2021-01-23T12:28:00.009-08:00

Pre-Tiger Donegal was a forgotten, magical place.

Between them, cowboy property developers, a supine county council, a take-the-money-and-run attitude and an invasion of post-Troubles SUV yuppies from Belfast and Dublin have did their brash best to destroy all that was sacred and beautiful in the county. That they haven't, yet, fully succeeded in doing so is testament to the deep-rooted nature of the county's charm.

Trillick is 17 miles from the Donegal border. In Dublin, listening to my accent, taxi drivers used to assume I was from Donegal. We half grew up in the place. Day trips were common, and the annual family holiday was always to Donegal.

Donegal really is two counties in one - North Donegal, up around Glenveagh, the Poisoned Glen and the Bloody Foreland; and S.W. Donegal, from Donegal town through Killybegs (we used to drive to Killybegs to buy iceboxes of weird and wonderful "non-standard" fish that was no use to the fish factories there; superb food, and practically being given away), Kilcar, Carrick, Sliabh Liag and Glencolmcille (though no local ever refers to "Glencolmcille" - a simple "Gleann" suffices).

Near Glenveigh

The Poisoned Glen

In the 1970s, given the wonderfully appalling state of the narrow, bumpy, sheep-filled "roads", getting from South to North of the county could take most of a day:

Road, Donegal, 1970s

Even though driving slowly on deserted roads to nowhere is wonderful:

Road, Donegal

Road to Lough Salt, Donegal

- we tended invariably to stick to the SW of the county. We had a massive old suitcase. So much stuff was crammed into the family Renault, you'd have sworn we were emigrating instead of merely going down the road on holiday.

Laden down, from Trillick, the Renault chugged slowly through the tight, dour neatness of Unionist Lack and Kesh, past the inevitable mobile checkpoint:

Working class Brits meeting working class Paddies in the 1970s

In the '70s, you never knew what humour they might be in. Relaxed and good, if their soccer team had won, or if somebody Republican had been shot; jumpy and bad, if someone had taken a few pot shots at them.

And then on through the permanent checkpoint at Pettigo, a bit like this one at Aughnacloy. You never wanted to be diverted into the shed (at left):

Holding pen to left

You just wanted Dad to show his photo ID, explain what we were up to; have them look in and see 3 small kids and wave you on. They usually, but not always, would. If you were unlucky, it was everyone out, and everything out (on the road).

The feeling of relief, of lightness, once you crossed the border, was palpable. Everyone started chatting again, and we always then stopped for a cone. The ones in the South were better, milkier. One day, after a long delay on the Northern side of the checkpoint at Pettigo, as we drove past the small wooden hut with the solitary unarmed Guard on the Southern side, we smiled as we noticed that the Guard, like us, was having an ice cream cone. He waved us on casually, smiling, and we all waved back.

In the 1970s, we mostly had Donegal to ourselves. Thanks to the Troubles, nobody from the South went to Donegal; and nobody from the rest of the North went to Donegal. Nonody wanted to drive too far; it just was too much hassle. And even Nordies who weren't from border areas generally just wanted to avoid "crossing the border". The few who did were mostly from bordering areas of Fermanagh and Tyrone, but most of our neighbours never got past the clichéd seaside attractions of Bundoran (since re-invented as a surf mecca) or of the pubs and hotels in Donegal town. Sure, we liked Bundoran fine. Kids love fun fairs and amusement arcades (not "dodgems" - we called them "bumping cars", to reflect the obvious fact that it was the bumping, and not the dodging, that was the point) and seaside chippers and toy shops.

Bundoran

My parents disliked the crowds though, and the "beach" at Bundoran is rubbish - small, rocky, and with vicious rip tides. Nor did it help when we drove the Renault up on top of Roguey Rock on hot day, and stopped for an arrival picnic. The two long-haired young people going at it under a blanket on a rocky ledge just below were un-fazed by our presence; but poor Mum, appalled, shoo-ed us back into the car and we found another spot without any heathen fornicators (Mum's morality was of the 1950s variety, and the anything-goes 1970s culture was a godless tide stoutly to be resisted, though she was well aware of the futility of her one-woman crusade in the prevailing 1970s permissive culture). Nearby Rossnowlagh, with the quaint little museum at the monastery beside its massive golden beach, generally was completely deserted:

Beach at Rossnowlagh

Once past Bundoran and Donegal town, you were in pure time-travel territory. Wonderful, deserted beaches, litter-free countryside, stunning (pre bungalow / McMansion blight) scenery, hilarious twisty "roads" to nowhere, cheap-as-chips chippers (each with a cone machine), and the world's friendliest people. Everybody waved and smiled. I mean, everybody.

Oh, and the hippies. The only other tourists we saw tended to be young hippy types from mainland Europe. Generally, from France, from Germany and from Sweden. Sometimes just hitching, often on ten-speed racers, lean and tanned, with massive pannier bags and guitars. They all waved too.

One holiday, we stopped somewhere and asked a shopkeeper if they knew of a cottage or caravan going spare. Sure enough, they did. The caravan was clean and new, sitting by itself, close to a twisted thorn hedge behind dunes. Literally, about 5 metres from the beach. And, apart from some Swedish hippies, we were the only people there - we had the beach to ourselves. I've travelled a fair bit, and Donegal's beaches - clean, uncrowded, copious amounts of sand (and none of your gentle Med or Irish sea for us, as Heaney puts it, we had the "secular powers of the Atlantic, thundering") - easily stand comparison with the best anywhere in the world:

Silver Strand, Malin Beg

Beach at Fintra

Beach at Culdaff

Beach at Marble Hill

Beach at Ardara

The hippies had a few tents in fields along the way. My 12 year old self had a crush on one of them, a leggy blonde young woman in faded denim shorts and flip flops who smiled cheerfully at the blushing small boy. There was a communal water tap, and Mum became a fan of theirs when they cheerfully assisted her in carrying water back to our caravan. At night, they lit a camp fire and sat around it, playing old Swedish folk songs. Dad went over and joined in with his violin, and they were amazed and delighted, and took photos and insisted that we all join in the grub they were brewing up. Mum wondered if there was drugs in it, but it was delicious. Then one morning they were gone, with just some small burn marks from their fire showing where they had been.

You got decent fish grub in Nancy's:

Nancy's bar & caff, Ardara

Our "touring" tended to favour the South West. For some reason, we often picnicked at Glengesh Pass - there was a place to pull in, the view was great and we tried to scramble up to the top of the hill:

Glengesh Pass

Before they banked and repaired the road, it was a hairy enough trip in an under-braked and over-loaded 1970s Renault. Of course, all these "bad" roads were great roads for other purposes dear to my heart:

Ballinamallard's late Bertie Fisher on the charge in Donegal in 1978:

Looking back, I was an observer at some cultural plate tectonics. Donegal was a last redoubt of an un-curated peasant culture, both traditional music and the Irish language. Donegal generally was ignored by the rest of the South; politically, it largely still is. (That's why, even today, you see young Donegal folk with Donegal number plates on yellow NI-type number plates.) Irish traditional music was on the way out though. The old guys bowing it higher, for love not money, in isolated cottages were fading fast, the dying embers of a defeated culture.

That culture was rescued though, by outside intervention. My late cousin, Dr. Kevin McCann of Newfoundland, a founder member of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann in the 1950s, was instrumental in that endeavour. Dr. Kevin, and his wife Kathleen, stayed with us every year, while he and his namesake, my Uncle Kevin, went on a major drinking and music session to the annual All Ireland Fleadh. Although by that stage, Dr. Kevin had stopped the booze completely, after the "waking up naked in a morgue with a John Doe number on his toe" incident, but I digress : ) Dr. K. and I wrote to each other throughout his life. He was an extraordinary, Hemingway type character (music, boxing, car rallying, literature, drinking, revolutionary politics). I thought the world of him, and he was a major influence on me as a child. He's still remembered fondly in his native Dungarvan.

CCÉ provided a platform and a new PR focus for trad music. Obviously, the Irish middle classes openly detested it. The sniggering references to "diddle-aye" music from the Dublin-based corporate lawyers I worked with in Dublin was a cultural eye-opener; I had never encountered any comparable cultural hostility in England. Now alerted to its existence, traditional music was revived by counter-cultural young people, people of the kind we met in Donegal in the 1970s. I remember my parents chatting to a young German bloke with a tin whistle. Hair down to his arse, anti-nuclear badges, presumably drugs in his back pocket, yet he and my parents bonding away happily over a shared interest in traditional fiddle music. "That music ... goes to my heart", he proclaimed, solemnly, to my parents' surprise. And, as we all knew, the best traditional fiddle music was in Donegal. That generation of blood and soil type traditional musicians, men who played that way because they knew no other way, included people such as:

John Doherty
Simon Doherty
Neilly Boyle
Francie Dearg Byrne
Mickey Bán Byrne
Con Cassidy etc

When John Doherty played the reel called "The Glen Road to Carrick", he was merely paying tribute to a rough mountainny road that he'd have tramped over in all kinds of weather:

Nowadays, young trad musicians who may never have set foot in Donegal, have preserved it for a new generation:

A young New York academic from NY University, Allen Feldman, was active in Donegal and Tyrone in that period also, recording old musicians. His resultant 1980 book, The Northern Fiddler, was an anthropological tour de force, and he also produced an album for John Doherty, then in his 80s, entitled, fittingly, given that John was a travelling tinker (long before the word acquired any pejorative overones), Bundle and Go.

My late Dad, Frank, was a superb traditional fiddle player, and much of his social life in his later years was mediated through music. A violin was a social passport. Through Dr. Kevin, we already knew the Dohertys, but Dad didn't know the Byrnes or Con Cassidy. So we would drive to their houses, knock, and my Dad would introduce himself as a fiddle player from Tyrone. If it was nowadays, you'd be chased; but I remember all of being invited in to Francie and Mickey's house, and a great music session ensuing. Mickey was un-married, but Francie's son and grandchildren were there. One year, their US cousins were there as well, and more chairs had to be borrowed from the village community hall. Everyone had to do their party piece. We stayed until the small hours and were fed twice, and my parents and the Byrne family became lifelong friends, and we visited them every year. I well remember Francie and Mickey sizing up my Dad on that initial gate-crash visit - was this Tyrone man any good, or was he just a tourist? Of course, once Dad broke out the Fritz Kreisler and Scott Skinner Highland compositions, and the German hornpipes in flat keys, broad grins of approval broke out, and then Francie and Mickey cut loose themselves. They wouldn't bother playing anything too complex until they (ever so tactfully) had sussed you out and were sure that you had sufficient musicial understanding.

In later years, Dad, by then a very old man himself, was attending the annual Cairdeas ns bhFidiléirí in Glencolmcille, and it was humbling to see a room full of younger Donegal fiddle players getting to their feet and applauding as he came in. Enthusiasts of the tradition, they had that instinctive respect for someone who, by then, was a living emobodiment of that tradition.

I admire and enjoy the scenery in the North of Donegal - it too is stunning. Yet for all the reasons noted above, a corner of my heart will always be in South West Donegal, in places like Teelin and Sliabh Liag

Sliabh Liag

among people like me, who just happened to be blessed with better scenery and ready access to beaches : )