Godoy in Ireland. Sligo

I´m learning to read and write and I like to do it on my own. All help is very welcome

Dear Fran,

After Dublin, my friend Godoy was in Sligo and from there he sent me …

 «Thursday, 21^st September 

This is Connolly. I still have a long time to leave Dublin. I have managed with the vending machine: the ticket is in my pocket.

A helpful employee offered to help me. I declined his offer because I already had the ticket.

Mary, do you remember that in the train station in Harry Potter there is a platform (3 ^1/4) where the protagonists enter in their magical world in? I have just seen how an Ulster Bank technician has entered in to the cash machine, he has repaired its ‘innards’ and after fifteen or twenty minutes he has appeared again. Help for what matters.

I get on the train and sit on my seat. On the other side of the aisle there is a woman who remind me to Jessica Fletcher the writer-detective.

A woman—in her sixties— with crutch has managed to get on the train by the skin of her teeth and she needs some time to leave of gasping for breath.

Across the window many football pitches, ravens, rugby pitches, wood pigeons, more football pitches, sheep, more rugby pitches, cows and horses in plots of land perfectly closed.

The ‘detective’ looks at the woman of the crutch over her glasses.

I like trains. I like the train which covers the journey not very fast. This way I have the time enough of going assimilating the landscape.

I have always seen Ireland grey and brown, ‘and I rode by the plains of the sea´s edge, where all is barren and grey’. When I was a teenager and I watched the Ryan´s Daughter film, since then, I had recognized Ireland grey and brown, but this county is intense green.

I continue observing flock of ravens and flock of pigeons  across the window; you know, as the old saying goes: birds the same feather …

Jessica Fletcher and the woman that arrived getting out of breath are chattering in a lively way —I only understand single words—; they are sharing their snacks even.

Madam Fletcher gets off at Mullingar. Will she have any unresolved crime here?

The Mullingar train station is very natty, in shades of yellow. Leaving behind Mullingar, there is a lake which almost grazes the railroad track.

When our detective left the train it was my turn. The woman that got on the train “in extremis”, didn´t spend a second and looking at my eyes she said something. I didn´t understand what she said but that was my opportunity for starting an English class, entertaining, long and free!

Sligeach

It was 12:16 and we should arrive in Sligeach at 14:10. We had a whole life ahead of us; or seven stations to get to our destination.

She told me she go to Sligo and from there someone would drive her to Donegal, her last destination. I told her I was from Spain and I was doing a travelling around visiting some of places which appeared in the poems described by the poet: Dublin, Sligo, Galway with some excursions to Drumcliff and surroundings, a trip to Gort where I hoped to visit Thoor Ballylee and Coole Park as well.

When she asked me what I had seen in Dublin I answered her I had been strolling around; that I had been in Fitzwilliam Square, Merrion Square, Stephen Green —I didn´t tell her that a garda throwed out me and two lads from the First Aid Kiosk— and when I named the National Gallery of Ireland I discovered her field! She spoke me about the poet´s brother, the painter, and we were agreed the important artist he was and we were talking about the importance that the loneliness is for an artist.

The woman from Donegal was talking to me about the Famine in the XIX century and about the emigration. In her own family, several relatives had had to emigrate, thing that reminded me what I had heard about the año del hambre (year of famine) that my parents told us. She blamed the potato crisis and the landowners.

Ben Bulben

By the way, the Famine Memorial in Sligo is layed in a hidden place. This monument should be in a more visible spot; it should remind us a tragic event constantly, or maybe I am wrong and this place is the better so that the traveller bumps into it unexpectedly.

Mary, I don´t want to bore you with these stories, so I continue telling you that the house where I will be guest for three days is ruled by a young very kind called Ciaran (as it is Irish you must say ‘Kioron’, more or less); it is a very well care and clean detached house situated in a little out-of-the-way residential area, this is, possibly, the reason of the price, really cheap, if we compare with the accommodation in the town centre.

Ciaran has showed me the common spaces and he has told me there is other guest and tomorrow will arrive another one. We have complete freedom respect the breakfast but the toilet is shared although not at the same time, I guess.

Maud Gonne

On the Sligeach streets I cross with dark-skinned women of short height —some ones shorter than I do— and ask myself if these women are descendent from that one Cuellar who roved in this neck of the woods when the Armada Invencible.

(Some days after I will find at the City Museum of Galway an old photo and a comment related to this. But let´s not get ahead of ourselves.)

It is 17:01. It is raining cats and dogs. Definitely, Ireland is green —according to my cousin Rafael, in Munich it is rain more in September than in October. It seems to happen in Sligeach too.

After the last rains, the river Garavogue runs violently towards the estuary where it gets wider and it tames itself.

Due to the rain, there have had changes in my programme. Instead of going to Drumcliff and Glencar, I am going to Strandhill.

Strandhill shows a breathtaking views over the Sligo bay and a great opportunity to photograph the Ben Bulben at dusk.

A group of twelve or fourteen surfers play surf.

Ben Bulben from Strandhill

Friday, 22^nd Septembre 

Before taking the bus to Drumcliff I visit an exhibition about our man. The most part of the objects are photos, however there are some letters and original manuscripts as well.

On the bus a romantic song is sounding; that song which was popularized by Matt Monro; Mary, sure it rings you. One person who cannot take his/her eyes off another one. Some drops are trickling down the windshield. It is a short trip.

When I arrived to the Drumcliff cemetery they were already there Vanessa and Jose, a Portuguese —from Porto— couple. They were paying their respect to the poet. We talked a little and I took a pic of them. Then we take the same bus to Sligeach. A pleasant couple.

Vanessa Sofia and Jose

I enter in Hargadon Bros, on O´Connell St. I order a Lissadell Seafood. A drop fall on the corner of the table. Although the sun is shining now it was raining to much.

The Lissadell Seafood Chowder is a vegetable soup with salmon complimented by Hargadon´s Brown Bread & Irish Butter. That way is explained by the menu. It smells a bit odd —my wife wouldn´t eat it— but it has a delicious taste.

The Abbey has historic and cultural values. Its cloister is simple but beautiful and it is the best thing to enjoy while you observe its arches and its figures and ornaments.

Sligo Abbey. Cloister

The Bus Station toilettes are situated in a strategic place in Sligeach. Sligo map is like a ‘diabolo’ and in the exact point where the two halves meet the Bus Station is there; so everywhere you go to, you walk for this spot or near it. There are two urinals and three WC. Have they studied the circumstance that five passenger arrive to the limit? What about six ones?

It is a small station. One can find five platforms, one waiting room not to much big and a tiny clock which almost goes unnoticed.

Saturday, 23^th September 

I am going on my way to Glencar Lake.

Ferns, holly trees, ivy, alder trees …

The drivers wave at me courteously: they reduce the speed and put their right hand index finger up; the more effusive ones put both the index and the medium up. There are some who put his right hand up completely.

Walking and walking I find the Devil´s Chimney, a really chimney which is flinging water vapour and where —according to the panel— “beautiful yew trees grow”.

Glencar Lough

There I knew a couple from Australia. Well, man and woman were born in Sligo, however they emigrated to our antipodes sixteen years ago. They told me they went to Galicia.

Some hundred meters more and I am at the foot of the waterfall. It is a very green place with a plentiful variety of plants. The spot is quiet. Quiet until a bus ‘downloaded’ approximately thirty or forty boys!

A second group of boys has arrived too. No, wait, a third group is downing at the left. This is stuffed full of people. I have almost two hours to wait the light changes to.

I am dripping with sweat. I hope do not to get a cold.

Also pensioners come to Glencar. Glencar Waterfall is a rosary of people today. I ask myself if here we are a crowd what a traffic jam there will have in the Giants Causeway!

Glencar Waterfall

(Do you know the difference between a tourist and a traveller?)

This place has the advantage (and the disadvantage) of that one can drive up to a hundred meters from the cascade.

It is 12:40. The people ‘rosary’ does not stop. This looks like a fair. I will bet you anything that in the Devil´s Chimney there are not so much racket —you have to walk more than one kilometre uphill.)

The couple from Sligeach, that they have already come down from the Chimney, greet me and they offer to give a lift to me on the way back. I have told them —politely— that walking I can take more some photos and I have given thank them.

I have my back dripping and I believe I have a blister in my small toe of my right foot.

When I arrived to Sligeach, despite the black clouds, I didn´t become intimidate to continue to Rosses Point. I wanted to take some pics from this side of the bay and of its woman ‘waiting on shore’. Yet I got caught in a downpour when I left the microbus; I didn´t flinch at the weather and took three or four images.

Waiting on Shore

The same microbus takes me back to the Bus Station. The driver: ‘let´s me remind you that it´s Ireland and it´s always raining in Ireland’.

‘Home away from home’.  Mara Guest House.

Because I am soaked to the skin I go straight to have a hot shower. »

Y. a.

Mary