Ancestral home

Taking a pause from my jaunt to the west of Ireland to blog from a lovely little cafe in Galway city. This is either a brave new world web 3.0 isn't the digital age just grand kind of thing, or very, very sad.

Dr K and I were in Sligo town, the Land of My Fathers and Mothers. A lot of it is very inspiring, all rolling hills punctuated by the odd sweep of a cliff face. We visited Yeats' grave in the dramatic little chapel in Drumcliffe on a misty, wind swept day with flocks of swifts coming out of the steeple, swirling around our heads. And later traditional music in small, dark pubs of an evening. All very Irish Tourist Board approved.

The big disappointment is that apart from the scenery and the town's geared up for tourism, there is a brutal ugliness to the architecture to the west of Ireland. The landscape is scarred by new build McMansions and property developments, all built in the 10-15 years of the economic boom. I understand people have to live somewhere. But why, if you had a wad of cash to spend on a new home (and a lot of these are second homes from Dublin folk), would you pick an area of astonishing natural beauty, and build a home that could be indistinguishable from those in the soulless suburban hellholes of Essex or Bakersfield, CA?

So we've tried to avoid those places, going off the beaten track as much as possible. Dr K is a new driver, not yet passed his driver's test (you can drive in Ireland with a learners if someone else with a license is in the car). He, like many new drivers, follows the road rules to a T. Yesterday, we turned the corner of a back road and found a cow in front of us, blithely chewing its cud. Dr K slowed, applied the handbrake to see if it would move. It was a sort of Mexican stand-off, our car and the cow on an empty stretch of road. When the cow didn't move, he decided to overtake, signalling as he did so. Just so the cow should know.