Motorhoming somewhere unfamiliar always has its idiosyncrasies. In Ireland these include campsites that won't accept guests who have not pre-booked even when they have spare pitches, site owners who insist on taking all your bank card details including the three digit code on the back when you phone to make a telephone reservation. Their explanation is always the same, "It's just for security." Whose would that be? Not the customer's! Then there is the mystery of remote campsites listed as having 150 pitches, but when you try to book one for the weekend in the shoulder season they are all full. It is only when you manage to stay on one mid-week that you understand the issue. They do have 150 pitches, but 130 of them are filled with permanently sited statics complete with decking and hi-tech gas BBQs, another 12 pitches have been block booked by caravanners for the season and two of the remaining eight are full of rubbish and wrecked lawnmowers. This leaves six available pitches to accommodate the dozens of camper vans and mohos from Great Britain and Europe all eager to do the 'Wild Atlantic Way' off-season, as well as a clutch of weekenders from Dublin or Cork seeking a romantic short break.
So, appearances are deceiving, rural Ireland seems uncrowded and remote, in fact it is uncrowded and remote and browsing 'Searchforsites' there seems plenty of places to stay in a motorhome, particularly around the coast. However, this doesn't mean you can simply wander about at will, like you might France, Iberia, Greece or Scandanavia. For all the reasons given above it is best to book ahead, and if you do plan to wing it, have an alternative in mind if your preferred place is unavailable.
.
I am writing this from Garrettstown House Holiday Park which is on the western side of Old Kinsale Head. After three unsuccessful attempts to find somewhere to stay over the weekend on the coast between Kinsale and Skibbereen Gill managed to book us in here; on the phone the manager implied they had 'loads of room'. In the event this proved to be simultaneously true and untrue.
As the name implies the site is in the grounds of a country house. The large mansion is now a roofless ruin; built in the early eighteenth century but abandoned in the 1950s as too costly to maintain, the old estate was turned into a static caravan park. The former outbuildings now house guest facilities, including a laundry - we needed a washing machine, that's the main reason why we are here.
The manager was affable on the phone and, chatty when we arrived. Squeezed between a lengthy explanation of why Irish voters under forty tend to support Sinn Féin, the outrageous cost of bar food in Reykjavik and Brisbane, the fact that because Kinsale Head was a peninsula it had the same water on each side (?) somehow, mixed in with this gush of mis-information he managed to drop in a useful fact or two - such as the touring pitches for motorhomes were in two locations, half a dozen with hardstanding in the camping field and a few more among the static caravans at the top of the site in an area designated as a 'child free'.
We took a walk around to check out the options. None the pitches on the camping field were level enough for a 7m van, even with ramps we still would be on a wonk. There were four empty pitches among the statics, one was full of scrap metal, another was on a corner and involved a nifty bit of parallel parking to access, which left only two possibilities - you see, not straightforward!
This is not to say that Ireland is not without its delights. The green rolling pasture land to the north of Kinsale is lovely, especially in late spring.
Parking the van in the town looked tricky so we drove straight through. Viewed from the cab Kinsale seemed like a pleasant seaside place, more stylish than Dungarvon where we had stayed previously.
The countryside surrounding the campsite looks interesting too. Tomorrow we'll unload the bikes and explore the roads running alongside local beaches, they are marked on our map as having 'blue flag' status. Today we have set aside for more practical matters - doing laundry.
After a week of blustery weather forecast for the next few days promises a more settled spell. The cold wind has dropped and in the sun occasionally it almost feels pleasant. Time to get out the Cadac and grill the Wagu burgers we bought in the award winning butchers in Roundwood.
For once I managed to get it just right, the grill hot enough to get a bit of caramelisation on the outside but timing it so the inside remained medium rare. Wagu beef is a great product, it would have been a shame to cremate them.
When you eat good quality burgers it makes you realise how the ones we buy habitually from supermarkets are really second rate. We are definitely eating less meat these days, we should make the effort to find a good quality local butcher - consume less, but better.
This morning was sunny and warm We cycled down to Garrettstown beach. When I say sunny and warm, we are in Ireland, so the term is relative. As a visitor this meant risking a lightweight hoodie; natives are made of sterner stuff, in swimsuits, some even splashing about in the sea.
Every culture has its very own seaside fare, ours, fish n' chip shops, France, moules frites vans, Spain, chiringuitos, Italy, gelateria, lreland - beach car park chuck wagons. It was Saturday, the sun was shining, the car park filling-up, five different food trucks were drawn up in a line. The biggest was an articulated truck with a trailer kitchen which looked more suited to mass catering at Glastonbury than a remote beach in County Cork. The food on offer was basically greasy caff. However this was not the case with the others. One trailer offered authentic Breton crêpes, another coffee and cupcakes.
The latter moveable emporium had serious competition from stylishly logoed 'Running Goat Artisan Coffee'. Finally there was the inevitable ice cream van.
The diversity of the offer reflected a broad social mix on the beach. Lots of families - a chill wind ensured the smaller the kid the bluer tinged they became. Still, the gradual onset of hyperthermia did not seem to reduce the queue for ice creams.
I guess the artisan coffee trailers were pitched primarily at the surfers and outdoorsy types - tri-suit suit clad wild swimmers, hikers heading for the path to the Old Head of Kinsale.
We pedalled towards the next bay. It was called Garylucas beach, raising the intriguing question, who was Gary, and what did he do to have a beach named after him? We locked the bikes by the beach car park. Somewhat bizarrely clumps of Yuccas had been planted on the the low dunes bringing a bit of a Baja California vibe to the Celtic coast. Decrepit picnic tables were sequestered amongst waist-high dune grasses like ancient remains. At some point the area must have been developed as a kind of coastal country park, but abandoned for some reason. The fact that the Yuccas seemed to to be thriving must mean lreland's south coast more is or less frost free. We have come across other 'exotics' in hedgerows here, like arum lilies, all indicators of mild winters hereabouts.
We decided to explore the cliff-top walk which headed off from here towards Old Kinsale Head. The beach was not exactly heaving, but it was quite lively. Two minutes from the car park and we had the magnificent coast to ourselves, gorgeous, both on a grand scale and in its smallest details
There seemed a kind of perfection to Courtmacsherry Bay as it stretched out before us to the west, a pleasing bow of sandy beaches, low dunes and rocky outcrops, with the grey outline of Seven Heads beyond, and paler still, in the far distance, a wisp of land. Galley Head, we speculated, consulting our trusty travelling companion, Google maps.
Nearby, on the cliff edge the grassy knolls were covered in wild flowers. One of the lines from Van Morrison's 'Streets of Arklow' that I recalled last week when we visited the town reoccured to me, 'gay profusion in God's green land'. On the dour streets of Arklow it had seemed hyperbolic, but here, not quite so ridiculously over-sentimental.
Still, I am very wary of romanticising landscapes, either with a big or a little 'R'. Luckily there was plenty of geology hereabouts to keep Gill occupied and me grounded. We took some photographs an as aide memoire so Gill could think about the strata a bit more later on.
Others I took simply because I found the patterns pleasing.
Meanwhile Gill was trying to figure out what we were looking at. "Is it all slate and shale, or mixed with layers of limestone?" She queried. I treated this as a rhetorical question, as any sort of sensible answer was beyond me. However, being clueless did not deter me from muddying the waters a bit,
"There seems to be patches of a paler coloured rock dotted about too," I observed. This prompted a noncommittal "hmmm" from Gill, I was uncertain if this signalled assent or slight irritation.
When we got back to the van I searched for some information about the geology of Old Kinsale Head. The first thing that came up was a general map of the geology of the whole of Ireland. This helped a bit, showing that the nearby coast was predominantly sandstone and shale laid down in the Carboniferous era around 300 million years ago.
A link from the page brought up a local geological map, and though it largely re-iterated the information on the large scale one it was fascinating for a slightly different reason. Geological Survey Ireland have digitised their archive, I inadvertently downloaded the map from 1857, it is a lovely thing if happen you like old maps.
Aside from the beautiful draughtsmanship what is exciting about the document is its date. By 1785 the Scottish geologist James Hutton had worked out that the earth was millions of years old by studying local rock formations and strata revealed by coastal erosion. However 'catastrophism' remained the prevailing view - the notion that the earth was shaped by a series of cataclysmic events such as the Biblical flood, all occuring within the last few thousand years. Only with the publication of Charles Lyell's 'Principles of Geology' in 1833 were the basic principles we know today accepted.
The map of Old Kinsale Head was produced little more than two decades later, imagine the scale of the scientific enterprise it took to map the geology of the British Isles at a local level. In fact you don't have to imagine the scale of the endeavour, the Geological Institute of Ireland have digitised much of its archive, which is why I could find the first geological map of the area on line. The notes accompanying the image mentioned the area had been surveyed by G V de Noyer in 1857; the name was hyperlinked - click!
It transpired that not only did de Noyer make a significant contribution to the four decade long project to map Ireland's geology but he was also a superb watercolorist, often illustrating the topography as well as surveying it. In fact a painting of the exact bit of rock Gill and I had been discussing earlier appeared as if by magic on-line.
Amazingly, despite 167 years of being battered by the Atlantic the outcrop has not changed much.
There are always two journeys, one on the ground and one in your head. It is perfectly possible to feel miserable even when visiting somewhere amazing; equally you can feel quite perky in miserable surroundings. Occasionally headspace and real space both feel great - a wow moment, like now, as an illustrious, but obscure Victorian geologist and I shared a landscape even though we were centuries apart.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment