TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9
On our way to Mizen Head Signal Station, we stopped in Scull so Saffi could run around.
Mizen Head is literally breathtaking, nature at its grandest, in all its dizzyingly powerful glory. It made us feel like we had come to the edge of the world. Wild ocean spreads out to a forever horizon, curving over the earth, undulating and pulsing. Gigantic waves crash against angular, jutting rock walls, the height of skyscrapers, built of ancient mud and sand, crushed, folded and wrinkled by millennium of weather and sea, earthquakes and tectonic shifts. The waves dip into depths a quarter mile deep, their darkness chilling. Goosebumps crawled across my skin when I looked at them. And when the waves rise, the sea thrusts it forward with shocking, unfathomable strength, the froth and foam spitting enormous walls of white spray.
THE SIGNAL STATION
Located on the southernmost tip of Ireland, Mizen Head Signal Station consists of narrow, steep, fenced walkways and a lighthouse with a museum inside. Stairs dip down and up, a bridge crosses a large ocean water ravine where seals played.
The lighthouse on the point of the outermost rock operated until 1993 when it became this small, folksy, DYI museum. Though the museum lacks polish, it offers enough to conjure the life of the three men who lived and worked there, a sense of the fierceness of the storms that swept and rattled the structure, and the danger and isolation they must have encountered.
Places like Mizen Head make me feel like a tiny dot on this earth, vulnerable and fragile by comparison to the vastness and power of nature.
CATHEDRALS
In one of the first large cathedrals we entered in Chloe’s childhood, I explained one reason why they are built so grand. Meant to glorify and elevate god, they simultaneously are designed to make us feel small in god’s presence, to “put us in perspective” in relation to god. Nature, I would argue, does this a thousand times better, not in relation to god, but in relation to the earth. In some ways, to me, the grandeur of cathedrals is a testament not to god but to the ability of human’s to create monuments.
BEACH NEAR MIZEN HEAD
After walking the windy walkways of Mizen Head, we drove off into a landscape that is rocky, rugged and sparsely populated and stopped at Three Castle Head beach. The beach has fine sand, large waves behind which is a hill covered in tall, golden grasses. Saffi played in the water and romped through the grass. We followed her around to the back of the hill to find an inlet of ocean water, where a deflated floating bridge rested limply in the grass. In the summer, inflated, people use it to cross from the hill to the land on the other side.
On the hour drive home, we were all exhausted and satisfied as we left this magical place where the ocean is mighty, rugged and grand.
