Through the wind’s bluster, I hear strident calls. However, as I scan the shelves of fields behind Ballyhillin beach, there’s no sign of the barnacle geese that fly from Greenland to winter along this coast. My gaze lingers on knuckles of land that show how the shore rose as a glacier melted away at the end of the last ice age. So much of Malin Head is like this. Shifting. Contradictory. Hinting of a vast elsewhere, with giant energies hissing at the brink.
When I first came here, decades ago, my parents teased me with this riddle: how could we be at Ireland’s northernmost edge in – as the Northern Irish commonly refer to it – “the south”? But anything seems possible in this place. Islay might thicken out of the horizon’s massed clouds. Like the child I was, I hunch forward as I squint. Maybe.
Turning my back on Scotland, I head for the shoulder of Altnadarrow (from the Irish, ailt na dtarbh, “the ravine of the bull”), where landfall brunts a seething ocean. To my right is Banba’s Crown, a promontory named for a mythological goddess, Banba. Her sister, Ériu, bequeathed her name to Eire, but Banba retained this vital point. Still, a flight of fancy could hold a jealous sibling responsible for the huge white letters of EIRE carved into the thin soil of the Crown’s rim. A firmer mind clings to the conventional story: the graffiti is a warning to second world war pilots of the Republic’s neutrality.
Banba’s Crown is topped by what looks like a truncated hennin, the tall headdress worn by medieval noblewomen. This is the derelict signal tower, built by the British Admiralty as part of coastal defences to thwart a Napoleonic invasion, and later used for early transatlantic telecommunications. That prominence finds its refrain in the echo of the “radio’s prayer”, as the former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy calls the BBC shipping forecast.
The bluff is pitching me towards the Atlantic’s shrugs of white-laced grey and jade. I stop to catch my breath. A gannet spears itself into the heaving swell. Beyond, the offing flattens to a vast disc that pans uninterruptedly to the Arctic.
• Country Diary is on Twitter at @gdncountrydiary
