I had come to Ireland, “a country I knew nothing about,” to lose myself in its misty, craggy hills, said Matt Gross in The New York Times. Ireland hadn’t been a blank slate to me; in fact, Irish cultural exports are so omnipresent in America that their spawning ground can come to seem “wholly imaginary,” a magical land where Guinness runneth over, the children recite Yeats, and U2 songs resound in the streets. I figured I should steer hard away from the beaten path to get past the reputation. So I decided to rent a Fiat and explore the Irish countryside without a map, GPS, or, “really, any sense of Irish geography.”
Pulling out of the parking lot in Dublin, I turned onto what felt like the wrong side of the road and my “heart raced with every careful shifting of gears.” But as I used the sun to navigate a southwestern path toward County Kerry, the rewards for my initial anxiety were “immediate and unending.” The Irish countryside was “remarkable, a constant flow of the expected green hills and greener valleys.” As I drove from glen to glen, I relaxed enough to enjoy the scenery and such “delightfully odd” village names as Kilgobnet and Ballygriffin. Sometimes, “a name would intrigue me enough to pursue it.” Other times, I let the road lead me, which is how I stumbled upon Powerscourt Waterfall, “about as classic an Irish image as you could imagine, all rocks and woods and fern-furred fields and white rushing streams.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
