From Malin Head to Mizen Head: In a nine-part series Irish Times writers travel the length of the country using different forms of transport. Their verdicts are as varied as the weather that greets them. In the fourth stage, Keith Duggan travels from Carrick-on-Shannon to Athlone by camper van

Ireland is still out there, if you care to look for her. Even in a motor home. To ride north Connacht in a camper van is not the sort of instruction you receive every week. And much like the child before the open fire, you know you shouldn't stick your paw in but curiosity is a killer.

At the pick-up place on the edge of Dublin city, the Motorhome people were incredibly courteous and managed to pretend that turning up to collect a highly expensive all-singing, all-cooking transportable home without a driving licence or any form of ID was not at all worrying. Just leaving the office was a family almost certainly not from local parts. The father, a silver-haired fellow, alert as a fox, whose name must have been Ernst, wore camping shorts, sturdy shoes and carried an impressive leather cartographer's satchel. He looked like he could recite Hegel and skin a rabbit in 30 seconds flat. He looked like a man ready for a joust with the great outdoors.

There are two relevant points to be made about the whole camper van scene.

Firstly, it is pretty much impossible to sit behind the wheel of a camper-van without feeling (and looking) like a douche bag. And secondly, it is highly difficult not to fast develop affection for the big, clumsy bastards.

Camper vans are basically like oversized, absurd puppy dogs, perpetually eager to please no matter how poorly you treat them. They are not roomy - but most of us have probably paid through the nose for tighter rental accommodation in downtown Dublin. And they are much better equipped, boasting every modern convenience under the sun except, disappointingly, an ejector seat.

If you are tempted to join the camper vanning fraternity, beware that there does seem to be some sort of society out there and fellow CV-ers, merrily chugging along in the opposite direction, will insist on greeting you with a disconcerting right-arm wave which is part Hi-De-Hi, part Third Reich. That is, cheesy but also truly frightening. To wave is to acknowledge that merely by roaming the land in a CV, you are somehow separate and part of a sect. But not to wave is to risk getting blackballed by a highly motivated and organised group of offbeat holiday-makers who, being camping enthusiasts, are probably aces with knives, ropes and the like. If you passed the likes of Ernst, you were definitely going to wave.

And finally, there is something slightly spooky about pulling into a nature reserve only to find dozens and dozens of other CVs, all gleaming white and glowing with gadgetry, like a Ku Klux Klan gathering for automobiles. And that was just one of the reasons that returning to Lough Key Forest Park was an unforgettable experience.

Extensive research has shown that practically all of my peers who were reared within 100 miles of Lough Key Forest Park (LKFP) spent several Sundays of their adolescence on family outings to that leafy and morose stretch of nature.

It must have been a 1980s thing, when everyone was smashed and family excursions were based on economy and imagination. In theory, Lough Key Forest Park denoted images of red-chequered picnic blankets and gorgeous sunshine, hot girls and Frisbee-throwing and all manner of high jinx on the warm and lapping water front. Such optimism brought us there, Sunday after Sunday. We heedlessly forgot that we lived in Ireland, that we were travelling to Roscommon and that the pertinent thing about Lough Key Forest Park is that they planted so many trees that even if the place were smack bang on the equator the sun wouldn't stand a chance. Light does not get in.

So the reality then was parking on the edge of Allen along side the other cars - Cortinas mostly - and staring out at the drizzling, darkening lake through fogged-up windows. Mothers made heroic efforts to brighten proceedings with prepared picnics; fathers fought the first signs of high blood pressure and valiantly tried to interest their offspring in the bird life. An acquaintance once confided that his old man used pretend that there were Grizzly bears to be found in LKFP. The Radio One sport droned in the background, on a good day there were yells and tears, on a bad day the car shook. On a bad day, entire rows of cars shook, like they were dancing or were being threatened by a tornado. But nothing as exciting as a tornado ever visited LKFP.

And needless to say, LKFP hadn't changed a jot in the 15 odd years since we all graduated from those Sundays. There are no fast-food franchises - no food at all in fact - and the camping quarters have remained loyal to that spare tile-and-brick style of 1980s architecture that leaves you in no doubt that if it is the comforts of home you are looking for, then best sod off home.

LKFP was the estate land of Rockingham House, the King family home burned to the ground in 1957. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why the place always has a lonely feel to it. And it is incredibly still and quiet. Even though this was a beautiful summer evening and although kids played loudly and long into the dusk, LKFP has a quietude that is hard to crack. At nightfall, it comes alive. In the playground - with sturdy, old-fashioned swings and slides - a Sligo lady said she bought a tent on impulse because of the good weather and took her children to camp, an act that surely deserved a medal for bravery.

The park is intimidating enough just sipping beer near the lit doorway of your metal home. There were howls and shrieks during the night, probably just the couple in pitch eight getting frisky but still enough to cause all novices to flick the meanest looking blades on our Swiss army knives. And at one point, the silhouette of a terrifying and vast brown bear appeared by the waste area. But then, if you hammer back enough Dutch Gold, you are liable to see anything.

The next morning was glorious and in Boyle, a farmers' co-op was being held in King's yard, a cobblestone area in the grounds of what used to be the winter townhouse for the old Rockingham family. The yard was a suntrap, Pachelbel was playing on a sound system and behind the candy-striped stalls were vendors from many parts of the world. Marion Norris, originally from England, was selling home-made organic preserves, from sweet gooseberry and elderflower to chili jam. She sources all the fruit locally and has attracted a local custom and has come to think of Boyle as home.

She believes that in the past half-decade, Boyle has done much to shed its cobwebs. John Brennan, the chairman of the co-operative, recalls Boyle and many towns of the northwest as bleak, demoralised places 20 years ago.

"Everybody was getting out. I came back after a farming scholarship in New Zealand and people thought I was mad. It was a difficult time and even after the Irish economy turned around, it took a long time to notice any effect here. But that has begun to change."

The old coal mining town of Arigna has not changed since the last coal seam was ploughed in July of 1990, bringing an abrupt close to 400 years of local mining tradition. Seamus Leyden was among those workers who turned up for work only to learn that the mine had finished.

""At the time, we felt devastated, but looking back, it was probably one of the best things that ever happened."

Leyden is one of the ex-miners who now works as a guide up at the Arigna mining experience, guiding tourists and schoolchildren along the damp, soot- black tunnels that he first worked as a 14-year-old schoolboy.

Lying idle for over a decade, the last working tunnels were restored to an authentic, working condition for the opening of the museum, with the old cutting machinery and air picks and coal barrows placed as if waiting for the gangs to return. It was brave and brutal work and Leyden relived his experience with riveting eloquence. Great tour guides must be a speciality in this part of the country. Saturday was scorching and Strokestown House cannot have known as many visitors since the grand days of ascendancy dinner parties. The Douglas Hyde summer school was in session and tour buses brought visitors to stroll through the fine gardens and tour perhaps the most evocative big house left in Ireland.

John, who escorted a lucky few through the Palladian mansion, explained Strokestown with a historian's precision and a storyteller's appreciation for drama. The end days of Strokestown House were classically novelistic. Olive Pakenham-Mahon was the last of the local ascendancy family to reside there and in 1981, a year before her death, she sold the house and its contents to a business group, legendarily leaving the grand house with nothing more than a suitcase. So the effect of Strokestown is of trespassing on rooms abandoned through sadness and circumstance.

All has been preserved with the kind of care and attention to detail that Marion Norris would approve of, from the 17th-century, four-poster beds to the crystal glass and tea-set that Olive used as a girl in the playroom. Sometime in the 1970s, Olive got a modern, Formica kitchen installed next to the vast dining room. When the restoration team broke through it after her departure, they discovered a huge galley kitchen behind it, with wrought-iron stoves, a mechanised spit, a curing station and windows blacked out because the serving people could, under no circumstances, be permitted to view the front entrance to Strokestown.

Time is funny. For a mere 12 quid now, all we descendants of peasant stock can roam through these lavish and stately rooms and even in bright sunlight it feels like a cold and creepy sort of privilege, to traipse through the private corridors and imaginations of the disappeared ruling class.

But then, the general feel of north Connacht is of a place gloriously unconcerned with catching up with the millennium. The canal village of Cootehall, the heart of McGahern country, is as plain and impressive as anywhere you could visit. It makes you want to speak in whispers.

Carrick-on-Shannon has made great economic strides yet there is still a place for established commercial strongholds such as Murtagh House of Fashion on the main street. It is hard not to sigh with relief when you see family businesses still thriving and not overrun with frothy coffee houses and universal clothing stores.

Located on tough and magnificent landscape, racked by emigration over the years, the towns and villages of counties Roscommon and Leitrim have an unblinking solidity and sense of good manners about them that makes much of what is labelled as progression seem frivolous and stupid in comparison. They leave you with the bright burning hope that they just might be remote and austere and sensible enough to never change.

Pointers and pitstops

Start to finish: Carrick-on- Shannon - Arigna - Strokestown - Athlone.

Transport: Camper van. The Motorhome Ireland rental and sales depot is at Ratoath Road, Kilbride, Co Dublin. Tel: 01-8220563

Distance: Anything from 100 to 300 miles (160 to 483km) as many wrong turns were made.

Worth stopping for: Cootehall, Arigna, Strokestown.

Best Part of Trip: Strokestown House.

Worst part of Trip: The Wave.

Upcoming event in the area: The Kenagh Heritage Festival in the small village of Kenagh near Longford is a four-day event featuring street and pub-based entertainment for all the family. For details tel 043 22227

Keith Duggan travelled as a guest of Motorhome Ireland