The Concept of Rain at a Jaunty Angle

The Concept of Rain at a Jaunty Angle

5 September 2025, Friday

Today, it being the sort of day that they’d describe in Ireland as a soft day, the rain fell vertically on the Fanad Peninsula rather than in the sideways way that we’d come to know and love. Priyatelkata and I were becoming experts at observing rainfall styles, despite the fact that the windows in the musty rustic cottage were very small and spattered with wet leaves. You know you’re in for an uneventful day when you find yourself fighting over whose turn it is to look out of the best window. The sideways rain had become a firm favourite as it usually only lasted twenty minutes, after which there’d be twenty minutes of sunshine, and so on. Vertical rain, on the other hand, fell without interruption until the clouds were completely drained. We had a short discussion about what would happen if the rain was neither vertical nor sideways. How would we cope with the concept of rain at a jaunty angle? We searched on Google for ‘Rain falling at a jaunty angle in sea areas Shannon, Rockall and Malin’ but there were no results. It seemed that the likelihood of us witnessing such a thing was on a par with us seeing the faerie people dancing round toadstools by the light of the moon or a Cavan man buying a round in a pub.

So the morning was spent in a mostly idle mode, especially after the best window had steamed up. We started a game of Gaeltacht Scrabble but when I put down the tiles to spell grianghrafadóireachta (meaning ‘photography’) I was challenged. We didn’t have an Irish dictionary to prove that it was a real word so, after a bit of a Scrabble squabble, I reluctantly settled for aah (meaning ‘ah’). We considered having a crack at dancing the Riverdance dance until we remembered that our green velvet party frocks were in the wash. However, we were saved from a terminal attack of cabin fever by the music of Planxty (who I mentioned in this saga a couple of days earlier, so I hope you were paying attention) and a full teapot with the hole in the bottom of it blocked up with chewing gum (Irish breakfast flavour).

The first album Planxty by Irish folk band Planxty, and Aladdin Sane by David Bowie, were both released during the spring of 1973, and both contained ground breaking music. There was nothing glam rock about Planxty so kids at my school in Leeds ridiculed me for buying the record, suggesting that I came from a family of gypsies, tramps and thieves who lived in a hovel in a wood and my mother was a gold-toothed, fortune-telling witch. But they were way off the mark there because her teeth were actually steel. Simultaneously buying Bowie’s album didn’t excuse me from the ‘travelling tinker boy’ epithet they gave me. I let my feelings of displeasure about this be known and was told that I didn’t have a sense of humour. For a young lad living in Leeds I had by far the wrong accent and was homesick for County Antrim, so the niggling remarks merely strengthened my resolve to leave the place as soon as I was old enough. I still have my original vinyl copies of both records which I still love to bits and listen to regularly at home. Of the two, the Bowie album is the better known around the world, but the Planxty one just edges it for me as it connects with me culturally and sets the Celtic blood coursing through the veins at a powerful pace. On a wet morning in the musty rustic cottage in the wilds of Donegal it was the finest music in the world. I wish I’d known back in the spring of 1973 that David Bowie’s great-great-grandmother had been from Tipperary.

Late in the morning, although retaining its straight downwards trajectory, the rain decreased in volume so we took the opportunity to visit Ballymastocker Strand, the so-called second best beach in the world which was only a five-minute drive from our lodgings. A lovely long arc of gorgeous golden sand lapped by the clear blue sea and edged with magnificent sand dunes that were a home for seabirds and rare grasses. It was perfect, but we’d seen better, so I would have described it as the fifth or sixth best beach on the Wild Atlantic Way, which happened to be where the fifty best beaches in the world were located, so there was little point in making a fuss about it. Two things that really struck me at Ballymastocker were the speed at which the tide went out, creating beautiful but temporary magical features in the sand, and the tunnel that ran under the golf course to ensure the safe passage of non-golfers in transit from the road to the sands. A bit of an eyesore, in my opinion, marking the beach down a few notches in my beaches top ten chart.

This might be a good point in the proceedings to announce that the very best beach in the whole wide world is Silver Strand in County Mayo on account of the wild beauty of the nature to be seen there, the mountains that rise majestically behind it, the almost total absence of human beings, the friendliness of the sheep, the dark and eerie history, the folklore and the culture. It had been a highlight of several of my trips to Ireland’s west, but was too far away to be included in the current trip.

The waitress at the Fanad Head Lighthouse café said she’d got sick of hearing me saying thank you in Irish. I explained that they were the only Irish words that I knew that weren’t rude. She taught me the word for goodbye which is slán, pronounced ‘slawn’ and from which the American ‘so long’ is derived. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to help me with my vocabulary or was it just a subtle way of telling me that she wanted me to leave.

Wandering the labyrinth of Fanad’s wee roads that had put the mean into meander, we took an hour and a half to reach the small town of Carrickart which was eighteen kilometres away as the Donegal crow flies. As Fionnuala the Fiat touched down in the Diamond there, I did some Google research and it became apparent that even ancient Irish speakers had abbreviated their words. I wondered if they had done it during their teenage years, just to annoy their parents. Carrickart these days is Carraig Airt in Irish but originally in Irish it was Ceathrú Fhiodhghoirt, meaning ‘Quarterland of the Wood of the Field’. It was easier for us to just call it ‘free roast chicken shop town’ due to a mix up in the Centra mini-supermarket and the kindness and understanding of the checkout lady who worked there.

Downings (Irish: Na Dúnaibh, which local people believed to be ancient words meaning ‘the hill forts’ or ‘the sandy dunes’ but we suspected they were trying to cover up the fact that it meant ‘ugly concrete golf hotel and clubhouse in a Bulgarian brutalist architectural design’). Many, many years before our arrival it had been a major herring fishing port but golfers, including John Wayne and Errol Flynn, had pushed the trawler men out following the opening of a golf course that dominated the town. The name of the golf course was Rosapenna Links, named after a local brand of sausages.

On the edge of the town, close to the old harbour, we found the famous McNutt of Donegal tweed factory and shop where it was possible to buy just about every object imaginable made out of beautifully woven Donegal tweed. We told the shopkeeper lady that we couldn’t buy any item of her wares because our cats at home would destroy it. She replied, ‘Not if you keep it in the box.’ They also sold splendid teapots, and believe me I was tempted, but I’d got used to the leaky one that had become a major source of entertainment on occasions when the weather was too wet and windy for us to set foot outside of the musty rustic cottage.

As we were leaving Downings late in the afternoon, some roadworks had mysteriously suddenly popped up. They hadn’t been there on the inward journey. Surely the mischief of the faeries, we thought, as we sat facing a red light for as many minutes as it would have taken to pour a pint of Guinness. Looking to the left and the right, all we could see was bits of golf course and men shivering in pink jumpers. There was more sign of misery on their faces than there had been at Doagh Famine Village the previous day, and it put a feeling of great pity upon us as we sat there waiting for the green light. Oscar Wilde’s quote ‘Golf is a good walk spoiled’ came to mind and was quickly updated to ‘Golf is a wait at a set of temporary traffic lights spoiled.’

We sped back to the musty rustic cottage for a hot brew and, to cheer ourselves up, we listened to the album Laments and Dirges of the Widows of Drowned Aran Islands Fishermen sung in Irish by Mrs Margaret Dirrane and her young son Seán without musical accompaniment. The free roast chicken from Centra in Carrickart was delicious.

6 September 2025, Saturday

You’d need pairs of both wellies and binoculars to get the most out of Inch Island Wildfowl Reserve and we had neither. But we had become quite adept at finding a good café with strong tea and homemade Irish scones, and we found everything that we could have hoped for at a loughside establishment called Spill the Beans. The teapot was plain but in perfect working order and the scones seemed to moan with pleasure as we spread locally produced farmhouse butter on them. There was not a whiff of a dolphin, of course, but the Fanad Head lone cormorant had followed us down for the day. I’d never been stalked by a cormorant before, but I had been stalked by a stork.

I’d no idea what the word Lisfannon in Lisfannon Strand meant but it lay on the eastern shore of Lough Swilly directly opposite Rathmullan. We were there because it was said to be the best beach in Ireland for finding sea glass which is really just old bits of broken bottles worn smooth by the tides to make them look smooth and attractive. In the past I’d sat in the surf sometimes for hours in the hope of becoming smooth and attractive myself, but the might of the sea had had the opposite effect on me.  We sneered at the pathetic dribbly rain and, each of us armed with a couple of carrier bags for lugging home our trash to treasure, we set off in search of some not-at-all-precious gems. Priyatelkata uses them in her art work and has created beautiful mosaics using our finds from previous trips to Ireland. Two hours after our arrival, with the unusually high tide lapping around our ankles, we realised that we’d been a bit overoptimistic with our predicted carrier bag requirements and that a small envelope would probably have sufficed. A nice piece of wave-worn porcelain teapot turned out to be the jewel in the coat pocket.  But nevertheless, it was a lovely place for getting a bit wet and admiring stormy black skies. The seventh best beach in the Lough Swilly area was the judges’ decision.

Returning to the car park we read one of those tourist information local history panels from which we learnt that the song Amazing Grace had been written by the eighteenth century English slave trader, John Newton. As a man without religion he had in desperation prayed to God to save him while in 1748 his ship was being battered by a violent storm off the Donegal coast. The ship and his life were spared so as soon as he got home he wrote the song as a gesture of thanks and eventually became an Anglican minister and an abolitionist. Rod Stewart brought it into popular culture when had a big hit with it in the 1970s. It was a shame, in my opinion, that it hadn’t been Olivia Newton John who recorded John Newton’s song. The record company would have had to credit it to John Newton - Olivia Newton John on the record label if she had performed on the recording.

From my experience of donkeys, I’d say they usually have morose demeanours, but the two we saw today at Lisfannon seemed reasonably cheerful despite their home patch making false claims about an abundance of sea glass, having a connection with a slave trader, and being only the seventh best beach in the district. The thing about donkeys is that they always seem to be up for having their photographs taken and will look at the camera until the job is done. Other animals tend to look the other way as soon as you ask them to say cheese, and birds just fly away within a split second of a lens cap being removed. But donkeys are always agreeable to a little posed photography. Maybe it’s because they already have long ears so they don’t need to worry about someone making fools of them by using fingers to make rabbit ears behind them. I think if donkeys had fingers of their own, or opposable thumbs, they’d have cameras of their own. They’re lovely creatures and they always look nice even though they might be suffering from clinical depression. If I had a donkey I’d call it Hoatey… Donkey Hoatey! 

Our day’s journey had involved passing through the town of Letterkenny (Irish: Leitir Ceanainn, meaning ‘endless traffic jams and retail parks’). I decided I’d write more about the town when I could think of something nice to say about the place. It wasn’t horrible, like Portsmouth, but so far only its branch of Tesco had been successful in tempting us to get out of the car yet it featured in our comings and goings almost every day as it had become a bit of a holiday day out hub.

In the evening we dined at the fabulous Water’s Edge restaurant in Rathmullan. As we were on the Atlantic coast of Ireland the whole shooting match was, of course, indoors but because we had a table by a huge window and because the tide was so high, it seemed like we were having our tea in the sea. We declined the recommended haddock and chips in case members of the haddock family were looking on. The best way to find sustenance, we agreed, was the Wild Atlantic Way.

Image:

Mr and Mrs Hoatey of Lisfannon. My own photograph.

Photographs:

The Donegal Dally

Part Six:

I’ll let it settle a bit and then top it up for you.