IN ‘Postscript’, the final poem from Seamus Heaney’s 1996 collection The Spirit Level, the Nobel Laureate invites us to: “Some time make the time to drive out west / into County Clare”. It’s a petition from Heaney to see Ireland as a whole. An entreaty to submit ourselves to the unknown, always running adjacent to the familiar.
In a 2009 interview with fellow poet and friend Dennis O’Driscoll, Heaney revealed that the drive referred to the route from his home in Sandymount, Co. Dublin, to Lady Gregory’s summer house in the west of Ireland.
“Now and again a poem comes like that,” he said. “Like a ball kicked in from nowhere. In this case… I had the quick sidelong glimpse of something flying past; before I knew where I was, I went after it.”
Though my wife and I decided to take the poet’s invite at his word, the journey we ended up embarking on was the slightly more arduous route from Belfast to Ennis. Since I’m a thirty five year-old manchild who has never learned to drive, the unenviable task of putting pedal to metal ultimately fell to my wife. For the next five hours, she bore my impractical musings on the landscape with characteristic good humour.
“It’s easy to forget that Ireland’s roads are more than just a backwash of arena-sized service stations, toll booths and fast lanes packed with careening articulated lorries,” I told her. “Once you come out of the North and get beyond the cities, the environment is as changeable as the people who inhabit it.”
“Mm-hm,” she said, indicating to take us onto the motorway at the Sprucefield retail park near Lisburn.
The first thing I noticed were the place names. Blackskull. Hillsborough. Names which bore the remnants of landed English domination and which gestured toward the colonial violence that produced and allowed them to thrive.
At Newry, the weather changed. The blues and greens of the spring-lush fields around the Belfast commuter belt suddenly gave way to browns and greys, as the black hills of the Gullion Ring rose up on either side of the dual carriageway like a solemn guard of honour.
The rain intensified the further we got beyond the first toll at Drogheda. For most of our journey toward Dublin, the water was so thick against the windscreen that we could barely distinguish the countryside beyond it.
The McAleese Bridge over the Boyne was so distorted it might as well have been a giant wishbone. The N50 was so tailed back with traffic that most of our view for the best part of an hour and a half consisted of nothing but giant warehouses, factories, industrial units and grey-white apartment blocks.
It wasn’t until we got beyond Maynooth in Co. Kildare that things started to open out. By then the spring sun was just a pale shimmer on the western horizon, and it was here that we found the views we’d been seeking so longingly for the first time.
“This sunset is beautiful!” My wife said, allowing herself a moment of lapsed concentration as the golden light spilled over bogland and heath, wind-bent hawthorn trees and the occasional body of black water.
Precarious as it felt at times, this version of a quiet rural Ireland at dusk could’ve featured on a Tourist Board brochure. We zigzagged through Offaly and Co. Westmeath, skirted the border with Laois and emerged on the northwestern flank of Tipperary before suddenly finding ourselves in Co. Galway.
This last couple of hours of our drive seemed to accelerate dramatically, and there was a feeling that after the arduousness of the journey’s first half, time was moving differently the further we came out west.
When we finally arrived in Ennis - Co. Clare's capital - it was dark. Both of us were ready for a long shower and a lie down. We were both glad we’d done it, if only to say that we had, and might even recommend it if it meant never having to do it again.
See More: Clare, Ennis, N50, Seamus Heaney
