Mo Laethanta Saoire: Conal Creedon's happy memories of Beara

In the first of our new series of summer-themed pieces, Conal Creedon recalls a childhood visitto his uncle in West Cork

Conal Creedon returns to the region where, as a nine-year-old, he spent a delightful week with his Uncle Jack.

MY MOTHER told of her loneliness when she first came to live in Cork City. On summer evenings, she would look westward and her heart would sink as the setting sun faded behind this urban horizon of cracked chimney pots and slate clad-buckled beams — her mind would carry her west, out of the city and all the way to a hillside farm on the Beara Peninsula, where she and her nine sisters were born and reared.

She sometimes spoke of crystal clear mountain lakes, sparkling like sapphires, along the craggy spine that runs the full length of the peninsula, all the way to the copper mines that sweep down to the white sands at Allihies. She said Beara had a coast of breathtaking beauty, a dramatic shoreline carved by the pounding of the wild Atlantic Ocean and kissed by the warm stream from the Gulf of Mexico bringing with it a hint of sub-tropical paradise.