Of course one feels free on a holiday: that’s what holidays are for. But I have rarely felt freer than when my younger brother, two wild Irish cousins and I, all aged 16 or under, drove across Éire to the south-west tip (with, I should mention, the permission and indeed encouragement of our respective parents). Setting off from Wexford in an ancient, definitely unroadworthy VW Beetle in the days before these vehicles had any classic cachet, with not even a provisional driving licence between us, it was a miracle that we arrived in Baltimore a day later — albeit decorated in mud and twigs after kipping the night in a ditch outside Cork where the Garda had passed their torches over us and grunted, leaving us to be the gypsies we so evidently were.
Half an hour or so on from Skibereen, Baltimore town is a pretty semi-circle of pastel-painted fishermen’s cottages around a harbour spiky with masts. I am sure that these days it is a tourists’ delight, with boating activities, linen-sheeted B&Bs and fresh crab and lobster mainlined from the sea. Our stay was slightly less civilised — but nevertheless infinitely enjoyable — sleeping in a recently converted cow shed (well, I say converted) and subsisting on baked beans and whiskey. With one tank of water and, if memory serves, no electricity, we washed our hair under an outside tap on the neighbouring farm. The farmers greeted my cousins in a foreign tongue and I was impressed with their grasp of Gaelic or Celtic or whatever they spoke in those parts, only to be told later that everyone was speaking in bog Irish accents. Experiencing an accent that Irish is worth the price of the ticket alone.
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