In February of 2010, I woke up in a cottage in the Irish countryside. Snow was falling gently and there were two stray sheep just out the window.
For an undergrad from Philadelphia, it couldn’t get much closer to a fairytale. My then-boyfriend and I were on internships in Dublin, and spent the weekend with his extended family he’d just met. They lived a short drive from Westport, County Mayo, Ireland. Westport is a tidy little town, but like most other cities in Ireland, it takes barely a ten minute drive to find yourself in the middle of nowhere. And I mean like, driving on a one-way farm road and then coming face to face with an oncoming car, then one of you has to slowly reverse thirty yards until you find a spot where one of you can pass the other kind of middle of nowhere.
The view from the McDonnall’s cottage is a pretty perfect view of the local icon, Croagh Patrick, a small but distinctly cone-shaped mountain, aka the Reek.
Our sweet and gracious hosts drove us through the region, around Clew Bay, through Doolough Pass. It’s serene, especially in the stillness of winter. A short drive down the road takes you to a valley where the mountains make you feel so small and insignificant.
I found this feeling in a few of my favorite places during my all-too-brief time abroad. The awesome beauty of Ireland and Scotland is impossible to deny. I have a special place in my heart for these sort of places, in the middle of the wild, the places that are so desolate and beautiful it makes you feel lonely.
It’s a peaceful sort of loneliness, though. The pleasant kind of serenity you find when you have a nice walk by yourself, away from the hustle and bustle of everyday. When you don’t talk, and there’s nothing to listen to except that pure, touchy-feely thing called “nature.” There’s a longing you feel in these places. A primordial longing for our wild roots–an unfamiliar feeling considering how keen I am on commodities like hot showers and comfy bedding.
Me as a college childbaby in Glencoe, Scotland. Taken during the dark ages of my Kodak point-and-shoot camera.
In these incredible isles, it doesn’t take much effort to find yourself lost in a spacious valley that feels almost untouched by civilization. This is the Wild. But often, these places are far from untouched. Often, these majestic highlands are sites of ancient tragedies, like the mass starvation of travelers in Ireland’s Doolough Pass, or the massacre of the MacDonald Clan at Scotland’s Glencoe. You can feel a certain solemnity in these places. The Wild has seen more than any of us. I love a good city, but my ear is always out for the silence of the beautiful, lonely places of the world.
WANDERLY 