1974

 June 29th 1974

Cape Clear Island, County Cork, Ireland

"There is a castle on the rocky promontory of an island which lies at the very edge of Europe. Years of gales and human neglect have caused its walls to crumble, so that instead of towering nobly above its mother rock it has, like a chameleon, taken on an appearance which does not clash with the cliff faces and the rocky islets that surround it.

Ah, but despite the decline, this ancient fortress has not yet revealed the rich history which the surrounding geology jealously watched being formed. Still, still midst the coastal rock plants, standing there ever so still you can sense worlds that have gone, a pirate called O'Driscoll, on those eroding stairs of stone, his footsteps padding, a tankard of stolen Spanish wine in his right fist. He stops on the parapet., hacking his throat clear. He looks out through the dark night to the ocean and his eyes stumble upon the distant lights of two of his wooden ships returning from the Americas.

On that very same horizon, two centuries later it is the blue and white spinnaker of a French yacht which reveals itself to the island. 

But what if that, that man of the sea with lice in his scalp and food detritus in his ragged beard could see his proud castle as it is today. Perhaps standing with me in the soft clifftop grasses, his shell of hardness and vulgarity might fracture and at last words would rise up from his buried heart, "I didn't know. I didn't know".

And we would walk along the clifftop, watching mewling seabirds glide to their ledges and he would stare at it all, leaning over the edge, seeking his reflection in the waves below... and having failed to find it renounce his days of plunder and piracy, finally seeing like me  a world of waiting and wondering - not rushing to fulfil a fool's dreams."

⦿

That long ago summer I was twenty years old, exploring Ireland on my 
own with a rucksack on my back and a few pounds in my pocket. I used
 a little notebook as my journal and rediscovered it earlier this week. 

The castle in question was Dun an Oir or Fort of Gold but known 

locally as O'Driscoll's Castle.