Country diary: North for some, south for others, but impressive for all

Malin Head, County Donegal: Anything seems possible in this shifting, contradictory placeThrough the wind's bluster, I hear strident calls. However, as I scan the shelves of fields behind Ballyhillin beach, there's no sign of the barnacle geese that fly from Greenland to winter along this coast. My gaze lingers on knuckles of land that show how the shore rose as a glacier melted away at the end of the last ice age. So much of Malin Head is like this. Shifting. Contradictory. Hinting of a vast elsewhere, with giant energies hissing at the brink.When I first came here, decades ago, my parents teased me with this riddle: how could we be at Ireland's northernmost edge in - as the Northern Irish commonly refer to it - "the south"? But anything seems possible in this place. Islay might thicken out of the horizon's massed clouds. Like the child I was, I hunch forward as I squint. Maybe. Continue reading...