The Renard Point ferry runs all year, which I find faintly remarkable. January, February, the depths of it – a small flat boat going back and forth across a narrow channel as if weather is irrelevant. I drove down from Stradbally on a Tuesday morning, left before nine while the light was still deciding itself, and had Renard Point nearly to myself.
The crossing takes five minutes. Maybe less. You pull onto the slipway, a man waves you forward, and before you’ve worked out whether to stay in the car or get out, you’re on the other side. Knightstown in January: closed tea rooms, a couple of houses with smoke coming from chimneys, a cat on a wall. The cat did not look cold. I envied it briefly and drove on.
I’d wanted to see the slate quarry. I’d read about it before and then somehow never gone, across all the years of living forty minutes away, which is a particular kind of failure common to anyone who lives near somewhere interesting. The quarry is signposted from the road and the drive up to it winds along the coast in a way that, in summer, I imagine is crowded. On a Tuesday in early January it was empty. The grass along the verge had that flat, pressed quality it gets in the cold – not frost exactly, but not quite right either. A thin pale light coming off the water.
The quarry itself is quiet now, obviously. There’s a viewing area. The slate face goes back into the hillside in tiers, wet and dark grey, and when you stand there the scale of it takes a moment to settle. This is where they cut the slate for the Paris Opéra House, which I had known and then forgotten and remembered again from the information board. There’s something about that – Kerry slate in Paris, in a building like that – that I couldn’t quite hold in my head while I was standing in front of the raw grey rock in January. The place that made the thing is always harder to imagine than the thing itself.
I stood there for a while. My hands got cold. There was no one else.
The loop road around the island takes the better part of an hour if you stop, which I did, several times, for no better reason than that the light kept doing something worth looking at. The south side of the island is softer somehow, more sheltered, and then you come around towards Bray Head and everything changes. The road gets narrower. The drop on one side gets serious. I parked at the small car park near the head and walked out on the path for twenty minutes or so, which was enough – the wind off the Atlantic on a January day is not something you stay in voluntarily unless you’re properly dressed for it, and I was only partially dressed for it.
Bray Head looks out towards the Skelligs. On a clear day, which this was – cold and hard-edged, the sky a pale washed blue – you can see them sitting out there in the water, dark and improbable. I’ve seen them before from various points on the Iveragh Peninsula and from a boat once, years ago with Donal, but they don’t stop being strange. They look like a mistake, somehow. Like someone miscalculated.
The wind was fierce by then and I was glad I hadn’t gone further on the path. I ate a sandwich in the car – cheese and a bit of leftover stew from Sunday, which is not a conventional sandwich but was welcome – and looked out at the Skelligs until my tea from the flask was gone.
Knightstown on the way back was slightly more animated than the morning, in that there was a second cat, and a man in a high-vis jacket doing something to a wall. I didn’t stop. The ferry came within a few minutes of my pulling up to the slipway, which felt like good timing, and then I was back on the mainland with Valentia sitting behind me in the water and the drive back north still ahead.
I don’t know what I expected from a January trip out there. Something quieter than summer, obviously. What I got was quieter than I’d managed to imagine, which is its own thing. The quarry and the wind and the Skelligs in the distance and no one asking me anything.