Life on a remote Danish island: It is the same as west Cork in many ways

It is winter now; we had frost again last night here on Bornholm, a Danish island in the middle of the Baltic Sea.

Though I am Irish I feel quite at home here. The island is the same as west Cork in many ways: granite cliffs, fishing industry, farming, arty with tourism. My children’s grandad was born and raised on the island, so just like in west Cork, we are related to half the country.

My journey to eventually end up here began with a simple conversation with a friend in the late 1980s. I lived in London after graduating from University College Dublin with a mechanical engineering degree. She was an economist, coolly pragmatic, and one afternoon over coffee she said, “You should go abroad for a while. Get some experience.”

So I did what she suggested. I applied for jobs in The Hague and Copenhagen. The very morning I began work at a Maltese travel agency in Pimlico, the letter arrived. I came home for lunch and found it on the mat – a plain envelope, nothing to distinguish it from a bill or a bank statement. A Dear John letter, I thought. But it wasn’t.

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The rocky Baltic Sea coast of Svaneke on Bornholm island, Denmark. Photograph: Cortuum/Getty/Istock

Several weeks later, on September 5th, 1988, a clear, bright morning, I stepped on to the Tube for Heathrow with everything I owned in a rucksack. My plan was simple, or seemed so then: live and work in Copenhagen, then move on to bigger and better things.

But time has a way of slipping quietly away. One day I woke up and 10 years of my life had gone by.

When a gynaecologist told me one of my ovaries had ceased to function, that simple, clinical statement cracked something open in me. I left my job in STEM and enrolled in an MBA programme in Barcelona.

Near the end of it, I began having strange dreams – vivid, almost hallucinatory – and mentioned them to a classmate one afternoon. “I had dreams like that too,” she said, “when I was pregnant.” And so it was.

Before you could say Jack Robinson, I had become what I never expected to be: an overqualified stay-at-home mother with three sons.

I raised them in Copenhagen and I later ran a company in Borneo and the Malaysian Peninsula for four years until 2015. But I missed my little family terribly while I was travelling – two weeks here, three weeks there; that’s the part I regret. So I returned to Copenhagen.

During the pandemic, a visit to an old friend on the island cemented my eventual journey here. I had worked the first Covid-19 summer on the docks in Copenhagen and my ship had, quite literally, sailed. So being between jobs, I took the train through Sweden and the ferry to Bornholm.

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I was quite desperate to get away from Copenhagen and its teenagers coughing all over the metro. My friend suggested that I call a few numbers and I got a temporary job at a nursing home nearby.

That first winter was cold and dry. I had a one-to-one job looking after a lady with dementia who loved walking. Soon I could walk 15km with minimal effort.

I walked over the crispy snow on Galløkke beach, felt the southwesterly wind blowing around Hammershus and I walked my beloved Blykobbe stretch north towards Hasle. I rounded the Kaolin lakes many times in the years that followed. I was lucky enough to live in Svaneke, once voted the prettiest town in all of Denmark.

I like the older people and sometimes, they like me back. I love their stories and their kindness. But more than anything, I like to make them laugh and bring life’s absurdity into relief – in both senses of the word. And now I am retraining as a nurse’s aide, a vocational course far from the academia to which I am used.

A swim in the Baltic: Cara O'Driscoll at Svaneke Harbour in Bornholm, Denmark

When I was a child in Cork I longed to be indoors, huddled over the fire with a book. Now I can’t get enough of the outdoors and the crisp cold Scandinavian air that sparkles its power into my lungs and all through my being.

It’s almost Christmas now and the frost still hasn’t returned. The damp and unseasonably warm weather is more reminiscent of west Cork than the Scandinavia to which I arrived in September of 1988.

The sun hangs low over Rønne, the Swedish-donated wooden houses bask in the orange light of the golden hour, the creepy-crawlies thrive in the still-growing rough grass and we wait, we wait for winter to blow in from the Russian steppes.

Cara O’Driscoll left Ireland for London in 1987, and moved to Copenhagen for a year. She now lives in Bornholm, an island three hours from the Danish capital.

This article is part of a series following Irish people living abroad in remote areas or countries with small Irish-born populations. Would you like to share your experience with Irish Times Abroad? You can use the form or email abroad@irishtimes.com