Coast (2005) s03e06 Episode Script
Galway To Baltimore
Cead mile failte 100,000 welcomes to Ireland's warm, wet, west coast.
From here in Galway, me and the team will be heading south along some breathtaking coastline all the way to Baltimore.
For thousands of years, this entire coast has been gnawed and mauled by the Atlantic, but this relentless pneumatic drilling by gales, wind, waves and rain from the west, has helped carve a coastline of truly majestic beauty.
On our journey, we'll be finding out why it rains here for 200 days every year, and why we should all be truly thankful it does.
Whoo! Fantastic! Marine biologist Miranda Krestovnikoff will be eavesdropping on dolphin chit-chat in the Shannon Estuary DOLPHIN CLICKS .
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and she'll be seeking out a marine organism that we can eat, that helps us breathe, and, apparently, can make us look beautiful.
Anthropologist Alice Roberts visits a remote island once at the sacred heart of Europe.
On Skellig Michael, this is just the beginning of the stairway to heaven.
And I'll be finding out how frail boats like these inspired one of the greatest journeys in history.
I'm going to take this up, this is great! These are just some of the stories of Ireland's west coast.
The route we've planned will take us 200 miles around Galway Bay, along the coast of County Clare, County Kerry and Cork to Baltimore and beyond.
Throughout our journey, there's nothing to the west for over 2,000 miles but the mighty Atlantic.
But we start our journey here in Galway, where I hope to find the first clues to a sequence of stories that sets this apart as being a coast between two worlds.
For centuries, Galway was an important link in a chain of commercial ports that ran from Iceland down to Spain.
But sometimes, things are washed ashore here that have come from far further afield.
What do you make of these? They look like props for the latest Hollywood remake of Jack and the Beanstalk or something.
And in fact, these ARE beans, and for centuries they've puzzled the people who found them washed up on our shores, not just here in Ireland but all along the Atlantic seaboard, and these are one of the clues that led to THE most successful accidental discovery in history - America.
In 1477, a young Genoese sailor landed here in Galway.
He already knew of the strange beans, even exotic trees that were washed ashore after westerly gales and had started to suspect that out there, to the west, there must be a great continent.
And that continent had to be Asia.
But what he himself observed here in Galway turned suspicion into conviction and prompted one of the greatest voyages of discovery in history.
That early visitor to Galway was none other than Christopher Columbus.
I've met up with historian Nicholas Canny to find out more.
What was it about Galway that inspired Columbus on his journey of discovery? Well, during the course of his diary, Columbus makes reference to a series of incidents, which convinced him that he could get access to Asia by sailing westwards into the Atlantic.
The most compelling of all was, he said when he was in Galway in Ireland that he saw the bodies of two people, a man and a woman with oriental appearance being brought ashore on a piece of wood and this satisfied him that the distance to Asia must be quite short if bodies could be carried across in that fashion.
He surely could be forgiven for thinking that maybe just beyond the visible horizon was their point of departure.
That is correct.
Of course, Columbus didn't find Asia by sailing west, he found a completely different continent.
So his celebrated discovery of America was, in reality, a comedy of errors.
You can imagine it, can't you? "Very sorry, folks.
I haven't found a westerly route to China after all.
"I seem to have discovered some other vast lump of land instead.
" It's ironic, isn't it? By the time Columbus stumbled on the continent, it was inhabited by about 7m people.
But until he, a European, discovered it, it didn't really exist.
But the really neat trick that Columbus pulled off wasn't getting to America by sailing west, it was getting back, and knowing how.
Although Ireland and the UK lie broadly at the same latitude as Warsaw, Moscow, Southern Alaska and Newfoundland, our winters are nothing like as cold as theirs thanks to a huge body of water that moves rapidly from west to east across the Atlantic - the Gulf Stream.
Columbus himself, describing the power of the Stream, said, "It moved like the skies.
" Warmed by the Caribbean, the Gulf Stream divides just north of the Gulf of Mexico and one section, the North Atlantic Drift, as it's called, makes a beeline for Europe.
Offshore, the prevailing south-westerly winds blow over it, hijacking its warmth and bringing it to land, an equivalent of a million power stations' worth of heat that warms our climate by between five and eight degrees.
Cold winds from the Arctic can intercept these Westerlies, though, and depressions form, bringing rain.
A lot of rain.
But without this rain, there would be no "Emerald Isle", there would be no fertile "green and pleasant land.
" It's also the Gulf Stream that explains how those huge beans make the astonishing journey to our shores all the way from Costa Rica.
As we cross south over Galway Bay, an altogether starker coastline looms into view.
The Burren.
This vast limestone landscape spilling down to the sea was once itself a seabed.
Now it lies raw, exposed.
But however scalped and sculpted the Burren has been by the elements, it has the international reputation of being a sort of coastal Kew Gardens, drawing plant lovers from all over the world to marvel at its hidden beauties.
Alice is on a mission to try to solve the riddle of how such a moonscape can sustain such a riot of colour.
There are about 700 species of flowering plants here on the Burren.
I haven't counted them all! and that's about two thirds of all the species here in Ireland, and actually about half of all the native species in Britain and Ireland together.
But that's not the only thing.
This is the only place in Europe where you get a collection of plants representing such a variety of different habitats.
I mean, there aren't many places anywhere where you can find this spring gentian AND hear waves crashing beside you.
Although it's the official symbol of the Burren, the spring gentian is more at home on the icy slopes of the Alps or the Pyrenees.
Amazing petrol-blue! Or there's the acid yellow of the rare hoary rockrose, a plant you're more likely to find on holiday on sun-baked Mediterranean mountains.
This place really is puzzling.
Mountain plants growing at sea level, and huge numbers of species thriving on bare rock, exposed to constant sea spray and salt winds.
I really don't understand how this is possible, so for some answers, I'm meeting Charles Nelson, who's spent years studying the Burren and its mysteries.
It's like a miniature gorge down there.
These are the wonderful grykes which criss-cross the pavement.
They're part of the karst landscape of the Burren.
What's a "karst" landscape? It's landscape that's been created by the rock being dissolved away by rain.
Limestone is a soluble rock.
Yeah.
So that rainwater will actually take away something like half a millimetre every decade.
But the important thing about the grykes, is it offers another habitat, a very protected habitat and when we look down into them, you'll see plants which are really woodland plants, and they're there for a number of reasons.
One, it's protected from the wind.
Secondly, it's quite moist, and thirdly, there's extra heat down in there because the rock itself is acting as a storage radiator, so that it's mild and mellow all the time down in these grykes and the plants can grow for almost 12 months of the year.
Of course, on the pavement then, on this flat surface, quite different plants grow.
There's a plant over here which I'd like to show you because I think you're going to recognise it.
It looks like the sort of fern that you might have as a houseplant to me.
Well, lots of people would grow this in their bathrooms.
It's maidenhair fern.
Right.
Which normally you would find let's say in the Azores, in the Canary Islands, in Hawaii, it is a sub-tropical fern.
But why is it growing here? Remember, we are 53 degrees north latitude.
There should be icebergs floating out there.
But we have the benefit of the warmth coming up in the Gulf Stream, keeping the whole of the west coast of Ireland mild and mellow.
So it's only here because we have the influence of the ocean.
Right.
And it's just one of a number of sub-tropical plants which occur in the Burren.
So far, we've found miniature woodlands, snug in the limestone grykes, or fissures, sub-tropical bathroom ferns, surprisingly at home in the teeth of Atlantic gales.
But the Burren has still more botanical surprises in store.
This is beautiful.
It's just like walking through a flower meadow, isn't it? Yes, it's absolutely splendid.
This is mountain avens with these lovely white and yellow flowers.
It looks like an Alpine.
Yes, if you were a gardener, you'd call it an Alpine, because it's quite small, grows flat on the ground and actually occurs on the high mountains in Central Europe as well as in the tundra, north of the Arctic Circle.
But there's more.
This is the Irish orchid, or the dense-flowered orchid, one of the enigmas of the Burren, and that, I've seen growing in Cyprus.
I've seen it growing in Crete.
Growing right next to an Arctic plant! That's crazy! That's mad! A botanical combination you won't find anywhere else.
In the world? Anywhere else in the world.
It's the only place where these two grow side by side.
So if these plants actually should belong to two completely separate climates, what are they doing growing side by side here on the Burren? We don't really know.
We can't easily explain it but we CAN say a couple of things.
We can say, for example, that the mountain avens will have come into Ireland when the ice caps melted at the end of the last ice age.
So that's been here for the last, say, 12,000 years.
The orchid, that's a bigger problem because that's had to come up from the south, and we feel that as the climate gradually warmed up, the North Atlantic Drift was established and that allowed plants from the south to migrate along the continental shelf, which was dry land in that time, and to reach Ireland before the sea came in and cut off Ireland from Britain and Britain from the continent.
And there are a group of these southern plants, the orchid is one, the maidenhair fern, which we've seen, is another, a whole series of combinations, of odd linkages between southern and northern.
It's the great enigma of this wonderful place.
WOMAN SINGS LILTING IRISH TUNE From the Burren, I'm now making my way out across the sea to the Aran Islands.
And I'm travelling executive class.
I've heard about being upgraded, but this is ridiculous.
I seem to have ended up as the co-pilot.
Now, this is a good example of the warm, damp air brought in by the North Atlantic Drift.
Fog! Down there somewhereAran.
This is Inis Mor, or traditionally, just Aran, the biggest of the three Aran Islands.
One thing you do realise when the fog lifts is that for some reason, the people only live on the north-east side of the island, their homes stretching like a long street from end to end.
To the south-west lies an expanse of bare rock, punctuated here and there by a resilient blade of grass.
And yet people DID once live here, on the other side of the island.
Perched on top of dramatic 300ft cliffs is Dun Aonghusa, acknowledged to be one of the finest prehistoric monuments in Western Europe.
But not for me the well-worn tourist trail.
No, I'm off in search of another ancient fort on a cliff edge.
Dun Duchathairthe Black Fort.
This landscape of booming ocean and jagged rock, it all suggests power and strength and nothing says it more clearly than this massive curving wall.
The Victorians rebuilt this thing but they were working from a known footprint, and they represented the known scale of the thing in their own hands.
It looks like the work of giants but it's not, it's the work of people thousands of years ago and the scale of it takes your breath away.
But why go to all this Herculean effort to cut off the end of this barren promontory? Who were they keeping out, or who were they keeping in? I've come here to meet a man who can explain what's going on.
For some years, geologist Michael Williams has also been trying to solve the conundrum of the strange location of the Black Fort.
Did the habitation of the interior actually reach all the way to the cliff edge? I think it certainly did because here we are in the central part of the promontory and a very exposed part of the promontory and yet here we have a constructed, human-constructed wall, you can see it quite clearly, the leading edge here.
You can see courses of it there.
Exactly.
But the habitation is not restricted simply to the inside wall of that so-called promontory fort.
It actually exists here, out in the exposed promontory.
Can you imagine a more god-forsaken spot to build a house? You might as well live on the moon.
Absolutely! But what about these huge boulders, they're not part of the fort? People might find this hard to believe, but these are actually washed up on top of this promontory 65 feet above sea level, by the giant waves that affect these islands on a regular basis.
They weigh five, seven tonnes, some of these.
They're plucked up like toys, really and flung inland.
So somewhere under this, are whatever internal structures there were in the fort? Absolutely.
So why would you go to all that effort to block off this end of the promontory when it's being pounded by these things? The mistake we're making is looking at this fort in the context of today, whereas we should be looking at it in the context of 2,500 years ago when it may have been built in the first place, and these boulders tell us something about what the landscape looked like then.
If we make a sort of rough estimate of the rates of erosion that produce this kind of debris and say that it comes to about 0.
4 metres a year.
Extrapolate that for 2,500 years, let's say, and we're looking at land extending from here, a kilometre out into the Atlantic Ocean.
So what's now known as Inis Mor, The Big Island, 2,500 years ago, was a heck of a lot bigger.
So we're not looking at a promontory fort at all.
We're talking about the remnants of a massive circular fort.
So we should be enclosed now by the continuation of that massive wall.
Which explains why we have huts and structures within the wall rather than in the middle of an exposed promontory like this which doesn't really make sense.
But what makes absolute sense is that any seas that can fling five tonne boulders far inland could eat a hilltop fort for breakfast.
This destructive energy is borne out as we pass over Inis Meain and Inis Oirr, the other two Aran Islands.
It's as though they've been cut in half with a blunt saw.
MUSIC: "Theme Tune to Father Ted" by The Divine Comedy At the most easterly end of Inis Oirr, the rusting hulk of a cargo ship, the Plassey.
But this ship is special, immortalised in the title sequence of the comedy series, Father Ted.
But, no time to dawdle.
We too must IN IRISH ACCENT: "go on, go on, go on.
" Over there in the mist are the Aran Islands.
When I was out there on Inis Mor, I stood on cliffs about 70 feet high.
Back here on the mainland are the Cliffs of Moher.
These are ten times that height.
And as you can see, it fairly packs in the tourists.
They're so big, they make the waves look quite puny.
But they're not, and from time to time, they get really mountainous.
Believe it or not, there are people who get to know them up close and personal.
My name is John McCarthy.
I'm the Irish Senior Surfing Champion.
Ireland is really exposed to all the elements on the west coast.
In Country Clare, you've got some of the most extraordinary surfing breaks in Europe.
In mid May, we attempted the Guinness World Records' "Most number of surfers on the same wave".
We got 44 people standing up for five seconds and we got the world record.
CHEERS, WHISTLES AND APPLAUSE A lot of people nowadays, they're learning how to surf when they're 35, 45.
It's not like soccer.
You can keep surfing until you're 80.
It can be extremely dangerous but it's an addiction.
Once you've become a surfer, all you're thinking about is the next time the waves are going to be good.
It's not so much an extreme sport where it's an adrenalin rush.
Surfing is really an art, actually.
EXULTANT CHORAL MUSIC PLAYS 'There's an extraordinary wave along here called Aileen.
'It's named after the headland, Aill Na Searrach, 'and it's only started being surfed in the past year.
' Oh, that's a good wave! 'We've surfed it possibly ten times.
'It doesn't happen too often but when it does happen, 'just the size of the wave and the shape of the wave 'makes it really unique.
' Oh, my God He just got eaten alive.
Whoo-hoo! He was fully in the wraps there, wasn't he? Aw, ho, ho, ho, ho! 'There are bigger waves in the world that you can surf, like in Mavericks 'or Waimea Bay in Hawaii, but it's more ferocious than any wave 'I've seen anywhere else in the world.
' The thought of putting out to sea with Atlantic breakers pounding the shore like this is enough to shiver anyone's timbers.
But down in Kilkee, they do it regularly .
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for fun! Before I came here, I thought the Currach was a famous horse-racing venue.
But down here on the west coast, it also means something quite different, as I'm about to find out from members of the West Clare Currach Club.
This the traditional hat in these parts, is it? Three men in a hat? Oh, my legs are disappearing into my chest.
OK, lads, we're going to drop it down here.
Ohhh! And now the flick.
So what is a currach, Richard? I suppose what makes a currach different from a lot of boats is that it's actually canvas that keeps the water out.
It's like a cotton canvas that's soaked in tar.
Right, so it's not a wooden hull.
No, it's not, it just sits on a timber frame.
Traditionally, it would have been cowhide and horsehide and sealskin, and then as canvas and tar came in the 1820s, it graduated on to that.
There's hundreds of years of knowledge in the building of this boat, for our local circumstances here in Clare.
It's such a lovely, elegant piece of workmanship.
It rides the swells beautifully.
So could I have a go? You're more than welcome.
Great.
UILLEANN PIPE MUSIC PLAYS And it's Richard's wife Mary and another Kilkee club member, Kieran Clancy, who've kindly volunteered to get me started.
Bit more on the right.
Keep an eye on one oar and you should be able to see the person behind you's oar out of the corner of your eye.
That's it, lovely tempo.
Oh! We're taking on water, Captain! KIERAN LAUGHS Just swing gently! You lose your water.
OK.
Altogether now, lads .
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lovely.
The oars look more like giant lollipop sticks.
They don't have a blade like a normal oar.
But when all three of us pull together, the currach really rides the swell.
OK, we're going to bring him slowly round now.
Altogether now, that's itand again.
Hey, we're skelping along now.
You've a nice rhythm now.
Sure you haven't done this before, Neil? I'm positive.
This guy's a natural.
You've done other rowing, I take it? No No?! This is my first time.
This fellow here's staying in Kilkee.
He's officially on the Kilkee team now.
That's it, all as one now Lovely! This is great out here.
I'm going to take this up, this is great.
And now for a masterclass.
Not wanting to miss out on any chance for a bit of "craic" as they say, the local villages have decided, at the drop of a hat, that it's time for an impromptu regatta.
First up, the men's teams, with Kilkee up against some strong opposition from Kilrush and Doonbeg.
I can tell you, that is NOT as easy as it looks.
And as they get to the buoy, it's Kilrush in the lead.
Dixie, Hopper and James from Kilkee putting in a great effort.
And Doonbeg bringing up the rear.
But at the line, it's a resounding victory forKilrush.
Oh, they've won by a mile.
In the women's race, it was another straightforward victory, this time for the Boland girls from Cross.
They seem pretty happy about it, but me? I've had some bad news.
There's not a part of my wee body that doesn't have a blister on it.
Despite all of that, I've been persuaded to take part in a race.
And in the interests of equality, this is the first-ever Kilkee mixed race, and it's even attracted the attention of the local radio station.
Neil Oliver, all the way from Glasgow, he's only two hours a rower, you could say.
I've been teamed up with Laura and Kieran, representing Cooraclare.
In boat number two, the Doonbeg team.
Very determined, these guys.
And in number four, Dixie Collins leads a Kilkee team.
I can't believe it.
We're actually in the lead.
For a man who came all the way from the City of Glasgow, and the first time in a currach, first time rowing actually, I was told, he's done very, very well.
Then, calamity, as we start to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Hard right! Right oar! That's it, and again.
The team leading is boat number two.
Boat number two is actually Doonbeg.
Now for some surprise last minute tactics, as we decide to go the wrong way! But Doonbeg sprint for the winning line.
This is sweet revenge for Doonbeg after losing the men's race.
It was a triumph.
A triumph of hope over inexperience.
The Shannon is one of the great rivers of Ireland.
Popular for fishing and other leisure activities, it's also one of the busiest and most industrially vibrant.
But the Shannon Estuary is also home to some remarkable wildlife, as Miranda is finding out.
Whoo, fantastic! That's brilliant, absolutely brilliant.
At any one time, there can be as many as 160 dolphins in the vast Shannon Estuary, and a small industry has grown up, taking people out to see them.
PEOPLE EXCLAIM WITH DELIGH But dolphin-tourist or marine biologist, there's only so much we can learn about dolphins from the few wonderful moments when they surface from their world into ours.
Simon Berrow's been studying the Shannon dolphins for years and has discovered that the best way of finding out how they interact and communicate with each other is by using his ears, not his eyes.
How deep does it need to go? About five metres.
Are you picking anything up? You got something? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Can I listen? Have a listen to that.
You can hear God, it's noisy down there, isn't it? It is, yeah.
You can hear that boat.
It's miles away! Imagine if you were really close.
I mean, it really would be deafening.
Can you hear any dolphin noise? I can hear the ferry and a bit of slopping about from this boat.
Yeah, I can, I can hear a few clicks.
Listen, clicks.
DOLPHINS CLICK RAPIDLY A regular kind of So how are they using that noise? They're clicking their nostrils.
They're clicking their nostrils and producing this very high, intensive narrow band to search for fish and find their way around.
So that's a hunting sound.
It is, and they're listening for the echo.
Echolocation, like a bat.
They're living in fairly murky water and it's not a visual world they live in, it's a very acoustic world.
Yeah, that's right.
The acoustic part of the dolphin's brain is very, very highly developed.
So there's obviously an awful lot of information coming in that they're using.
The other thing that would be nice to hear is the whistles.
I can actually hear some in the background.
Well, there's one, yeah.
It's actually repeating it over and over again.
DOLPHIN WHISTLES What is the difference between a whistle and a click then? It's thought each dolphin has its own "signature whistle.
" That's a dolphin kind of calling its name, really.
It's whistling "I am me, I am me.
" It's whistling its presence here, which can be heard right the other side of the estuary.
And other dolphins will know that that dolphin is here.
The idea, "I'm a dolphin, I'm an individual, I recognise myself and other dolphins can recognise me", is unique in the animal kingdom apart from humans, that they have this idea of self-recognition.
They live in tight social groups so they have a lot to say, so I'm sure they have a big vocabulary between themselves and are effectively "talking to themselves".
Here in the Shannon, the first thing I want to do is find out what is the range of whistle types they produce.
Because maybe when we compare the Shannon to other sites with resident dolphins, they use different whistle types.
So maybe these have the Shannon Estuary dialect, they have the West Clare accent.
Like a local accent.
Absolutely, compared to the Scottish, north eastern accent or the Welsh accent so we are at that very early stage.
It's only natural, when we're studying dolphins, for us to give them names, to identify them as individuals.
But it's fantastic to discover that, all the while, the dolphins have their own names for themselves - their "signature" whistles.
Come to think of it, I wonder what they call Simon? 'I wonder if they've got a name for me?!' These dolphins are giving us an absolutely fantastic display but we don't really know if they're feeding or just having fun, and it goes to show how little we know about these magnificent creatures.
From the Shannon Estuary, we continue south to one of Ireland's tourist jewels, the Dingle Peninsula.
Check out the map and one name seems to dominate this coast - Brandon.
There's Brandon Village, Brandon Bay, Brandon Point, Brandon Head.
Behind me in the mist is Mount Brandon.
According to the legend, a sixth century monk stood on its summit and had a vision of a land far to the west.
That land turned out to be the Promised Land of the Saints.
The monk's name was St Brendan and his legendary journey became the best seller of medieval Europe.
It tells how he sailed in a currach from Brendan Creek, here on the Dingle Peninsula, how he came across an island of sheep, a land where giants hurled rocks of fire at his boat, a floating mountain of crystal and many other wonders till, at last, he reached his goal.
For years, people had suspected that Brendan's legendary Promised Land of Saints might have a very different name today - America.
Back in 1976, author and explorer Tim Severin decided to test the legend of St Brendan's voyage using precisely the same materials and technology that were available 1,500 years ago.
After years of research and painstaking replication of ancient boat-building skills, Tim and four companions set sail from St Brendan's Creek in their tiny, hide-covered currach.
Ahead of them, a perilous 4,000-mile journey to Newfoundland.
On the occasion of Tim's first visit to Brendan Creek in 30 years, now that I myself am versed in the ways of the currach, I have just one question to ask him.
Why did you do it? What possessed you? Curiosity, really.
I wanted to find out if it was possible for an early medieval, late-dark-age leather boat to get to the far side of the Atlantic in the same sequence of events that you'd have had described in the legend of St Brendan.
You know, there was an island of sheep.
Faroes means "islands of sheep".
They encounter a column of crystal floating in the sea, which sounds like an iceberg and they sail through a mist, which surrounds the promised land - which sounds very much like the fog banks off Newfoundland and they arrive in this promised land.
What was your journey like? Cramped.
Wet, uncomfortable, smelled a lot.
I mean, obviously WE smelled.
But the leather, we dressed with wool grease - and wool grease stinks.
It was pretty malodorous.
But were there moments where you thought that you wouldn't make it? A couple of times, yeah.
Between Iceland and Greenland in what's called the Denmark Strait, we ran into some heavy weather.
SEA ROARS We were later told it was a force nine, but it lasted for about two-and-a-half days and we were swamped twice, once in the middle of the night and, you know, you're lying down, and suddenly you're floating and you've just got to get the boat light enough to survive.
But the terrorwas the sound.
WAVES BOOM AND CRASH Big waves, when the top falls forward and that broken water falls down the front surface of the wave, makes an absolutely distinct noise.
And it's a bit like hearing an express train coming towards you, and in the darkness, for hour after hour, you can hear train after train, and as each one emerges, white, out of the darkness and comes just roaring down, slams into the boat, and everything does that, and it was I was frightened.
I had four colleagues and they were equally frightened.
If you're not frightened, there's something wrong with you.
And if that wasn't enough, you ran into Brendan's "columns of crystal" off Newfoundland as well? We lasted almost a day before the boat was punctured and once you've got a puncture you've got to fix it.
Whereas if it had been a metal or wooden hull A metal hull, you couldn't have done anything.
You might have patched a wooden hull but we could sew up the rip in the skin.
While somebody else was bailing? Yeah.
The fellow with the longest arms had to reach out over the side and do the stitching.
Wool grease, again, on his hands to keep him warm.
I know it's an outrageous thought, but what about Columbus? How much do you think the Brendan story would have inspired or affected what Columbus did? Columbus himself, according to the journal written by his son, when he was half way across on his first voyage, the three little ships all draw together and the pilots confer, and Columbus says, "This is the area where we should be finding the islands of St Brendan.
" So Columbus was absolutely familiar In fact, you would have to be a deeply ignorant mariner of the time not to have known the story of St Brendan.
In your heart, do you think it's possible that the New World was discovered, getting on for 1,000 years before Columbus, by Irishmen? We didn't prove that they DID, only that they COULD, and only the archaeological evidence would prove it.
June 1976.
After a gruelling journey of 4,000 miles from Ireland, Tim Severin and the crew of the Brendan arrive safely in Newfoundland to a tumultuous welcome.
CAR HORNS BEEP Just recently, another intrepid traveller made the return crossing from America back to Brendan's Creek, only to be trapped briefly in a fisherman's net, fitted with a transmitter, and sent on her way.
In search of her favourite food, jellyfish, this incredible 3,000-mile journey was made by a giant, two-metre-long leatherback turtle.
As you settle into the rhythm of this coast, the passage of time changes, becomes imperceptible, and distances that you cover pass by without you hardly noticing.
So maybe it's appropriate that this beach, this lovely beach, which is exactly a mile long, is called Inch.
Our next stop, Valencia Island.
Follow the coast road from Knightstown and you're suddenly confronted with architecture that's more West Kensington than West Kerry.
This is the Cable Station.
It was the hub of a communications network established in 1866, when 2,500 miles of telegraph cable were laid across the Atlantic between Valencia and Newfoundland, allowing rapid diplomatic and commercial messages to be sent in Morse code between the Old World and the New.
They called it the eighth wonder of the world.
"The Atlantic is dried up", said The Times.
But the irony is that while the Transatlantic Cable united two continents, it split the people of Valencia in two.
Those who worked for the Cable Company and those who didn't.
My name is Des Lavelle.
I am a Valencia Island man first and a Kerry man second, and we are at the Cable Station where I lived as a child and where I worked for 16 years and three days until 1966 when the station closed.
It was a whole way of life because what we had here was almost an exclusive colony where everything to do with the cable station was top-class, was special in its way, whereas outside the walls, things were a bit tougher.
We had access to a tennis court.
We had a library, a billiards room with conditions that very few people enjoyed on the Irish coast anywhere at that time.
I think there was very much a sense of them and us.
We all went to the national school in the village but we went our way after that and they went theirs.
And don't forget that it was an immigrant community, people from the cities suddenly placed in the middle of the countryside with no communications locally but plenty of communications with the other side of the Atlantic.
I mean, this was magic! This little island outpost, the centre of world communications.
I mean, we were online here back in the mid 1800s.
The Transatlantic Telegraph Cable wasn't the first time this coast has been in the vanguard of communications and spreading the word.
It's a surprise to learn that the first modern European language to be written down wasn't French or Spanish, German or Italian, and it certainly wasn't English.
It was Irish.
And after the fall of the Roman Empire, it was Irish monks who preserved the traditions of Christian learning and literature, not in some lofty monastic cloisters, but, as Alice is on her way to discovering, in some of the most inaccessible locations in Western Europe.
Over there on the horizon are the twin peaks of the Skelligs, Skellig Michael and Small Skellig.
And this journey I'm making out to them is one that's been made by people for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
As long as 1,500 years ago, monks built a monastery on Skellig Michael, the further of the two islands.
And since then, pilgrims have seen the island as a bridge between this world and the next.
For me too, this is a pilgrimage in search of that monastery, once one of the last footholds of Christian learning in Europe.
SOARING BAROQUE MUSIC PLAYS The first of the two Skellig islands we get to is Small Skellig, which looks white even from the mainland.
When you get closer, you realise why.
With 23,000 pairs of gannets, it's one of the largest gannetries in the world.
GANNETS CRY On Skellig Michael, this is just the beginning of the stairway to heaven.
Somehow, it's both comforting and humbling to think of all the pilgrims who, for over 1,000 years, have climbed these steps before me.
There's supposed to be 600 of them leading up to the monastery.
Well, this is Christ's Saddle and that is the highest point of the Skellig up there.
There used to be a hermitage up there but even when the monks left at the end of the 12th century, this was still a place that pilgrims needed to get to.
There was a rock that stuck out at the top of that edge just there, and the penitent pilgrim would walk up to it and then crawl along it and kiss the very end of it, 217 metres above the sea.
And that marked the end of their pilgrimage.
But mine's continuing because I'm going to the monastery.
This is the last set of stairs up to the monastery and it is just phenomenal the way that the monks set these steps into the side of the island, this immense effort in the service of God, and what they've done is transformed an island into a natural cathedral.
This is amazing.
Little beehive-shaped huts, actually quite small.
I don't know what I was expecting, you know, a monastery, you expect something quite large, but it sort of It's just enough, isn't it, it's just enough for them to be protected from the elements up here.
Imagine living in one of these.
Oh, this is great.
It certainly feels a lot bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside.
It's got immensely thick walls.
It's really built to stand all that the North Atlantic can throw at it.
It's actually quite cosy.
And this style of architecture is just so simple.
This corbelling, you're gradually bringing the walls in, into this cone shape and finishing it off with a couple of flat stones at the top.
It's an ancient way of building.
It's the same architecture that we see in the Neolithic tombs.
I don't think I would have minded being a monk living here.
The thing is though, that the monks didn't just live here, stoically braving the elements and getting nearer to their God through self-denial.
At Skellig Michael and other tiny monastic communities in Ireland, by copying manuscripts, by going out to form new communities, they helped to revitalise a Europe largely bereft of faith and learning after the fall of Rome.
Skellig Michael is a special place.
If someone told you that seaweed is often a key ingredient of the lightest, creamiest of seaside pleasures, an ice-cream, you'd probably fall off your deckchair in disgust.
But there's so much more to seaweed than meets the taste buds.
And to Miranda, it's one of the wonders of the undersea world.
It's sad that any plant we don't think of as particularly useful, we have to call a weed.
Now, most of us eat, drink and even wear seaweed without being particularly aware of it.
And it's a thought that without these marine plants, or algae as they're properly called, we'd all be in deep trouble.
Incredibly, over half the world's oxygen is provided, as a bi-product of photosynthesis, by marine algae like seaweed and tiny plankton in our oceans.
So, far from being some slippery, slimy stuff that half-lives in the sea, half on land, seaweed is a key to our very survival.
But why tell you that here? Well, this is Roaring Water Bay and here, the whole community's dedicated to seaweed.
A few years ago, the parish council decided something had to be done to stem the numbers of people emigrating.
Then someone had an inspired idea.
If you've got a lot of seaweed, why not try marketing it? So they did.
They started a co-operative and they've never looked back.
One of the co-operative members is a blow-in - an outsider from England, Diana Pitcher, who's become an avid convert to seaweed, starting with the sustainable way of harvesting it.
You grab a handful, hack it like that and chuck it into a pile, then we pike that later into a container.
You need to leave about three or four inches of root on the rock and about 12 to 18 months later it will all regrow again.
Now, the whole community have got involved in this.
How many people is that? We have 208 shareholders.
Nearly all of them live in the community.
You can virtually see it from all round here.
They're all interested and help out from time to time.
What a fantastically social thing, to come and cut the seaweed! Now, you're harvesting huge amounts.
What is it used for? Did you do your teeth this morning? Mm-hm.
The toothpaste you used would have had a seaweed gelatine in it.
Any hair gels, shampoos, seaweed, froth of beer has seaweed in it.
If you've got livestock or animals, a handful of dried seaweed in their feed gives them shiny noses, healthy animals, garden fertilizers - dried seaweed on a garden, fantastic, the best slug repellent you could imagine.
Of course, the slugs hate the salt, don't they? And the salt doesn't harm the garden.
You obviously need to harvest a huge amount of it.
We'd better get busy.
'And now, I get to experience the Roaring Water Bay version of treading grapes.
' Fantastic exercise! I'm sure there's not a gym locally so you can just come down and jump on seaweed.
The seaweed gets packed tight like this in the cage.
The tide comes in and hey presto, the cage floats and the seaweed gets pulled ashore.
But before all that happens, I reckon I've got another half an hour to see exactly what sort of seaweed's growing here with Michael, a farmer and another member of the co-operative.
Right, let's start with this one.
Here, on top of the shore, we have some channel wrack.
And if we look underneath, it's got these little channels.
This helps it to float when the tide is in.
I love it when things are named exactly how they appear, so this one you'll never forget because of the channels underneath! That's it, it's like somebody with a perm, you can almost see it there.
Frizzy perm! Frizzy perm equals channel wrack.
OK, what have we got further down then? Further down the shore here we've got our bladderwrack.
Right, how do I tell a bladderwrack from anything else? It's very easy to identify, because it's got these little bladders.
Quite often in pairs.
We can burst open, fronds are flat and there's a very clear vein down the centre.
When the tide comes in, the weed floats, it gets a maximum amount of light to make the food.
Now, we've got a very different one here.
The black one? Knotted wrack.
It's got a bigger bubble whereas these bubbles are in pairs.
These are in singles.
It's only when you see the different species of seaweed in their other world, underwater, that you begin to appreciate just how effectively the air-bladders turn a slippery mass on the beach into organisms of extraordinary beauty.
It's also amazing just how many species you get on one beach, and how useful they can be.
This is a lovely sample of kelp.
Laminaria digitata.
And you remember that cos you've got five digits and there should be five fronds.
Yes.
And they used to burn this on the Aran Islands.
One of the weeds they use to make iodine from.
This is your dillisk, you can cook it.
Right, this is what we call dulse.
And what's this one? Yes, that's a bit of carrageen.
Normally found on rocky outcrops where there's a good bit of wave action.
And you can use this in cooking? That's right.
And it turns out that carrageen is the seaweed used in the making of beer and ice-cream.
It's the long chains of sugars in carrageen moss that put a good head on your beer and also gives your seaside ice-cream that light, wispy chewiness.
But if you're a real foodie, seaweed can also be the star ingredient in a meal.
They smell delicious, don't they? What a feast! Enjoy! Brilliant! Try a crisp.
This is just deep-fried seaweed? Yes, just dillisk.
Straight off the beach.
Great flavour to it.
It tastes of the sea.
The soup has got what in it? Again a dillisk, it's a very useful seaweed to have around.
Again, top marks for the soup.
What's in the fishcakes, Di? Salmon, potato and carrageen.
Miranda, will you have some pudding? I'd love some.
It's carrageen pudding.
It's a type of blancmange.
Have it with cream and whiskey sauce.
Oh, well, I'll definitely need that.
Michael? Yes.
That's delicious, it's not like blancmange at all, it's much more fragrant.
The whiskey sauce is really good! Now there's another recipe Diana tells me I really have to try.
It's quite simple.
Pour boiling water on a pile of bladderwrack so it turns a beautiful apple-green.
And then what do you do? You climb into it! Well, in a way it feels quite pleasant and sort of bizarrely relaxing, it's a bit like being in a bath of warm blancmange, whatever that feels like.
The seaweed's very good for your skin, you burst these bladders and then you rub it in.
And it makes your skin feel really nice.
And apparently it's really good for your hair, so here goes Soyou can eat it, it goes in your beer, it gives your dog a shiny nose and you can have a bath in it and yes, it does make your skin feel as smooth as silk.
But for me I think I prefer it au naturel Even in the 1800s, you actually paid a higher rent if you had a foreshore from which to harvest seaweed.
Because seaweed was a vital way of improving the thin acidic soil to grow your family's staple crop, the potato.
But all the seaweed in the Atlantic couldn't have saved Ireland from its worst disaster ever.
Imagine what would happen if, within the space of just a few years, three million Londoners, about half the population of that city, was wiped out by famine and disease or were forced to emigrate to the ends of the earth.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that heads would roll, that governments would fall.
But when, in the 1840s, three million Irish people, out of a total population of only eight million, died of starvation, dysentery and typhus or were forced to emigrate, what did the government of Queen Victoria do to help? As near as damn itnothing.
By the 1840s millions of Irish people were utterly dependent on the potato for their staple diet.
And when, in 1845, '46 and '47, the crop was ravaged by blight, the consequences were devastating.
Here at Skibbereen alone, thousands died of starvation or the fever that rampaged through the over-crowded workhouses.
This lawn was once an open pit into which over 8,000 corpses were laid, in a mass grave.
They died of neglect by government and landowner alike.
Just down the coast even the relatively better-off community of Baltimore suffered as over 2,500 inhabitants emigrated in fear of famine.
But this wasn't the first time the population of Baltimore had been hammered.
200 years earlier, on the night of the 20th June, 1631, something extraordinary happened.
The entire community, 109 men, women and children, vanished, kidnapped by Barbary pirates from the North coast of Africa and sold as white slaves in the markets of Tunis, Tripoli and Algiers.
The man behind this raid was a Flemish renegade turned Muslim, Murat Reis.
It was certainly he who had taken and enslaved 400 Icelandic people two years previously.
The twist here, however, is that he was almost certainly invited in by a local faction antagonistic towards the people of Baltimore.
Not one of them is known to have escaped or ever to have seen their home again.
But what happened at Baltimore was by no means an isolated incident.
In fact, over the space of 100 years, over a million people were taken from the coasts of Europe and sold into slavery in North Africa.
We think of the twin abominations, the living deaths of slavery and starvation as part of Africa's past and present.
But slavery and famine are part of our history too, they could happen here and they did.
The moist, warm air from the Atlantic has decided to see me out of Ireland in much the same way as it saw me in.
But my mode of transport is very different.
Yet again, it's a traditional craft, now lovingly restored for the Ireland of tomorrow.
This one's a sort of nomadic lobster-fishing boat called a towel yawl.
Now speedboats and the like are all very well, but for me, this 114-year-old is in a different class and I bet she's got some colourful tales to tell as well.
The last moments of this journey are taking me out to the Fastnet Rock, also known as the Teardrop of Ireland because it was the last part of the Old Country that emigrants glimpsed before they headed out for the New World.
For me, the Fastnet Rock is the first stepping stone to a whole new journey.
But for now, farewell, or, slan abhaile, till we catch our first glimpse of a whole new stretch of coast.
From here in Galway, me and the team will be heading south along some breathtaking coastline all the way to Baltimore.
For thousands of years, this entire coast has been gnawed and mauled by the Atlantic, but this relentless pneumatic drilling by gales, wind, waves and rain from the west, has helped carve a coastline of truly majestic beauty.
On our journey, we'll be finding out why it rains here for 200 days every year, and why we should all be truly thankful it does.
Whoo! Fantastic! Marine biologist Miranda Krestovnikoff will be eavesdropping on dolphin chit-chat in the Shannon Estuary DOLPHIN CLICKS .
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and she'll be seeking out a marine organism that we can eat, that helps us breathe, and, apparently, can make us look beautiful.
Anthropologist Alice Roberts visits a remote island once at the sacred heart of Europe.
On Skellig Michael, this is just the beginning of the stairway to heaven.
And I'll be finding out how frail boats like these inspired one of the greatest journeys in history.
I'm going to take this up, this is great! These are just some of the stories of Ireland's west coast.
The route we've planned will take us 200 miles around Galway Bay, along the coast of County Clare, County Kerry and Cork to Baltimore and beyond.
Throughout our journey, there's nothing to the west for over 2,000 miles but the mighty Atlantic.
But we start our journey here in Galway, where I hope to find the first clues to a sequence of stories that sets this apart as being a coast between two worlds.
For centuries, Galway was an important link in a chain of commercial ports that ran from Iceland down to Spain.
But sometimes, things are washed ashore here that have come from far further afield.
What do you make of these? They look like props for the latest Hollywood remake of Jack and the Beanstalk or something.
And in fact, these ARE beans, and for centuries they've puzzled the people who found them washed up on our shores, not just here in Ireland but all along the Atlantic seaboard, and these are one of the clues that led to THE most successful accidental discovery in history - America.
In 1477, a young Genoese sailor landed here in Galway.
He already knew of the strange beans, even exotic trees that were washed ashore after westerly gales and had started to suspect that out there, to the west, there must be a great continent.
And that continent had to be Asia.
But what he himself observed here in Galway turned suspicion into conviction and prompted one of the greatest voyages of discovery in history.
That early visitor to Galway was none other than Christopher Columbus.
I've met up with historian Nicholas Canny to find out more.
What was it about Galway that inspired Columbus on his journey of discovery? Well, during the course of his diary, Columbus makes reference to a series of incidents, which convinced him that he could get access to Asia by sailing westwards into the Atlantic.
The most compelling of all was, he said when he was in Galway in Ireland that he saw the bodies of two people, a man and a woman with oriental appearance being brought ashore on a piece of wood and this satisfied him that the distance to Asia must be quite short if bodies could be carried across in that fashion.
He surely could be forgiven for thinking that maybe just beyond the visible horizon was their point of departure.
That is correct.
Of course, Columbus didn't find Asia by sailing west, he found a completely different continent.
So his celebrated discovery of America was, in reality, a comedy of errors.
You can imagine it, can't you? "Very sorry, folks.
I haven't found a westerly route to China after all.
"I seem to have discovered some other vast lump of land instead.
" It's ironic, isn't it? By the time Columbus stumbled on the continent, it was inhabited by about 7m people.
But until he, a European, discovered it, it didn't really exist.
But the really neat trick that Columbus pulled off wasn't getting to America by sailing west, it was getting back, and knowing how.
Although Ireland and the UK lie broadly at the same latitude as Warsaw, Moscow, Southern Alaska and Newfoundland, our winters are nothing like as cold as theirs thanks to a huge body of water that moves rapidly from west to east across the Atlantic - the Gulf Stream.
Columbus himself, describing the power of the Stream, said, "It moved like the skies.
" Warmed by the Caribbean, the Gulf Stream divides just north of the Gulf of Mexico and one section, the North Atlantic Drift, as it's called, makes a beeline for Europe.
Offshore, the prevailing south-westerly winds blow over it, hijacking its warmth and bringing it to land, an equivalent of a million power stations' worth of heat that warms our climate by between five and eight degrees.
Cold winds from the Arctic can intercept these Westerlies, though, and depressions form, bringing rain.
A lot of rain.
But without this rain, there would be no "Emerald Isle", there would be no fertile "green and pleasant land.
" It's also the Gulf Stream that explains how those huge beans make the astonishing journey to our shores all the way from Costa Rica.
As we cross south over Galway Bay, an altogether starker coastline looms into view.
The Burren.
This vast limestone landscape spilling down to the sea was once itself a seabed.
Now it lies raw, exposed.
But however scalped and sculpted the Burren has been by the elements, it has the international reputation of being a sort of coastal Kew Gardens, drawing plant lovers from all over the world to marvel at its hidden beauties.
Alice is on a mission to try to solve the riddle of how such a moonscape can sustain such a riot of colour.
There are about 700 species of flowering plants here on the Burren.
I haven't counted them all! and that's about two thirds of all the species here in Ireland, and actually about half of all the native species in Britain and Ireland together.
But that's not the only thing.
This is the only place in Europe where you get a collection of plants representing such a variety of different habitats.
I mean, there aren't many places anywhere where you can find this spring gentian AND hear waves crashing beside you.
Although it's the official symbol of the Burren, the spring gentian is more at home on the icy slopes of the Alps or the Pyrenees.
Amazing petrol-blue! Or there's the acid yellow of the rare hoary rockrose, a plant you're more likely to find on holiday on sun-baked Mediterranean mountains.
This place really is puzzling.
Mountain plants growing at sea level, and huge numbers of species thriving on bare rock, exposed to constant sea spray and salt winds.
I really don't understand how this is possible, so for some answers, I'm meeting Charles Nelson, who's spent years studying the Burren and its mysteries.
It's like a miniature gorge down there.
These are the wonderful grykes which criss-cross the pavement.
They're part of the karst landscape of the Burren.
What's a "karst" landscape? It's landscape that's been created by the rock being dissolved away by rain.
Limestone is a soluble rock.
Yeah.
So that rainwater will actually take away something like half a millimetre every decade.
But the important thing about the grykes, is it offers another habitat, a very protected habitat and when we look down into them, you'll see plants which are really woodland plants, and they're there for a number of reasons.
One, it's protected from the wind.
Secondly, it's quite moist, and thirdly, there's extra heat down in there because the rock itself is acting as a storage radiator, so that it's mild and mellow all the time down in these grykes and the plants can grow for almost 12 months of the year.
Of course, on the pavement then, on this flat surface, quite different plants grow.
There's a plant over here which I'd like to show you because I think you're going to recognise it.
It looks like the sort of fern that you might have as a houseplant to me.
Well, lots of people would grow this in their bathrooms.
It's maidenhair fern.
Right.
Which normally you would find let's say in the Azores, in the Canary Islands, in Hawaii, it is a sub-tropical fern.
But why is it growing here? Remember, we are 53 degrees north latitude.
There should be icebergs floating out there.
But we have the benefit of the warmth coming up in the Gulf Stream, keeping the whole of the west coast of Ireland mild and mellow.
So it's only here because we have the influence of the ocean.
Right.
And it's just one of a number of sub-tropical plants which occur in the Burren.
So far, we've found miniature woodlands, snug in the limestone grykes, or fissures, sub-tropical bathroom ferns, surprisingly at home in the teeth of Atlantic gales.
But the Burren has still more botanical surprises in store.
This is beautiful.
It's just like walking through a flower meadow, isn't it? Yes, it's absolutely splendid.
This is mountain avens with these lovely white and yellow flowers.
It looks like an Alpine.
Yes, if you were a gardener, you'd call it an Alpine, because it's quite small, grows flat on the ground and actually occurs on the high mountains in Central Europe as well as in the tundra, north of the Arctic Circle.
But there's more.
This is the Irish orchid, or the dense-flowered orchid, one of the enigmas of the Burren, and that, I've seen growing in Cyprus.
I've seen it growing in Crete.
Growing right next to an Arctic plant! That's crazy! That's mad! A botanical combination you won't find anywhere else.
In the world? Anywhere else in the world.
It's the only place where these two grow side by side.
So if these plants actually should belong to two completely separate climates, what are they doing growing side by side here on the Burren? We don't really know.
We can't easily explain it but we CAN say a couple of things.
We can say, for example, that the mountain avens will have come into Ireland when the ice caps melted at the end of the last ice age.
So that's been here for the last, say, 12,000 years.
The orchid, that's a bigger problem because that's had to come up from the south, and we feel that as the climate gradually warmed up, the North Atlantic Drift was established and that allowed plants from the south to migrate along the continental shelf, which was dry land in that time, and to reach Ireland before the sea came in and cut off Ireland from Britain and Britain from the continent.
And there are a group of these southern plants, the orchid is one, the maidenhair fern, which we've seen, is another, a whole series of combinations, of odd linkages between southern and northern.
It's the great enigma of this wonderful place.
WOMAN SINGS LILTING IRISH TUNE From the Burren, I'm now making my way out across the sea to the Aran Islands.
And I'm travelling executive class.
I've heard about being upgraded, but this is ridiculous.
I seem to have ended up as the co-pilot.
Now, this is a good example of the warm, damp air brought in by the North Atlantic Drift.
Fog! Down there somewhereAran.
This is Inis Mor, or traditionally, just Aran, the biggest of the three Aran Islands.
One thing you do realise when the fog lifts is that for some reason, the people only live on the north-east side of the island, their homes stretching like a long street from end to end.
To the south-west lies an expanse of bare rock, punctuated here and there by a resilient blade of grass.
And yet people DID once live here, on the other side of the island.
Perched on top of dramatic 300ft cliffs is Dun Aonghusa, acknowledged to be one of the finest prehistoric monuments in Western Europe.
But not for me the well-worn tourist trail.
No, I'm off in search of another ancient fort on a cliff edge.
Dun Duchathairthe Black Fort.
This landscape of booming ocean and jagged rock, it all suggests power and strength and nothing says it more clearly than this massive curving wall.
The Victorians rebuilt this thing but they were working from a known footprint, and they represented the known scale of the thing in their own hands.
It looks like the work of giants but it's not, it's the work of people thousands of years ago and the scale of it takes your breath away.
But why go to all this Herculean effort to cut off the end of this barren promontory? Who were they keeping out, or who were they keeping in? I've come here to meet a man who can explain what's going on.
For some years, geologist Michael Williams has also been trying to solve the conundrum of the strange location of the Black Fort.
Did the habitation of the interior actually reach all the way to the cliff edge? I think it certainly did because here we are in the central part of the promontory and a very exposed part of the promontory and yet here we have a constructed, human-constructed wall, you can see it quite clearly, the leading edge here.
You can see courses of it there.
Exactly.
But the habitation is not restricted simply to the inside wall of that so-called promontory fort.
It actually exists here, out in the exposed promontory.
Can you imagine a more god-forsaken spot to build a house? You might as well live on the moon.
Absolutely! But what about these huge boulders, they're not part of the fort? People might find this hard to believe, but these are actually washed up on top of this promontory 65 feet above sea level, by the giant waves that affect these islands on a regular basis.
They weigh five, seven tonnes, some of these.
They're plucked up like toys, really and flung inland.
So somewhere under this, are whatever internal structures there were in the fort? Absolutely.
So why would you go to all that effort to block off this end of the promontory when it's being pounded by these things? The mistake we're making is looking at this fort in the context of today, whereas we should be looking at it in the context of 2,500 years ago when it may have been built in the first place, and these boulders tell us something about what the landscape looked like then.
If we make a sort of rough estimate of the rates of erosion that produce this kind of debris and say that it comes to about 0.
4 metres a year.
Extrapolate that for 2,500 years, let's say, and we're looking at land extending from here, a kilometre out into the Atlantic Ocean.
So what's now known as Inis Mor, The Big Island, 2,500 years ago, was a heck of a lot bigger.
So we're not looking at a promontory fort at all.
We're talking about the remnants of a massive circular fort.
So we should be enclosed now by the continuation of that massive wall.
Which explains why we have huts and structures within the wall rather than in the middle of an exposed promontory like this which doesn't really make sense.
But what makes absolute sense is that any seas that can fling five tonne boulders far inland could eat a hilltop fort for breakfast.
This destructive energy is borne out as we pass over Inis Meain and Inis Oirr, the other two Aran Islands.
It's as though they've been cut in half with a blunt saw.
MUSIC: "Theme Tune to Father Ted" by The Divine Comedy At the most easterly end of Inis Oirr, the rusting hulk of a cargo ship, the Plassey.
But this ship is special, immortalised in the title sequence of the comedy series, Father Ted.
But, no time to dawdle.
We too must IN IRISH ACCENT: "go on, go on, go on.
" Over there in the mist are the Aran Islands.
When I was out there on Inis Mor, I stood on cliffs about 70 feet high.
Back here on the mainland are the Cliffs of Moher.
These are ten times that height.
And as you can see, it fairly packs in the tourists.
They're so big, they make the waves look quite puny.
But they're not, and from time to time, they get really mountainous.
Believe it or not, there are people who get to know them up close and personal.
My name is John McCarthy.
I'm the Irish Senior Surfing Champion.
Ireland is really exposed to all the elements on the west coast.
In Country Clare, you've got some of the most extraordinary surfing breaks in Europe.
In mid May, we attempted the Guinness World Records' "Most number of surfers on the same wave".
We got 44 people standing up for five seconds and we got the world record.
CHEERS, WHISTLES AND APPLAUSE A lot of people nowadays, they're learning how to surf when they're 35, 45.
It's not like soccer.
You can keep surfing until you're 80.
It can be extremely dangerous but it's an addiction.
Once you've become a surfer, all you're thinking about is the next time the waves are going to be good.
It's not so much an extreme sport where it's an adrenalin rush.
Surfing is really an art, actually.
EXULTANT CHORAL MUSIC PLAYS 'There's an extraordinary wave along here called Aileen.
'It's named after the headland, Aill Na Searrach, 'and it's only started being surfed in the past year.
' Oh, that's a good wave! 'We've surfed it possibly ten times.
'It doesn't happen too often but when it does happen, 'just the size of the wave and the shape of the wave 'makes it really unique.
' Oh, my God He just got eaten alive.
Whoo-hoo! He was fully in the wraps there, wasn't he? Aw, ho, ho, ho, ho! 'There are bigger waves in the world that you can surf, like in Mavericks 'or Waimea Bay in Hawaii, but it's more ferocious than any wave 'I've seen anywhere else in the world.
' The thought of putting out to sea with Atlantic breakers pounding the shore like this is enough to shiver anyone's timbers.
But down in Kilkee, they do it regularly .
.
for fun! Before I came here, I thought the Currach was a famous horse-racing venue.
But down here on the west coast, it also means something quite different, as I'm about to find out from members of the West Clare Currach Club.
This the traditional hat in these parts, is it? Three men in a hat? Oh, my legs are disappearing into my chest.
OK, lads, we're going to drop it down here.
Ohhh! And now the flick.
So what is a currach, Richard? I suppose what makes a currach different from a lot of boats is that it's actually canvas that keeps the water out.
It's like a cotton canvas that's soaked in tar.
Right, so it's not a wooden hull.
No, it's not, it just sits on a timber frame.
Traditionally, it would have been cowhide and horsehide and sealskin, and then as canvas and tar came in the 1820s, it graduated on to that.
There's hundreds of years of knowledge in the building of this boat, for our local circumstances here in Clare.
It's such a lovely, elegant piece of workmanship.
It rides the swells beautifully.
So could I have a go? You're more than welcome.
Great.
UILLEANN PIPE MUSIC PLAYS And it's Richard's wife Mary and another Kilkee club member, Kieran Clancy, who've kindly volunteered to get me started.
Bit more on the right.
Keep an eye on one oar and you should be able to see the person behind you's oar out of the corner of your eye.
That's it, lovely tempo.
Oh! We're taking on water, Captain! KIERAN LAUGHS Just swing gently! You lose your water.
OK.
Altogether now, lads .
.
lovely.
The oars look more like giant lollipop sticks.
They don't have a blade like a normal oar.
But when all three of us pull together, the currach really rides the swell.
OK, we're going to bring him slowly round now.
Altogether now, that's itand again.
Hey, we're skelping along now.
You've a nice rhythm now.
Sure you haven't done this before, Neil? I'm positive.
This guy's a natural.
You've done other rowing, I take it? No No?! This is my first time.
This fellow here's staying in Kilkee.
He's officially on the Kilkee team now.
That's it, all as one now Lovely! This is great out here.
I'm going to take this up, this is great.
And now for a masterclass.
Not wanting to miss out on any chance for a bit of "craic" as they say, the local villages have decided, at the drop of a hat, that it's time for an impromptu regatta.
First up, the men's teams, with Kilkee up against some strong opposition from Kilrush and Doonbeg.
I can tell you, that is NOT as easy as it looks.
And as they get to the buoy, it's Kilrush in the lead.
Dixie, Hopper and James from Kilkee putting in a great effort.
And Doonbeg bringing up the rear.
But at the line, it's a resounding victory forKilrush.
Oh, they've won by a mile.
In the women's race, it was another straightforward victory, this time for the Boland girls from Cross.
They seem pretty happy about it, but me? I've had some bad news.
There's not a part of my wee body that doesn't have a blister on it.
Despite all of that, I've been persuaded to take part in a race.
And in the interests of equality, this is the first-ever Kilkee mixed race, and it's even attracted the attention of the local radio station.
Neil Oliver, all the way from Glasgow, he's only two hours a rower, you could say.
I've been teamed up with Laura and Kieran, representing Cooraclare.
In boat number two, the Doonbeg team.
Very determined, these guys.
And in number four, Dixie Collins leads a Kilkee team.
I can't believe it.
We're actually in the lead.
For a man who came all the way from the City of Glasgow, and the first time in a currach, first time rowing actually, I was told, he's done very, very well.
Then, calamity, as we start to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Hard right! Right oar! That's it, and again.
The team leading is boat number two.
Boat number two is actually Doonbeg.
Now for some surprise last minute tactics, as we decide to go the wrong way! But Doonbeg sprint for the winning line.
This is sweet revenge for Doonbeg after losing the men's race.
It was a triumph.
A triumph of hope over inexperience.
The Shannon is one of the great rivers of Ireland.
Popular for fishing and other leisure activities, it's also one of the busiest and most industrially vibrant.
But the Shannon Estuary is also home to some remarkable wildlife, as Miranda is finding out.
Whoo, fantastic! That's brilliant, absolutely brilliant.
At any one time, there can be as many as 160 dolphins in the vast Shannon Estuary, and a small industry has grown up, taking people out to see them.
PEOPLE EXCLAIM WITH DELIGH But dolphin-tourist or marine biologist, there's only so much we can learn about dolphins from the few wonderful moments when they surface from their world into ours.
Simon Berrow's been studying the Shannon dolphins for years and has discovered that the best way of finding out how they interact and communicate with each other is by using his ears, not his eyes.
How deep does it need to go? About five metres.
Are you picking anything up? You got something? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Can I listen? Have a listen to that.
You can hear God, it's noisy down there, isn't it? It is, yeah.
You can hear that boat.
It's miles away! Imagine if you were really close.
I mean, it really would be deafening.
Can you hear any dolphin noise? I can hear the ferry and a bit of slopping about from this boat.
Yeah, I can, I can hear a few clicks.
Listen, clicks.
DOLPHINS CLICK RAPIDLY A regular kind of So how are they using that noise? They're clicking their nostrils.
They're clicking their nostrils and producing this very high, intensive narrow band to search for fish and find their way around.
So that's a hunting sound.
It is, and they're listening for the echo.
Echolocation, like a bat.
They're living in fairly murky water and it's not a visual world they live in, it's a very acoustic world.
Yeah, that's right.
The acoustic part of the dolphin's brain is very, very highly developed.
So there's obviously an awful lot of information coming in that they're using.
The other thing that would be nice to hear is the whistles.
I can actually hear some in the background.
Well, there's one, yeah.
It's actually repeating it over and over again.
DOLPHIN WHISTLES What is the difference between a whistle and a click then? It's thought each dolphin has its own "signature whistle.
" That's a dolphin kind of calling its name, really.
It's whistling "I am me, I am me.
" It's whistling its presence here, which can be heard right the other side of the estuary.
And other dolphins will know that that dolphin is here.
The idea, "I'm a dolphin, I'm an individual, I recognise myself and other dolphins can recognise me", is unique in the animal kingdom apart from humans, that they have this idea of self-recognition.
They live in tight social groups so they have a lot to say, so I'm sure they have a big vocabulary between themselves and are effectively "talking to themselves".
Here in the Shannon, the first thing I want to do is find out what is the range of whistle types they produce.
Because maybe when we compare the Shannon to other sites with resident dolphins, they use different whistle types.
So maybe these have the Shannon Estuary dialect, they have the West Clare accent.
Like a local accent.
Absolutely, compared to the Scottish, north eastern accent or the Welsh accent so we are at that very early stage.
It's only natural, when we're studying dolphins, for us to give them names, to identify them as individuals.
But it's fantastic to discover that, all the while, the dolphins have their own names for themselves - their "signature" whistles.
Come to think of it, I wonder what they call Simon? 'I wonder if they've got a name for me?!' These dolphins are giving us an absolutely fantastic display but we don't really know if they're feeding or just having fun, and it goes to show how little we know about these magnificent creatures.
From the Shannon Estuary, we continue south to one of Ireland's tourist jewels, the Dingle Peninsula.
Check out the map and one name seems to dominate this coast - Brandon.
There's Brandon Village, Brandon Bay, Brandon Point, Brandon Head.
Behind me in the mist is Mount Brandon.
According to the legend, a sixth century monk stood on its summit and had a vision of a land far to the west.
That land turned out to be the Promised Land of the Saints.
The monk's name was St Brendan and his legendary journey became the best seller of medieval Europe.
It tells how he sailed in a currach from Brendan Creek, here on the Dingle Peninsula, how he came across an island of sheep, a land where giants hurled rocks of fire at his boat, a floating mountain of crystal and many other wonders till, at last, he reached his goal.
For years, people had suspected that Brendan's legendary Promised Land of Saints might have a very different name today - America.
Back in 1976, author and explorer Tim Severin decided to test the legend of St Brendan's voyage using precisely the same materials and technology that were available 1,500 years ago.
After years of research and painstaking replication of ancient boat-building skills, Tim and four companions set sail from St Brendan's Creek in their tiny, hide-covered currach.
Ahead of them, a perilous 4,000-mile journey to Newfoundland.
On the occasion of Tim's first visit to Brendan Creek in 30 years, now that I myself am versed in the ways of the currach, I have just one question to ask him.
Why did you do it? What possessed you? Curiosity, really.
I wanted to find out if it was possible for an early medieval, late-dark-age leather boat to get to the far side of the Atlantic in the same sequence of events that you'd have had described in the legend of St Brendan.
You know, there was an island of sheep.
Faroes means "islands of sheep".
They encounter a column of crystal floating in the sea, which sounds like an iceberg and they sail through a mist, which surrounds the promised land - which sounds very much like the fog banks off Newfoundland and they arrive in this promised land.
What was your journey like? Cramped.
Wet, uncomfortable, smelled a lot.
I mean, obviously WE smelled.
But the leather, we dressed with wool grease - and wool grease stinks.
It was pretty malodorous.
But were there moments where you thought that you wouldn't make it? A couple of times, yeah.
Between Iceland and Greenland in what's called the Denmark Strait, we ran into some heavy weather.
SEA ROARS We were later told it was a force nine, but it lasted for about two-and-a-half days and we were swamped twice, once in the middle of the night and, you know, you're lying down, and suddenly you're floating and you've just got to get the boat light enough to survive.
But the terrorwas the sound.
WAVES BOOM AND CRASH Big waves, when the top falls forward and that broken water falls down the front surface of the wave, makes an absolutely distinct noise.
And it's a bit like hearing an express train coming towards you, and in the darkness, for hour after hour, you can hear train after train, and as each one emerges, white, out of the darkness and comes just roaring down, slams into the boat, and everything does that, and it was I was frightened.
I had four colleagues and they were equally frightened.
If you're not frightened, there's something wrong with you.
And if that wasn't enough, you ran into Brendan's "columns of crystal" off Newfoundland as well? We lasted almost a day before the boat was punctured and once you've got a puncture you've got to fix it.
Whereas if it had been a metal or wooden hull A metal hull, you couldn't have done anything.
You might have patched a wooden hull but we could sew up the rip in the skin.
While somebody else was bailing? Yeah.
The fellow with the longest arms had to reach out over the side and do the stitching.
Wool grease, again, on his hands to keep him warm.
I know it's an outrageous thought, but what about Columbus? How much do you think the Brendan story would have inspired or affected what Columbus did? Columbus himself, according to the journal written by his son, when he was half way across on his first voyage, the three little ships all draw together and the pilots confer, and Columbus says, "This is the area where we should be finding the islands of St Brendan.
" So Columbus was absolutely familiar In fact, you would have to be a deeply ignorant mariner of the time not to have known the story of St Brendan.
In your heart, do you think it's possible that the New World was discovered, getting on for 1,000 years before Columbus, by Irishmen? We didn't prove that they DID, only that they COULD, and only the archaeological evidence would prove it.
June 1976.
After a gruelling journey of 4,000 miles from Ireland, Tim Severin and the crew of the Brendan arrive safely in Newfoundland to a tumultuous welcome.
CAR HORNS BEEP Just recently, another intrepid traveller made the return crossing from America back to Brendan's Creek, only to be trapped briefly in a fisherman's net, fitted with a transmitter, and sent on her way.
In search of her favourite food, jellyfish, this incredible 3,000-mile journey was made by a giant, two-metre-long leatherback turtle.
As you settle into the rhythm of this coast, the passage of time changes, becomes imperceptible, and distances that you cover pass by without you hardly noticing.
So maybe it's appropriate that this beach, this lovely beach, which is exactly a mile long, is called Inch.
Our next stop, Valencia Island.
Follow the coast road from Knightstown and you're suddenly confronted with architecture that's more West Kensington than West Kerry.
This is the Cable Station.
It was the hub of a communications network established in 1866, when 2,500 miles of telegraph cable were laid across the Atlantic between Valencia and Newfoundland, allowing rapid diplomatic and commercial messages to be sent in Morse code between the Old World and the New.
They called it the eighth wonder of the world.
"The Atlantic is dried up", said The Times.
But the irony is that while the Transatlantic Cable united two continents, it split the people of Valencia in two.
Those who worked for the Cable Company and those who didn't.
My name is Des Lavelle.
I am a Valencia Island man first and a Kerry man second, and we are at the Cable Station where I lived as a child and where I worked for 16 years and three days until 1966 when the station closed.
It was a whole way of life because what we had here was almost an exclusive colony where everything to do with the cable station was top-class, was special in its way, whereas outside the walls, things were a bit tougher.
We had access to a tennis court.
We had a library, a billiards room with conditions that very few people enjoyed on the Irish coast anywhere at that time.
I think there was very much a sense of them and us.
We all went to the national school in the village but we went our way after that and they went theirs.
And don't forget that it was an immigrant community, people from the cities suddenly placed in the middle of the countryside with no communications locally but plenty of communications with the other side of the Atlantic.
I mean, this was magic! This little island outpost, the centre of world communications.
I mean, we were online here back in the mid 1800s.
The Transatlantic Telegraph Cable wasn't the first time this coast has been in the vanguard of communications and spreading the word.
It's a surprise to learn that the first modern European language to be written down wasn't French or Spanish, German or Italian, and it certainly wasn't English.
It was Irish.
And after the fall of the Roman Empire, it was Irish monks who preserved the traditions of Christian learning and literature, not in some lofty monastic cloisters, but, as Alice is on her way to discovering, in some of the most inaccessible locations in Western Europe.
Over there on the horizon are the twin peaks of the Skelligs, Skellig Michael and Small Skellig.
And this journey I'm making out to them is one that's been made by people for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
As long as 1,500 years ago, monks built a monastery on Skellig Michael, the further of the two islands.
And since then, pilgrims have seen the island as a bridge between this world and the next.
For me too, this is a pilgrimage in search of that monastery, once one of the last footholds of Christian learning in Europe.
SOARING BAROQUE MUSIC PLAYS The first of the two Skellig islands we get to is Small Skellig, which looks white even from the mainland.
When you get closer, you realise why.
With 23,000 pairs of gannets, it's one of the largest gannetries in the world.
GANNETS CRY On Skellig Michael, this is just the beginning of the stairway to heaven.
Somehow, it's both comforting and humbling to think of all the pilgrims who, for over 1,000 years, have climbed these steps before me.
There's supposed to be 600 of them leading up to the monastery.
Well, this is Christ's Saddle and that is the highest point of the Skellig up there.
There used to be a hermitage up there but even when the monks left at the end of the 12th century, this was still a place that pilgrims needed to get to.
There was a rock that stuck out at the top of that edge just there, and the penitent pilgrim would walk up to it and then crawl along it and kiss the very end of it, 217 metres above the sea.
And that marked the end of their pilgrimage.
But mine's continuing because I'm going to the monastery.
This is the last set of stairs up to the monastery and it is just phenomenal the way that the monks set these steps into the side of the island, this immense effort in the service of God, and what they've done is transformed an island into a natural cathedral.
This is amazing.
Little beehive-shaped huts, actually quite small.
I don't know what I was expecting, you know, a monastery, you expect something quite large, but it sort of It's just enough, isn't it, it's just enough for them to be protected from the elements up here.
Imagine living in one of these.
Oh, this is great.
It certainly feels a lot bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside.
It's got immensely thick walls.
It's really built to stand all that the North Atlantic can throw at it.
It's actually quite cosy.
And this style of architecture is just so simple.
This corbelling, you're gradually bringing the walls in, into this cone shape and finishing it off with a couple of flat stones at the top.
It's an ancient way of building.
It's the same architecture that we see in the Neolithic tombs.
I don't think I would have minded being a monk living here.
The thing is though, that the monks didn't just live here, stoically braving the elements and getting nearer to their God through self-denial.
At Skellig Michael and other tiny monastic communities in Ireland, by copying manuscripts, by going out to form new communities, they helped to revitalise a Europe largely bereft of faith and learning after the fall of Rome.
Skellig Michael is a special place.
If someone told you that seaweed is often a key ingredient of the lightest, creamiest of seaside pleasures, an ice-cream, you'd probably fall off your deckchair in disgust.
But there's so much more to seaweed than meets the taste buds.
And to Miranda, it's one of the wonders of the undersea world.
It's sad that any plant we don't think of as particularly useful, we have to call a weed.
Now, most of us eat, drink and even wear seaweed without being particularly aware of it.
And it's a thought that without these marine plants, or algae as they're properly called, we'd all be in deep trouble.
Incredibly, over half the world's oxygen is provided, as a bi-product of photosynthesis, by marine algae like seaweed and tiny plankton in our oceans.
So, far from being some slippery, slimy stuff that half-lives in the sea, half on land, seaweed is a key to our very survival.
But why tell you that here? Well, this is Roaring Water Bay and here, the whole community's dedicated to seaweed.
A few years ago, the parish council decided something had to be done to stem the numbers of people emigrating.
Then someone had an inspired idea.
If you've got a lot of seaweed, why not try marketing it? So they did.
They started a co-operative and they've never looked back.
One of the co-operative members is a blow-in - an outsider from England, Diana Pitcher, who's become an avid convert to seaweed, starting with the sustainable way of harvesting it.
You grab a handful, hack it like that and chuck it into a pile, then we pike that later into a container.
You need to leave about three or four inches of root on the rock and about 12 to 18 months later it will all regrow again.
Now, the whole community have got involved in this.
How many people is that? We have 208 shareholders.
Nearly all of them live in the community.
You can virtually see it from all round here.
They're all interested and help out from time to time.
What a fantastically social thing, to come and cut the seaweed! Now, you're harvesting huge amounts.
What is it used for? Did you do your teeth this morning? Mm-hm.
The toothpaste you used would have had a seaweed gelatine in it.
Any hair gels, shampoos, seaweed, froth of beer has seaweed in it.
If you've got livestock or animals, a handful of dried seaweed in their feed gives them shiny noses, healthy animals, garden fertilizers - dried seaweed on a garden, fantastic, the best slug repellent you could imagine.
Of course, the slugs hate the salt, don't they? And the salt doesn't harm the garden.
You obviously need to harvest a huge amount of it.
We'd better get busy.
'And now, I get to experience the Roaring Water Bay version of treading grapes.
' Fantastic exercise! I'm sure there's not a gym locally so you can just come down and jump on seaweed.
The seaweed gets packed tight like this in the cage.
The tide comes in and hey presto, the cage floats and the seaweed gets pulled ashore.
But before all that happens, I reckon I've got another half an hour to see exactly what sort of seaweed's growing here with Michael, a farmer and another member of the co-operative.
Right, let's start with this one.
Here, on top of the shore, we have some channel wrack.
And if we look underneath, it's got these little channels.
This helps it to float when the tide is in.
I love it when things are named exactly how they appear, so this one you'll never forget because of the channels underneath! That's it, it's like somebody with a perm, you can almost see it there.
Frizzy perm! Frizzy perm equals channel wrack.
OK, what have we got further down then? Further down the shore here we've got our bladderwrack.
Right, how do I tell a bladderwrack from anything else? It's very easy to identify, because it's got these little bladders.
Quite often in pairs.
We can burst open, fronds are flat and there's a very clear vein down the centre.
When the tide comes in, the weed floats, it gets a maximum amount of light to make the food.
Now, we've got a very different one here.
The black one? Knotted wrack.
It's got a bigger bubble whereas these bubbles are in pairs.
These are in singles.
It's only when you see the different species of seaweed in their other world, underwater, that you begin to appreciate just how effectively the air-bladders turn a slippery mass on the beach into organisms of extraordinary beauty.
It's also amazing just how many species you get on one beach, and how useful they can be.
This is a lovely sample of kelp.
Laminaria digitata.
And you remember that cos you've got five digits and there should be five fronds.
Yes.
And they used to burn this on the Aran Islands.
One of the weeds they use to make iodine from.
This is your dillisk, you can cook it.
Right, this is what we call dulse.
And what's this one? Yes, that's a bit of carrageen.
Normally found on rocky outcrops where there's a good bit of wave action.
And you can use this in cooking? That's right.
And it turns out that carrageen is the seaweed used in the making of beer and ice-cream.
It's the long chains of sugars in carrageen moss that put a good head on your beer and also gives your seaside ice-cream that light, wispy chewiness.
But if you're a real foodie, seaweed can also be the star ingredient in a meal.
They smell delicious, don't they? What a feast! Enjoy! Brilliant! Try a crisp.
This is just deep-fried seaweed? Yes, just dillisk.
Straight off the beach.
Great flavour to it.
It tastes of the sea.
The soup has got what in it? Again a dillisk, it's a very useful seaweed to have around.
Again, top marks for the soup.
What's in the fishcakes, Di? Salmon, potato and carrageen.
Miranda, will you have some pudding? I'd love some.
It's carrageen pudding.
It's a type of blancmange.
Have it with cream and whiskey sauce.
Oh, well, I'll definitely need that.
Michael? Yes.
That's delicious, it's not like blancmange at all, it's much more fragrant.
The whiskey sauce is really good! Now there's another recipe Diana tells me I really have to try.
It's quite simple.
Pour boiling water on a pile of bladderwrack so it turns a beautiful apple-green.
And then what do you do? You climb into it! Well, in a way it feels quite pleasant and sort of bizarrely relaxing, it's a bit like being in a bath of warm blancmange, whatever that feels like.
The seaweed's very good for your skin, you burst these bladders and then you rub it in.
And it makes your skin feel really nice.
And apparently it's really good for your hair, so here goes Soyou can eat it, it goes in your beer, it gives your dog a shiny nose and you can have a bath in it and yes, it does make your skin feel as smooth as silk.
But for me I think I prefer it au naturel Even in the 1800s, you actually paid a higher rent if you had a foreshore from which to harvest seaweed.
Because seaweed was a vital way of improving the thin acidic soil to grow your family's staple crop, the potato.
But all the seaweed in the Atlantic couldn't have saved Ireland from its worst disaster ever.
Imagine what would happen if, within the space of just a few years, three million Londoners, about half the population of that city, was wiped out by famine and disease or were forced to emigrate to the ends of the earth.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that heads would roll, that governments would fall.
But when, in the 1840s, three million Irish people, out of a total population of only eight million, died of starvation, dysentery and typhus or were forced to emigrate, what did the government of Queen Victoria do to help? As near as damn itnothing.
By the 1840s millions of Irish people were utterly dependent on the potato for their staple diet.
And when, in 1845, '46 and '47, the crop was ravaged by blight, the consequences were devastating.
Here at Skibbereen alone, thousands died of starvation or the fever that rampaged through the over-crowded workhouses.
This lawn was once an open pit into which over 8,000 corpses were laid, in a mass grave.
They died of neglect by government and landowner alike.
Just down the coast even the relatively better-off community of Baltimore suffered as over 2,500 inhabitants emigrated in fear of famine.
But this wasn't the first time the population of Baltimore had been hammered.
200 years earlier, on the night of the 20th June, 1631, something extraordinary happened.
The entire community, 109 men, women and children, vanished, kidnapped by Barbary pirates from the North coast of Africa and sold as white slaves in the markets of Tunis, Tripoli and Algiers.
The man behind this raid was a Flemish renegade turned Muslim, Murat Reis.
It was certainly he who had taken and enslaved 400 Icelandic people two years previously.
The twist here, however, is that he was almost certainly invited in by a local faction antagonistic towards the people of Baltimore.
Not one of them is known to have escaped or ever to have seen their home again.
But what happened at Baltimore was by no means an isolated incident.
In fact, over the space of 100 years, over a million people were taken from the coasts of Europe and sold into slavery in North Africa.
We think of the twin abominations, the living deaths of slavery and starvation as part of Africa's past and present.
But slavery and famine are part of our history too, they could happen here and they did.
The moist, warm air from the Atlantic has decided to see me out of Ireland in much the same way as it saw me in.
But my mode of transport is very different.
Yet again, it's a traditional craft, now lovingly restored for the Ireland of tomorrow.
This one's a sort of nomadic lobster-fishing boat called a towel yawl.
Now speedboats and the like are all very well, but for me, this 114-year-old is in a different class and I bet she's got some colourful tales to tell as well.
The last moments of this journey are taking me out to the Fastnet Rock, also known as the Teardrop of Ireland because it was the last part of the Old Country that emigrants glimpsed before they headed out for the New World.
For me, the Fastnet Rock is the first stepping stone to a whole new journey.
But for now, farewell, or, slan abhaile, till we catch our first glimpse of a whole new stretch of coast.