My mother’s place is wild
Just blanket bog
My father’s people
Knew a greener place
For them the drumlins of Clew Bay
The little hills beside the sea
And Westport Newport
Never far away
The great divide
The hills of Nephin Beg
And the road that runs
Round Claggan mountainside
To the south a micro climate
Mulranny’s shingle shore
To the north the bogs of Erris
That claimed my heart astor
Two different worlds
Sitting side by side
One so green and beautiful
The other one so wild
Gentle waters in Clew Bay
Tamed as they roll in
And fierce Atlantic rollers
At Erris Head the din
Brian Fahy
25 February 2023
+ We went to Erris and to my mammy’s place every summer. It is wild. Then one summer when I was about thirteen we drove down from Bangor and through Mulranny and along to Newport. From there, using only his memory, my father took us along back roads in search of his own father’s home that he had visited and stayed in when a boy of fourteen. Unerringly he found it – Slinaunrue – and there we met my grandfather’s sister, Kate, and her son Paddy Nevin.
What struck me most on this visit was how different the landscape was. Erris is all bog land, moor and mountain. Here in my father’s country, the fields were green, the land little hilly drumlins that in fact continue out into Clew Bay as many islands. The places are so different in every way, and yet only thirty miles apart, and both are beautiful, one gentle the other rugged.
The road back to Erris from Newport takes you along the northern shore of Clew Bay as far as Mulranny. Mulranny became a favourite holiday spot for me when Maggie was alive. We loved to be on the beach there. After Mulranny the road divides. The main branch goes on to Achill Island, which is an adventure in itself, but a right fork takes you under the old railway bridge and suddenly you are in another world.
Scraggy sheep welcome you to drive along a windy road under the steep side of Claggan Mountain until the vista opens out and before you lie the wilds of Erris.
My mother’s people and my father’s father came from very near one another, and yet they were such contrasting places. I feel blessed to be connected to both the places and the people of my ancestry.
B.F.
Erris Poetry 