Today is the shortest day of the year. Its very dark up north here. The morning are very dark yet I find it hard to sleep. When the sun appears it illuminates and reveals a verdent but slummering landscape. I am always looking for flashes of red to paint in the deepest winter. In the past it might be a coat, or a door. Today it is a red roof on an old stone cottage. The old houses are disappearing fast here.
This part of Inishowen near Dunaff feels remote. Maybe that’s because we drove through up and through the Urris Hills and Mamore gap to get here. It’s all small long roads like this one. Its tucked away in a north western corner of Inishowen, Malin Head is to the north, close by. I look forward to the days slowing getting longer.
Dun Fhraoigh in Irish means, “Fort of the Heather” – it has been a fort at Dunree for thousands of years, since the Bronze age (over 4000 years ago). When you see the chunk of rock that the “modern” day fort (well Napoleonic era) for has been built on, you understand why.
Its a big chunk of rock! (photo credit: Emma Cownie)
Photo Credi t: The Artillery Club of Ireland
Aeriel View of Dunree Head (Google Maps)
Its location, on the cliffs of Dunree Head, is great for observing and controlling ships moving up and down the majestic Lough Swilly, one of Ireland’s three glacial fjords.
The English built this sturdy fort on the chunk of rock c. 1812-3 with a draw-bridge! The enemy back then, as readers of Jane Austen will know, was the French forces of Napolean Bonaparte. (The story of Jane Austen’s Donegal nieces is worthy of a BBC/RTE mini-series in its own right; linking Kent, Ramelton and Gweedore). The French had attempted landing in Lough Swilly in 1798 with a force of about 8,000 men, which was repelled at sea. The Royal Navy anchored ships in the Lough. There were a lot of big guns here, nine 24-pounders were in 1817. There was once a Martello-type in the centre of the old fort but it was demolished c. 1900, as it obstructed the field of fire from the new fort on the summit of Dunree Hill.
Although the Irish Free State was created in 1922 and they followed (and still follow) a policy of political neutrality, the British army did not leave Dunree until 1938. This was because Lough Swilly was a “Treaty Port”, and it remained under British military control for defensive purposes. During the Second World War, it was under control of the Irish Army and it played an integral role in safeguarding Ireland when a number of anti aircraft guns were added to site. The waters off the coast of Donegal are under threat today from Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet”.
I am not particularly interested in military hardware, although I know plenty of people in the world are. I have not been in the military museum. What did take my interest, however, were the barracks. There were brick buildings but also a lot of decaying iron huts that the gunners had lived in. I am nosy and I enjoy seeing how people lived. Although, frustratingly, most of that has gone. There tiny glimpses; brick chimney stacks, the odd rusting bedstead but not a lot.
Army Barracks – Brick and iron. Photo Credit: James Henry Johnston
A little further up (a steep) hill from Fort Dunree and the barrack buildings is Dunree Lighthouse. This a puzzling lighthouse. I am used to lighthouses being built atop of great pillars like the one across the Swilly water at Fanad.
The one at Dunree, however, has no tower. It doesnt need one. The light is at ground level. The “ground” however its up high on the cliff way above the Fort. A lantern attached to a house for the Lighthouse Keeper was built, and the light established on 15th January 1876. The light was a non flashing one with a two wick oil burner. Sadly, for the lighthouse keeper, technology did away with his job in 1927 when this light was replaced in December 1927 with an “unwatched acetylene with a carbide generating plant attached to the station”. The light was later converted to electricity in 1969. It must have been a great place to live.
The lighthouse keeper’s house has a spectacular view across the Lough. Its built of local rubble stone masonry, this building retains its early form and character. Its visual appeal and expression is enhanced by the retention of much of its original fabric including timber sliding sash windows. Both the house and the lantern were built by McClelland & Co. of Derry. The simple outbuilding and boundary walls are very elegant too.
The views at Dunree are spectacular. Lough Swilly is quite majestic, even on an overcast day. Perhaps, it’s particularly dramatic on a overcast day with the shifting light and colours. You can walk up Dunree Hill and look over towards the Urris Hills and Dunree Bay (Crummies Bay).
There is a regular bus service from Buncrana, a coffee house, museum and public toilet. It might be a good idea to go before they start work on revamping the place!
Ireland was once covered in a massive sheet of ice. Then about ten thousand years ago it retreated and trees and grasses sprang up to cover the rocky landscape. Today those trees are long gone. Farmers came and cleared them about 6,000 years ago and the continual rains from the Atlantic soaked and washed the soil reducing the mineral content making it more acidic. Plants like sphagham moss helped keep the land wet. So now West Donegal is covered in something called blanket bog. Blanket bog is a type of peatland found in only a few parts of the world with cool, wet and, usually, oceanic climates. It covers 3% of the world but contains a third of all the carbon in the world.
I love the blanket bog – it covers vast areas. It is a seemingly empty landscape. On an overcast day it has an exhilerating bleakness. On a sunny day, it hints at what a prehistoric Ireland might have looked like (plus a few wolves and lots of red deer). There are few, if any, paths through the bogland. If you venture on the land in summer it is springy underfoot. Most of it is drained with ditches along the road and narrow bog roads leading to “nowhere”.
Blanket bog in West Donegal (from N252 on the way to Doochary)
For generations people who lived on the boglands drained the land then cut and dried the peat, also called turf, to burn. This was cheap fuel to cook and heat their homes. In a land with no oil or coal, the turf was essential. The landscape across west Donegal is marked with the long scars of peat banks. Cutting it is back-breaking work. In the past the surface of the bog was mostly cut away by hand using the traditional turf spade or sleán. Further South mechanised extraction is apparently the norm, using chain cutter, digger, sausage, hopper and milling machines. In Donegal, however, it is still cut by hand.
The Irish government used to burn turf on an industrial scale, enough to fuel a couple of power stations, up until very recently, 2020 in fact. People with “turbary rights” can cut and burn sod peat on their land for their own domestic uses but they are not meant to sell it. However with fuel poverty, older people in particular, will buy it to use it in winter. A load of turf may cost as little as 200 Euros (about 230 US dollars) and can last months.
The government is trying to discourage this not only because of the enviromental costs but also because of the pollution it causes. It smells delicious but its smoky and very bad for the lungs, especially if you have asthma.
There are moves to encourage the rewetting of the bogs. Targets have been set by the EUand a few pilot schemes in Donegal and a lot more in the Midlands, have been rolled out, Cloncrow Bog Natural Heritage Area is a great example of a rewetted raised bog. However, much more funding is needed from the government to encourage widespread adoption and to help the 4% of the population for whom turf is their main source of heating.
Scars of turf banks line the landscape
Turf drying in the summer sun – West Donegal
Turf bagged up
Bags of turf and Errigal
Wildlife growing in the bogland
Wildlife is abdundant in Donegal, if you look down.
The boglands are abundant with wildlife and have been an important part of Irish culture. Bogs were seen as liminal zones – watery places often are. They were seen as places of both life and death—fertile ground for spirits, fairies, and supernatural beings. The bog was also believed to be the gateway to the Otherworld, where fairies, spirits, and even the dead could cross between realms. Many bog bodies and ancient artifacts were likely put there as ritual offerings to appease gods or supernatural forces.
If you want to look at some bog bodies this site has some good photos. I wont post them here, I never really got over looking at the poor soul in the British Museum (Lindow Man) who died in a Cheshire bog. I was fascinated by his face but couldn’t help thinking he could never imagine his mortal remains being looked at by all and sundry over 2000 years later.
One of the most famous mythical figures associated with the bog is Fionn Mac Cumhaill (Finn McCool), the legendary warrior of the Fianna. Some stories say that he and his warriors roamed the boglands, using them as a hiding place during battles.
Green, blue, yellow and red – God is down in the swamps and marshes Sensational as April and almost incred- ible the flowering of our catharsis. A humble scene in a backward place Where no one important ever looked The raving flowers looked up in the face Of the One and the Endless, the Mind that has baulked The profoundest of mortals. A primrose, a violet, A violent wild iris – but mostly anonymous performers Yet an important occasion as the Muse at her toilet Prepared to inform the local farmers That beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God Was breathing His love by a cut-away bog.
+ Patrick Kavanagh (One of Ireland’s most famous poets, from Monaghan, d.1967)
Cronashallog Bogcut (Arranmore) – a commission by Emma Cownie
“Announcing SAOIRSE by @charleen_hurtubise, a powerful novel set between the United States and Ireland about a woman who runs from her traumatic past and the secrets she carries to survive. Coming February 24, 2026.”
With artwork by me!
SAOIRSE by @charleen_hurtubiseFrom Ferry Coll – a painting by Emma Cownie (SOLD)
“Is this a fast painting or a slow one?” My husband asks.
This question gives me pause.
“A fast one” I reply.
Portnoo Colours (Donegal) by Emma Cownie
My paintings usually take days to complete. On average three days. A smaller one quicker. Commissions are still “slow” paintings.
Lately, though I have taken to completing paintings in a single sitting. This may well be several hours, but its a single sitting.
Rocky Ground Bun An Inver by Emma Cownie
The results are more sponanteous-looking. The process feels slightly out of control. Often I think “I have bitten off more than I can chew” here. But I stick with it. Years of painting have taught me to ignore the impulse to give up. To push on, even when when it looks a bit ugly.
There may well be things wrong; colours or details but they dont matter too much. I will alter them if they really bug me. Mostly I dont. The brush strokes are broken and incomplete. In some places they are deliberately rough. The canvas shows through in places. Often I am uncertain if I like the painting when I stop. Its usually a bit of a surprise. I have to fight my perfectionism.
Narin Rise, Donegal by Emma Cownie
I am racing ahead of my thoughts. Ahead of my critical mind that tells me its not good enough and to keep painting. Now I refuse to listen and keep going. It’s intense and exhausting.
Over Cruit Island, Donegal and painting by Emma Cownie
My father died in June this year. He was 92. My heart is broken. He was a lovely, funny and kind man and I miss him terribly.
To Celebrate the New Year I am giving 30% off all work on my website – to get the discount you have to enter a code at the checkout. Where’s the code? Join my email list and it will be sent to you, automatically. The sale ends on 15th January.
View from the Pier (Portnoo)-Emma Cownie SOLD
If you have already joined my mailing list and haven’t had my latest newsletter with the sale code check your SPAM folder.
Here is the painting that finished me off. Now I look at it after a month, I am not sure why. I just felt like I had run into the sand and needed a change. I had been doing a lot of reading about composition but I suspect it had more to do with taking too long to paint. Acrylic paint often requires several layers to achieve the opacity of oil paint. I was getting bored and tired and I wanted to try something new. A change is a good as a rest.
Toralaydan Island, West Donegal
So I took a month off posting new work on facebook & instagram, to give myself head space. Some artists love being filmed live and showing their “process” – I am not like that. I get very self conscious and often will immediately screw up a painting if I take photos too early in its development. It’s one of the reasons I cannot bear to paint outside “en plein air” – people understandably want to see what you are painting and that makes me feel very self-conscious. I really dont know how people go on TV shows like “Landscape Artist of the Year” and produce really good paintings, or half-way decent paintings at all, in fact. They must have nerves of steel. I don’t. In fact, I know that many of my paintings can go through stages of looking quite rubbish before they (almost always) emerge butterfly-like from the murk and layers. It’s a lovely (and sadly rare) experience when a painting look interesting/beautiful all they way through the process of coming into being.
I had bought some tubes of Acrylic Gouache in the spring but had not got around to trying them out. Now I opened that box of paints and gave them my full attention. I had been looking for a water-based paint, to reduce the risk to my pets, especially my young inqusitive cats. I had had oil paint/white-spirit incidents with pets in the past when we had a lot more space and I did not want to take that risk now. I also wanted opaque paint. I had discovered that some American artists, whose work I liked, used Nova acrylics which is pretty opaque but they did not have a UK stockist. I was cautious about importing paints from the US as I once ordered a load of paint from a sale from JerrysArtsarama only to get stung by customs and VAT charges. So any saving I had made in the sale were wiped out! I also considered Golden SO FLAT matte acrylic paint but I am not a great fan of Golden colours. Dont get me wrong, some of their acrylic colours are great (light ultramarine for example) and I know many artists rave about them, but I don’t LOVE them. They were also sold in a jar rather than a tube, and I could just see me absent-mindedly sticking my dirty paint brush in a jar and mucking up the colour. I prefer tubes that I can squeeze a tiny bit of paint out onto my wet palette and keep my colours clean.
Not the set I bought – I wish!
I saw that Jacksons Art stocked Turner Acryl from Japan. I watched a couple of videos comparing different makes of Acrylic Gouache and liked the vibrancy of Turner’s paint. There is not a lot of information about acrylic gouache, unlike regular acrylic (I have several books on the technical aspects of using this acrylic). I keep reading the same thing – its a cross between gouache and acrylic. Gouache is a water-based paint which can be opaque (unlike water colours which are usually transculent) and it can be reactivated with water. Acrylic gouache, however, once dry, sets like acrylic and cannot be reactivated with water. It dries pretty quickly too. It dries to a smooth velvety matt finish too. It is used by illustrators, especially anime.
An example of anime art from Instagram from @happy.artistry
Look at the lovely rich colours!
The colours are lovely but I have a lot to learn. There are so many wonderful rich colours and I can see why these [paints are popular with illustrators. Unlike acrylics or gouache, there is little to no colour shift. It is non-toxic. It does not dry lighter or darker. I am finding this hard to get used too. I am overcautious about laying down darker colours. I have to learn this again and again. I often dont make my paintings dark enough as I am afraid the strong colour of the tarmac road will overwelm the painting. I have to repaint the shadows.
I feel out of control with it at times. Sometimes that is exciting, others just scary.
Winter Morning on Academy Road, Derry – Acrylic Gouache on wood Panel 2024 – An early effort
I painted a load of duff pieces before I started to feel I was getting somewhere with “Ardara”.
Ardara – Acrylic Gouache on Wood Panel 2024 – Another early effort
I felt that a new medium required new subject matter to set it apart from the rural scenes I had focused on since moving to Ireland in 2021. My work had previously described by Niall McMonagle in the Irish Independent as a “Clear bright glimpse of a vanishing Ireland”. I wanted to mix things up and paint a more contemporary version of everyday Irish life.
This meant scenes with cars. The Irish love their cars. I have painted cars in the past but not for a very long time. It was usually at night or in the rain (at night) so you could not really see them properly.
My Pop Art – The Driving Rain (SOLD) Oil on Linen Canvas, 2015
Coming out of Shell, Oil on Linen canvas (SOLD) 2020
It was in 2017 that I decided to pursue “Urban Minimalism” for my “Hollowed community” project for the MadeinRoath festival in Cardiff. For a long time, I have sought out empty scenes with no cars or people. It found it cleansing. The Morris Minor (below) was one of few exception to this. This vintage car was parked around the corner from our home in Brynmill. I used to hear the owner drive past our house on the way to the paper shop every morning.
Urban Minimal style – Morris Minor 2018 Oil on Linen Canvas (SOLD)
Now I decided on a volte face and to seek out street scenes with cars to challenge myself. Car are difficult to paint. I know some people will disagree with me, but in themsleves, they are not intrinsically beautiful, although the light reflected on their surfaces can be. I am more a fan of vintage cars like the Morris Minor and old-style minis (genuinely small cars) and enjoy the colours used by Italian manufacturers such as Fiat 500s. Too many cars in Ireland are black or grey. They don’t make for interesting compositions. Surprisingly, Lorries do. In the right place.
Deliveries on Queen Street, Derry – Acrylic Gouache on wood panel 2024
I wanted to paint with speed. I was bored of spending days or even weeks on a large painting. I wanted to work fast keep things fresh. I tried hard to resist overpainting. I left wobbly lines where possible so as to convey some of the energy of the urban areas.
Derry is a very lively city. I also wanted to explore town/city life on both sides of the border in Donegal and Derry, in Northern Ireland. The building stock is very different depending on which side of the border you are. The number plates maybe different but the cars are pretty similar.
Bogside, Derry – Acrylic Gouache on wood panel 2024
Light and shadows continue to be a theme in my work.
Carn (Donegal) – Acrylic Gouache on wood panel 2024
I have found this both challenging and exciting. I have produced quite a few paintings that didn’t work, especially at the start but I just pushed on. I knew that there would be a lot of wastage at the start. The only way I would get the hang of this medium was by painting a lot. I learn through my hands, mixing the paint and then placing the paint on the board. I have not yet achieved the consistency in my work I am used to with oils and acrylics.
I also had to deal with the fear that people might not like this style of paintings or the subject matter. That’s why I had to stay off social media until I felt like I knew what I was doing (sort of). I have shifted styles and subject matter before. There are themes I have focused on before and I am revisiting them. Others are constant – shadow and light. Strong dynamic compositions are also important.
I used to alternate larger landscapes with smaller people/animal paintings. This way I kept my interest in what I was painting. But I seem to get stuck painting landscapes when I came to Ireland. I am not sure it was good for me as an artist. I need to mix things up to keep them fresh. I don’t know where I am going with this but I feel I need to persue this trail for a while longer. I just have to keep going to see where I end up.
I am delighted that Peter Zantingh, a Dutch blogger, wrote this an account of Gola and my work. I have translated it for you to read (well, Google did). You can read the original here.
“In the autumn of 2018, Emma Cownie looked out from the Irish mainland at an island she could not get to. It seemed so close. She could see the rocks off the coast and beyond them, scattered seemingly at random across the rolling land, the whitewashed cottages. Some were abandoned, others clearly still inhabited, or used as summer homes.
Gola Island is one of 365 islands off the Irish coast. It is just two square kilometres in size. No one knows exactly how many people live there, because there are more in the summer than in the winter. Ferryman Sabba only goes up and down between June and September.
But in 2022, there were fifteen people living on Gola, according to official figures.
Emma Cownie is a British artist. She studied medieval history at Cardiff University and taught at a secondary school for a while. On 29 February 2012, she was hit by a car. It was, in retrospect, what prompted her to take up painting full-time. The days in front of the class were exhausting, almost all contact with other people in fact, she was startled by every sudden sound. A few years before the accident her dog had been run over on a busy road.
Painting helped.
In the days after she had stood on the mainland looking at those houses in the distance she painted Spring Light on Gola. It came, she told me, ‘out of a kind of longing for the island’.
In the spring she went again. It was early April, sunny but chilly, a cold wind blowing along the coast. Her husband Séamas was with her, their dog Mitzy too. To get the best view of the island – again there was no ferry – they walked along long stretches of beach and climbed on granite boulders, almost pink in the spring light. From here she could see the houses that had recently been renovated and modernised.
That summer she was finally able to go there. ‘There are hardly any cars’, she told me about it. ‘Just a few tractors, no telephone poles or electricity pylons and only a few other people. Other than that, just birdsong and wind. It’s bliss.’
Spring Light on Gola (Sold)
*I emailed Emma Cownie last month with a simple question. One of her paintings was used on the cover of one of my favorite books, Foster by Claire Keegan. I wanted to discuss that book in my newsletter, and I would like to show that painting as well. Would that be okay? I would mention her name and link to her website.
She responded the same day, and we got to talking. She said that the painting I had asked about was called Traditional Two Storey House, Gola, and that it was nice to hear from someone from the Netherlands, because although she regularly sees Dutch campers in Donegal, the county in the northwest of Ireland where she lives part of the time, she has never sold work to anyone from the Netherlands.
The title of the painting made me curious. Gola? What was that? That’s how I became fascinated with the island in my own way.
At one time, there were about two hundred people living there, who made a living from fishing and small farms. But after 1930, the population began to decline. Especially in the winter, it was easier to earn money in the cities, especially those of Scotland and England, and fewer and fewer people returned for the summers. In 1966, the island’s school closed; with only nine pupils (there used to be sixty), it no longer had a right to exist. The few families with young children were forced to move to the mainland – and once the last family with children had left, the community was doomed.
I read this last in Gola: The Life and Last Days of an Island Community (1969) by F.H. Aalen and H. Brody, which I ordered for a few euros on boekwinkeltjes.nl or Abebooks. I think I mainly wanted to know what happened when the last ones left. How does a group of people dissolve itself?
Brody, a sociologist who wrote the part about the last days of the community by the two authors, saw a kind of laconic group feeling among those who were still there at the end of the sixties. Everyone wanted to stay, if the rest stayed too. Everyone thought it was okay to go, as long as everyone else went too.
The most intriguing aspect of each islander’s account of his own predicament is his insistence that it all depends on the others. […] The general attitude is one of wait and see – what the others do. But all of the Gola people are waiting on one another in this way, and do not seem to mind the impasse that this conditional planning involves. Of ten islanders who related their plans, nine said they would like to stay, but it depended on the others. One man said he would stay so long as he had a dog with him, and could not see any advantage to life away from the island. Apart from that one man, all stated they would be glad to remain on Gola, but did not really mind leaving.
The authors also contributed to a short documentary for the Irish public broadcaster RTÉ from the same year, which shows how one family, the O’Donnells, leaves the island. They lock the door and walk with their dog, a long-haired collie, to a motor boat in the harbor. They are all wearing black. (Screenshots from the film below)
Five people remained: fisherman Eddie, fisherman Tadhg, postman Nora and her husband John, and ninety-year-old Mary. It would not be long for them either.
What was left behind? The island had no shop, no pub, not even a church. “The islanders worship on the mainland when the weather is good enough to make a safe crossing,” Brody wrote in 1969. Just over thirty houses remained, most in poor condition. The schoolhouse and the post office. Wooden boxes and fishing nets in the harbour, where a statue of the Virgin Mary, housed in a stone shrine, continued to look out. Two pegs on a washing line.
Between 1969 and 2002, Gola was an uninhabited island. In Dances With Waves: around Ireland by Kajak (1998), Brian Wilson (not the Beach Boys guy, another Brian Wilson) writes about the time he went ashore during his nearly two-thousand-mile kayak trip all the way around Ireland. He hoped to find some peace and shelter that day, but he encountered “the eerie atmosphere of a ghost town”. Fishing boats lay rotting in the harbour among the washed-up debris.
But he found something more hopeful in the cottages. They were “abandoned, but not in decay”.
[…] one felt as though, like faithful dogs, they were just waiting for their owners to return. More than that, it was as if the island itself was still waiting. And the people came again. They came back. Somewhere around the turn of the millennium, the first ones crossed. Today, most of the cottages are still uninhabited, but in summer the sounds and movements of people join those of the cormorants, guillemots and gannets.
Emma Cownie has made more than 25 paintings of Gola in recent years.
For Traditional Two-storey House, Gola, the painting that made me contact her, she returned to the ‘rules’ she had set for herself a few years earlier. These rules – not coincidentally – coincide with how she wanted to organise her life after the car accident and the difficult time that followed: no cars, no people, bright light.
Furthermore, there must be shadows, preferably diagonal, in simple shapes. The painting must be about the interplay between shadows and man-made constructions, the tension between 3D buildings and 2D shadows.
She also wanted to think longer and better about colour. Not to choose the brightest colour, purely for effect, as she had done before, but to work more subtly. In a new series of works based on the houses on Gola Island, including Traditional Two-storey House, she resisted the urge to make the shadows very dark, the sky pale pink and the grass yellow and bright green. “I tried to keep the shapes and colours as simple as possible without it being a cartoon,” she told me. “I wanted to capture the essence of the place.”
The Traditional House, (Gola)
She painted the picture in January 2021, during a Covid-19 lockdown in Wales, where she was then living. That summer, she and Séamas moved to Donegal, in the north of Ireland.
It was the following summer, 2022, that she was approached by the prestigious London publishers Faber & Faber: they wanted to use Traditional Two-storey House for the cover of Claire Keegan’s Foster, originally published in 2010. “I didn’t realise what an honour it was until I got a copy of the book and read it,” she said. “I cried at the end.”
Foster by Claire Keegan, Published by Faber
Is there a writing lesson in this? I don’t know. Maybe that there’s more to everything. Maybe it’s worth following your interests and fascinations without reservation. To notice it – this interests me, this grabs me – and follow that line, see where it takes you.
The name will be familar to British ears who ever listened to the daily shipping forecast on BBC Radio. It is broadcast late at night just before 1 am and very early (5.20am). Anyone who is a night owl or insominiac will have listened to it. The list of shipping zones and forecasts is not only practical but also poetic and rather mysterious. Following the litany of locations and numbers is very soporistic. Listen to the clip below. The actual broadcast is from 2.46 onwards ZZzzzzzzzzz
Shipping Forcast (1993) – almost always broadcast on the radio, you have to use your imagination!
Many British people may not know where Malin Head it is anymore than than they know the location of German Bight or Viking. To Irish ears, however, it is well-known as the most northerly tip of the island of Ireland and also features on Met Eireann’s, sea area forecast, broadcast on RTE.
UK_shipping_forecast_zones
Malin Head to Mizen Head
People regularly tranverse the length of Ireland from Malin Head, Donegal, to Mizen Head, Cork. It’s a fair stretch. Just under 400 miles (640 km). Some incredible people have cycled it in just over 15 hours. Ordinary mortals take about 4 days.
Amazingly some super-human runners have done it in about the same time – 4 days! I recently listened to a radio interview with the heroic Sophie Power. Sophie is from England and she recently ran the length of Ireland in under 4 days. This is a World Record. She beat the previouis record by three hours. Being a mother, she had to fit it in during her children half-term holiday and didn’t get to pick the day with the nicest weather – just the Tuesday of half-term and so she started off in driving rain! Many years ago I used to run (only piddly 10ks and 5ks) and I would certainly prefer to run in rain than heat.
Incredibly Sophie ran most of the distance without sleep, snatching the odd half an hour on her second and third day. She ended up hallucinating, and with a knee injury that had to be braced. When she finished the race in Cork she had developed heat stroke! That alone shows you how far south Cork is. There’s no way she’d get heat stroke in Donegal! She’s planning to come back and run the Cork Marathon.
Sophie Power at Malin Head
At the Edge of the world
Standing at Malin Head is like standing at the edge of the world. To the north is nothing can be seen but sky and sea. A long way off is Iceland and much. much further away to the north-west is North America. It feels very remote (but surprisngly accessible from Letterkenny and Derry/Londonderry) but to fishermen and sailors, I’m sure it’s not. Scotland is surpisingly close to the north-east. If you have ever flown from England to Belfast on a clear day, you can see the Scottish Isles and the Isle of Man scattered across the Irish Sea, pretty close the Antrim coast. Donegal is just a bit further along.
On the most northerly tip of the island of Ireland, you will find a tower that was built in 1805 during the Napoleonic wars as a lookout tower to defend against any attacks by the French. You can see at the top left hand side of my painting above. Edges of places are places to look out from – for invaders, or for incoming storms. Weather reports that were important to local and international shipping were first recorded at Malin Head in 1870. It was in that year the tower became a signal tower for Lloyds of London. Semaphore was used to connect with ships at sea and the lighthouse on nearby Inishtrahull. In 1902 the first commercial wireless message was sent from Malin Head to the S.S.Lake Ontario by the Marconi Company.
Divers’ magnet
There are the wrecks of many ships lying off the coast in this area. Many of these such as SS Audacious, SS Carthaginian and RMS Justicia date to the time of the First World War, when Ireland was still part of the British Empire.
In 1917 two German mines sankLaurentic and although her crew successfully abandoned ship, but 354 of them died of hypothermia in her lifeboats.Interestingly, Laurentic was carrying about 43 tons of gold bars when she sank. Most of the 3,211 bars were salvaged by 1924; three more bars were found in the 1930s, however 22 gold bars have still not been recovered.
The Great Emergency/Second World War
During the Second World War, Ireland was neutral. The Irish army built lookout posts in places along the coast to prevent any violation of this neutrality. This was important as this part of Donegal is so close to Northern Ireland, which not not neutral and was bombed by the Germans. There is an EIRE 80 sign built of stones during the war so aircraft would know that they were over Ireland (not Northern Ireland). They acted also as a navigational aid for pilots. Eire 79 is at Fanad Head to the west. Eire 81 is at Glengad Head, further along the Inishowen Peninsula, to the east. You can see it on the map below. The SS Athenia, a passenger ship carrying 1,418 people was torpedoed by a German U-boat just hours after war had been declared in 1939 off the coast of Malin Head! Most of the passengers survived but 117 perished.
Tourism Sign at Malin Head
Some scenes from the film Star Wars: The Last Jedi film was shot at Malin Head. I have to admit that I am not a Star Wars fan – I never made it through awhole film. I have to admit that I’m more of a Star Trek fan. Apparently, it is possible to have a tour of the locations used for the film from local tour guides. The road leading up to Bamba’s Crown has been renamed locally from the R242 to the R2D2 in recognition of the Star Wars connection. Also beside the tower, there is a short lovely refreshing walk along the cliffs to Hell’s Hole. The cliffs are massive here and even on a relatively calm day the sea is restless and a bit intimidating It needs to be remembered that this not just a sea here but an Ocean.
Birds Eye View of Malin Head, Donegal- Emma Cownie
