'The Atlantic was an oily, glassy calm; the sky clear in many parts'

On a glorious day in a seafront car park, a biker brotherhood revved up for a delightful spin through Connemara

THE DAYS when Connemara is bathed in warm sun are rare and to be treasured. For all the thousands of days that drown in rain and end in exasperated despair, yesterday was a day to remember and savour.

Salthill was doing what Salthill likes to do – selling ice-cream, offering visitors the opportunity to amble along the seafront without getting blown off their feet, and giving the beach over to bathers, paddlers and sun worshippers.

The Wild Atlantic Way, being developed by Fáilte Ireland, is at its most advanced stage in Connemara. A pilot project by the Paul Hogarth Company of landscape architects and urban designers, which has been given the go-ahead (and funding) by the Government, envisages the “way” breaking into three distinct routes through the area.

There will be a lake drive around Corrib and a mountain drive through the centre and off into the Twelve Pins in the Connemara National Park and the Maumturk Mountains in Joyce’s Country. And there will be the coastal drive from Galway all the way around to Clifden.

The way will have its own distinctive signage, and each of the sections offered in Connemara will, like sections everywhere along the way from Donegal to Cork, have lay-bys where the stories of each locality are told. There will be loops and spurs off the main way.

Connemara has many stories to tell. Ours began yesterday in the seafront car park in Salthill with my biker companion Tony Sullivan, David Gill – a friend from Dublin who joined us for the day – and me, waiting for the Dutch bikers who missed their 10.30 rendezvous deadline. But they arrived eventually, creating something of a stir. Enthusiasts and the simply curious stared at the bikes, all BMWs.

A black Harley Davidson glided into the car park, making that distinctive deep-throated putt-putt exhaust noise that they do. It stopped to examine the assembled BMWs.

“When are yous going to get a real bike,” the rider shouted over to us. The rider, it transpired, was 76-year-old Paddy Meaney, the self-proclaimed “oldest biker in town”, a man of impish stature but with a big sense of humour sitting astride his Harley 838R.

We left Paddy in our wake.

The view south across Galway Bay as we drove west through Barna was breathtaking. Black Head was crystal clear; bear-headed Slieve Elva – the limestone mountain that defines the Burren – lay there brooding, peering out to sea, out to her geological children, Inishmore, Inishmaan and Inisheer.

The Atlantic was an oily, glassy calm; the sky clear in many parts, save for some Paul Henry clouds north over the Maumturks.

Connemara’s landscape of endless stone walls, tiny fields, – boney, rocky and poor quality – lay before us at every turn. The bog lakes, dark but sometimes China blue in the sun, bespeak a lonely beauty that captivates and has a restorative quality.

We traversed the great blanket bog over which much of the R336 passes. Wild flowers were in abundance – yellow flag wild iris was in bloom and the banks of the narrow roads around Carna and Glinsk were laden with buttercups and tall, wild daisy.

A quick pit stop for lunch in O’Dowds of Roundstone (lots of chowder) and it was off again past Dog’s Bay, possibly one of the prettiest beaches in the world, and on to the Alcock and Brown memorial on Errislannan peninsula, just south of Clifden.

Extraordinary to think that it was on Derrygimla Bog that the two Britons – John Alcock (27) from Manchester and Arthur Brown (33) from Glasgow – landed in their flimsy (by today’s standards) first World War Vickers Vimy propeller aircraft in June 1919, having completed the first transatlantic flight, a feat that tamed the ocean in many respects.

Never again would it be the barrier it had been until then.

Nearby, of course, was the huge navigational landmark of Marconi’s transatlantic wireless station, opened in 1907 when 10,000 words were sent to north America, and employing more than 400 people at its peak.

It was destroyed during the Civil War, and all that remains today are the foundations and outline of some of the buildings and evidence of where his great transmitting masts once stood.

It is a huge story just waiting to be told in the right way – with imagination and some theatricality. It would surely be one of the most compelling attractions on the Wild Atlantic Way and forms a yet-to-be-funded part of the Hogarth project for Connemara.

There is no lack of attractions in the area, however. Clifden welcomes all-comers. As do the wonderfully restored gardens at Kylemore Abbey, a little further on. And on days like yesterday, you sometimes think there’s no end to what Ireland has to offer the traveller who pauses to look, listen and chat.

Tomorrow: Louisburgh via Doolough, and maybe a scamper up Croagh Patrick