Seaside Haunts: Mullaghmore: Martina Devlin looks back with mixed feelings on the hazy childhood summers she spent on Mullaghmore strand in Co Sligo

My mother changing into one of her beach outfits - turquoise Capri pants, perhaps, teamed with Jackie O sunglasses, or nutmeg hot pants with a detachable micro-skirt - was always the signal for departure. Such ensembles horrified us children, because they made her look impossibly glamorous, apt to excite attention and therefore wholly unsuitable as a mother. But at least they meant we were on our way.

Every Sunday in summer, irrespective of weather, our destination was the seaside. It took an eternity for my parents to be ready: we would loiter, impatient, our clothes acting as magnets for melting tar from the road while the adults fussed with bathing togs and a picnic.

Then my father would settle his straw trilby on his head, worn only at the seaside, and we were corralled and shoehorned into the car. All seven of us children in an aged white Austin. There were bodies crammed into every crevice, limbs so intertwined even their owners were uncertain which belonged to whom; and sometimes, if my parents detected an inch of spare space, a neighbour's son or daughter was rounded up too.

As the car reversed out of the driveway - "heads down at the back, I can't see where I'm going," my father cried - a younger brother would climb onto the Austin's parcel shelf, curl into a foetal crouch and nap through the journey.

Invariably, our destination was Mullaghmore in Co Sligo, an hour and a half's drive from our home town of Omagh. It was only 12 miles over the Border, but the distance seemed interminable, for travelling hopefully is an alien concept to children who prefer to arrive. Immediately.

As soon as we crossed into the Republic my father would stop the car to buy raspberry-ripple wafers. "Free State ice cream," he'd announce, extracting a bank note from his wallet and handing it to the eldest child to conduct the transaction. "Best ice cream in the world." We'd nod sagely, although none of us had set foot outside Ireland, and he had travelled no further than Leicester.

Our route took us through Bundoran, in Co Donegal, a staging post that catapulted us into exhilarated hyperventilation. Bundoran was Las Vegas and Disneyland coalesced. It was also where I first fell in love. (With a youth who collected the admission fee at the open-air swimming pool: he was 16 and I was five, and he used to call me his girlfriend. I felt as betrayed as a wife of 20 years' standing when I spied him holding hands with a teenager in a bikini.)

The tinny skirl of music from the amusement arcades had a snake-charmer impact on us, and we'd beg for a pit stop. "What, and miss the beach?" Our parents mimed incredulity.

We didn't want to sit on the seashore, however, when we could be shoving pennies into machines, each one more alluring than the last. The laughing sailor who held his wobbling stomach between podgy hands as he guffawed; the giant claw, custodian of a fluffy polar bear we burned to possess but that never parted with more than a gobstopper; the fortune teller whose eyes flashed when she was activated - we never suspended belief in her powers, even when the cards she disgorged told us six- and seven-year-olds to expect promotion at work .

Yet once we turned off the main road and meandered downhill past fuchsia-studded hedgerows leading towards Mullaghmore the clout of Bundoran's gaudy glitter waned. Instead we craned for glimpses of Classiebawn Castle, roosting starkly on the cliff face, and competed for first sight of the swans gliding across the lake at the approach to the fishing village.

The car would park opposite a granite Famine-era harbour, snout-nosed Ben Bulben standing sentry to the right, and out we'd tumble, salt air startling our lungs. "Jack Yeats painted this strand," my father would announce, forever trying to trickle general knowledge into us, while my mother scanned the scimitar beach for cows.

Cattle used to dander onto it and leave their calling card, to her horror, for she knew with a mother's unerring instinct that no matter how extensive the beach a child would sooner or later step in the steaming mound. "Don't go near the cow clap," she'd instruct, precipitating a mass stampede of small feet to circle the excrement and study its stacked formation.

While we were immersed in sandcastle competitions, boys versus girls, my parents would erect a striped canvas windbreak and drink tea from a flask, simultaneously decorous and ridiculous. Just as our game - sometimes it was crab catching, or seaweed collecting, or scratching our names in impacted sand with sticks - reached a crucial juncture, they'd summon us to the rug for food.

At least one child would drop his bread, precipitating a ripple effect of fallen sandwiches, and we'd salvage what we could, throw the rest to the scavenging gulls and switch to crisps. Minuscule blue packets of salt were included with the bags, for DIY seasoning; concentrate though I might I despaired of learning how to sprinkle it equitably among my crisps. It was a baffling skill only adults were able to master.

Afterwards a stroll would be decreed, and my parents would lace fingers as they sauntered - the only time I remember them holding hands - while we trailed behind. "Stop striddling, your legs are younger than ours," my father would throw over his shoulder while we whined for chips or fretted about the incoming tide bulldozing our sandcastles.

We always walked the cliffs anticlockwise, my parents commenting on the occasional skeletal formation of a new house under construction and pausing to admire the view across Donegal Bay. My brothers, sister and I would lean over the cliff rim to watch the foaming Atlantic waves shatter against rocks, regroup and shatter again, until one or other parent noticed our reckless disregard for safety and ordered us back from the brink.

Along the laneways near the turrets of Classiebawn our walk led us. We knew the castle was the summer home of an English lord related to Queen Elizabeth, but his name was too much of a tongue-twister to recall. "When I grow up I'm going to live in Classiebawn," I predicted. My mother smiled: "I wouldn't want to heat a house that size." I was mystified, practicalities foreign to my six-year-old mind.

A few years older, daring from constant reading of Famous Five stories, I sneaked through the fields for a closer look and was beguiled to discover twin stone lions guarding Classiebawn's entrance steps, until the snarl of a car engine sent me scuttling away.

Mullaghmore appeared a private fiefdom to us, in this north-west corner of Ireland where my freckles bloomed, my brothers taught me how to build moats around sandcastles and my father pushed back his straw trilby on his forehead to quote Yeats. "Upon the brimming water among the stones / Are nine and fifty swans."

Then came a time when I heard Mullaghmore cited on the evening news. This was a Mullaghmore I did not recognise, one in which an IRA bomb had exploded, killing a group of people, including that English earl whose name had seemed too complicated for a little girl to pronounce. Mountbatten. I'd always remember it now.

Mullaghmore was his retreat as it was ours. The date was August 27th, 1979, when a wider world heard of our fishing village, and the following day I read in the newspaper how a witness said the boat Lord Mountbatten had been sailing in was blown "to smithereens". I tasted the word on my tongue: previously I had envisaged china cups being dashed to smithereens - was it possible the human body could be dismantled so comprehensively too? Suddenly the seaside enclave, with its strand stretching to infinity, was no longer an isolated Eden.

There was a hiatus before we visited Mullaghmore as a family again, perhaps because of a reluctance to tread where blood had been spilled barbarously, or maybe it was simply that we children were nearly all in our teens now, and sandcastles hadmislaid their allure.

Yet when we did go back it seemed inconceivable that anything inharmonious could ever have pierced the grandeur of its setting. Mullaghmore resisted any paradise-lost analogies: the butchery had been assimilated by the stately mountains, the serrated cliffs, the fretful motion of the sea. It remained an idyll, no echo of savagery in the geography, and this puzzled me. For years I gnawed at it, wondering how an act of carnage could be subsumed so comprehensively.

Recently, I returned to Mullaghmore, pacing the cliff walk anticlockwise with an assortment of nieces and nephews in tow. "Stop striddling, your legs are younger than mine," I almost found myself calling as they cajoled for chips and were apprehensive about the tide destroying their sandcastles.

The thatched cottages I remembered had vanished, but I noticed rank upon rank of bungalows, considerably more than my parents could have envisaged, fields that were once farmed gobbled up by them. Many are holiday homes, ghost houses in winter, some assembled with a breathtaking brutality that's at odds with the natural beauty they inhabit.

I paced the harbour wall, orange lobster pots bobbing below, remarking how the jumble of confetti-coloured boats tethered there are pleasure craft rather than fishing vessels. Cows no longer ramble onto the beach - the cattle grid has taken care of that - but I smiled to see children scrape their names in sand with sticks and trawl the rock pools for crabs.

I delayed before approaching Classiebawn, commanding the skyline on Mullaghmore Head, waiting still for me to buy it, although I'd probably just be happy to wander around it now. The dwindling expectations of an adult have taken root, whereas the child I once was expected to grow up and inhabit a castle.

It was there, gazing across the fields at Classiebawn's silhouette, that I found the answer to my conundrum, 25 years almost to the month after Mountbatten and Mullaghmore became intertwined names. I grasped that the mountains and coastline that girdle this village are impervious to man, untouchable by any deeds of his. Nothing we do impinges on the landscape's essence. And at that realisation, the ghost of the carefree small girl I had been stirred. "Who wants me to show them how to build a moat around a sandcastle?" I sang out.

Martina Devlin's latest novel is Temptation, published by Poolbeg, €9.99

Tomorrow: Enda Wyley on Cruit Island, Co Donegal

Friday: Louise East on Brittas Bay, Co Wicklow

Saturday: Thomas McCarthy on Dungarvan Bay, Co Waterford