It is always better driving from east to west across the island. Last Saturday there were buckets of rain against the car for a couple of hours, but once over the Shannon the road rises with you and the stone walls become the norm. The gardens of the roadside houses everywhere keep you admiring - perhaps especially those older, smaller houses with their front doors often not more than five yards from the roadside.
The old regulars still thrive. Mallow, cheerful and lasting. Roses, honeysuckle; buddleia, of course, spilling over the wall, and, as you go farther west, that semi-domesticated stunner: montbretia. The more modern houses often go for variegated poplar. No comment. Mercifully, the verges are unsprayed and all sorts of plant life flourishes. The fields are, this year, carpeted with the greatest show ever of meadowsweet. Is it the wet season? Then there is, on verges and in fields, the yellow horror, ragwort - one of the noxious weeds that in your parents' or grandparents' day would bring the sergeant on his bicycle to warn them of the penalty for not cutting the offending plant. And along the way, too, runs of brilliant, purple loosestrife.
The John Healy Forest Park on your left after Carracastle and before Charlestown, in Mayo, carries on a plaque set into a giant stone the opening words of his splendid book Nineteen Acres: "It isn't much of a road and it doesn't lead to much of a holding. The road is claytopped and rutted. The holding is just over nineteen acres. Half of it is reclaimed bog. The other half, above the house on the hill, is lean and rockribbed. . ."And it is on the lower half, running down to the road that the trees in memory of John are planted: oak, ash, cedar, birch, beech, Norway spruce and others.
The summer grasses and wild plants grow luxuriantly now, but the trees stand out well above them - in so few years. John Healy was widely thought of as primarily a political writer, but he had a broad view of life, and trees became almost a passion with him. A fitting memorial. Nineteen Acres tells a story which could be repeated in France, Germany and other European countries. Brendan Kennelly wrote: "It is both vigorous social history and imaginative creation . . . Nineteen Acres will be read a long time from now by people yet unborn."