They put up with it - six or seven-mile tailbacks on the road to the West, according to the radio - perhaps because they cannot get away earlier from the job, and all for maybe only 48 hours or so of a stay. With some of them, it's a pull they cannot resist. To the West, to the land of Hy Brasil, almost a Tir n nOg. They can't help it.
Robert Lloyd Praeger writes in his book The Way That I Went: "The west coast of Ireland is farthest west - the Ultima Thule - of all Eurasia." (Not just Europe, mark you, but Europe and Asia.) "Thither come strange, silent messengers - floating seeds and so on - from tropical lands across the ocean." (As we know from Eithne and Michael Viney today.) And Praeger goes on: "Out beyond the sunset are legendary islands - Hy Brasil and the rest - and the shoals that mark the grave of the sunken land of Buss. Hy Brasil, along with St Brendan's Isle and Buss, is our own particular property, lying only a few hundred miles west of Ireland and intimately concerned with maps of the early geographers and with Irish legend."
A Dutch map, he writes, of about 1655, shows a large island at Rockall, and Brasil in about the position of the Porcupine Bank. Indeed Brasil Rock is plainly marked with latitude and longitude given, in a General Chart of the Atlantic "corrected to 1830". Praeger asks if it is possible that there once was an island there. . .a volcanic island.
He writes: "With the aid of mirage alone can they be seen in these degenerate days", and quotes T.J. Westropp, well-known scholar, who saw it three times, alone, and once with family members. A few decades ago a member of another family, saw it mirage-clearly from around Ballyconneely in the 1940s. In 1950 the late Frank Mitchell published The Way That I followed (Town House, 1990), a bow to Praeger, and evidence that scientific knowledge had gained much in the half-century and more between the two books.
But, of course, most of these visitors to the West are less interested in mirages than in having a good night or two out with a meal and a drink in Roundstone or other places, or parties in their summer houses there. And the long walks along Dogs Bay and other beaches. . .a cleansing and invigorating experience. Y