DAY 2 - The Mizen (21 DAYS OF RAGE)

This is the 2nd instalment of a 21 day writing series about maternal rage and anger.

In the visitor centre at the Mizen Head, Ireland's most south-westerly spot, there's a replica of what a bedroom in the nearby Fastnet Lighthouse would have looked like, an attempt to transport you in time and place, to make it feel as though someone had just stepped out of the room.

As a kid taken to the same place for my holidays every year and going back to this exhibit plenty of times, I always found the scene spooky, peeking round the door frame at the empty bed and refusing to step any further. It felt too real, like finding myself in someone else’s life. In the car on the way home I tried to imagine what life on a remote outcrop of rock in cramped living conditions might have been like, when you only had a radio to make contact with the rest of the world.

A few miles down the road was a beach we used to go to that wasn't accessible by car; you had to park and thrash your way through blackberry thorns and down a slippery chalk path to get to the beach. We used to pass a dilapidated house and my sister and I would dare each other to go inside, into the two roomed ground floor where cows had wandered and branches broken through windows. Up the stairs, just about sturdy enough to hold us, felt even more ominous: the iron bedstead still had sheets on it, a simple sign of a human who had lived and slept and washed and was now, for whatever reason, gone.

Ireland's tourist board has made a smart move in rebranding the west coast as the Wild Atlantic way, and there's no exaggeration in the label. It's an unbelievably stunning stretch of coast, sometimes gentle on the days when the clouds are blown away and the blue of the sky hits the water, with the green and yellow of the gorse bushes imprinted on my child and adult's mind forever and ever. And so often untamed, the fierce force of the tide as it smacks the jagged black rock, the salt spray flying high.

As an adult I tried to find a bit of coast I remembered from childhood, a rocky ravine with water slashing at the sides. It was maybe somewhere around Sheep's Head or Beara but I never found it, so it's just in my mind now, the sound of the water still in my ears.

Our own landscape must be affected by the landscape around us but like so many lessons staring us in the face, the learning can only happen when we open our eyes. We live blindly most of the time, or we haven't had enough practice at being somewhere different to understand what's right there in front of us.

In this part of the world the water, the rocks, the line of the land is unapologetic, it asks us to stand in awe and watch and be silent. There is moral neutrality, things simply move, way bigger than us. Nothing is held back and if anything tries the force of water and rock will find a way to make a change. Sometimes there is stillness and at other times there are apoplectic storms when it feels like the world is ending. But it passes. It completes its cycle, there is catharsis and recovery. There is some kind of resolution, when a new day begins.