My heart besieged by anger, my mind a gap of danger. I walked among their old haunts. The home ground where they bled; And in the dirt lay justice like an acorn in the winter Till its oak would sprout in Derry where the thirteen men lay dead. (Seamus Heaney)

Tuesday May 26

Galway to Derry, via Foxford , Sligo and Donegal

After leaving Galway, our first stop was the little town of Foxford, which was recommended as a good stop for its Woollen Mills. The woollen mill was set up in 1892 by Sisters of Charity to provide employment for local people. Today it is still making beautiful woollen blankets, and also sells a wide range of Irish homewares and clothing. We browsed for a while and made a couple of purchases to be posted home.

We drove on towards Sligo, and then to Carrowmore, which has a site of megalithic burials/tombs. The burial sites were discovered, spread over a huge area. You might think that they are just a pile of rocks, but archaeologists have found human remains in some. The burial mounds date back to about 6000 years BC. That is older than the pyramids.

The site is rather understated and we almost missed it. Many of Ireland’s attractions are not overly publicised.

The drive from Galway to Sligo to Derry goes through very different types of Irish countryside – lush, green paddocks, bogs, dry rocky ground, rolling hills and impressive mountains shooting up vertically, wide river deltas and surf beaches. Every few miles we saw a ruined castle or a magnificent church, and cows, sheep and horses everywhere.

We arrived in Derry at about 6pm and checked into our hotel which is inside the city walls. Derry is a walled town. The walls were built sometime following the 1601 battle at Kinsale in the 17^th Century to keep the Irish chieftains and their armies out. It is also called The Plantation City, as many Scots were brought over to inhabit and populate the city, to increase the British presence. The Protestants were given all the good land, and laws were made to keep the Catholic Irish down. So begins The Troubles.

From our hotel window we look down on Butcher Gate and across the wall to Bogside, the Catholic side of Derry. We can see many of the Bogside murals.

 It is called Bogside, because originally Derry was an island in the middle of the river which slowly changed its course and one side of the island silted-up to become the marshy, wet bogside. It was the only place that the Catholics could live, mainly because the English/Scots did not want it.

The walls surround the old town and we walked around them after dinner.

 The walk is about one mile (it is the UK after all, no metric here). As we were driving in the GPS changed to the imperial system, and it was a bit of a challenge to work out, as we were trying to find the hotel and follow directions of 0.2 of a mile, 0.6 of a mile – how far is that?

Dick’s observation. I find it very conflicting that we are staying on the unionists’ side of the wall rather than with the Catholic nationals. For 40 years we have looked on and wondered how can there be a resolution when so many families have been spilling blood for over 400 years? This impasse must have become part of each and everyone’s social, cultural and psychological make-up. Everyday they pass and see reminders all around them of their losses. It is no longer close to them as it feels close to me right now, it has become them and the only way out is to leave and make a future somewhere else.