Boa Hoo Hoo: Northern Ireland, Day 6

The trip is starting to have a theme… a not entirely pleasant one, unfortunately. We’ll be having a lovely time, and then hit a pretty serious bump. We regroup, we get back to it, and eventually all is well again, but so far we haven’t really had a 24-hour stretch where everything was going smoothly. Case in point – ever wonder what would happen if you went driving around to the ass end of everywhere and then blew out a tire? No? Well then, my friend, I must say that you lack imagination, because we managed it in record time. Prior to that, though, we saw some amazing stuff. See what I mean? Up. Down. Crap.

Like I said, it began well enough. Leaving London/Derry we first made our way to Drumskinny Stone Circle, Cairn, and Alignment. First of all, an admission: neither of us recalls hearing the term “alignment” before this trip. It’s easy enough to understand, though – it’s a row of stones lined up as a proto-arrow. In other words, it guides your attention towards something. Most times we’ll be darned if we can figure out what we’re being pointed towards, but there ya go. In any case, Drumskinny is a particularly fine circle, largely still intact and the replaced stones are obvious. Not sure if this has come up before but I get reaaaaally twitchy when it comes to restorations. I think it dates back to our first trip to Pompeii, where I marveled over some fantastic mosaics, only to later discover at the Naples Archaeological Museum that the actual mosaics had been removed to the Museum, with replicas fashioned in their place. No mention was made of this, and for some reason this caused me to blow a gasket. Whatever, we all have our peeves, right? Anyway, Lisa doesn’t share my vehemence but she’s still keenly interested along with me as to which bits are genuinely as they were thousands of years ago and which aren’t. At Drumskinny, according to the signage almost everything is as it was, and you can see the supports that have been placed – look at the photo at the top of this post and you should see a vertical bar on one of the stones. Ta-da!

From Drumskinny we turned towards Boa Island – an island in truth but a short baby bridge from the mainland (which now that I think about it is simply a bigger island. Derp.) and a lovely spot in general. Down the main road twenty minutes or so brought us to a pretty rudimentary road that led to Caldragh Graveyard. The graveyard has been in continuous use… hrm, I guess once you bury a body there it’s in continuous use even if you build a bank on top of it… but in any case, they’ve been burying bodies in this Graveyard for roughly 3000 years, give or take. The most famous stone here is also one of the iconic images of Ireland if you go in for the really old bits: the so-called Janus Stone. No, they don’t actually think it has anything to do with the Roman deity, it’s just that the stone has a face on both sides of it and the nickname stuck. Besides, nobody knows for certain what it’s actually supposed to depict. There are stones from what look like medieval times, all the way up to 2021. Somewhat charmingly, no attempt is made for a faux ancient look; the gravestones are clearly from the periods in which they were created. Lisa and I fancied that, with a fairly stable population of people who probably didn’t migrate a whole lot over the years, there was no reason not to think that the newest interred are descendants of the first interred, to one degree or another.

Leaving Caldragh Graveyard, we both observed that the road really was pretty shitty. Then, we turned on to the more modern “A” road and realized that the thumping and bumping had continued. Hurm. We pull off to the side of the road. Sure enough, flat tire. Now, the next series of events is one of those things where there are all kinds of things that happened, and miscommunications that occurred, all leading to the result that we’re about to explain, but honestly: like a lot of stories, the details just aren’t that interesting, plus who wants to spend a lot of time wallowing in the misery of others? (Yes yes, those people exist, but you don’t post pictures of your feet if you don’t want foot fetishists, and you don’t describe your misery if you don’t want to please jerks who don’t like you.) The long and the short of it is that they equip cars with spare tires anymore, the kit that reinflates and repairs tires failed to do either, and the left hand (rental company) and the right hand (the roadside assistance company) did not know what the other was doing, and thus the flat tire that was observed at around 1 PM was not repaired until about 5:30 PM. Insult to injury, the very nice young man who finally arrived on scene swapped in the new, good tire in literally five minutes. The only part of this story that I want to memorialize for my own memory is that at the second place we came to rest, a mile or so up the road when we discovered the repair kit had failed, a lovely man named John came down the drive to check on us. We chatted a moment and he offered for us to come back to his house for a cup of tea. He was 100% sincere in his offer. It was charming as hell. We demurred but asked if he’d fill our water bottles just in case. He drove back down a few minutes later with his family (they were off to somewhere), when he handed back our bottled and his elderly mother added a fresh bottle of their own. I mean, come on. Anyway, the tire was replaced at last. At this point, our irritation spoiled any notion of continuing on to something interesting, and we simply made for our hotel. It’s a nice place with pretensions of being a great place, so that’s nice, but just like in Derry they seem to have no interest in air conditioning so we’ve resorted to fostering breezes through barely-cracked windows.

Nevertheless, it was an easier room to cool and we slept well enough, letting us regroup in anticipation of a better day tomorrow. (I know, right? It’s almost not worth mentioning anymore just how good I am at this*.)
*It occurs to me that some of you don’t know me well enough to know that this ongoing commentary on the nature of writing teases/cliffhangers is making me cackle more and more with each passing day. I certainly don’t mean any of it. 🙂