Doolin in February has about forty people in it, if you’re generous. I drove up on a Thursday – the Yaris making that noise under the dashboard that I’ve been ignoring since spring, a little louder on the long stretches – and by the time I reached the village in the late afternoon the light was already low and flat and the street was empty. One van outside the small shop. A heron on the wall near the river, standing very still, which seemed appropriate.
I’d booked a room in a guesthouse at the edge of the village. The owner was a quiet woman who showed me upstairs and said there was tea and bread in the kitchen and to help myself, and she meant it, which I appreciated more than I said.
The Cliffs of Moher the next morning were, as I had half expected, fog. Not a dramatic rolling fog, not even a particularly interesting fog – just a thick grey absence where the view was supposed to be. I walked as far along the path as felt sensible and then stood there for a few minutes looking at nothing, or looking at the idea of what was behind it, which comes to the same thing. A couple from somewhere central European – German, I think, or Austrian – stood nearby with a shared expression of stoic disappointment. We didn’t speak. We all stood there a while longer and then went back the way we came.
But here is the thing about Doolin in February: the session.
Friday night in the pub at the end of the village, a group of maybe eight musicians set up in the corner and played for two hours without much ceremony. No announcement. No introduction. They just started. An older man on fiddle, a woman on concertina, two younger lads on guitar and bodhrán who deferred to the others and seemed glad to be there. The pub had perhaps twenty people in it. Nobody was performing for anyone. The music was for itself, and you were welcome to sit near it if you liked.
I had two glasses of Guinness and stayed until it finished. Walked back to the guesthouse in the cold, the sound still in my head a little.
That was the whole of Doolin, really. The fog, the empty street, the heron, the session. I drove home on Saturday through the Burren – grey stone, no leaves, the land looking stripped back and patient – and then down through Clare and into Limerick and back west on the N21, which took the better part of the day. The Yaris noise persisted.
I don’t know what I expected to find up there. Something to do with winter, maybe, or with being somewhere that wasn’t here. The cliffs were invisible. The village was quiet. I’m glad I went.