Paolo came to Mayo last week with one of my Italian groups and wrote the following wonderful piece on his Instagram account, reproduced here with his kind permission, with its Google translation edited by myself.
“I had already been to Ireland, but here we have not been in the classic postcard Ireland for tourists, with smiling leprechauns and green shamrocks.
Instead, we saw the real Ireland, that of a county on the West Coast, a territory of small towns and villages, depopulated, which experienced a bloody English colonialism, the monoculture of the potato, famine and now the invasion of Chinese goods.
But it is also a land where nature expresses itself in all its vigour and sweetness: expanses of heather, trees larger than elsewhere, the sun that dives into the Black Oak River in the late northern evening, the endless expanse of the Atlantic, islets and inlets, lakes, streams and peat bogs… a silent land, sparsely inhabited, where you can hear the chirping of birds, the gurgling of the water, the ocean swell…
It is the vigorous breath of the Atlantic wind that calls to life!
The rocks overlooking the ocean carved out like walls of tall buildings and the green hills like houses. (And who says that a lord of the Ancient People does not live there).
Protagonists of many stories without a moral: In Ireland, a good story does not have to have a moral. It can tell of the many dimensions of reality or of the events of life, because in life many things are pure chance. Like eating of the salmon of knowledge while sucking on a burned finger. It happened to Fionn, leader of the Fianna!
Here is a de-idealised but not demythologised Ireland, because the myth speaks of life and what you feel in the Atlantic wind! If there had not been another dimension of reality, there would have been no Easter Rising, or even the hunger strike of the H-Block martyrs.
Thank you, Barry, a true seanchaí and guardian of memory !”
When The Man from Piacenza Came to Mayo
[Written by Paolo Pantrini on Instagram, at https://www.instagram.com/paolo_pantrini/, where you can view the original in Italian.]
Accompanying images are mine, taken on Achill Island.
While I do not lead long hiking weekends on Achill, you can join me in NW Mayo for my 4-night Western Ocean Walking Weekend each June, based on the Mullet Peninsula.
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