We continue on, passing through another beautiful peninsula on the northern side of Ireland. County Donegal is a place to see. We’ve timed the weather perfectly. If you want to go swimming, wait until June. If you come in March, bring a light jacket, and prepare for variability and the wind. But do come. It’s a beautiful place, as I have feebly tried to show you here. We’ve got one more day here, but we’re already scheming for our return. How could you not come back?

Ros Goill is heathland and bog, hill and pasture. There are nearly 800 people living here, with about a third being native Irish speakers. There’s still the weekly Gaelic football match and traditional music at night.

Across the way here is Dooey, the sandy place. Many of the places here are named after landscape features. Dinn a’ Deidadh is the cliff of the sharp teeth, for instance. Poll na Murlas is the hole of the mackerel.

You wonder how the mackerel felt about that name when they first heard about it. Dooey is just on the horizon here. Off in the distance is Sheephaven Bay, a big game fishing destination. Giant bluefin tuna is the catch of choice. Apparently, when you get off the big road and up into the peninsula here you get a taste of the traditional Ireland.

Just up from the Ros Goill marker, you round a curve and with no warning, no pull off, no parking lot, no nothing, you get this view. Click to open it in another window to get the full effect.

That’s just Ireland for you, round a bend, see something amazing. And the Wild Atlantic Way is perhaps some of the best of it. Of course we’re planning how and when we’ll come back.

This region is full of diverse wildlife habitats. Coastal Ireland has vegetated sea cliffs, grasslands (which were once ancient beaches for ancient tourists) and boasts a variety of rare species of plants, animals, and birds. But the freshwater lakes are a unique feature to this region. They generally have enough nutrients for plants, but not enough for algae. So the plants, like special ferns, don’t have competition. Somehow this ties into being an enticement for water fowl. There are ducks and sanderlings across the peninsula, as well as endangered falcons and Chough (think of crows) and plenty of other critters.

Sitting in the middle of this is Island Roy, or “the isle.” You can just see it in the background, below. Previously, this place was filled with farming, fishing, seaweed and shellfish gathering. If you were on the mainland and needed to get on to the isle, or vice versa, you crossed on stilts.

On a map it looks like a crude U, or a hand frozen in an arthritic position, with fingers going this way and that. It sits in the back of a shallow bay. The first causeways connected the island to the mainland in 1927. Finally, in 2001, the local community could officially call themselves an island. And, during high tide or particularly bad storms, it very much is one.

Here you can see the Harry Blaney Bridge, which is County Donegal’s longest span. Blaney was descendent of an IRA commander, and himself a local politician and farmer. At one time it was alleged he might have been an arms dealer during the Troubles. He denied it and the claims apparently never went anywhere. Over the years he and his brother built up a successful political machine. An Irish nationalist who resisted partition or compromising Irish sovereignty, his bio reads like he was the sort of socially conservative, rural populist man beloved by the locals who knew him, and devil have the rest. Now he has this bridge in his name. I wonder how many times he was on it between when they opened the bridge and closed his casket, four years later. He’s buried three miles away, but you have to take an indirect route, the sort so typical in watery regions, to get there.

The bridge with his name, though, turned what used to be a half-hour trip into a five minutes drive. Can you think of a better rural memorial than that?

Lovely as these roads are, anything that gives you back that chunk of time on routine trips is, you would assume, a welcome change. Of course some of the folks didn’t think the bridge was necessary.