Westward Ho

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Westward ho!
Sunday 25th June
6.30pm and I'm camped on a patch of grass next to a pub car park, on Old Head of Kinsale, 20 miles south of Cork. Today I went to Fota Wildlife Park, and saw the baby Sumatran Tiger out in public today for the first time. He was suckling; his head hardly distinguishable from his mother’s belly, until she pushed his head away, and he scrambled up to her face to be licked and nuzzled.
At the beginning of the Wild Atlantic Way, after Kinsale I met a van like mine, same colour, year, design. The driver said it was the only year of that particular design. They were a couple with a white Scottie dog type terrier. My alter ego. They were Irish, and the first VW I've seen here.

The week I spent in Waterford was quite different from touring. I saw the swallows fledge, learned about silage and haymaking, and the working hours of those who work on the land.

In the car rally, a Rolls Royce owner said my van would be worth more than his Rolls, which would sell for about £10K. I'm not sure whether to feel pleased or nervous that I'm driving around in a gold mine.

I eat at the pub, the Speckled Door, up on the Old Head of Kinsale, then have an early night listening to an audio book, cosy in bed.

The next morning I try to visit the signal station museum on the headland, but it hasn't opened by 9.30 so I give up. I look round the Lusitania memorial garden there, opened in 2015, 100 years after the sinking of the Lusitania. Like the Titanic, anywhere that has a connection with these famous ships, no matter how tenuous, there will be a plaque, or museum or board, commemorating the event.
I go on to Clonakilty still festooned with bunting from the carnival there last week, and have some breakfast, Bantry for lunch and arrive at Ballylickey on Bantry Bay to the house of Greenwich Yacht Club friends Hal and Kyria. After a catch up they take me to see their new house overlooking Dunmanus Bay. Unfortunately the heatwave is over and the weather has returned to its normal Irish condition and it is raining so we can't actually see the view which is why they bought the house.
We go to the Tin Pub, a small shack of corrugated iron, which inside looks like a normal Irish pub, then up into the Shehy Mountains to Gougane Barra Lake where the hotel serves an upmarket menu to appreciative tourists or discerning locals.
The next morning Hal, Kyria and I drive to Baltimore, down on the south West corner of a finger of land below Skibbereen. It's more like a Cornish village them an Irish one; steep, and wrapped round a harbour, with craft gift shops, pirate models and a pub that looks English. This small fishing village was sacked by Moroccan pirates in 1631, and the inhabitants taken away for slavery. This may explain the pirates dotted round the village.
The pub serves a very good crab sandwich, then I set off eastwards again.

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