It was here in August 1979, that the Provisional IRA planted a bomb on a boat which belonged to Lord Mountbatten, Admiral of the Fleet, and the last Viceroy of India. At least a dozen guns have been recovered, so far.īut Mullaghmore harbour also has a tragic 20 th century story to tell. Their main danger is from storm damage, and a salvage operation was launched in 2015 to rescue what could be found. We don’t know exactly where the ships are, but, the timber wreckage found suggests that the organic remains are in a good state of preservation. The stones you can see are created from millions of fossilised sea creaturesĮventually, we found that we had covered three-quarters of a circle and reached the stretch of Streedagh beach where the three Spanish ships still lie eight meters down. Streedagh beach: the site where the three Spanish Armada ships foundered. But no wolf hound remains have been found here – at least so far. Its local name was the Tomb of the Wolfhound. But, as you can see, the tomb has now virtually disappeared again. The tomb is surrounded by a circle of boulders about 11 metres in diameter. The storm stripped off the sand and revealed a chamber constructed with limestone slabs with a passage leading up to it. It appeared in the 1840s after a particularly fierce storm.
Wild thyme, which scents the air as you walk pastīut pink and purple flowers flourish, too I saw both bell and ling heathers, and some wonderfully vivid purple wild thyme.Īuriel telling us about the wedge-shaped tombĪuriel stopped to tell us about the 5000 year old wedge-shaped tomb. It’s interesting how many of the flowers are yellow. There were plenty of more common flowers, too, like the yellow bird’s foot trefoil, St John’s wort and cat’s ear – which looks rather like a country cousin of the dandelion. There were orchids, too, like the pyramidal orchid, whose bright cyclamen-coloured flowers stood up like candles amid the dunes. Once I knew what they were, I saw them everywhere. We could hear larks, for example, and occasionally see them high above us, mere dots in the sky, singing.
AURIEL PRONUNCIATION FULL
What we were walking across was machair grassland, where grasses have bound the dunes together to create a diverse habitat, full of wild flowers, birds and butterflies, many of them rare. Yellow wild iris, these grow in profusion and make vivid yellow clumps amid the machair In places the sheets of limestone look almost like paving stones.
Woe betide any ship trying to reach a safe haven during a storm, here. The carboniferous limestone, some 350 million years old, has been carved by ice sheets during the last Ice Age into the lethally sharp sheets of rock we see along the coast today. Whichever way you look, the scenery is dramatic. Streedagh, looking across Donegal Bay to the mountains of Northern Ireland They still rest in eight metres of water off shore, and recent marine excavations have brought up a number of guns and other artefacts.Īuriel also told us the story of Francisco de Cuellar, a rare survivor of the Armada shipwrecks who wrote a detailed eyewitness account of his adventures and the struggle he had to survive and get back to Spain. Three of them: the Lavia, the Juliana, and the Santa Maria de Vison, foundered here after several ferocious storms had driven them onto the rocks. Our walk started at the Armada monument, a bronze plaque which showed the route the Spanish Armada ships had taken down the west coast of Ireland in their desperate attempt to get back to Spain in 1588. Looking in the opposite direction are the sand dunes of Streedagh (pronounced STREE-da, to rhyme with ‘Freda’) overlooking Donegal Bay. If I look straight across the water, I can see the unmistakable outline of Benbulben, the flat topped mountain beloved of the poet W. It was a beautiful day and, for once, my photos turned out as I wanted. In the photograph above, I am standing among the sea dunes at Mullaghmore. The walk covered a huge amount: local geology dating back 350 million years prehistory, we examined an interesting Bronze Age Wedge tomb 16th century history, hearing the story of the shipwrecks of three ships from the Spanish Armada which sank here in 1588 botany, walking over the machair grassland with its profusion of wild flowers marine geology: marvelling at the fossilized corals, sea lilies and other creatures strewn in profusion along the shore and 20th century history, seeing Mullaghmore harbour where the tragic murder of Lord Mountbatten, and three other people, two of them children, took place in 1979. In June last year, I was at Streedagh strand in Co Sligo, on Ireland’s west coast, on one of Auriel Robinson’s wonderful SeaTrails walks.
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