From Malin Head to Mizen Head: Arminta Wallace walks from Schull to Mizen Head.
There's something slightly spooky about the place where a country runs into the sea. In England it's called, bluntly, Land's End. The Romans, with their flair for flamboyant overstatement, dubbed the westernmost tip of mainland Europe finis terrae. The end of the earth. The name Mizen Head inspires the same spine-tingling shiver; the end, not of the earth, but - as every Irish schoolchild knows - of Ireland.
Beyond Mizen there is, apart from a few islands, nothing but an awful lot of open ocean. Stand on the edge and stare into that big, big blue for long enough, and you really do feel you're clinging to Europe by your fingertips.
But that's the end of the story. The town where I start my leg of this Irish Times crossing of Ireland gives exactly the opposite impression. Very laidback, is Schull. Very continental: all boats and gourmet sandwiches and tanned people strolling around in shorts.
"West Cork has been called the Levant of Ireland," says cheese-maker Giana Ferguson. "Lots of people have come here - the Huguenots, the Spanish, the French and, in the 1960s, the last wave of immigrants were the hippies and thinkers. And the extraordinary thing is that west Cork has opened up to all of them."
It has certainly opened up to cheese-makers. In fact, west Cork may just be the cheesiest place on the planet. Why? I ask Bill Hogan of West Cork Natural Cheese as we sit in the West Cork Gourmet Store drinking coffee. At least, I'm drinking coffee; Hogan is tucking into apple juice, some kind of creamy super-Brie whose name I can't remember, and salad leaves. He is as passionate about food as he is about the environment, the theatre, the visual arts and biodiversity. This, after all, is the man whose website quotes the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano: "In the colonial to neo-colonial alchemy, gold changes to scrap metal and food to poison".
A New Yorker by birth, Hogan makes a hard cheese named - after the long, low mountain that defines Schull's northern boundary - Gabriel.
"I came here because of the milk," he says. Which is ironic because, thanks to rising property prices and falling numbers of dairy farmers along the coastline, he will shortly be forced to north Co Cork instead.
Milk, Hogan explains as he shovels forkfuls of Brie onto my plate - "you know what? It will go really well with your lemon drizzle cake" - is to a cheese-maker as a grape is to a winemaker. West Cork's mild, humid climate produces lush green grass, which the cows graze all year, producing some of the best milk anywhere, and thus the best cheeses. One of the best known of the latter is Gubbeen, made by Giana Ferguson and her family at their farm 2km or so out of Schull. Like Hogan, Ferguson is a blow-in - an English kid who spent her summers on an uncle's farm on the island of Inishbeg.
"They made their own country butter. I'll never forget that taste - ever," she says, smiling her calm smile. It's that kind of home-produced taste that west Cork artisan producers aim for, she says - even though making quality food these days means battling against an ever-rising tide of rules and regulations.
"Good food is life-enhancing," Ferguson says, as I haul myself out of a chair in her shady walled garden and hit the road.
Outside the gate I meet a cow, who greets me with a hopeful sort of bellow-cum-bark before trundling off in the opposite direction. Apart from this cow, passing birds and the occasional rabbit, I don't meet a living soul on this first half (third, really) of my walk until I rejoin the main Schull to Goleen road at the townland of Altar.
Walking on roads in 21st-century Ireland, you have two choices. Walk on the main road and take your life in your hands, or walk on back roads and meet absolutely nobody. The latter is undeniably pleasant - the famous west Cork grass, much of which is being made hastily into hay while the sun shines, smells fantastic - but you end up chatting to cows, which is possibly not healthy. The cows seem to like it, though.
Back at my B&B I have a leisurely shower and gaze out at the panoramic view of the bay, relaxed and refreshed. Suddenly I realise that if I'm to make it to Schull Planetarium for the 8pm star show, I need to leg it. Thus I arrive at Schull Community College at 7.59pm, as dishevelled and sweaty as ever. At the door, an immaculate young man with glasses regards me dubiously. "Could you," I gasp, "fit in one more person?" "Ah," he says. "I could. Except that you're the only person. To do a show we need a minimum of five."
But as my disappointment is so acute, the young man - aka Mark Sweetnam, senior lecturer - agrees to go through the entire routine, complete with question-and-answer session, just for me. It is enthralling. Tough luck to all you people who stayed at the beach that Monday night - you missed a great show.
Next morning I set off for the assault on Mizen. This being Ireland - and summer - I've armed myself with rain jackets and fleeces and waterproof trousers. The continuing heatwave, however, ensures that the only puddles in sight are puddles of tar. Am I hallucinating, or is the road in serious meltdown? I'm not. With impressive promptness, Cork County Council begins a major gritting operation - too late, alas, to save the soles of my trainers which, within an hour, are coated in a layer of cow dung and tar, with strings of straw sticking out at jaunty angles front and back. (No wonder some of the drivers have been aiming straight at me; they obviously think I'm a hedgehog.) On the plus side, there's not a scrap of haze anywhere, and the lie of the land hereabouts is such that around every corner a small bay sparkles and glimmers in the sunshine.
Not to be outdone, the hedgerows glow with the sort of colour that would make a John Hinde postcard blanch: the reds of fuchsia and wild rose, the yellows of honeysuckle and buttercup and, as I approach the spectacular golden crescent of Barleycove beach, the pinks and purples of thrifts and sedges. Mizen Head 5km, reads the signpost. All uphill is what it doesn't read. I squelch on. Something unspeakable is happening inside my socks, and an interesting rash has developed around my left ankle. I arrive at Mizen Visitor Centre to discover that, according to the weather station there, the ground temperature is 25.7 degrees. I droop instantly, like an unwatered lettuce.
In the ticket office, a tall man rises from his computer and - somewhat heroically, given the state of my extremities - offers his hand to shake. He is, it turns out, Stephen O'Sullivan, a former lightkeeper and now manager of Mizen Tourism Co-Operative Society, a stalwart band of people who are struggling to keep Mizen Head Visitor Centre open despite, on one hand, chronic lack of funding and, on the other, the ravages of the sea, which is doing its best to dislodge the arched bridge (only recently re-opened after repairs) to the signal station itself, located on a coastal outcrop. Sue Hill, owner of The Heron's Cove restaurant and B&B in Goleen and a mine of information about local walks and sights, describes the bridge as "an iconic structure for west Cork". Any readers with €1 million to spare, take note: the Mizen bridge will celebrate its centenary in 2010. If it's still there.
I drive back to Toormore Bay, where my landlady, Margaret Whitley, calls me over to her garden hedge. "Look at this," she says, laughing and pointing down to the beach. Her sons Keith and Jason have put their pet lamb, Barney, on a lead and are taking him for a paddle so that the sea water can heal his sore foot. This is the same landlady who, hearing me tapping away on the laptop, knocks softly on my door and brings me a glass of Bailey's; the same landlady who gets up at a godawful hour next morning in order to make me breakfast. Much later, when I'm sitting somewhere else altogether, trying to sum up west Cork in a sentence, my mobile rings. I answer it cautiously, not recognising the caller ID. But I recognise the voice at once.
"It's Margaret," the voice says."I just wanted to make sure that you had a safe journey . . ."
Generosity and humanity way, way beyond the call of duty. There it is - west Cork 2005, in a nutshell.
Pointers and pitstops
Start point: Schull.
Finish point: Mizen Head.
Mode of transport: Walking.
Distance: 27.3km (17 miles) as the crow flies; this crow, however, walked for 29.75km. Go figure.
Three things worth stopping for: Food, food, and more food. Breakfast at the West Cork Gourmet Company, dinner at Heron's Cove in Goleen, takeaway lunch from the fish shop on the pier in Schull: a monkfish-and-prawn kebab and chips for €7.50. Also, a swim at Barleycove beach and a visit to the Schull Planetarium.
Best part of trip: The people of west Cork, especially the landladies of the exceptional B&Bs I stayed in, courtesy of the Family Homes of Ireland Guide 2005. Take a bow, Marie MacFarlane and Margaret Whitley.
Worst part of trip: Discovering that many of these exceptional B&Bs are threatened with extinction next year, when Fáilte Ireland regulations will demand that kitchens and dining-rooms must be totally separate entities. Fáilte my eye.
