Leaving Cape Clear, and on to the mainland, my next walks were in footsteps of Ellen Hutchins, whose life was a far cry from the island woman I had found on Cape. My aim was to travel all the way up the western coastline to the tip of Donegal. It was only later that I realised that, in the excitement of my great-grandfather’s poetry, sailing, fishing and fighting, my great-grandmother and her story had been overlooked. I have pictures from that weekend – myself and my cousins leaning back against a whitewashed wall, cigarettes in hand.
On that occasion I had sat mutely, my cousins reciting some poems he wrote in Irish, while we all drank ourselves into oblivion. I had been to Cape Clear once before, in 2016, where with my mother's family I had celebrated the story of my great-grandfather John K, a skilful sailor involved in the Howth gun-running, in which he helped to unload the rifles used in the fight for Irish independence. I decided that a summer walking and thinking, through the lives of Irish women who had lived and worked along this Atlantic shore, might help me find meaning in my travels
#Footsteps of peig sayers series
She became the first of a series of women connected to this shoreline whom I would follow up Ireland’s west coast over the next three months, as I walked in the paths of other women who had also somehow defied expectation – who had been, in their own way, “wild.” I was midway through my first walk along the west coast of Ireland, in the footsteps of my great-grandmother Ellen Cotter, a lacemaker.Īt the end of the 19th century her skill with a crochet hook had allowed her to dodge a life of domestic service and teach her trade here, in a wooden school at Cape Clear’s North Harbour. I was at Ireland's southernmost point, a place where, centuries ago, sailors thought they might fall off. Two weeks past midsummer in June 2019, I stood on a cliff edge at the tip of Cape Clear Island, the Fastnet lighthouse a hazy silhouette against the horizon.
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