fully open, so every morning, rain or shine, they could eat breakfast in lone splendour before a perfectly framed idyllic view. I admired their resolve.
We don't tend to question why we unconsciously 'frame' the natural world in order to re-imagine it as a beautiful view. Hold your phone sideways to take a picture and the aspect becomes 'landscape'. This is not some kind of 'given' it's a curiously 'Western' notion rooted in Albertian linear perspective developed in Florence in the early fifteenth century. Over the centuries these aspect ratios have become so ubiquitous we regard them as natural, nobody wonders why TV screens aren't circular or your mobile phone oval to better fit the palm of your hand .
In fact it is striking how new technology supercharges established conventions as much as creating new ones. Here's a screenshot of my phone cameras settings:
The grid and levelling feature harks back to Alberti. Similarly, the smart composition gizmo 'rule of thirds' is a simplified version of the Renaissance ideal proportions of the 'golden section'.Even though I don't use the auto features, nevertheless the pictures I took today probably look similar to everyone else's - because we have shared notions of what constitutes a 'nice view'. The landscape itself cannot be innately beautiful, it looks that way because we have shared cultural values; by and large we are conditioned to admire similar things.
Having spent far too much time looking at the view then thinking about it, then watching other people looking at the view then thinking about that, it was definitely time to move somewhere else and think about something else altogether . But... finally, I now realise why Mr Noyer and I chose the exact same spot to compose a very similar picture of Garylucas Bay though we were separated by 167 years.
We share the same pictorial conventions, so we chose the same viewpoint.
There is something intriguing about the how unspoken cultural assumptions have been embedded within the auto-compose feature on my camera phone. History tends to foreground what changes, but what prevails over time, what stays the same, is equally fascinating.
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