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. On the third leg of the journey Kathy Sheridan boats from Belturbet to Carrick-on-Shannon.
Is there anything more tedious than someone else's incredibly relaxing holiday? Anything more boring than hearing how someone else lost track of the days, how the phone battery ran out and there were no daily papers, how London was bombed and the Lions were hammered and it all passed them by because they were so incredibly relaxed?
You'll hear a lot of that once you get on the waterways. It's only when you hear yourself droning on a bit that you realise you've been hooked. And in record time.
It happens because the form of transport you're using averages about eight kilometres an hour and the rush-hour traffic works out at about two boats an hour, and because you're gliding through an enchanted landscape of streams, rivers, lakes, fairy hills and cairns and beautiful, old cut-stone bridges so low you have to duck - all enveloped in a silence broken only by the swish of the clear, fresh water.
You have no choice but to relax. Your car is way back somewhere out of reach. The road is nowhere in sight. The only option is to stop fighting it.
And it all happens within minutes of receiving some basic tuition from the staff at Emerald Star and heading north-west out of Belturbet on the River Erne. Suddenly, it's just you and the fat, contented cattle lazing on the banks, the sheep ambling over for a look, the swans nesting in the shallows. A fish leaps from the water; a grey heron stares regally the other way; little orange and blue kingfishers flash through the dense foliage over the creamy meadow and huge yellow buttercups crowding the river edge.
We're vaguely aware that the cattle on one bank are Northern and that we are sailing on the actual boundary between the North and the Republic. The navigation markings are the only indication that we've moved from the Erne onto Shannon waters. The Erne markings are more idiot-proof.
An hour and a half passes before we meet "traffic" - another boat, in which half a dozen young fellows are playing cards.
The world intrudes just often enough to keep it interesting. Thus, the guilty pleasure of observing the stunned bewilderment of a solemn German woman, her own boat trapped behind a boat containing a large, middle-aged man, who points repeatedly and graphically at his bosoms while shouting at her in a strange language. What he is saying - in kindly Cavanese - is: "Put on your lifejacket. Never trust the water."
But short of opening the wrong sluice gates (which would be highly dramatic - although we're assured that the electronic lock controls are fool-proof), nothing much happens. You relax or you abandon ship.
Occasionally, a sudden onset of Captain Bligh syndrome in the senior male scuppers the plan.
Frank McCabe, a lock-keeper who patrols the locks from his little navy Inland Waterways van, remembers a German couple who had pushed off from Carrick-on-Shannon on the first day of their holiday. Trouble flared at the first lock.
"I'm not a fluent German speaker now but you'd have known by his tone that he wasn't about to bring her flowers. There was a lot of shouting. She wouldn't manage to throw the rope far enough or it'd fall into the water or she'd tie it wrong. At the next lock it was the same, only the shouting was louder. A few locks on, and the next thing I see is her on the side of the road, thumbing a lift back to Carrick-on-Shannon." Frank presented a bunch of daisies to her, which made her cry again.
The other not-very-relaxed types he sees are mothers of young children. "You see them in the locks. The man is as happy as the clappers, taken up with running the whole operation. But the woman always looks tense because the kids are running around."
The message is that there are certain personalities and family types who probably shouldn't attempt to use the waterway (via 16 fairly labour-intensive locks at the lower end) to get from Belturbet to Carrick-on-Shannon.
The first lock is manned - the only one manned of the 15 between here and Leitrim - and for good reason. Derryquill's lock-keeper is well accustomed to idiot-novices. Suffice to say you don't tie the boat up in the lock, because the boat can be left hanging humiliatingly on its side in the rapidly falling water level while you furiously try to untie the rope. Got that?
Some gravitas is restored by the plaque alongside, which commemorates the opening of the waterway by Dick Spring and Sir Patrick Mayhew on May 23rd, 1994.
For a while, the canal becomes a kind of politicians' progress. At Ballinamore, Co Leitrim, another plaque recalls the November 1990 visit by then taoiseach, Charles J Haughey, to launch the Ballinamore-Ballyconnell Canal Restoration Project. At the moorings in Ballyconnell (a town in Co Sligo that has won a National Tidy Towns Award twice), yet another fine stone monument commemorates the visit of the same taoiseach on February 7th, 1992, "to inspect progress in the reconstruction of the canal, which commenced in January 1991".
The most impressive monument however is in Ballinamore - an obelisk flanked by the crests of the four provinces and erected to the memory of John Joe McGirl, 1921-1988, "An unbroken and unbreakable Fenian". There's a persistent rumour that Shergar is buried around here, although locals tend to distance themselves from such notions.
On a wall in Prior's pub hangs a cutting taken from The Irish Times some time in the early 1990s, when reporters were exploring the newly-restored waterway. It described how mass emigration was sucking the lifeblood from towns like these, how every weekend at the local disco brought new announcements about more emotional departures, how parish GAA teams were being decimated.
Now, says one old man, the only lads leaving are the ones heading off to Australia for a year. "That's their choice now," he says wistfully, "and good luck to them. Let no one try and tell me that the old days were better."
Down the town on a lazy, drizzly mid-afternoon, a wonderful new library is buzzing with browsers of all ages, sitting on sofas or lying on squashy, child-friendly floor mats or logged on to the internet.
Ballinamore has not escaped the inevitable eruption of apartment developments, which have blighted nearly every settlement on this charmed waterway. But here, at least, they do not rear over the river approaches like some giant interloper plonked on a country town. Ballinamore has the feel of a place anxious to hold on to its soul.
Down river, tiny Keshcarrigan, a little lakeland village at the foot of Sheebeg, a fairy mountain, is also attracting developers. In the walk from the river, before the old Garda barracks (for which the council is seeking listed status), an estate of large detached, suburban-style houses has taken root - a couple with not one but two BMWs and Mercedes in the yard and a cinema-style TV screen in the front room.
At the other end of town, an even larger development of smaller houses is beginning to sprawl, plus a shopping centre.
In front of it, Leitrim County Council's mobile cinema is showing Dead Meat (adults only) and Star Wars 3. On the bridge, business is quiet enough in Gertie's Bar, a comfortably eccentric mix of old shop signs, beer ads and a defunct parking meter cemented into a doorway out front.
Keshcarrigan is a village in transition, and its developers and investors are playing cute. In the shopping centre, the estate agent's window is plastered with houses for sale. Unusually, every single property but one is listed as "price on application".
In the same centre, the Waterside, a small Italian restaurant, is reasonably busy for a Tuesday night. Half a dozen German anglers are in as well as a couple of Irish families.
Later, the Germans admit to being taken aback by what they call "the city prices" for "just okay" food. "Where is the fresh fish from the lakes that we expect but never can get . . . Why is it an extra €2 or €3 for an ordinary vegetable in the middle of such a green country?" Ask river travellers about their impressions of the Irish life and the response is generally positive.A young couple from Frankfurt declare that "the Irish are the friendliest people anywhere".
But when the chat turns to prices, they become almost incoherent. "Look, see, all those sheep? Do you see? Sheep, sheep, sheep everywhere," says Hans. "Yet you go looking for sheep cheese and if you can find it, the first thing is it probably will not be Irish and the second thing is it will be about €4. In Germany it is everywhere and might be about €1." They gave up eating out after a couple of attempts. "You pay €20 before wine and then you find you can cook it better yourself on the boat. So that's what we do."
In the well-known, comfortable Angler's Rest pub in Ballyconnell, Co Sligo, with the raucous din of Take a Walk on the Wild Side thumping over a silent showing of Coronation Street on the big screen, the menu majors in enormous portions of deep-fried fish, chicken Kiev, steaks and burgers, and chips with everything. An Austrian couple take a look, nod politely and leave to find "something lighter".
Michael and Deirdre Collins, a couple from Newcastle, Co Down are back on the waterway for the fourth year. They look like the most contented couple in Europe. "If heaven is anything like this," says Michael, "then what I'd say is 'take me now'."
Last year, when they had to head home prematurely because of a serious illness in the family, a supervisor opened the locks all the way in their direction to speed their passage.
They are wholehearted fans. But even they have serious caveats. They have a sense that "the crack is dying in the pubs - perhaps the smoking ban?"; but it is Southern prices that stagger them. "It's desperately expensive. I don't know how you live here," says Deirdre. "We used to buy our food here when we started coming a few years ago but it never seemed to be less than €50 for a few basics," she says, echoing the views of many continental visitors. "Now we buy in Enniskillen before we set off."
High prices, lack of choice and poorly cooked food are mentioned by almost every visitor we talk to.
It is surely significant that all along the river, the talk among the business people is of a steep drop in visitors. "The quietest I've seen in 11 years," says one man, who reckons boat traffic is down by between a third and a half and falling year on year. Some admit privately that prices are probably a factor.
Pat Bradley, who runs one of the most charming mooring points on the waterway - Swan Island Open Farm and Restaurant, north of Ballinamore - reckons business is down 20 per cent on last year, which itself was down 20 per cent on the year before.
"Business from the water is brutal," he says frankly. Bradley keeps his end of the deal. Excellent home-made soup and open sandwiches on warm brown bread are available for lunch from a varied menu as well as a variety of good coffees, served in an unobtrusive, rambling, old cottage with a peat fire in the grate.
Outside, the place seems to be overrun with tiny pups, scuttling around an extraordinary assembly of native and exotic fauna such as alpaca, red deer, floppy-eared rabbits, chinchillas, budgies, wild boar, Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs (some destined for Pat's famous barbecue spit at some point), a Jacob's ram, a Shetland pony and a barnacle goose who dropped in once and decide to stay. As important as any f these is Pat's running commentary, which provides a glimpse of an Ireland building on its strengths.
Further on, we divert towards Lough Key to Cootehall, in homage to John McGahern who spent his youth there and where he found the setting for The Barracks. Cootehall was also home to the late Seán Doherty, to whom a virtual shrine has been erected in the pub near the church, with funeral photographs and a large portrait of the man himself.
Fascinating as it is, we don't feel inclined to linger, mainly because large signs at the nearest (empty) marina proclaim it to be for customers of the local coffee house only - which happens to be closed in the afternoon and now appears to be called Manfred's (whose steaks are recommended by the Collinses).
But the diversion is worth it. For anyone craving the sight of a manually-operated, old-fashioned lock, it's just ahead. Clarendon Lock at Knockvicar, Co Roscommon, is a massive piece of engineering dating from 1848.
The enchanting weir and the burly, determinedly monosyllabic lock-keeper are among the outstanding memories we take with us to bustling Carrick-on-Shannon, a fine pint with friends in Flynn's, our waiting car (delivered from Belturbet, courtesy of Emerald Star) and a rainswept N4 heading south-east.
• Kathy Sheridan travelled as a guest of Emerald Star
