NYTimes: A Wild Corner of Ireland, Through the Eyes of Dylan Thomas

We drive up through the steep Glengesh Pass, or Glen of Swans, in smooth, switchback turns. The pass, a short distance from the town of Ardara, in County Donegal, also marks the threshold to the Glencolumbkille Peninsula, a bulge of backcountry that’s rimmed with sandy beaches, sea cliffs and caves that boom in a thrashing tide.

In 1935, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas made his way to this same forgotten corner of Northwest Ireland with his literary editor for an extended summer vacation. They rented a stone cowshed converted a decade before by the American artist Rockwell Kent,
who used it as a place to stay and paint.

For some time, I’ve been dipping in and out of a book idea about the travel writing of the 1930s, when poets, novelists and journalists were using foreign journeys to try and make sense of (or escape) their restless times. I’ve followed W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice to Iceland, and J.B. Priestley up the spine of England. I’m following Thomas here — and, like him, I’m also traveling with a friend, the photographer Michael Turek. We’re lodging in the nearest habitable cottage to Thomas’s former abode —
“the hourless house,” as he called it, and now a ruin.

A Ragged Edgeland

With Ardara behind us, we follow a spur leading off the Wild Atlantic Way — the popular tourist coastal route running the
country’s length — and head for a former fishing hamlet called An Port. As we crest barren moorland, a shadow looms to our left: the rising slopes of Slieve League, the highest marine cliffs in Europe. Evidence of human habitation begins to thin: some peat-cutting here, a standing stone there, islands of pines with roots too shallow to hold in the treacly black earth. Burbling bog and quicksilver puddles shine brightly in the mizzling rain. Now and again our way is blocked by huddling sheep, their fleeces blotched pink and blue with dye.

We press on for another 12 miles; only then does the single-track road run out on this ragged Atlantic edgeland, the ground
diminishing into a kind of continental ellipses of rock stacks poking out of the ocean spume. Thomas described them as “petrified like the old Fates and Destinies of Ireland.” The largest of the six is a basalt tower known as Búd an Diabhal, or the Devil’s Penis, later renamed the Devil’s Stake by the parish priest to protect local Catholic sensibilities.

A friend of mine, Roland Purcell, owns the no-frills cottage where we’re staying. When the family isn’t here, anyone can rent it.
Guests collect the keys and bedsheets from the launderette owner in Ardara. If you don’t want to spend all your time driving for
provisions, you need to bring enough food and drink to keep yourself going for a few days. Cozy evenings depend on your
ability to light a turf stove, while hot baths involve peaty water that runs the color of steeped tea.

We could have opted for more creature comforts. The recently refurbished Tara Hotel is a good choice, its best bedrooms facing
the fishing harbor of Killybegs. About a 40-minute drive from An Port, Killybegs also has plenty of decent seafood restaurants, including Anderson’s Boathouse and the Marina Cafe. Or there’s Roarty’s Bar with rooms for €50 (about $58) in Glencolumbkille, a
long day’s walk from An Port over a treeless bluff. (Thomas stayed at the bar for a night or two, when Roarty’s was called Big Annie’s after the current owner’s great-aunt.)

Ardara is another possibility. But Thomas’s letters put me off. Ardara is “a village you can’t be too far from,” he wrote to a friend.
When I mentioned this to Alan McHugh, the barman at Nancy’s — whose family has owned the pub for seven generations — he said Thomas was a well-known drinker; in Ardara, he’d left a trail of unpaid bar bills.

‘Lonely as Christ’

Thomas’s Donegal sojourn started out happily. His companion taught him how to fish for trout in nearby Glenlough, a rippleless
pool about an hour’s walk from An Port. But after his editor returned to London, the landscape — “on the periphery of the
periphery,” the local author Christy Gillespie told me — felt overwhelming. “I’m ten miles from the nearest human being (with
the exception of the deaf farmer who gives me food), and lonely as Christ,” Thomas complained. With the cowshed a day’s walk from the closest bar at Meenaneary — then called O’Donnell’s, now a gas station — Thomas turned to illegally brewed poteen, or
moonshine whiskey, instead.

He couldn’t sleep. He tried “padlocking out the wild Irish night,” but to no effect. He saw ghosts walking over the hill toward him.
When he shouted into the darkness, echoes of Irish voices — “sad, grey, lost, forgotten, dead and damned forever” — bounced back.

For all of Thomas’s complaints, his Donegal experience was creatively enriching. In this turbulent landscape of ancient stone and “seawhirl, ” Thomas drafted a short story — “Prologue to an Adventure,” published a year later — which describes “the winter night before the West died.” In a dystopian city of ill-lit streets, faces flicker out of the shadows. Violent imagery of poverty and persecution evoke the restlessness of the 1930s, including the rise of fascism in Europe and the effects of the Great Depression.

Ancient Landscapes

We settle into our accommodation. The rain beats hard against the window panes. My phone won’t pick up a signal; the internet isn’t working. Instead we listen to the slow drone of Ocean FM radio, enjoying the melodic lilt of Donegal voices around the smoking fire. We feast on steaming cockles we’d picked up earlier. When the weather lifts, Michael heads to the An Port cliffs to take long-exposure pictures of the starfall outside.

The next day, we get up early. With a coffee in hand, I watch a whiskered seal down by the skerries, in rain that doesn’t fall but floats. The sea swell carries the seal out beyond my sightline, until the drive of the current softens and it swims back in, sometimes rolling onto its back. I’ve been told there are a pair of golden eagles here, too, reintroduced after Ireland’s last wild eagles were killed. As for the “gannets and seals and puffins flying and puffing and playing” that Thomas described, they no longer seem to be here in the same wheeling profusion.

In a thickening Atlantic mist, we look for a dramatic cut in some nearby basalt rocks, searching for the spot where, in 1746, Bonnie Prince Charlie — the leader of a failed rebellion against King George II — was rumored to have hidden, waiting for a French ship to rescue him from the royal manhunt. We visit one of the megalithic tombs that pepper this ancient landscape. With a narrow opening into a stone circle, the 5,000-year-old structure feels strangely womb-like. I wonder if it’s what the Irish would call a “thin” place, where the earthly and spiritual realms draw near. The squelching ground is so saturated with wet, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before my weight will burst through the layer of fibrous thatch holding the surface tension, the peat swallowing me up.

Descending the Sea Cliffs

But it’s the sea cliffs north of the cottage that keep drawing me back — a scene that Rockwell Kent painted, and one that Thomas was also drawn to, when he wasn’t imagining crucifixes in his soup or the devil walking by his side. On wet days, the ocean is a boiling cauldron; when it’s calm, the surface quivers with a lisping breeze.

About an hour’s hike from An Port, we get our first glimpse of Tor Mór, a mesmerizing sea stack with a terrible history. During the famine, some young lads went out to gather gull eggs on the rock face. But one of them was too weak to climb back down to the boat, and perished on the island as storms came in and cut off his would-be rescuers. I think of the body washed up on Claddagh Mór — a storm-raised beach. The shore is a rim of white stones beneath imposing granite cliffs.

Michael and I mull over our options — the beach looks reachable, the water a peacock blue — but my friend Roland is clear: However tempting, an unguided descent even on a cloudless day is extremely dangerous because of the scree and gradient. So I call Iain Miller, a rock climber and adventure guide based nearby, who has made more than 500 first ascents in Donegal, including 60 of the sea stacks.

We meet on St. Swithun’s Day — a day full of foreboding, given the folk belief that if it is raining on St. Swithun’s Day, it will rain solidly for the next 40 days. The scramble down takes us most of the morning. I negotiate the drop by clinging to coarse tufts of heather, and rocks glazed with rain. I want to turn back, but am glad I don’t. The attacks of vertigo, assuaged by Miller’s experience, come with a magnificent reward.

When we reach the water, the skeleton of what we think is a porpoise is curled up on the beach. It looks as if it has only just been cast above the tideline, the remains picked bare. I don’t want to disturb the perfection of the vertebrae, each curvature of bone gently nestled in its adjacent cavity. Instead I take a round white stone I find lying beside the animal’s skull — a creamy ball about the size of a tangerine, and as smooth and round as floured dough — and slip it into my pocket. It’s a stone I will keep on my desk at home, both as a relic picked up on this literary pilgrimage of sorts and as a reminder to return to Donegal in another year.