Coast (2005) s05e05 Episode Script
Galway to Arranmore Island
There was a time when people thought Ireland's west coast was the edge of the world.
A vast ocean meets this lonely shore, and mighty cliffs rise up to mark the boundary between land and sea.
For millennia, people have stood here, in awe of what lies beyond.
Now we're following in the footsteps of those who've battled to survive and to thrive on this wild Atlantic shore, a voyage of discovery along Ireland's North West coast.
And the team's along for the ride.
Alice is searching for Ireland's first farmers.
Oh, yes, I've got a stone.
That is remarkable.
Dick discovers how Mr Marconi sparked a radio revolution to transmit messages across the Atlantic.
Hey! We have sparks.
Miranda tracks down Irish mountain hares, lying low on the coast.
There's more hares than you can shake a stick at! Barefoot Nick explores a magical island community.
That's the smallest school I've ever seen! And I'm all at sea Am I going in, yeah? .
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relying on the life boat crews and air crews of the Atlantic Rescue Service to keep me dry and high.
This is Coast.
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and beyond.
From the west coast of Wales, we've come to the west coast of Ireland, for a 600-mile journey around these shores.
It'll take us all the way up to Arranmore Island in Donegal.
But our journey begins in Galway.
The walled city of Galway.
There's nothing between here and North America, but sea and ocean of sea.
In the 19th century, wave upon wave of emigrants trusted their luck crossing the Atlantic to flee poverty and famine in Ireland, for a new life in a new world.
The family ties and shared history that bridge 2,000 miles of ocean now bring Irish descendants back across the water.
In June 1963, a famous son of America returned here in triumph to the land his great grandparents had left in despair.
All of Galway turned out to salute the world's most powerful man.
And I'm here to look for the man who took this photo.
He arrives in Galway to be welcomed by Mayor Ryan and Bishop Brown of Galway.
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was in Ireland to reconnect with his roots.
The whole of Galway spilled onto the streets for the biggest party the city's ever thrown.
Kennedy's great grandparents had emigrated to Boston Massachusetts over 100 years before in the potato famine.
Now, JFK wanted to remind the crowd of the family ties they also shared with the States.
If you ever come to America, you'd see down working on the docks there .
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some O'Doherty's, Flaharty's and Ryan's and cousins of yours who've gone to Boston and made good.
In the crowd that day, taking pictures of JFK for the Galway City Tribune, was a 19-year-old photographer, caught on film, on his first big job.
Almost half a century later, I'm here to meet Stan Shields, the man who took the picture that brought me here.
That's the picture.
It's the picture of all the ones I took of my career that I remember, and I take pride in having took it.
It wasn't easy.
Every time Stan got close enough, there always seemed to be something or someone in the way.
Stan had to seize his last chance as JFK got into the limo.
I saw him in the car and I stared at him until he looked my way.
And I pointed the camera and pointed at him.
And he said, yes.
So I opened the door of the car, jumped in, lifted up the camera, and this fella jumped at me.
His nightmare was somebody getting too close to the president with the wrong idea? Yeah, but I didn't realise that.
Kennedy said, "It's OK, Jim, he's a friend.
" So he let me go Really, he said, "It's OK, Jim, he's a friend"? Yeah, he's a friend I knelt up, took the picture and shook hands with him.
And thanked him for coming.
These images of joy are sadly prophetic.
The motorcade, the open topped limousine.
So much like that day in Dallas just five months later when JFK became the victim of an assassin's bullet.
And how did it feel those months later when you heard that he'd been shot? I got an awful shock.
You felt you'd lost a friend, seriously, you you felt you'd lost a friend.
Grief washed across the Atlantic.
Pain shared between people bonded by blood.
But this special relationship with America goes back further than you might think.
90 million years ago, what's now Ireland and North America were joined together.
Then they began to drift apart.
And the world's second biggest ocean emerged - the Atlantic.
It dominates life on the Irish coast, yet the Atlantic remains full of mystery.
We know more about Mars than we know about the oceans.
And the reason for that is the vastness of the oceans, they take up most of the planet.
They're really deep, a huge body of water.
I've joined James Ryan, from Galway's Marine Institute and we're out here to check on this.
It's a scientific buoy that's processing a constant stream of information about the ocean.
Battered by the waves, occasionally it requires a little loving attention.
Oh, there we go.
So a more physical life than I imagine for most scientists? It is! This is the bit I really like, when we get away from the desk and the computers.
Hanging below the buoy are data probes to monitor temperature, salt content, wave motion, nutrients and even the dolphins' comings and goings.
Wow, beautiful.
So what do you have to do now that we're out here? I just want to raise up the sensors which are down at the bottom of this big pipe and in order for us to check them, we have to haul them up.
The underwater sensors need a clean to keep them working reliably.
It means scientists can now study the Atlantic without ever leaving their desks.
It's sending its information out.
Sending the information 24/7, it's sending data all the time.
There are plans to install a network of these buoys to track the progress of global warming.
This is one buoy here on the edge of Ireland.
There are other equivalent buoys all around the world, all very new technology.
They are, I suppose, like the heart monitor on a patient.
We are checking the physiology of the oceans here and monitoring it at a time when it's really vital for the planet.
We're finally learning to cherish this precious ocean that previous generations saw as territory to be conquered.
Past the Slyne Head Lighthouse, our journey continues on to Clifden.
The first people to see this view from the air were the pioneering aviators Alcock and Brown .
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who completed the first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight by landing here in 1919.
But a few years before, this was home to another transatlantic breakthrough.
Dick Strawbridge is searching for its remains.
In its day, this was the world's biggest communications hub.
The brainchild of an Italian entrepreneur.
Just over 100 years ago, this man, Guglielmo Marconi, the pioneer of radio, brought his men here to set up the world's first wireless telegram service.
We want to discover how Marconi did it.
And why did he come here to this isolated peat bog on the Irish coast? When Marconi arrived, his challenge was immense.
Build the most powerful transmitter the world had ever seen.
Good to see you, sir.
If you just want to swing around that way.
I've assembled a team of experts who'll try and generate a radio signal with the same technology that Marconi pioneered here in Ireland.
You want to try and align those two insulators with these two vertical members here.
We've got electronics engineers from the Galway and Mayo Institute of Technology, supported by radio experts from the Irish naval service, and they're all here to unpick the puzzle that Marconi cracked in 1907.
Just to confirm, we have arrived at the Clifden site and we're going to conduct the Marconi exercises, over.
Clifden's one of the closest points between Ireland and North America.
From here, Marconi planned to send and receive radio signals a staggering 1,900 miles across the Atlantic.
He built a sister station at Glace Bay in Nova Scotia.
This was years before it was possible to transmit voice messages.
So he used Morse code, electronic pulses that correspond to letters of the alphabet.
Marconi sent the first transatlantic radio message from Poldhu at Lands End.
But six years later, to set up as a business, he uprooted to Ireland.
Marconi proved radio communications at Lands End, didn't he? So why did he come to Ireland? Poldhu radio site for Marconi wasn't large enough for the type of antenna structure he was experimenting with.
Marconi was building big.
Here at Clifden, there was room for a huge antenna suspended on poles 200 feet high.
All that's left of the mighty structure are dozens of concrete anchor blocks for the masts.
To get some sense of the scale, I've asked our guys from the Navy to act as markers.
See that, the far lad there, he's only a bout a third of the way? Absolutely, that guy at the very top there of the hill, he's one third of the way of the entire antenna.
This was a ginormous antenna.
You could say the biggest in the world at that particular time.
Nothing like this had been seen before.
An antenna over half a mile long! It would need up to 300,000 watts of power to send messages all the way across the Atlantic.
So Marconi had to generate lots of energy on site.
That's why he built a power station in the middle of a bog.
The two metre thick foundations are intact, but little remains of the hardware itself to tell us how it worked.
He had a lake which he needed for water supply for his DC generators, which were right here beside us, that's the remnants of the DC generators over there.
Amazingly, the generators were driven by a steam engines which burnt a traditional Irish fuel.
Every where you look, what do see? Energy.
Turf peat.
They actually used peat for fuel? Absolutely.
He had six generators in here, three working and three on standby at all times.
But Marconi still needed a way of storing the electrical energy from his peat-fuelled generators and releasing it rapidly.
The solution was to construct a capacitor or condenser.
We're trying to build one like Marconi did from steel plates.
Adding plates increases the electrical energy a capacitor can store.
Unlike a battery, it can be charged up quickly and discharged in a split second.
This was the key component that enabled Morse code to be received loud and clear 1,900 miles away.
This is huge.
That may look huge today, but compared to Marconi, this condenser, this is minute! Look, have a look at that picture.
Have you seen this?! This is a man here.
We're talking about each panel being 12 times bigger than that? If we think the panels at the bottom were about 12 feet, which would be about three of these sheets wide, and about 30 feet tall, which is between seven and eight times 25 times the size? Absolutely.
And how many did he have? You'll not believe this, he had 1,800 sheets.
This condenser housing was 350 feet long and 75 feet wide! We've built a Marconi style steel plate condenser, but what about generating the radio signal itself? The man with the biggest collection of early radio equipment in Britain is Bob Smallbone.
He's arrived with a rare and crucial bit of kit that dates right back to Marconi's time.
That's cast iron, weighs a tonne.
1910 rotary spark gap.
We're ready to go.
Get it connected, good man.
In 1907, powering up such a rotary spark gap was no mean feat.
Marconi's peat-powered steam engine drove his generators.
We're using petrol power.
We should be getting, what, about 230, 240 out, 230? But our generator's output is too low.
I should be expecting 220.
A century ago, Marconi overcame much bigger problems than this.
Out here, it's a bit of an unknown quantity.
Marconi's men had to be inventive as they struggled to turn transatlantic radio messages from an experiment into a business.
After some tweaking, it's all systems go.
That's on top.
That's it.
That's 220, so we're happy with that.
Just one more part of the circuit to complete.
Bob's brought along a Morse key.
An absolute replica.
So, that's exactly what they would have used 100 years ago? Exactly.
Here in Clifden? Here in Clifden.
There you go, no expense spared here today.
Let's get it wired up.
Perfect.
Marconi was an astute entrepreneur.
He wanted to make communications by wireless telegraph more accessible and create a big market for his ground-breaking service.
Here's an advert of the time, Dick.
The Marconi-gram! Yep.
'By making messages more compact, they'd use up less air time and so it'd be a lot cheaper.
' Marconi's Wireless Telegraphic Code book.
You just use one word and he gives you a whole sentence.
And those aren't real words? No, they're not.
Abrotanoid? Abrotanoid.
What a cracking word! Bankrupt stock will realise large amount.
That's a very long sentence for one word.
It is.
That would cost me eight pence.
8p.
We're getting a feel for the challenges Marconi faced here in 1907, trying to generate his revolutionary transatlantic radio messages.
Now, the ultimate test.
Frank has now got a live feed.
Is anybody else worried? If you touched the steel plates now, you'd become part of a 6,000-volt circuit, and almost certainly die.
The condenser's wired up, which means we can store lots of energy.
So we need to get everybody safe, flip the switch, and we'll be sending Morse a long way using our condenser.
Do you want to do a quick safety check for me please, sir? Clear the danger area.
Can you confirm the danger area is clear? Yes, it is clear.
Thank you.
On my mark.
Five, four, three, two, one, mark.
You're in control.
Whoa! We like that! We like that! We're looking good.
That is awesome.
Isn't that good? That's pretty, isn't it? That's really good.
I saw the big smile coming out there.
The high voltage sparks are jumping across a tiny air gap between the stud contacts.
When these rotating contacts line up, and the Morse key is pressed, the spark creates a signal.
Marconi's rotary spark gap was five feet in diameter and the sound of the sparks could be heard over half a mile away.
As well as making audible sound waves, the sparks are also creating invisible radio waves.
Even without connecting our scaled down model to an antenna, it's so powerful, it's actually transmitting through the air.
This is a radio that'll pick it up? A conventional radio, set to long wave, we should be able to pick it up.
If we head off, can you send us a message of some description? I can indeed.
Excuse us.
SIGNALS BUZZ ON RADIO Isn't that a beautiful clean spark!? We've got 100 watts in there.
This is still going.
And there's no antenna? Marconi had something like 100,000 watts.
Our signal could be picked up almost half a mile away.
Over a century ago, when Marconi launches his transatlantic wireless telegraph service, it heralded the dawn of a new era of high-speed communications.
A big idea that made the world seem a little smaller.
On our journey along Ireland's north west coast, we've reached Cleggan.
Its bustling harbour is the point of departure for islanders and travellers.
The local pub is run by Noreen Higgins, who is Cleggan born and bred.
Busiest times tend to coincide with the boats.
There's a service going to Inishbofin every day all year round, weather permitting.
The fine weather brings them out from under the stones, a good day like this people come to Cleggan.
I'll have some of them.
OK.
If they come to Cleggan, they want to eat the crab, they want to eat the lobster, you know? Particularly in the summer time, you can be jam packed and then the boat will be leaving at 7.
30 and at 7.
25, the whole place clears out.
Now, thanks very much, folks, thank you.
When you've lived on the coast, it's hard to live anywhere else.
We love the blue skies and the calm weather and that, but there's a real beauty to it in the winter time as well, you know.
You can get raging powerful seas.
It's a very nice lifestyle, if not, you know, the busiest or most lucrative and that.
But there's a good quality of life here and people that like it, like it, you know? It's lovely.
We're heading east towards the holy mountain of Croagh Patrick.
Wherever there's a beach, you'll find a smattering of holiday retreats.
The temporary residents of this shore seem compelled to journey as far west as they can to the very edge of Europe.
And they're not alone.
For thousands of years, people have been drawn here.
The mountain of Croagh Patrick is the main attraction for those on a spiritual journey.
Following their well-trodden path is Nick Crane.
I'm on the holy mountain of Croagh Patrick where St Patrick is said to have fasted for 40 days.
Once a year, thousands of pilgrims make the climb to the 762-metre summit.
Many of them in bare feet.
Some Catholics brave the pain of this barefoot pilgrimage as a penance.
But I'm here on a mission of my own.
The pilgrimage I'm making is to celebrate one of nature's great spectacles and you need to get high up to take it in.
The extraordinary islands of Clew Bay.
It's a beguiling water world, unlike anything else in the British Isles.
Local mythology counts Clew Bay's islands at 365.
One for every day of the year.
I'm intrigued to discover how this community of islands once supported a community of people.
Mary Gavin-Hughes still sails these waters.
She's one of the last generation of self-sufficient islanders who've fished, and farmed, in Clew Bay.
What was it like living on the Islands? It was heaven on earth living on the island.
It was very peaceful, great tranquillity.
Mary grew up in a world with no electricity, in a tight knit community separated by water.
What's that building over there? This one here is, erm, known as Cullen school, that's Cullen Island, that was the school.
That little white building? Yep.
That's the smallest school I've ever seen in my life! By the time Mary was a teenager, she was roving around Clew Bay on her own.
This picture here shows how we used to row to and from home.
Here you are.
It's a heavy looking boat, these oars are absolutely huge.
They were hand made, my dad actually made them, and, erm Yeah, they were good and sturdy but we needed them for the weather we were up against sometimes.
You look as though you're enjoying yourself there.
Of course I am.
Smile, Charlie.
That's his home.
Mary's father taught her to feel at home on the water, harvesting the sea's bounty.
But they didn't live on fish alone.
We did all our farming on the island, our fishing and we were very self sufficient.
The grass seems really quite lush and rich.
The soil of the island is very rich.
You can see just over here where we grew our own crops and the evidence of the ridges.
Those lines on the turf? Yeah.
It was fantastic for the potatoes and all the vegetables.
You had to be able to turn your hand to everything, living on an island.
The fertile soil is a clue to how the extraordinary landscape of Clew Bay formed.
Its islands are made of the rich residue left behind by glaciers.
20,000 years ago, much of Ireland was covered by a vast ice sheet.
As the climate cooled, and warmed, the ice advanced and retreated, moulding the land underneath, and creating the distinctive features that became Clew Bay.
Paul Dunlop is an expert on how glaciers made the mounds which formed these islands.
These are known technically as drumlins, but where does the word come from? The word drumlin comes from the Gaelic word druim, which means a small hill.
Any glacial landscape you go to, you find these landforms.
They're always called drumlins.
What's so striking is the repetitive pattern of drumlin islands across the bay.
Paul's developed a theory that a wave like motion under the melting ice created these distinctive shapes and patterns.
It's a process similar to what happens when the tide goes out on a beach.
leaving those familiar wave-like ripples in the sand.
If you take a look around nature, you find wave patterns everywhere.
You find them in the clouds, on the beach.
Ripples on sand.
Yes, exactly, and ice flowing across sediment can produce the same scenario.
As the wave goes up, it's leaving sediment on the surface of the land, which then becomes a drumlin.
That's right.
It is amazing that the most brutal forces working deep beneath the ice so long ago left us their legacy - this beautiful bay.
For seafarers who know these islands and reefs, it 's a place of protection from the North Atlantic.
But without local knowledge, it's also a treacherous maze.
400 years ago, this territory was controlled by an extraordinary Gaelic leader who lived in this.
The Tower House at Rockfleet sits on a natural slab of bed rock.
And at high tide, it's surrounded on three sides by water.
Hello.
Hello there! Can I come in? You're more than welcome, but mind your head.
Denise Murray knows every nook and cranny of the Rockfleet Tower House.
But first, I have to find her in this a warren of a castle.
Each floor has a spacious room, but the passages and stairways twist and turn, as well as being unbelievably narrow.
Who's the most famous occupant of here, then? The main occupant of this tower house was a woman named Grainne ni Mhaille who lives on in legend as the Pirate Queen of Connaught, which does her a disservice because she was much, much more than that.
She was a trader, pirate, mother, grandmother and the wife of the man who eventually became the overlord of Mayo, with her financial backing.
Will we go further up? Yes, mind your head.
Very impressive that the most famous occupant here is a woman.
Yes.
To be remembered from that time.
Grainne ni Mhaille, the Pirate Queen, is sometimes referred to by an Anglicised version of her name, Grace O'Malley.
Grace saw the sea as her domain, so anyone who crossed it was fair game.
She would stand here, having come up from her hall, and look out across Clew Bay.
And she would see a ship.
And down below, she had three galleys, 200 fighting men, with oar and sail, and they would take over across the bay like rockets and capture whoever was passing.
She particularly despised the merchants of Galway who had a monopoly on the wine trade.
Many a Galway-bound merchant ship fell pray to Grace O'Malley's ships.
Eventually, they came looking for her.
She could defend this castle from attack, which she did in 1579 where ships were sent from Galway to arrest her because of her piracy.
And she beat them off, so much so that the man in charge of the expedition said he was afraid she was going to capture him.
This is warrior ship.
She had the values a marshal society valued, she just was a woman and a mother.
Grace brought up her children here, and although the tower would have had home comforts, its primary purpose was to protect the O'Malley's from their enemies.
And what are these for? They're quite simply for dropping things down on top of people.
Grainne's standing here, her castle is under attack, the last thing she wants them to do is get in the door.
So she's here, they've got oil, they've got pitch, they've got anything that will burn or anything that is disgusting.
And they pour it down here.
In the O'Malley house, security was paramount.
Even if attackers got into the ground floor, Grace had installed another line of defence.
Instead of a stone staircase there was a wooden ladder that could be removed.
And even if they got past that there was another surprise in store for any 16th-century raiders.
This is not an easy building to get around, is it? No, and deliberately so.
To get through that door even somebody as short as me has to bend down to come through.
Obviously, a fully armoured man in here has the advantage, he can just kill you.
So what they would do is if you had managed to get up those wooden stairs, the first person up would be caught, their throat would be cut and they'd be thrown back, it's called the murder hall, onto their comrades below as a little disincentive to come any further.
This is one wild country.
It's the wildness of the ocean that dominates now as we journey north-west to Achill Island.
Massive marine ramparts speak of the power struggle between land and sea.
People, too, have left their mark in stone.
The remains of communities who finally conceded defeat in an age-old battle to cling on to this coast.
Further around the coast of County Mayo, communities still thrive at Beal Derrig.
Beal Derrig doesn't have a village centre as such.
Each family home is surrounded by fields, precious land for farming.
It's an agricultural tradition that goes way, way back.
Alice is time-travelling back to its beginnings.
Underneath my feet are the preserved remains of the oldest farm site in the British Isles.
The discovery was made back in 1934 when this man, Patrick Caulfield, was cutting peat in these fields and kept on striking stones buried in a regular pattern.
Patrick's son, archaeologist Seamus Caulfield, has continued his father's investigation into the stones beneath the bog.
Seamus came up with this very simple technique of probing to plot their locations.
The probe goes through easily, doesn't it? So, what am I hitting there, Seamus? You're hitting ground level, and now we're hitting on something higher.
You can actually hear it hitting on the stone.
I can.
The deeper you probe the peat, the further back in time you go.
The depth and pattern of the finds forced Seamus and his father to an astounding conclusion.
The stones were placed here before Stonehenge.
That's a stone that someone lifted into place 5,500 years ago.
It hasn't been seen or known about for 5,000 years.
And we're hearing it now for the first time.
That is amazing.
Mapping the site, they realised they might be following the lines of buried walls.
We're hitting a wall in section, are we? Do you think? Yes, we're coming across the wall and it should now begin to drop the far side of it.
Some of this massive site has been excavated to confirm the theory that the lines of stones plotted with all that probing were collapsed walls that would originally have stood around a metre high and a metre wide.
These buried walls once marked out the British Isles' oldest network of farmers' fields.
They extend over this mountain, over the mountain in the distance, and they're large, enclosed fields appear to be for cattle, grazing land for cattle.
It's likely that 5,500 years ago, people were engineering the landscape here to rear animals for food.
These are the fields of Ireland's first farmers.
The long parallel walls run all the way from the cliff edge for half a mile inland.
The layout suggests that cattle were reared here for meat and milk, because walled fields meant the farmers could separate stock and control grazing.
This extensive farm would have supported as many as 1,000 people.
So this is a massive undertaking.
People must have been working as a team to build all these miles and miles of stone walls.
They had to be.
It's not a single operation, it's not a few families.
It's a large community, making a decision to divide the terrain like this into these long, large fields.
Someone was making the decision and they were sticking to it.
The move to farming was a revolutionary change in lifestyle.
Nearby, on the Beal Derrig coast, there's evidence of other people who'd lived here just a few hundred years before the farmers.
Hello, Graeme.
Oh, hi, Alice.
Have you got some archaeology appearing there? Yes, we do, we have a range of archaeology.
Graeme Warren's searching for the leftovers of meals eaten 6,000 years ago, buried amongst the stone tools of people who survived by hunting and gathering along this sea shore.
One of the things that makes the site so important is that we have preserved fish bone.
Just in here, underneath this stone, you can just make out some very, very small creamy white little flecks sticking out of the soil.
Tiny.
They don't look like very much, but they are actually pieces of prehistoric fish bones.
In some places, we're finding these in association with lots of stone tools and lots of carbonised hazelnut shells.
So we're certain that these are the results of human activity.
I have some here that we had from the excavations, and where they've been processed.
And you can just about see there some tiny, tiny pieces.
They're very fragmentary, but every now and then, you get something which is recognisably of a certain type of bone.
There's a tiny little fish vertebrae.
That's a fish tooth, I think, actually.
Yes, I think that's a fish tooth.
Very, very small.
The stone tools and fish remains reveal that these people lived by fishing and foraging on the coast.
But the discovery of the farmers fields nearby shows that times were changing.
In a landscape which is so heavily associated with Neolithic farmers, through Seamus' work, to be able to look here at the very final hunter gatherers gives us an opportunity to answer some very basic questions.
Were these same people, who were the hunter gatherers and the farmers? Or was there a wave of different people arriving, or small groups of different people? Whoever these predecessors of modern farmers were, they'd taken a crucial step towards controlling their food supply.
Now, they could plan ahead for the winter and leaner times.
But there's is an enigma surrounding these early beef and dairy farms that remains a puzzle.
Where did the first Irish farmers get their first livestock? And their first crops? Someone had to introduce cattle, sheep, wheat, and barley into Ireland.
It wasn't here before that.
But the question is, and the question still remains, did these Beal Derrig fisher gatherers, did they switch to farming, or were they replaced by farming? And we just don't know.
Beyond the mystery of Ireland's Stone Age farmers, we pass the towering sea stack off Downpatrick Head.
We're heading towards the sheltered haven of Sligo Harbour.
Here, rivers run into the Atlantic forming an estuary that's full of life, where an unusual encounter with nature awaits Miranda.
You might expect to see a great many things along the coast.
Birds, seals, even a passing porpoise.
But I'm off to look for something quite surprising.
It's thought to be Ireland's oldest native animal.
And I've been told the best place to see them is on an island.
I've come to Oyster Island looking for hares.
Irish hares, to be precise.
Hi, Neil, all right? You spotted any yet? 'Dr Neil Reid studies changes in hare populations all over Ireland.
He's already on their trail.
' We know this is a hare run as opposed to foot path because, if you look along it, there will be dung every few metres.
Right there! And you can see there's a cluster of dung right here.
Look at that.
They're a different shape from rabbit droppings.
Yeah, they're about twice as large.
And they put them every few metres along all of their runs around their home range.
There he goes, along the beach.
Before long, the Irish hares overcome their shyness.
I didn't think I'd see so many.
There are more hares than you could shake a stick at! They are very different from the European hare that I'm used to seeing.
The ears are much shorter.
The Irish hare's actually a mountain hare, but it doesn't live in the mountains, it lives all throughout the altitude from the sea, here on the coast, right up into the mountains, so it's everywhere.
Over the last century, Irish hare numbers have generally been falling.
But on Oyster Island, the population's actually increased.
It's because these hares are used in a field sport that in other countries, including Britain, is controversial.
Hare coursing.
Now, hare coursing conjures up all sorts of very brutal images, in my mind, anyway, of hares being chased across fields and killed by dogs.
But it's quite different over here, isn't it? In England and Wales, hare coursing along with all hunting with dogs was banned in 2005.
But it's still legal in the Republic of Ireland.
And, in fact, it's quite popular.
There are about 75 coursing clubs.
These hares on Oyster Island were introduced by the hare coursing clubs.
Every so often, in preparation for a coursing event, they capture some of the animals.
At the competitions, two greyhounds pursue a wild hare.
The winner is the first dog to turn the hare.
The dogs are muzzled to minimise injuries, and after competitions, the hares are released back to where they came from.
I'm not comfortable with the idea that hares should be managed for sport, but here there may be a positive side to it.
It's places like this that coursing clubs manage so that they have a stockpile of hares.
They're managing these hares on this island They're very healthy.
Exactly.
They find good spots, with good habitat.
They're on the island so they're away from predators.
So, un-intuitively, hare coursing might be helping some populations which are well protected.
Hares have been here in Ireland for over 30,000 years.
They've seen glaciers come and go, adapting to wherever they found themselves, including the sea shore.
They seem to be all running along the beach, is there something down there that they like? When the tide will be out, I've seen them grazing in amongst the seaweed.
And they will take seaweed.
I think it's quite unusual behaviour, I don't think it's very well documented, but I assume there are salts and nutrients in that seaweed that they won't be getting from the grass up here.
And so they're mixing their diet and having a varied diet.
They really are a very coastal hare.
Absolutely.
Hares are making their mark here now, but travel further up Ireland's west coast, and the animal tracks are much older.
The relentless Atlantic has eroded the coastline to reveal the remains of an ancient life form, which has given the headland its name - Serpent Rock.
If you take a walk along here and come across these shapes in the rock, you could be forgiven for thinking they're the remains of snakes.
And for centuries, that's exactly what people thought they were.
It's hardly surprising, because snakes play a starring role in Irish mythology.
Legend has it that every "loathsome and poisonous serpent" was driven from Ireland by St Patrick.
True to the legend, there are no snakes in Ireland now.
But then, there's no evidence that there ever were any.
So what's going on here? Every one of these was once an animal living around 340 million years ago.
They were a kind of coral and we know they only ever lived in the warm water of shallow, tropical seas.
These tube shaped creatures grew up from the sea bed, capturing their food from the water in the same way as sea anemones.
An ancient, primeval sea bed now exposed to the brooding Atlantic.
In the worst of its moods, most people seek shelter.
But not those who brave the sea at Tullan Strand.
The sweeping three mile beach is a second home to Easkey Britton.
She shares her unusual name, Easkey, with a famous surf wave.
In Irish, it means fish.
Hardly surprising she's turned out to be Ireland's champion woman surfer.
This part of the coast, it's really special for me.
It's where I grew up and where I learnt to surf.
When I started surfing, it was a really small scene and I was the only kid on my beach in the middle of winter time.
And all my friends thought I was mad.
And now it's just really popular.
I guess everyone wants a little taste of it.
Surfing's definitely defined who I am, the choices that I've made in life.
Whatever mood the oceans in, sort of, defines how our day's going to be.
Here at Tullan is great, it's our, I guess, swell magnet spot.
Because of the cliffs, the waves bounce off it and makes them a bit bigger right along the cliff edge.
What really draws me to it is that aspect of freedom.
It's such an unpredictable environment.
The energy of the ocean's infectious.
I mean, you catch that wave, and you're tapping into something that just feels bigger than yourself.
What drives you as a surfer to get that feeling that only a surfer knows, that "buzz", where I guess you even lose the feeling of yourself being separate from that experience.
It feels like sometimes that you're on that wave forever and it actually only lasts a few seconds.
Constant currents and powerful gales cross the Atlantic and crash on these shores.
Sometimes they wash up tragedy.
At Dunkineely, it's not only locals who are laid to rest in the peaceful churchyard.
Dick Strawbridge is looking for the grave of a British soldier who didn't make it home.
There we go.
556746, Trooper A Freeman.
This'll be Albert.
Albert Freeman came from Gainsborough in Lincolnshire.
His local paper records the tragic events of his death in 1940.
Trooper Freeman was drowned when his ship, the Arandora Star, a former luxury liner that was carrying German and Italian internees to Canada, was torpedoed into the Atlantic.
Albert's body was one of many washed up on the Donegal coast.
He was found by the Irish servicemen manning this observation post as they watched the Second World War unfold offshore.
Ireland's National Archivist, Michael Kennedy, is with me to explain the role of the men stationed at lookouts like this.
They could see convoys, they'd see aircraft flying over protecting the convoys, and they'd occasionally see German aircraft flying by attacking the convoys.
The idea is you're here, you're observing the battle of the Atlantic out in front of you there, out off Ireland's west coast.
These watchmen were onlookers to a world at war, because Ireland was neutral.
The Irish didn't even call it a war.
It was known as The Emergency.
Publicly, the British Government denounced Ireland's neutrality.
But Michael's discovered that the two governments were holding talks in secret.
Let's looks at some secret documents that show more of what was going on.
It's not just secret, it's "most secret".
This only came out in the early 1990's.
It was hidden in the archives until then.
And it's written by a man named Joseph Walshe, who was Ireland's top diplomat.
And the title of it is, "Help Given by the Irish Government "to the British in Relation to the actual Waging of the War".
So there's a lot being done here that we didn't know about.
OK, so the important ones here, say, point two, here.
"Broadcasting of information relating to German planes "and submarines in or near our area," so out here.
So these posts were actually feeding information.
That's right.
The men of the coast watching service were reporting first to the Irish Intelligence Services, and then the reports were going over to the British military, as well.
'Ireland's close contact with the British government brought other benefits, too.
' And you can see here another one, the third point.
"Permission to use the air for their planes," that's British planes, "over certain specified areas.
" The Allies used flying boats to help protect the vital North Atlantic convoys from U-Boat attack.
Those flying boats were stationed on Lough Erne in North Ireland.
The shortest route to the Atlantic meant flying through Irish air space directly over Donegal.
Using this route required the permission of Ireland's leader, Eamon Da Valera.
The Donegal air corridor, it was called, it was negotiated over the Christmas of 1940 into 1941.
And through it, Da Valera gave the Royal Air Force permission to fly right behind us here, across Donegal bay, and out into the North Atlantic.
The shortest route to get out to port.
Exactly.
Protecting the convoy.
Stopping the Germans starving Britain into submission.
Yeah.
Just along the coast at Carrigan Head is an even bigger clue to the Irish contribution towards Allied air effort.
There were 83 of these strange markers located strategically along the Irish coast.
Look carefully and the stones spell out EIRE, marking this as neutral Ireland for German and Allied pilots.
Look closer, and there's more.
What's the squiggly bit at the top? It's a number, 71.
71 is the number of the lookout post here.
OK, and what's it for? That was put in at the request of the American Ambassador in Dublin.
And the reason that was there was that, this is 71, we were at 70 earlier on today at St John's Point.
Each post around the country has a number.
What he wanted this for is because in the run up to D-Day and the assault on Germany, there were aircraft, flying fortresses, liberators and so on, coming across the Atlantic.
You see the number, you know where you are.
That makes sense.
You come all the way across the Atlantic knowing where you are, so important! What's to stop the German pilots using it? Well, they didn't know about this.
The numbers were only given to the American pilots by the Irish.
It doesn't sound very neutral.
These navigational markers, and the secret route through Irish air space, were a significant advantage to the Allies.
Walshe writes at the bottom here, he says, and it's in his own hand, "We could not do more if we were in the war.
" So it's serious, high level co-operation that is twisting and bending the parameters of legal neutrality out of shape.
Evidence on this coast tells us a surprising story of Ireland's active participation in the Second World War.
Testimony to a secret bond between countries on the edge of the Atlantic during desperate times.
Skirting the cliffs of Slieve League, I'm on the final leg of my journey to Arranmore Island.
Around here, you can't escape the power of the mighty Atlantic Ocean.
It's carved out massive sculptures to remind us that for millions of years it's battered Ireland's north-west coast.
The islanders of Arranmore have an intimate relationship with the fickle sea.
So at the heart of the community there's a lifeboat station.
Now, there's no way I could leave these shores without meeting the men who know more than anybody else about the harsh realities of life on the edge of the Atlantic.
The lifeboat men, who brave the wildest storms to bring help to those in peril.
The RNLI here in Ireland is the same organisation that operates in Britain.
Yet the crew of the RNLI's Arranmore boat are Irishmen operating in Irish waters.
It's remarkable that the Royal National Lifeboat Institution's presence in Ireland has survived the struggle for independence and the troubles that followed.
It begs a question for Terry Johnson, one of the RNLI's top brass.
I must admit, I'd never really thought about it.
It was almost a surprise to think that there's a ROYAL National Lifeboat Institution in the Republic of Ireland.
Well, it's always been the RNLI.
And it was operating for nearly 100 years before Ireland's government was formed in 1922.
And they approached the Irish Free State Institution and said, "We're here in Ireland, our lifeboat crews want to continue the work.
" And the government said, "Well, we welcome and support you in that.
" It's not about national boundaries, it's not about England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and Northern Ireland.
It's just about the sea.
And if you're in it, the RNLI will come and get you out of it.
The Irish Coastguard work with the RNLI to provide a vital search and rescue service for mariners in the North Atlantic.
The Sikorsky Search And Rescue helicopter is on its way to join us for an exercise that'll test the skills of both crews.
There's about to be a seafarer in troubleme! So far, I've done a lot of talking about the Atlantic Ocean.
But now it's only fitting that I get a proper taste of the beast itself.
Am I going in, yeah? OK.
OK.
Let the air out of your suit.
Without my dry suit, I wouldn't expect to last more than matter of minutes.
Being adrift in the ocean as the life boat disappears from view is unsettling.
In a real emergency, my distress flare could be a life saver.
The plan is to pick me up and land me on the deck of the moving life boat.
A procedure the crew practise for rescues when there's a number of people in the water.
Imagine this in a ten foot swell.
With the ten tonne helicopter hovering directly above me, I'm being blasted by the downdraft from the rotor blades.
Brilliant.
The lifeboat's purposely travelling into the wind, and I'm flying through the air at 15 knots, following it! The reason? It gives the pilot more control, because flying forward, the helicopter gains lift, so it's more stable, if more scary.
I would never even contemplate taking part in an exercise like this if it wasn't with the RNLI and the Coastguard.
Not only will they rescue anyone, irrespective of nationality or creed, but they'll go out a 100 miles into the worst Atlantic storms have to offer to get their job done.
Now, that's class! From the wilds of the west of Ireland, our journey round the British Isles and beyond continues next time along the majestic west coast of Scotland.
If you want to know more about our coast and beyond, The Open University has produced a booklet with ideas and information to inspire you.
For a free copy, or to find out more about Open University programmes on the BBC, phone: Or go to the website:
A vast ocean meets this lonely shore, and mighty cliffs rise up to mark the boundary between land and sea.
For millennia, people have stood here, in awe of what lies beyond.
Now we're following in the footsteps of those who've battled to survive and to thrive on this wild Atlantic shore, a voyage of discovery along Ireland's North West coast.
And the team's along for the ride.
Alice is searching for Ireland's first farmers.
Oh, yes, I've got a stone.
That is remarkable.
Dick discovers how Mr Marconi sparked a radio revolution to transmit messages across the Atlantic.
Hey! We have sparks.
Miranda tracks down Irish mountain hares, lying low on the coast.
There's more hares than you can shake a stick at! Barefoot Nick explores a magical island community.
That's the smallest school I've ever seen! And I'm all at sea Am I going in, yeah? .
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relying on the life boat crews and air crews of the Atlantic Rescue Service to keep me dry and high.
This is Coast.
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and beyond.
From the west coast of Wales, we've come to the west coast of Ireland, for a 600-mile journey around these shores.
It'll take us all the way up to Arranmore Island in Donegal.
But our journey begins in Galway.
The walled city of Galway.
There's nothing between here and North America, but sea and ocean of sea.
In the 19th century, wave upon wave of emigrants trusted their luck crossing the Atlantic to flee poverty and famine in Ireland, for a new life in a new world.
The family ties and shared history that bridge 2,000 miles of ocean now bring Irish descendants back across the water.
In June 1963, a famous son of America returned here in triumph to the land his great grandparents had left in despair.
All of Galway turned out to salute the world's most powerful man.
And I'm here to look for the man who took this photo.
He arrives in Galway to be welcomed by Mayor Ryan and Bishop Brown of Galway.
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was in Ireland to reconnect with his roots.
The whole of Galway spilled onto the streets for the biggest party the city's ever thrown.
Kennedy's great grandparents had emigrated to Boston Massachusetts over 100 years before in the potato famine.
Now, JFK wanted to remind the crowd of the family ties they also shared with the States.
If you ever come to America, you'd see down working on the docks there .
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some O'Doherty's, Flaharty's and Ryan's and cousins of yours who've gone to Boston and made good.
In the crowd that day, taking pictures of JFK for the Galway City Tribune, was a 19-year-old photographer, caught on film, on his first big job.
Almost half a century later, I'm here to meet Stan Shields, the man who took the picture that brought me here.
That's the picture.
It's the picture of all the ones I took of my career that I remember, and I take pride in having took it.
It wasn't easy.
Every time Stan got close enough, there always seemed to be something or someone in the way.
Stan had to seize his last chance as JFK got into the limo.
I saw him in the car and I stared at him until he looked my way.
And I pointed the camera and pointed at him.
And he said, yes.
So I opened the door of the car, jumped in, lifted up the camera, and this fella jumped at me.
His nightmare was somebody getting too close to the president with the wrong idea? Yeah, but I didn't realise that.
Kennedy said, "It's OK, Jim, he's a friend.
" So he let me go Really, he said, "It's OK, Jim, he's a friend"? Yeah, he's a friend I knelt up, took the picture and shook hands with him.
And thanked him for coming.
These images of joy are sadly prophetic.
The motorcade, the open topped limousine.
So much like that day in Dallas just five months later when JFK became the victim of an assassin's bullet.
And how did it feel those months later when you heard that he'd been shot? I got an awful shock.
You felt you'd lost a friend, seriously, you you felt you'd lost a friend.
Grief washed across the Atlantic.
Pain shared between people bonded by blood.
But this special relationship with America goes back further than you might think.
90 million years ago, what's now Ireland and North America were joined together.
Then they began to drift apart.
And the world's second biggest ocean emerged - the Atlantic.
It dominates life on the Irish coast, yet the Atlantic remains full of mystery.
We know more about Mars than we know about the oceans.
And the reason for that is the vastness of the oceans, they take up most of the planet.
They're really deep, a huge body of water.
I've joined James Ryan, from Galway's Marine Institute and we're out here to check on this.
It's a scientific buoy that's processing a constant stream of information about the ocean.
Battered by the waves, occasionally it requires a little loving attention.
Oh, there we go.
So a more physical life than I imagine for most scientists? It is! This is the bit I really like, when we get away from the desk and the computers.
Hanging below the buoy are data probes to monitor temperature, salt content, wave motion, nutrients and even the dolphins' comings and goings.
Wow, beautiful.
So what do you have to do now that we're out here? I just want to raise up the sensors which are down at the bottom of this big pipe and in order for us to check them, we have to haul them up.
The underwater sensors need a clean to keep them working reliably.
It means scientists can now study the Atlantic without ever leaving their desks.
It's sending its information out.
Sending the information 24/7, it's sending data all the time.
There are plans to install a network of these buoys to track the progress of global warming.
This is one buoy here on the edge of Ireland.
There are other equivalent buoys all around the world, all very new technology.
They are, I suppose, like the heart monitor on a patient.
We are checking the physiology of the oceans here and monitoring it at a time when it's really vital for the planet.
We're finally learning to cherish this precious ocean that previous generations saw as territory to be conquered.
Past the Slyne Head Lighthouse, our journey continues on to Clifden.
The first people to see this view from the air were the pioneering aviators Alcock and Brown .
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who completed the first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight by landing here in 1919.
But a few years before, this was home to another transatlantic breakthrough.
Dick Strawbridge is searching for its remains.
In its day, this was the world's biggest communications hub.
The brainchild of an Italian entrepreneur.
Just over 100 years ago, this man, Guglielmo Marconi, the pioneer of radio, brought his men here to set up the world's first wireless telegram service.
We want to discover how Marconi did it.
And why did he come here to this isolated peat bog on the Irish coast? When Marconi arrived, his challenge was immense.
Build the most powerful transmitter the world had ever seen.
Good to see you, sir.
If you just want to swing around that way.
I've assembled a team of experts who'll try and generate a radio signal with the same technology that Marconi pioneered here in Ireland.
You want to try and align those two insulators with these two vertical members here.
We've got electronics engineers from the Galway and Mayo Institute of Technology, supported by radio experts from the Irish naval service, and they're all here to unpick the puzzle that Marconi cracked in 1907.
Just to confirm, we have arrived at the Clifden site and we're going to conduct the Marconi exercises, over.
Clifden's one of the closest points between Ireland and North America.
From here, Marconi planned to send and receive radio signals a staggering 1,900 miles across the Atlantic.
He built a sister station at Glace Bay in Nova Scotia.
This was years before it was possible to transmit voice messages.
So he used Morse code, electronic pulses that correspond to letters of the alphabet.
Marconi sent the first transatlantic radio message from Poldhu at Lands End.
But six years later, to set up as a business, he uprooted to Ireland.
Marconi proved radio communications at Lands End, didn't he? So why did he come to Ireland? Poldhu radio site for Marconi wasn't large enough for the type of antenna structure he was experimenting with.
Marconi was building big.
Here at Clifden, there was room for a huge antenna suspended on poles 200 feet high.
All that's left of the mighty structure are dozens of concrete anchor blocks for the masts.
To get some sense of the scale, I've asked our guys from the Navy to act as markers.
See that, the far lad there, he's only a bout a third of the way? Absolutely, that guy at the very top there of the hill, he's one third of the way of the entire antenna.
This was a ginormous antenna.
You could say the biggest in the world at that particular time.
Nothing like this had been seen before.
An antenna over half a mile long! It would need up to 300,000 watts of power to send messages all the way across the Atlantic.
So Marconi had to generate lots of energy on site.
That's why he built a power station in the middle of a bog.
The two metre thick foundations are intact, but little remains of the hardware itself to tell us how it worked.
He had a lake which he needed for water supply for his DC generators, which were right here beside us, that's the remnants of the DC generators over there.
Amazingly, the generators were driven by a steam engines which burnt a traditional Irish fuel.
Every where you look, what do see? Energy.
Turf peat.
They actually used peat for fuel? Absolutely.
He had six generators in here, three working and three on standby at all times.
But Marconi still needed a way of storing the electrical energy from his peat-fuelled generators and releasing it rapidly.
The solution was to construct a capacitor or condenser.
We're trying to build one like Marconi did from steel plates.
Adding plates increases the electrical energy a capacitor can store.
Unlike a battery, it can be charged up quickly and discharged in a split second.
This was the key component that enabled Morse code to be received loud and clear 1,900 miles away.
This is huge.
That may look huge today, but compared to Marconi, this condenser, this is minute! Look, have a look at that picture.
Have you seen this?! This is a man here.
We're talking about each panel being 12 times bigger than that? If we think the panels at the bottom were about 12 feet, which would be about three of these sheets wide, and about 30 feet tall, which is between seven and eight times 25 times the size? Absolutely.
And how many did he have? You'll not believe this, he had 1,800 sheets.
This condenser housing was 350 feet long and 75 feet wide! We've built a Marconi style steel plate condenser, but what about generating the radio signal itself? The man with the biggest collection of early radio equipment in Britain is Bob Smallbone.
He's arrived with a rare and crucial bit of kit that dates right back to Marconi's time.
That's cast iron, weighs a tonne.
1910 rotary spark gap.
We're ready to go.
Get it connected, good man.
In 1907, powering up such a rotary spark gap was no mean feat.
Marconi's peat-powered steam engine drove his generators.
We're using petrol power.
We should be getting, what, about 230, 240 out, 230? But our generator's output is too low.
I should be expecting 220.
A century ago, Marconi overcame much bigger problems than this.
Out here, it's a bit of an unknown quantity.
Marconi's men had to be inventive as they struggled to turn transatlantic radio messages from an experiment into a business.
After some tweaking, it's all systems go.
That's on top.
That's it.
That's 220, so we're happy with that.
Just one more part of the circuit to complete.
Bob's brought along a Morse key.
An absolute replica.
So, that's exactly what they would have used 100 years ago? Exactly.
Here in Clifden? Here in Clifden.
There you go, no expense spared here today.
Let's get it wired up.
Perfect.
Marconi was an astute entrepreneur.
He wanted to make communications by wireless telegraph more accessible and create a big market for his ground-breaking service.
Here's an advert of the time, Dick.
The Marconi-gram! Yep.
'By making messages more compact, they'd use up less air time and so it'd be a lot cheaper.
' Marconi's Wireless Telegraphic Code book.
You just use one word and he gives you a whole sentence.
And those aren't real words? No, they're not.
Abrotanoid? Abrotanoid.
What a cracking word! Bankrupt stock will realise large amount.
That's a very long sentence for one word.
It is.
That would cost me eight pence.
8p.
We're getting a feel for the challenges Marconi faced here in 1907, trying to generate his revolutionary transatlantic radio messages.
Now, the ultimate test.
Frank has now got a live feed.
Is anybody else worried? If you touched the steel plates now, you'd become part of a 6,000-volt circuit, and almost certainly die.
The condenser's wired up, which means we can store lots of energy.
So we need to get everybody safe, flip the switch, and we'll be sending Morse a long way using our condenser.
Do you want to do a quick safety check for me please, sir? Clear the danger area.
Can you confirm the danger area is clear? Yes, it is clear.
Thank you.
On my mark.
Five, four, three, two, one, mark.
You're in control.
Whoa! We like that! We like that! We're looking good.
That is awesome.
Isn't that good? That's pretty, isn't it? That's really good.
I saw the big smile coming out there.
The high voltage sparks are jumping across a tiny air gap between the stud contacts.
When these rotating contacts line up, and the Morse key is pressed, the spark creates a signal.
Marconi's rotary spark gap was five feet in diameter and the sound of the sparks could be heard over half a mile away.
As well as making audible sound waves, the sparks are also creating invisible radio waves.
Even without connecting our scaled down model to an antenna, it's so powerful, it's actually transmitting through the air.
This is a radio that'll pick it up? A conventional radio, set to long wave, we should be able to pick it up.
If we head off, can you send us a message of some description? I can indeed.
Excuse us.
SIGNALS BUZZ ON RADIO Isn't that a beautiful clean spark!? We've got 100 watts in there.
This is still going.
And there's no antenna? Marconi had something like 100,000 watts.
Our signal could be picked up almost half a mile away.
Over a century ago, when Marconi launches his transatlantic wireless telegraph service, it heralded the dawn of a new era of high-speed communications.
A big idea that made the world seem a little smaller.
On our journey along Ireland's north west coast, we've reached Cleggan.
Its bustling harbour is the point of departure for islanders and travellers.
The local pub is run by Noreen Higgins, who is Cleggan born and bred.
Busiest times tend to coincide with the boats.
There's a service going to Inishbofin every day all year round, weather permitting.
The fine weather brings them out from under the stones, a good day like this people come to Cleggan.
I'll have some of them.
OK.
If they come to Cleggan, they want to eat the crab, they want to eat the lobster, you know? Particularly in the summer time, you can be jam packed and then the boat will be leaving at 7.
30 and at 7.
25, the whole place clears out.
Now, thanks very much, folks, thank you.
When you've lived on the coast, it's hard to live anywhere else.
We love the blue skies and the calm weather and that, but there's a real beauty to it in the winter time as well, you know.
You can get raging powerful seas.
It's a very nice lifestyle, if not, you know, the busiest or most lucrative and that.
But there's a good quality of life here and people that like it, like it, you know? It's lovely.
We're heading east towards the holy mountain of Croagh Patrick.
Wherever there's a beach, you'll find a smattering of holiday retreats.
The temporary residents of this shore seem compelled to journey as far west as they can to the very edge of Europe.
And they're not alone.
For thousands of years, people have been drawn here.
The mountain of Croagh Patrick is the main attraction for those on a spiritual journey.
Following their well-trodden path is Nick Crane.
I'm on the holy mountain of Croagh Patrick where St Patrick is said to have fasted for 40 days.
Once a year, thousands of pilgrims make the climb to the 762-metre summit.
Many of them in bare feet.
Some Catholics brave the pain of this barefoot pilgrimage as a penance.
But I'm here on a mission of my own.
The pilgrimage I'm making is to celebrate one of nature's great spectacles and you need to get high up to take it in.
The extraordinary islands of Clew Bay.
It's a beguiling water world, unlike anything else in the British Isles.
Local mythology counts Clew Bay's islands at 365.
One for every day of the year.
I'm intrigued to discover how this community of islands once supported a community of people.
Mary Gavin-Hughes still sails these waters.
She's one of the last generation of self-sufficient islanders who've fished, and farmed, in Clew Bay.
What was it like living on the Islands? It was heaven on earth living on the island.
It was very peaceful, great tranquillity.
Mary grew up in a world with no electricity, in a tight knit community separated by water.
What's that building over there? This one here is, erm, known as Cullen school, that's Cullen Island, that was the school.
That little white building? Yep.
That's the smallest school I've ever seen in my life! By the time Mary was a teenager, she was roving around Clew Bay on her own.
This picture here shows how we used to row to and from home.
Here you are.
It's a heavy looking boat, these oars are absolutely huge.
They were hand made, my dad actually made them, and, erm Yeah, they were good and sturdy but we needed them for the weather we were up against sometimes.
You look as though you're enjoying yourself there.
Of course I am.
Smile, Charlie.
That's his home.
Mary's father taught her to feel at home on the water, harvesting the sea's bounty.
But they didn't live on fish alone.
We did all our farming on the island, our fishing and we were very self sufficient.
The grass seems really quite lush and rich.
The soil of the island is very rich.
You can see just over here where we grew our own crops and the evidence of the ridges.
Those lines on the turf? Yeah.
It was fantastic for the potatoes and all the vegetables.
You had to be able to turn your hand to everything, living on an island.
The fertile soil is a clue to how the extraordinary landscape of Clew Bay formed.
Its islands are made of the rich residue left behind by glaciers.
20,000 years ago, much of Ireland was covered by a vast ice sheet.
As the climate cooled, and warmed, the ice advanced and retreated, moulding the land underneath, and creating the distinctive features that became Clew Bay.
Paul Dunlop is an expert on how glaciers made the mounds which formed these islands.
These are known technically as drumlins, but where does the word come from? The word drumlin comes from the Gaelic word druim, which means a small hill.
Any glacial landscape you go to, you find these landforms.
They're always called drumlins.
What's so striking is the repetitive pattern of drumlin islands across the bay.
Paul's developed a theory that a wave like motion under the melting ice created these distinctive shapes and patterns.
It's a process similar to what happens when the tide goes out on a beach.
leaving those familiar wave-like ripples in the sand.
If you take a look around nature, you find wave patterns everywhere.
You find them in the clouds, on the beach.
Ripples on sand.
Yes, exactly, and ice flowing across sediment can produce the same scenario.
As the wave goes up, it's leaving sediment on the surface of the land, which then becomes a drumlin.
That's right.
It is amazing that the most brutal forces working deep beneath the ice so long ago left us their legacy - this beautiful bay.
For seafarers who know these islands and reefs, it 's a place of protection from the North Atlantic.
But without local knowledge, it's also a treacherous maze.
400 years ago, this territory was controlled by an extraordinary Gaelic leader who lived in this.
The Tower House at Rockfleet sits on a natural slab of bed rock.
And at high tide, it's surrounded on three sides by water.
Hello.
Hello there! Can I come in? You're more than welcome, but mind your head.
Denise Murray knows every nook and cranny of the Rockfleet Tower House.
But first, I have to find her in this a warren of a castle.
Each floor has a spacious room, but the passages and stairways twist and turn, as well as being unbelievably narrow.
Who's the most famous occupant of here, then? The main occupant of this tower house was a woman named Grainne ni Mhaille who lives on in legend as the Pirate Queen of Connaught, which does her a disservice because she was much, much more than that.
She was a trader, pirate, mother, grandmother and the wife of the man who eventually became the overlord of Mayo, with her financial backing.
Will we go further up? Yes, mind your head.
Very impressive that the most famous occupant here is a woman.
Yes.
To be remembered from that time.
Grainne ni Mhaille, the Pirate Queen, is sometimes referred to by an Anglicised version of her name, Grace O'Malley.
Grace saw the sea as her domain, so anyone who crossed it was fair game.
She would stand here, having come up from her hall, and look out across Clew Bay.
And she would see a ship.
And down below, she had three galleys, 200 fighting men, with oar and sail, and they would take over across the bay like rockets and capture whoever was passing.
She particularly despised the merchants of Galway who had a monopoly on the wine trade.
Many a Galway-bound merchant ship fell pray to Grace O'Malley's ships.
Eventually, they came looking for her.
She could defend this castle from attack, which she did in 1579 where ships were sent from Galway to arrest her because of her piracy.
And she beat them off, so much so that the man in charge of the expedition said he was afraid she was going to capture him.
This is warrior ship.
She had the values a marshal society valued, she just was a woman and a mother.
Grace brought up her children here, and although the tower would have had home comforts, its primary purpose was to protect the O'Malley's from their enemies.
And what are these for? They're quite simply for dropping things down on top of people.
Grainne's standing here, her castle is under attack, the last thing she wants them to do is get in the door.
So she's here, they've got oil, they've got pitch, they've got anything that will burn or anything that is disgusting.
And they pour it down here.
In the O'Malley house, security was paramount.
Even if attackers got into the ground floor, Grace had installed another line of defence.
Instead of a stone staircase there was a wooden ladder that could be removed.
And even if they got past that there was another surprise in store for any 16th-century raiders.
This is not an easy building to get around, is it? No, and deliberately so.
To get through that door even somebody as short as me has to bend down to come through.
Obviously, a fully armoured man in here has the advantage, he can just kill you.
So what they would do is if you had managed to get up those wooden stairs, the first person up would be caught, their throat would be cut and they'd be thrown back, it's called the murder hall, onto their comrades below as a little disincentive to come any further.
This is one wild country.
It's the wildness of the ocean that dominates now as we journey north-west to Achill Island.
Massive marine ramparts speak of the power struggle between land and sea.
People, too, have left their mark in stone.
The remains of communities who finally conceded defeat in an age-old battle to cling on to this coast.
Further around the coast of County Mayo, communities still thrive at Beal Derrig.
Beal Derrig doesn't have a village centre as such.
Each family home is surrounded by fields, precious land for farming.
It's an agricultural tradition that goes way, way back.
Alice is time-travelling back to its beginnings.
Underneath my feet are the preserved remains of the oldest farm site in the British Isles.
The discovery was made back in 1934 when this man, Patrick Caulfield, was cutting peat in these fields and kept on striking stones buried in a regular pattern.
Patrick's son, archaeologist Seamus Caulfield, has continued his father's investigation into the stones beneath the bog.
Seamus came up with this very simple technique of probing to plot their locations.
The probe goes through easily, doesn't it? So, what am I hitting there, Seamus? You're hitting ground level, and now we're hitting on something higher.
You can actually hear it hitting on the stone.
I can.
The deeper you probe the peat, the further back in time you go.
The depth and pattern of the finds forced Seamus and his father to an astounding conclusion.
The stones were placed here before Stonehenge.
That's a stone that someone lifted into place 5,500 years ago.
It hasn't been seen or known about for 5,000 years.
And we're hearing it now for the first time.
That is amazing.
Mapping the site, they realised they might be following the lines of buried walls.
We're hitting a wall in section, are we? Do you think? Yes, we're coming across the wall and it should now begin to drop the far side of it.
Some of this massive site has been excavated to confirm the theory that the lines of stones plotted with all that probing were collapsed walls that would originally have stood around a metre high and a metre wide.
These buried walls once marked out the British Isles' oldest network of farmers' fields.
They extend over this mountain, over the mountain in the distance, and they're large, enclosed fields appear to be for cattle, grazing land for cattle.
It's likely that 5,500 years ago, people were engineering the landscape here to rear animals for food.
These are the fields of Ireland's first farmers.
The long parallel walls run all the way from the cliff edge for half a mile inland.
The layout suggests that cattle were reared here for meat and milk, because walled fields meant the farmers could separate stock and control grazing.
This extensive farm would have supported as many as 1,000 people.
So this is a massive undertaking.
People must have been working as a team to build all these miles and miles of stone walls.
They had to be.
It's not a single operation, it's not a few families.
It's a large community, making a decision to divide the terrain like this into these long, large fields.
Someone was making the decision and they were sticking to it.
The move to farming was a revolutionary change in lifestyle.
Nearby, on the Beal Derrig coast, there's evidence of other people who'd lived here just a few hundred years before the farmers.
Hello, Graeme.
Oh, hi, Alice.
Have you got some archaeology appearing there? Yes, we do, we have a range of archaeology.
Graeme Warren's searching for the leftovers of meals eaten 6,000 years ago, buried amongst the stone tools of people who survived by hunting and gathering along this sea shore.
One of the things that makes the site so important is that we have preserved fish bone.
Just in here, underneath this stone, you can just make out some very, very small creamy white little flecks sticking out of the soil.
Tiny.
They don't look like very much, but they are actually pieces of prehistoric fish bones.
In some places, we're finding these in association with lots of stone tools and lots of carbonised hazelnut shells.
So we're certain that these are the results of human activity.
I have some here that we had from the excavations, and where they've been processed.
And you can just about see there some tiny, tiny pieces.
They're very fragmentary, but every now and then, you get something which is recognisably of a certain type of bone.
There's a tiny little fish vertebrae.
That's a fish tooth, I think, actually.
Yes, I think that's a fish tooth.
Very, very small.
The stone tools and fish remains reveal that these people lived by fishing and foraging on the coast.
But the discovery of the farmers fields nearby shows that times were changing.
In a landscape which is so heavily associated with Neolithic farmers, through Seamus' work, to be able to look here at the very final hunter gatherers gives us an opportunity to answer some very basic questions.
Were these same people, who were the hunter gatherers and the farmers? Or was there a wave of different people arriving, or small groups of different people? Whoever these predecessors of modern farmers were, they'd taken a crucial step towards controlling their food supply.
Now, they could plan ahead for the winter and leaner times.
But there's is an enigma surrounding these early beef and dairy farms that remains a puzzle.
Where did the first Irish farmers get their first livestock? And their first crops? Someone had to introduce cattle, sheep, wheat, and barley into Ireland.
It wasn't here before that.
But the question is, and the question still remains, did these Beal Derrig fisher gatherers, did they switch to farming, or were they replaced by farming? And we just don't know.
Beyond the mystery of Ireland's Stone Age farmers, we pass the towering sea stack off Downpatrick Head.
We're heading towards the sheltered haven of Sligo Harbour.
Here, rivers run into the Atlantic forming an estuary that's full of life, where an unusual encounter with nature awaits Miranda.
You might expect to see a great many things along the coast.
Birds, seals, even a passing porpoise.
But I'm off to look for something quite surprising.
It's thought to be Ireland's oldest native animal.
And I've been told the best place to see them is on an island.
I've come to Oyster Island looking for hares.
Irish hares, to be precise.
Hi, Neil, all right? You spotted any yet? 'Dr Neil Reid studies changes in hare populations all over Ireland.
He's already on their trail.
' We know this is a hare run as opposed to foot path because, if you look along it, there will be dung every few metres.
Right there! And you can see there's a cluster of dung right here.
Look at that.
They're a different shape from rabbit droppings.
Yeah, they're about twice as large.
And they put them every few metres along all of their runs around their home range.
There he goes, along the beach.
Before long, the Irish hares overcome their shyness.
I didn't think I'd see so many.
There are more hares than you could shake a stick at! They are very different from the European hare that I'm used to seeing.
The ears are much shorter.
The Irish hare's actually a mountain hare, but it doesn't live in the mountains, it lives all throughout the altitude from the sea, here on the coast, right up into the mountains, so it's everywhere.
Over the last century, Irish hare numbers have generally been falling.
But on Oyster Island, the population's actually increased.
It's because these hares are used in a field sport that in other countries, including Britain, is controversial.
Hare coursing.
Now, hare coursing conjures up all sorts of very brutal images, in my mind, anyway, of hares being chased across fields and killed by dogs.
But it's quite different over here, isn't it? In England and Wales, hare coursing along with all hunting with dogs was banned in 2005.
But it's still legal in the Republic of Ireland.
And, in fact, it's quite popular.
There are about 75 coursing clubs.
These hares on Oyster Island were introduced by the hare coursing clubs.
Every so often, in preparation for a coursing event, they capture some of the animals.
At the competitions, two greyhounds pursue a wild hare.
The winner is the first dog to turn the hare.
The dogs are muzzled to minimise injuries, and after competitions, the hares are released back to where they came from.
I'm not comfortable with the idea that hares should be managed for sport, but here there may be a positive side to it.
It's places like this that coursing clubs manage so that they have a stockpile of hares.
They're managing these hares on this island They're very healthy.
Exactly.
They find good spots, with good habitat.
They're on the island so they're away from predators.
So, un-intuitively, hare coursing might be helping some populations which are well protected.
Hares have been here in Ireland for over 30,000 years.
They've seen glaciers come and go, adapting to wherever they found themselves, including the sea shore.
They seem to be all running along the beach, is there something down there that they like? When the tide will be out, I've seen them grazing in amongst the seaweed.
And they will take seaweed.
I think it's quite unusual behaviour, I don't think it's very well documented, but I assume there are salts and nutrients in that seaweed that they won't be getting from the grass up here.
And so they're mixing their diet and having a varied diet.
They really are a very coastal hare.
Absolutely.
Hares are making their mark here now, but travel further up Ireland's west coast, and the animal tracks are much older.
The relentless Atlantic has eroded the coastline to reveal the remains of an ancient life form, which has given the headland its name - Serpent Rock.
If you take a walk along here and come across these shapes in the rock, you could be forgiven for thinking they're the remains of snakes.
And for centuries, that's exactly what people thought they were.
It's hardly surprising, because snakes play a starring role in Irish mythology.
Legend has it that every "loathsome and poisonous serpent" was driven from Ireland by St Patrick.
True to the legend, there are no snakes in Ireland now.
But then, there's no evidence that there ever were any.
So what's going on here? Every one of these was once an animal living around 340 million years ago.
They were a kind of coral and we know they only ever lived in the warm water of shallow, tropical seas.
These tube shaped creatures grew up from the sea bed, capturing their food from the water in the same way as sea anemones.
An ancient, primeval sea bed now exposed to the brooding Atlantic.
In the worst of its moods, most people seek shelter.
But not those who brave the sea at Tullan Strand.
The sweeping three mile beach is a second home to Easkey Britton.
She shares her unusual name, Easkey, with a famous surf wave.
In Irish, it means fish.
Hardly surprising she's turned out to be Ireland's champion woman surfer.
This part of the coast, it's really special for me.
It's where I grew up and where I learnt to surf.
When I started surfing, it was a really small scene and I was the only kid on my beach in the middle of winter time.
And all my friends thought I was mad.
And now it's just really popular.
I guess everyone wants a little taste of it.
Surfing's definitely defined who I am, the choices that I've made in life.
Whatever mood the oceans in, sort of, defines how our day's going to be.
Here at Tullan is great, it's our, I guess, swell magnet spot.
Because of the cliffs, the waves bounce off it and makes them a bit bigger right along the cliff edge.
What really draws me to it is that aspect of freedom.
It's such an unpredictable environment.
The energy of the ocean's infectious.
I mean, you catch that wave, and you're tapping into something that just feels bigger than yourself.
What drives you as a surfer to get that feeling that only a surfer knows, that "buzz", where I guess you even lose the feeling of yourself being separate from that experience.
It feels like sometimes that you're on that wave forever and it actually only lasts a few seconds.
Constant currents and powerful gales cross the Atlantic and crash on these shores.
Sometimes they wash up tragedy.
At Dunkineely, it's not only locals who are laid to rest in the peaceful churchyard.
Dick Strawbridge is looking for the grave of a British soldier who didn't make it home.
There we go.
556746, Trooper A Freeman.
This'll be Albert.
Albert Freeman came from Gainsborough in Lincolnshire.
His local paper records the tragic events of his death in 1940.
Trooper Freeman was drowned when his ship, the Arandora Star, a former luxury liner that was carrying German and Italian internees to Canada, was torpedoed into the Atlantic.
Albert's body was one of many washed up on the Donegal coast.
He was found by the Irish servicemen manning this observation post as they watched the Second World War unfold offshore.
Ireland's National Archivist, Michael Kennedy, is with me to explain the role of the men stationed at lookouts like this.
They could see convoys, they'd see aircraft flying over protecting the convoys, and they'd occasionally see German aircraft flying by attacking the convoys.
The idea is you're here, you're observing the battle of the Atlantic out in front of you there, out off Ireland's west coast.
These watchmen were onlookers to a world at war, because Ireland was neutral.
The Irish didn't even call it a war.
It was known as The Emergency.
Publicly, the British Government denounced Ireland's neutrality.
But Michael's discovered that the two governments were holding talks in secret.
Let's looks at some secret documents that show more of what was going on.
It's not just secret, it's "most secret".
This only came out in the early 1990's.
It was hidden in the archives until then.
And it's written by a man named Joseph Walshe, who was Ireland's top diplomat.
And the title of it is, "Help Given by the Irish Government "to the British in Relation to the actual Waging of the War".
So there's a lot being done here that we didn't know about.
OK, so the important ones here, say, point two, here.
"Broadcasting of information relating to German planes "and submarines in or near our area," so out here.
So these posts were actually feeding information.
That's right.
The men of the coast watching service were reporting first to the Irish Intelligence Services, and then the reports were going over to the British military, as well.
'Ireland's close contact with the British government brought other benefits, too.
' And you can see here another one, the third point.
"Permission to use the air for their planes," that's British planes, "over certain specified areas.
" The Allies used flying boats to help protect the vital North Atlantic convoys from U-Boat attack.
Those flying boats were stationed on Lough Erne in North Ireland.
The shortest route to the Atlantic meant flying through Irish air space directly over Donegal.
Using this route required the permission of Ireland's leader, Eamon Da Valera.
The Donegal air corridor, it was called, it was negotiated over the Christmas of 1940 into 1941.
And through it, Da Valera gave the Royal Air Force permission to fly right behind us here, across Donegal bay, and out into the North Atlantic.
The shortest route to get out to port.
Exactly.
Protecting the convoy.
Stopping the Germans starving Britain into submission.
Yeah.
Just along the coast at Carrigan Head is an even bigger clue to the Irish contribution towards Allied air effort.
There were 83 of these strange markers located strategically along the Irish coast.
Look carefully and the stones spell out EIRE, marking this as neutral Ireland for German and Allied pilots.
Look closer, and there's more.
What's the squiggly bit at the top? It's a number, 71.
71 is the number of the lookout post here.
OK, and what's it for? That was put in at the request of the American Ambassador in Dublin.
And the reason that was there was that, this is 71, we were at 70 earlier on today at St John's Point.
Each post around the country has a number.
What he wanted this for is because in the run up to D-Day and the assault on Germany, there were aircraft, flying fortresses, liberators and so on, coming across the Atlantic.
You see the number, you know where you are.
That makes sense.
You come all the way across the Atlantic knowing where you are, so important! What's to stop the German pilots using it? Well, they didn't know about this.
The numbers were only given to the American pilots by the Irish.
It doesn't sound very neutral.
These navigational markers, and the secret route through Irish air space, were a significant advantage to the Allies.
Walshe writes at the bottom here, he says, and it's in his own hand, "We could not do more if we were in the war.
" So it's serious, high level co-operation that is twisting and bending the parameters of legal neutrality out of shape.
Evidence on this coast tells us a surprising story of Ireland's active participation in the Second World War.
Testimony to a secret bond between countries on the edge of the Atlantic during desperate times.
Skirting the cliffs of Slieve League, I'm on the final leg of my journey to Arranmore Island.
Around here, you can't escape the power of the mighty Atlantic Ocean.
It's carved out massive sculptures to remind us that for millions of years it's battered Ireland's north-west coast.
The islanders of Arranmore have an intimate relationship with the fickle sea.
So at the heart of the community there's a lifeboat station.
Now, there's no way I could leave these shores without meeting the men who know more than anybody else about the harsh realities of life on the edge of the Atlantic.
The lifeboat men, who brave the wildest storms to bring help to those in peril.
The RNLI here in Ireland is the same organisation that operates in Britain.
Yet the crew of the RNLI's Arranmore boat are Irishmen operating in Irish waters.
It's remarkable that the Royal National Lifeboat Institution's presence in Ireland has survived the struggle for independence and the troubles that followed.
It begs a question for Terry Johnson, one of the RNLI's top brass.
I must admit, I'd never really thought about it.
It was almost a surprise to think that there's a ROYAL National Lifeboat Institution in the Republic of Ireland.
Well, it's always been the RNLI.
And it was operating for nearly 100 years before Ireland's government was formed in 1922.
And they approached the Irish Free State Institution and said, "We're here in Ireland, our lifeboat crews want to continue the work.
" And the government said, "Well, we welcome and support you in that.
" It's not about national boundaries, it's not about England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and Northern Ireland.
It's just about the sea.
And if you're in it, the RNLI will come and get you out of it.
The Irish Coastguard work with the RNLI to provide a vital search and rescue service for mariners in the North Atlantic.
The Sikorsky Search And Rescue helicopter is on its way to join us for an exercise that'll test the skills of both crews.
There's about to be a seafarer in troubleme! So far, I've done a lot of talking about the Atlantic Ocean.
But now it's only fitting that I get a proper taste of the beast itself.
Am I going in, yeah? OK.
OK.
Let the air out of your suit.
Without my dry suit, I wouldn't expect to last more than matter of minutes.
Being adrift in the ocean as the life boat disappears from view is unsettling.
In a real emergency, my distress flare could be a life saver.
The plan is to pick me up and land me on the deck of the moving life boat.
A procedure the crew practise for rescues when there's a number of people in the water.
Imagine this in a ten foot swell.
With the ten tonne helicopter hovering directly above me, I'm being blasted by the downdraft from the rotor blades.
Brilliant.
The lifeboat's purposely travelling into the wind, and I'm flying through the air at 15 knots, following it! The reason? It gives the pilot more control, because flying forward, the helicopter gains lift, so it's more stable, if more scary.
I would never even contemplate taking part in an exercise like this if it wasn't with the RNLI and the Coastguard.
Not only will they rescue anyone, irrespective of nationality or creed, but they'll go out a 100 miles into the worst Atlantic storms have to offer to get their job done.
Now, that's class! From the wilds of the west of Ireland, our journey round the British Isles and beyond continues next time along the majestic west coast of Scotland.
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