As we reached the top of the hill and saw the view in front of us my heart thumped so hard I slammed my foot on the brake and declared that we had to turn back.
A wind- and sea-battered piece of terrain jutting out into the Atlantic ocean told us very loudly to go away.
I heard it in my head, as clear as a person saying it, and I pretended I hadn’t, but I had. So I stopped the car above that desolate valley and sat there, frozen, not knowing what to do or even how to turn the car in the narrow space.
Having climbed a steep hill on this grass-covered road, we balanced almost on the summit of it, with the road falling away in front of us. Into the distance ahead twisted the road through the rugged landscape but we couldn’t see the place we sought at the end.
We were looking for a ruin called Three Castle Head, famed for having a ghost called the White Lady, who is said to have appeared to the French woman Sophie Toscan du Plantier in the hours before she was found murdered on the driveway of her holiday home near the village of Goleen in West Cork in December 1996.
We had driven down here after a busy summer season during which we have seen almost nothing of the renowned coastal scenery around us because we have been running the B&B. After hearing from almost all our customers of their wonderful days out near Mizen Head, we drove down the peninsula and went for a winter walk on Barleycove beach with the dogs.
It was a bright sunny day, but the vast sandy spit was desolate and whipped by fast winds. We had to fasten our coats and force ourselves down it.
The dogs were ecstatic, throwing themselves in the freezing sea and galloping through sand dunes. The tide was through the middle of the sand so we walked on one side only. The pontoon bridge that links the two sides was piled in pieces on the dunes. The sand blew in the air. Out-of-season desolation.
I was gripped by foreboding. ‘I can’t go on,’ I thought, and I wondered where the thought had come from
We turned and walked back, the wind battering us forward so that we almost fell on our knees. ‘Hideous,’ said the builder boyfriend as we struggled into the car and pulled the doors shut.
The wind screamed and battered the car. I gave him a mince pie to cheer him up from a stash I’d brought, and as he munched I stared at the satnav. ‘Well, we may never come here again so we might as well see Mizen Head. It’s just over there,’ I said, and he didn’t care because his mouth was full of pastry. So we set off for the southernmost point of Ireland.
There it was around the bend, jutting into the ocean. We pulled into the car park of the observation point and visitor centre and I opened the car door. The wind nearly blew the door off and the BB shouted to shut it again.
‘I just want to see it, wait here!’ I shouted above the wind, forcing the door shut, and I walked towards the centre.
As I got there, it disgorged two Italian-looking tourists, owners of the only other car in the car park, and as they battled forward in the wind a lady inside the centre locked the door and shut off the lights.
Standing out there in a screaming gale on the edge of the world at sunset, I stared at the angry ocean and the precarious-looking bridge to an observation point, and then allowed the wind to blow me back to the car, passing an improbable children’s playground perched at the very edge, a smallish fence around it as a nod to stopping infants hurling themselves on to the rocks. The BB laughed as I pointed to it when I got inside the car. ‘Only in Ireland,’ he said. As we drove to the crossroads for the right-turn home, I said: ‘You know, we really are never coming here again, so shall we see Three Castle Head?’ For the sign at the junction showed the town near our home one way, and the site of the White Lady the other. Mouth full of mince pie again, he blithely said: ‘Why not?’
In fading light, we soon had to turn on to a barely-there boreen, and this went on winding ever narrower for quite a way until I feared we would get stuck. It mounted and mounted to a summit and that was when we caught sight of what we were driving into. I slammed on the brakes.
The BB pushed the box of mince pies on to the dashboard, his appetite lost. We looked down at dark cliff-top fields and a churning sea to the left of them. The ocean was throwing waves the height of skyscrapers into the air. The feeling was vertigo. The sensation of falling, as though we could topple into the sea, even though it was miles away.
‘We need to go back,’ I said. But he said we might as well see it now. So we drove very slowly forwards on the deserted track as the sun disappeared, the sky blackened and the rain merged with the spray off the sea.
I was gripped by the most awful fore-boding. ‘I can’t go on,’ I thought, and I wondered where the thought had come from. ‘I am lost,’ said a voice inside my head. ‘Go away,’ said the valley. I carried on driving but it was as if every dark thought I had ever kept at bay was pounding in my brain. The idea of a void gripped me. Too much space opening up in front of me.
We descended at last from the highly perched lanes and came down to a dip where a closed gate stopped us going any further. A sign left by the owners of the land on which the castle sits said the access was closed.
We pulled into a car park by the gate and sat staring at the sea. We could not see the castle, and I was glad. It was hidden beyond another hill we would not climb, thankfully.
Much has been written about Sophie and her death, but far too little, in my view, about why she came for a walk in this place in December on her own, in what would turn out to be her final hours. Allegations she saw the White Lady who portends imminent death seem farfetched.
All the same, the hostility of the landscape was baffling to me. ‘I don’t ever want to walk to that castle,’ I said, as we sat staring out at the darkening vale, before turning the car and retreating. He waited until we had driven for an hour and arrived home before telling me that he felt it too.
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