Where do the young things, the Bright Sparks of Belfast go to see the New Year in, and generally to get a bit of a refresher before the last spurt of winter? Donegal, in some cases. From Dublin there is no doubt where they head - the West, for Clifden, for Gogarty's old place the Renvyle Hotel and other lively refreshing establishments. The West does have something at Christmas and New Year. You walk the old railway line near Recess, explore, again, the Inagh Valley, go out to Slyne Head, wonder why you spend so much of your life in traffic jams in Dublin or some other city.
This West smells and sounds of peace and restorative wonders. Roundstone with its memories of Kate O'Brien, which now cherishes the Robinsons who have shown us so much of ourselves and country. A couple of miles away is Gortin Bay where Bulmer Robson lived so many of his later years, and where he is buried in the sandy graveyard nearby. A kindly area, not forgetting O'Dwyers in the village with its good seafood. Then there's Errisbeg, 917 feet high, and you remember one summer day standing on the top and seeing the mountains of Kerry. And between that peak and Clifden stretches one of the most valued bogs in Ireland. It's not that it's studded with small lakes; it seems from the map to be as much lake as bog.
Clifden is the centre of so much activity. A man who has just been there a week or so ago says it is already humming. Renvyle again. In a recent book A Year in Connemara a paperback, from Daletta Press, Monasterevan, Kildare, Guy St John Williams, grandson of Oliver St John Gogarty, tells of his restoring the old Gogarty house on Tully Lake. At the start he writes: "Some of the names in this narrative may be fictitious, but then many of the characters are surreal." Much hard work, much visiting establishments around the Tully Cross, Letterfrack, Claddaghduff, Moyard and Omey Island area. Much observation of the wild life and the history of the area in stone. Michael Gibons, "Connemara's indigenous archaeologist and natural historian," who describes the Renvyle peninsula as "an archaeological garden". You would like to see this house in the middle of a lake "where," a note says of the author: "he strove to make his dreams a reality." A delightful book.