The Rough Guide to Ireland - The Rough Guide

If you sail west from Liverpool, if you aim for the Isle Of Man but miss, chances are you will end up in an enchanted land. A land of pubs, of mad drivers, and even madder dancing. A land of rain, mist and sun, but usually rain. And a land that makes England's history look like America's (i.e. very brief). That'll be Ireland, then.

I'll try my best to review the book, but I suspect I'll be reviewing Ireland a bit too. I love the place. For an Englishman, there's something comfortingly familiar, yet still utterly alien about it. I've spent about a month travelling around the Emerald Isle in the last year, atlas in one hand, Rough Guide in the other; and while an atlas is generic, a guidebook can shoot off in all manner of directions.

So, firstly the guidebook's format; I own several Rough Guides, and they are structured in a similar fashion:

1) Introduction. Within this book, this includes an introductory essay on Ireland as a whole, followed by a "where to go" section which briefly touches on what each area has to offer in general. Then there is an illustrated list of "33 Things Not To Miss", which includes places (e.g. The Giant's Causeway), things (e.g. stout!) and activities (e.g. surfing).

2) Basics. This starts with a section on "Getting There", detailing various plane/ferry possibilities, covering access from various corners of the globe. Brief sections on red tape (passports, visas etc), tourist information, insurance and costs follow. Next up is "Getting Around", listing internal transport options, including a list of car rental agencies (I've always used Irish Car Rentals, for what it's worth). Then there is a section on general accommodation (obviously, there is more detailed info later in the book); types of accommodation, rough ideas of costs and advice on booking it (whenever I haven't stayed with friends, I have used Gulliver, the Republic's official agency, who have a vast choice of B&Bs to suit all pockets). Brief sections on communications (public phones, internet access and mobile phone coverage), the media, business opening hours, festivals/events, sports, outdoor activities, crime, general culture and etiquette and travel for the disabled round out the Basics chapter.

3) The Guide itself. This divides Ireland into 16 areas; mostly substantial areas of countryside and towns, although Dublin and Belfast are endowed with chapters of their own. A chapter will open with a list of the area's highlights, then the chapters will be subdivided, based on a county, or perhaps a town, or a natural feature of particular note. Then these subdivisions will contain places of interest, accommodation suggestions, places to eat, historical notes and more.

4) Contexts. This includes essays on Irish history (which is vast, fascinating and occasionally tragic beyond reason), traditional music and a list of relevant books and maps (the Irish Ordnance Survey is in the process of remapping the entire country, so the maps are generally nowhere near as sketchy as once they were).

Finally there is a brief discussion of the Irish language and a glossary.

Of necessity, I cannot be sure that all of the information within the book is accurate and trustworthy! All I can say is that it has never let me down; and in an area that I consider my opinion to be genuinely worth listening to (walking and climbing), the book is brief but accurate, neither over nor underplaying the dangers (and that's rare in a volume not aimed at the specialist mountain market, believe me), which I feel bodes well for everything else in the book. The dining out suggestions seemed well worth paying attention to as well.

Just to show that even self-confessed maths/geography freaks can discover places they'd never heard of from a guidebook, here are a few moments/places I never would have experienced without the guide:

a) The Loughcrew Cairns: up a hill in a corner of County Meath lies a huge group of communal tombs, between 5-6000 years old. Commanding a vast view of the plains of the Midlands, it's like so many places in Ireland, almost tangible in its air of history.

b) The Gallarus Oratory: a 1300 year old "church" in the shape of an upturned boat; just one of the cavalcade of highlights that make up the Dingle Peninsular, a paradise of mountain, sea and culture.

c) Uragh Stone Circle: set in a tremendous mountain bowl on the Beara peninsular in the south-west, it's the sort of place that would have a visitor centre in England. Over here, I was alone with my thoughts and the wind. (It wasn't raining that day).

d) Mitchelstown Cave: I decided to break the drive from Wicklow to Killarney by visiting this "middle of nowhere" attraction. Having discovered (to my slight disappointment) that it WASN'T the Very Very Very Dark Caves from "Father Ted", and having also failed to get into the cave because a power cut had taken out the emergency lighting, one might wonder why I'm mentioning this at all. Well, let's just say my sighting nearby of the juxtaposition of a woman, a buggy, a babe-in-arms, an absence of a nappy or a baby wipe, and a grass verge..... it's a tableau I'm not likely to forget, no matter how frantically I try.

It's a bit of a throwaway line, but fans of the aforementioned "Father Ted" will have a field day; "90% documentary, 10% comedy" as a friend of mine (who does live there!) said. I actually stayed with a landlady called Mrs Doyle; her plea that I should "call her Greta" was entirely understandable; lord knows how many people have hoped her offers of tea would include an exhortation to "go on go on go on go on go on".

Anyway, I hope you will forgive me for concluding with a blog entry I wrote on the experience of driving in Ireland; by concentrating on one thing, I think you get an idea of the whole experience. An experience I highly recommend. (And the book too).

Days Of Thunder
===============

Someone, I think it was Nietzsche, said: "Out of chaos comes order."

Nietzsche had been driving in Ireland. How can there be so much potential mayhem with so little damage, collateral or otherwise?

Ostensibly, driving in Britain and Ireland are similar disciplines. Both drive on the left, similar (but not quite identical) road signs and markings, roughly analogous speed limits (albeit ours imperial, theirs metric). Yet just as if a butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing, that can mean that bloody Mika song goes to number one, our motoring paths have diverged.

The basic mantra of the Irish driver seems to be thus:

"Don't worry. God will save us".

Put it this way; you drive past (for instance) a sign in Kerry, one of those "in the last x number of years there have been y number of people killed on Kerry's roads.... help us stop the carnage" and your immediate reaction is "What? So few??"

Let me illustrate by pointing out the difference between what our road markings mean.

In Britain, a broken white line in the middle of the road denotes the gap between opposing directions of traffic flow. And in Ireland, much the same.

In England, a double white line in the middle of the road means "no overtaking. At all. Unless there's a stationary obstruction". In Ireland, exactly the same marking means "it's probably a bad idea to overtake, especially considering that blind corner up ahead. But don't worry. God will save you. Go for it, flyboy."

The number of times one is confronted with an oncoming car blithely straddling the centre line is hilarious; they move out of the way, sure, (usually), but it's still a wonderful shot of adrenaline. I understand that when the Ring Of Kerry (the road around the Iveragh Peninsular, one of the world's great drives) gets overcrowded in the summer, there is a gentleman's agreement in place that sees all of the multitude of coaches go round it the same way. The frequent narrowness (and impracticality of overtaking) presents you with a lovely dilemma; do you want to die in a convoy of boredom, or would you rather be obliterated by an oncoming 60-seater-holidaymaking-Texan-laden-beas​t of the apocalypse?

Even parking is carefree. They have double yellow lines.... it's just that the natives totally ignore them. To quoth, a conversation between myself and my landlady in Wicklow:

Me: "Can I ask where the offroad parking is?"
Her: "Just leave it on the double yellow at the front"
Me: "Erm.... won't I get into trouble for that?"
Her: "No, don't worry. The Garda don't care about it" (The Garda are two doors down!)

In Donegal, they even park on the inside of roundabouts....

The Irish solution to slowing cars down is laudably well-thought-out too; why waste money on traffic calming measures when allowing the roads to degenerate into a manic patina of potholes is far more effective?

And yet..... I did not sit in a single traffic jam in 15 days. Other road users were lovely and courteous. Hell, even the workmen in the roadworks (yes, Ireland has roadworks with actual people working on them) will wave as you drive by. There's something to be said for it all, I think.... I certainly let it influence me. Maybe it's something in the air, but I managed to drive the wrong way round the one-way system in Tralee (twice), and I also (having got in the wrong lane for a toll barrier) reversed up a motorway within 30 minutes of picking the car up on the first day. Nobody died; it's fine.

But never try to hurry in Ireland. Ireland won't let you hurry. Just enjoy the view, you'll get there in good time, don't worry. Because God will save you.....