Ulster (Northern Ireland and Ireland) -- Description and travel
To the west of Killybegs begins that wonderful line of cliff
stretching away past Carrick and Glen Columbkille, and girdling all
the projecting headland till it runs back to Loughros Bay, near
Ardara. For wildness and for majesty this region has no equal, except
in Achill; and it has what Achill lacks, the charm of rivers. Mr.
Williams's pictures illustrate well the coastline, which even when
it is low runs out with huge flag stones and giant boulders into
the deep--fit buttress against such waves as roll in there even on
a day of calm. Everything is big there; distances are long, and a
mile never seems to get you far in any direction. It is a country to
walk, the finest of all the countries known to me; but I would gladly
supplement my walking with a bicycle, travelling one of the roads as
far as it will carry me and then leaving it simply by the ditch at
the roadside, among the osmunda fern which grows everywhere free as
the heather. It commits you to return that way; but what you leave
by the roadside is as safe as if Argus watched it--unless, indeed,
some mountainy heifer should pass that way and eat it: they will
chew anything from a fishing rod to a suit of clothes. I have seen
embarrassed bathers pursuing an active cow, who carried essential
garments in her mouth, still masticating them even while she pranced
in her clumsy gallop.--Carrick is the centre for this country and
Slieve League the great excursion; it is a fine walk down by the
little port of Teelin and then up the track which winds along the
cliff edge of the mountain--perhaps the finest view of all is when you
are halfway, with seven or eight hundred feet of sheer cliff below you
and the steep face towering up another thousand above. At the somewhat
overrated hazard of the One Man's Pass you would fall, I dare say,
sixteen hundred feet before you reached the water; but from the top a
pebble may be dropped two thousand feet plumb into the sea.
[Illustration: GLENVEAGH, DONEGAL]
Horn Head is only seven or eight hundred feet; yet because the cliff
face there is undercut, and the Horns themselves project so oddly,
it always seemed to me a dizzier place than the greater cliff. The
really marvellous thing at Slieve League is that view across Donegal
Bay to the mountains of Sligo, Benbulbin of magic fame, and along the
wild Mayo coast that stretches out and out to the west till the long
promontory is finished off by island rocks, the Stags of Broadhaven.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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