Displaced in Mullingar:Visiting Newfoundland to see the wild gannets' nesting place brings many echoes of home, writes Michael Harding.

I suppose it's odd to go 3,000 miles to look at birds. I don't know anything about birds, except that I used to love the cuckoo's call, in the hills above Lough Allen, and the curlew's sean-nós song, and the caw of seagulls, laughing at the ocean.

In childhood I used to walk a headland north of Bundoran and sit on the edge of the cliff, with the green sea, and listen to the gulls' music. I would pass through many streets of gaudy one-armed bandits, chip shops and tattooed men with broad forearms, just to sit in a cement shelter on the cliff and watch the mad birds of Rogey dive.

So the wild birds of Newfoundland seemed like a good excuse to flee the streets of Mullingar for an entire week.

On my arrival I stayed in St Johns, in a timber house with bay windows. In the drawing room there were old bookcases with leather-bound books, a silent harmonium, and five white candles in a silver candelabra, standing on the mantlepiece. The room was dominated by a grandfather clock that sliced the silence in even portions.

I tried to imagine what the room may have been like in bygone days, when matrons in tight corsets sang hymns at the harmonium. Or when servant boys, with caps in hand, waited on the master's bidding.

But I couldn't. All I could see was Turlough O'Carolan, sitting on top of the bookcase.

It was in fact a beautiful piece of sculpture by the great OisíKelly - the blind bard was seated with his harp, his fingers alive and his eyes dead.

NEWFOUNDLANDERS HAVE BEAUTIFUL eyes, which is a gift the sea bestows, and some faces are still haunted by the scars of ethnic cleansing, far away and long ago; they are heroic, like birds blown off course in yesterday's storm.

Yet when they sing, they show no trace of longing for home, or no uneasy air of displacement. When they sing, they fold themselves up in songs, and sing with the warmth of children at a log fire on Christmas eve.

They sang all night. Long after dawn one man discovered he had run out of matches for his cigarettes, so he went down the road and stood at the corner, flagging the morning traffic, until he got lit up again.

Later that day I went to a flowershop and bought a bunch of flowers from a tall stick of a woman with grey eyes.

The shop was empty. There weren't even flowers in it, except for a few chilled stems behind glass.

I bought 12 big daisies, which she brought from the kitchen in her long fingers. And she folded them in pink paper and tied them with pink ribbon.

We both looked out the window towards the harbour, at a few rusting fishing boats, and the lights of a cruiser just arrived from Philadelphia.

"You look tired," she said.

I said, "I'm exhausted. I stayed up all night listening to someone singing."

"Were they good songs?"

I said, "They were worth a bunch of flowers!"

FOR THE FOLLOWING couple of days I hired a car, drove a few hours down the coast, and stayed in a cabin surrounded by birch trees on the southern shore. During the day I walked along the cliffs, and I dined each evening, on salmon glazed with maple syrup, at the Captain's Table.

And at night I lit a fire in the cabin and slept soundly in a big brass bed. In the middle of the night, I could hear the trees outside, whispering in the wind, just like they do in the hills above Lough Allen.

Over the week I ate deep-fried cod, pan-fried cod, cod fillets, cod bake with cheese, chowder and even cods' tongues. Then I had more cod.

And in the end I found the cliff I was looking for. The cliff at the end of the world; the cliff at the Cape where the gannets nest. Forty thousand of them.

The onshore wind swept the stench of their droppings into my face - a whiff so fierce that it reminded me of the monkey house in Dublin Zoo.

But they were beautiful, and I had found them; gannets stretching, kissing, preening, covering the sky above like confetti, diving into the ocean for fish, and then returning to the rock.

I stood on the cliff's edge for a few moments, and then I turned for home.