The Celtic tiger is still burning bright, and he's building himself some fine new lairs. Galway City in the far west of Ireland is now ringed with large, multi-bedroomed, satellite-dished and balconied houses, which have come to be known as "McMansions" - catalogue-bought grandeur. New roads and bypasses are also being built. The poetic west of J. M. Synge, the Technicolor west of The Quiet Man and even the satiric west of Father Ted is getting that bit more elusive as the euros wash over the peat bogs.
The McMansions are grouped tight together like the pristine urbanizacions that litter southern Spain. But eventually you break free and head down the N59. The ground gets peatier, the hillsides steeper, the prospect less promising for developers and more exciting for weekend escapers.
The travel writer H. V. Morton said this was "the most interesting road in Europe" after a visit in the 1930s. There's a spot where the "True West" begins over the brow of a hill, and the Twelve Bens mountains materialise and the landscape gets a lot wilder. On your left is a sign to The Quiet Man bridge.
The edge of Europe I chose was at Renvyle, a peninsular village chipped out of the Atlantic coastal rocks. Perched at the far end of this village is Renvyle House. It's a low, gabled, pleasant 1930s building sitting between a small lake and the Atlantic. There are tropical gardens (courtesy of the Gulf Stream), and a sweet, slightly mad nine-hole golf course. The house seems as harmless as a Betjeman couplet.
In fact, Renvyle has a history as complex and fractious as Ireland itself, one tangled up with the literary and political roots of the independence movement. For decades, it was the home of the poet, surgeon and statesman Oliver St John Gogarty. Gogarty played host to the guiding souls of the "new" Ireland. One was William Butler Yeats. While he didn't leave anything as distinguished as Wild Swans at Coole in the visitors' book, Yeats, a dedicated spiritualist, did have a busy time communing with the resident ghosts. He left a schoolmasterly list of instructions for one apparition, including the commands that "you must cease to moan about the chimneys" and "you must name yourself to me".
The ghost was later identified as a 14-year-old suicide from the Blake clan, who occupied the land until the late 19th century. The spooky old house was burned down by the IRA in 1923 during the civil war. Gogarty, who shifted his medical practice to the safety of London, was heartbroken, but his wife extracted enough compensation from the new government to rebuild Renvyle in its current form.
The rebuilding is still going on in one form or another, as the slightly youth-hostelish rooms are replaced with more sophisticated dwellings. I liked the neutral cosiness of my room - too may design statements would detract from the wonderful view. As for the view, in the words of Gogarty, "It as if, in the faery land of Connemara at the extreme end of Europe, the incongruous flow together at last, and the sweet and the bitter blended. Behind me, islands and mountainous mainland share in a final reconciliation, at this, the world's end".
It was pretty hard to shut Gogarty up once he got going on this or most other subjects. He confessed he had no great love of food as it distracted him from his two favourite pastimes, drinking and talking.
Fortunately, the current owner gives the taste buds more of a look-in. Chef Tim O'Sullivan produces a superbly reliable menu. In so many country places, local ingredients are obscured by all sorts of competing foreign nuances. Here, the fish and the local lamb get to express themselves as purely as the Connemara air.
That air alone is a good reason for heading there. I read a report some years ago saying that scientists believe it is the cleanest air in the northern hemisphere. As Gogarty noted, "the next parish is New York" and there's an awful lot of sea in between.
Unfortunately, clean air brings out in me the perverse desire to smoke a dirty big cigar, which of course you can't do in Ireland any more, not inside at least. It being pretty chilly outside, Renvyle's smokers gathered in the porch. A Galway company was having a fancy dress party that night, so I enjoyed my Partagas with a seven-foot-tall member of the Supremes called Mike. Well, at least he scared the ghosts away.
