Having accepted an invitation from an English acquaintance to stay with her at her holiday cottage on an island just off the west coast of Ireland, I joined her the night before her departure at her Elizabethan-era home in Devizes, in Wiltshire, England. The plan was to leave early in the morning, drive across England and Wales, about 175 miles, catch the car ferry from Fishguard on the coast of southwest Wales, to Rosslare on a bit of southern Ireland that protrudes east, just south of Wexford. From there it was another 220 miles to Valentia Island.
I’m not at all clear whether her sense of timing was excellent or we’d left late. In any case, while I don’t frighten particularly easily, I was terrified, sitting for 3 hours in what should have been the driver’s seat, as we tore across the south of the United Kingdom to our rendezvous with the ferry. At one point I requested a comfort stop just to catch my breath before we screamed on and pulled onto the ferry dock just as the boat was loading.
Home for my time on Valentia Island.
It didn’t take the whole day to realize I’d joined a mad woman on whom I’d be completely dependent for the duration of my stay in her isolated island home. The drive across southern Ireland was less dire, but long, another 5 hours or thereabouts. Almost to our destination, we boarded the local ferry for the 5 minute ride to the main town, Knightstown, one of 2 access point to Valentia. The other is a bridge from the small mainland town of Portmagee, the place we mostly went, to eat at the pub, to shop for groceries, to access the internet at the library and to find other faces to look at besides each other’s.
The upside of accepting hospitality in friends’ homes is, of course, free and comfortable accommodations and one may also hope for congenial company thrown in. The downside is when things go awry, through no fault of one’s own, and one must bear it, whatever torture fate has planned. In this case, my hostess had proposed a stay of 10 days. Not long after our arrival she asked,”how long do you plan to stay”? I mumbled something like, “I believe you mentioned 10 days”, to which she replied, “well, THAT’s a long time, isn’t it.” I knew the 3 day rule, perfectly well, and had ignored it.
My companion had, I knew, suffered terrible losses in the year before and it was, I thought, to keep her company that she had extended the invitation. But I came to believe she must have been suffering a deep depression and, rather than being company, she was feeling her losses even more keenly with me there. There was nothing to do but the best I could summon and make my getaway when the opportunity seemed right. Meantime, when we went out she played guide and I played tourist on this beautiful bit of Ireland on the Atlantic, less than 2 miles wide by 7 miles long. It was late spring and the weather was fine. There was, fortunately, no shortage of things to do on Valentia.
We had wonderful walks, passing men cutting peat for fires on our way down a track to the beach, sharing the hills with the sheep and, from high points, views of the Skelligs 10 miles offshore to the southwest. One afternoon on our way home from a walk we passed a sign in the middle of nowhere for a tearoom and turned into the driveway. A woman had made a business of serving tea and cakes in a corner of her home, and she welcomed us cheerfully as we entered the cosy room.
One day we visited beautiful Glanleam Subtropical Gardens, and another, the small but absorbing Valentia Heritage Centre in Knightstown dedicated to the story of the attempts to lay a transatlantic cable to North America, based on Valentia Island and succeeding on the third try.
Driving on the mainland one day, across the water from Knightstown, she pointed out the weather observatory, one of 22 stations that contribute to the BBC Shipping Forecast and suggested we go for a closer look. It had the appearance of a military installation so, rather than wander on our own, we parked and went to the office to enquire about what we could see. We were offered a personal tour, if it interested us (it did), and we were taken up into the building that housed the instrumentation, pleased by the friendly reception and fascinating explanations. It made us very glad we’d asked.
After a number of days I began to think about how I’d make my way to Kerry Airport, from which I’d planned to leave for London at the end of the originally proposed 10 day visit. In the Portmagee library I’d picked up a schedule for the bus to Killarney. I asked my friend if she’d deliver me to the bus a couple of days short of 10, as I figured she’d be glad to see the back of me and Killarney seemed like it might be a pleasant place to spend them. Instead, she offered to drive me to Killarney, and so she did. She thought she might do some shopping and walked me to the TIC, the tourist information office, where I knew I could arrange a B&B for the 2 nights until my flight. Despite the sadness, I’d been glad to see Valentia Island. I thanked her for having me and was about to say goodbye when she simply turned and slowly walked away, looking like a lost child.
The Skellig Islands, barely visible on the horizon, center.
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