Wading at the Edge of the World: Cold, Wet, and Mostly Alone on the Irish Coast (1 of 3)

Wading at the Edge of the World: Cold, Wet, and Mostly Alone on the Irish Coast (1 of 3)
Ireland

Looking back now, I realize how close a thing it was that I even made it to Goleen at all. I was on the tail end of a trip through Ireland, visiting relatives I’d never met before in the weekend-market traffic-stop town of Skibbereen, about forty minutes west of Cork by bus. Part of the point of my trip was to eventually get down to the coast, but something always came up, and I started getting desperate as the flight home loomed.

So I went and pestered the folks at the Skibbereen Bord Faílte (Irish Tourism Board) office for a bus down the coast. I couldn’t get right to the water, but I could get close, down to a tiny little town called Goleen that even my trusty guidebook didn’t think merited more than a few words.

Right next to Goleen, however, is Barleycove Bay, which did get more than a quick mention. I’d read about this tiny, out-of-the-way beach on Ireland’s southern shore, just around the corner from Mizen Head, before even getting on the plane, and the part of the description that caught my eye read like this: “reputed to be a good beach for surfing.” What? Surfing, in Ireland? It’s a beautiful country, definitely, but even at the height of the summer heat, it rained nearly every day — not exactly my picture of surfing paradise. Still, it intrigued me, and I decided that I absolutely had to get there and try to surf Ireland, just to say that I’d done it.

Unfortunately, I ran into problems in two areas:

1. I’d never touched a surfboard, much less ridden a wave on one;
and

2. I didn’t own one to begin with, so I’d have to find somewhere that rented boards.

Ever optimistic, I asked Michael Murphy, the owner of the Russagh Mill Hostel in Skibbereen (and who is incidentally, one of the first Irishmen to climb Everest and a former schoolteacher who runs adventure courses for city-bred schoolkids in the summertime) about surfing in the area and found I was out of luck. I figured that if anybody around knew how and where to surf in Co. Cork, he and his staff would, but the closest surf shops he knew of were up north in Co. Mayo and Co. Kerry.

Damn. Oh well, I wanted to touch the North Atlantic anyway, and surfing or no, Barleycove seemed as good a spot as any. The woman at the Bord Faílte cheerily told me where to go to catch a bus down through Schull to Goleen and back that afternoon, and I was off.

When I reached Schull, I asked the bus driver if he went on to Goleen, just to make sure. He looked at me somewhat strangely and told me that no, he turned around in Schull, and that the next bus to Goleen wouldn’t be for several hours. The lady at the tourist office had been a bit confused, apparently, and on that particular day the usual mid-afternoon bus to Goleen didn’t go that far…and here was where things started to go wrong.

I shrugged and figured, well, I could make it to Goleen on foot before the bus even got to Schull, just by walking and hitching the 16 km down the road. I’d just finished recovering from injuries I’d sustained while hiking most of the Wicklow Way, south of Dublin, so what was 16 km after that? No problem.

I hiked about four miserable kilometres in the pouring rain before I gave up and turned back. Naturally, not one single car even slowed for me as I hobbled down the road from

Did you like this article?

    

 

Share it

 

Place a comment