Ardara Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

Ardara Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

8 September 2025, Monday

The Wilderness FM radio station’s weather forecaster’s words were ‘Sure, it won’t be shite until the late afternoon’ so, with heads bursting with confused optimism, we loaded up Fionnuala the Fiat with our precautionary trawlermen’s protective clothing (and trawlerwomen’s) and on the rocky road to the south of County Donegal we started.

We’d stayed a couple of nights in Falcarragh (Irish: An Fál Carrach, meaning ‘the stone wall’) on a previous trip and loved the place, especially Falcarragh Strand whose five kilometres of exquisite white sand and lack of human interference must have made it another contender for the Second Best Beach in the World title. So it was great to be back for a brief visit, especially the bit where we returned to the Batch Coffee House near the crossroads for breakfast. Well actually it was more of a late breakfast and early dinner crossover arrangement, so I’m tempted to call it brinner.

Not many people outside of Falcarragh knew about the miracle of the rhubarb toasted in soda bread and served with hot custard. Its description appeared before me on the menu like some sort of apparition leading me to a higher plane of consciousness that would have made Bernadette Soubirous herself want to be best friends with me. After just two spoonsful of it landing in my belly it had become obvious that it was worthy of a holy shrine, or at least we’d make a second visit to the café later in the week for another plate of it. There was something miraculous about the tea too, of course, which was the top-notch Barry’s Red Label (or maybe even Gold Label… ooh!) stuff that we’d come to expect, served in a pot that didn’t leak.

I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking I’ve nothing better to do than moan and groan about an item of kitchenware with a hole in it, but the defective pot in our musty rustic cottage would gnaw at every single one of the happiness cells in my brain each time I sat down in our holiday kitchen for a brew. In Ireland the teapot is sacred and as much a part of our tradition as a thatched roof on a musty rustic cottage, or a creamy head measuring precisely five eighths of an inch on a pint of Guinness. The vessel that the waitress brought to our table at the Batch was perfectly perfect so we had a moment of reflection to offer up thanks to St. Spyridon the patron saint of potters, who once used a shard of pottery to illustrate the Holy Trinity to doubters, which miraculously turned into flame, water and dust before their eyes. We didn’t dare tell him that the pot our tea had come in was made from some sort of alloy material with a faux Bakelite handle.

Priyatelkata and I often sing out loud on long car journeys and today was no exception as our route made it virtually impossible for us to resist giving uproarious renditions of (Get Your Kicks) on the N56 and I Left My Heart in Lackaghatermon. Twenty minutes after the point at which we’d had enough of the N56, we stopped to stretch our legs in Ardara (Irish: Ard an Rátha, meaning 'height of the fort'). We’d read on a leaflet we’d found in the battered cardboard shoebox full of touristy leaflets on the table in the musty rustic cottage that it was one of Donegal’s five designated heritage towns. Having a leaflet dedicated all to itself suggested to us that it must have been good, and it had probably been a great place before the downturn in global economics arrived with its asphyxiating consequences and its determination to close down shops that might have sold anything from books to chips to plastic statues of the Virgin Mary back in the rare old times. From my experience there I’d struggle to go in with anything stronger than ‘alright’ should I be called upon to do the Tripadvisor review thing. Irish people would probably describe it as perfect, even though it wasn’t. 

In most Irish towns I’d visited, the square in the middle of them hadn’t been exactly square in shape. So where people in Irish towns had called their bit in the middle ‘the Diamond’ I couldn’t see that there was a problem because although they were unlikely to be in the shape of a diamond when looked at on a map, they were geometrically as close to a diamond as they were to a square. In fact, I could see no reason for not calling them ‘the Dodecagon’ should the need arise. In the Diamond in Ardara stood a marble statue of a fella wearing a cloth cap (Donegal tweed, no doubt) and playing a fiddle. The polished granite plinth at his marble feet bore the inscription John Doherty - Fiddler on the Road. My attempts to take a photograph were impaired by a man who was rubbing the statue with an old rag. I asked the man why he was doing this, suggesting to myself that it might be the fiddler’s birthday or wedding anniversary or his lottery numbers had come up, and he replied, ‘Ah sure, wasn’t he looking a bit wet?’ I spent much of what remained of that day trying to estimate what number of working hours per week might be expected of a person employed as a statue drier in the West of Ireland.

Leaving Ardara, we sang Bob Dylan’s Ardara Rain’s A-Gonna Fall as, with the sky darkening, we wound along a windy wee road that took us up and through the dramatic Glengesh Pass and across deliciously wild bog land dominated by oily-black turf banks to arrive at the village of Glencolmcille (Irish: Gleann Cholm Cille, meaning ‘Valley of Saint Columba’). By then the weather had switched to the twenty-minutes-on and twenty-minutes-off shift pattern of sunshine and sideways rain, so we parked up as near as we possibly could to a ferocious-looking old grey stone-built church of the Church of Ireland variety so that if meteorological circumstances worsened we’d at least be able to say we’d seen something of the history and culture of the place. We braved getting out of the car for twenty minutes, fifteen of which were climatically hospitable, to have a look at an ancient cross slab (i.e. a religious cross carved on a megalithic standing stone).

Thanks to mobile phones and warm dry cafés, we later discovered the significance of our over-photographed and lovingly caressed limestone chunk of the Pagan to Christian conversion. Apparently, on St Columba’s Day each year (9 June) at midnight, pilgrims set out in their bare feet to make a tour of this and fourteen other holy places within the village environs where Columba was said to have prayed, before attending Holy Mass at 3:00 a.m. at the church named after the lad himself. This sowed the seeds of a plan for our next Irish trip, if only we could be sure that the weather conditions would improve a bit for all the trotting around with the shoes and socks off. But that was to be a fair way off into the future so we’d plenty of time for getting in a bit of praying to Clare of Assisi, the patron saint of lovely weather for your holidays, though she must have already been sick to the back teeth of hearing from us.

The warm dry café that saved us from perishing was Kelly’s Corner Café where the proprietor, Anne-Marie, asked us ‘What good did a scone do anybody on such a fierce day?’ before insisting ‘A good hot bit of apple crumble would suit you far better!’ Reluctantly we agreed and washed it down with glorious tea from a glorious teapot. Anne-Marie’s Irish good spirit and humour had sprinkled a thin covering of fertile soil over those seeds of our Glencolmcille ’27 plan. Meanwhile the rain had stopped so we said go raibh maith agat (thank you) to her and dashed off in the direction of the impressive coastal scenery.

Malin Beg (Irish: Málainn Bhig, meaning ‘little hill-brow’) was a great place for anyone who liked hidden away little fishing harbours and gorgeous secluded beaches that had been named Silver Strand. We had lost count of the number of Silver Strands we had explored on our Irish adventures but this one was just as stunning as any of the rest of them, almost all of which had been worthy of the title Second Best Beach in the World. It was also a good place for observing one of the many defensive towers built by the English all along the Donegal coastline during the Napoleonic wars to protect ‘their’ borders. Their plan had been to keep out the French. Priyatelkata, who had been born in the same country as Napoleon Bonaparte but a fair few years later, was living proof that they had failed and she was so delighted by this that she vowed that she would come back to Malin Beg again and again and again, and learn how to sing La Marseillaise without it turning into All You Need is Love by the Beatles. Reminding her that the English had left Ireland a century earlier, she said she would do it anyway, just in case they changed their minds.

On the homeward leg of our grand day out, we passed through the town of Killybegs (Irish: Na Cealla Beaga, meaning 'little cells', a reference to early monastic settlements) and it was there that we discovered that there was a huge difference in the meanings of the words ‘spa’ and ‘Spar’. The brightly illuminated panel at the gate of the magnificently opulent Lucky Leprechaun Plaza Hotel boasted that it had spa facilities. Imagine our embarrassment when we rolled up at the reception desk and asked for a couple of cans of Guinness and a big bag of scones.

Image:

The ancient cross slab and the Church of Ireland church in Glencolmcille. My own photograph.

Part Eight:

My Perfect Zombie

Click on the link to read.

Photographs:

The Mayo Meander