Last Saturday evening, at the Immrama Festival of Travel Writing, writer and journalist Manchán Magan made a fair point – were some act of god to befall Ballyrafter House Hotel in Lismore, Co Waterford, a good chunk of the world’s finest travel writers would have been wiped out in a stroke.
Rubbing shoulders in one room were Tim Severin, who has built boats out of leather and bamboo to recreate epic historical voyages, perhaps most famously that of St Brendan; some chap called Ranulph Fiennes, the legend in her own lifetime that is Jan Morris, who was in flying form at her reading on Sunday evening; and the visionary Pico Iyer. Local woman Dervla Murphy was also in attendance earlier in the week at a special screening of a documentary on her extraordinary life.
Strolling around Lismore at the weekend, it was hard to avoid the literary luminaries and this is a festival to be treasured. The only question is, how are they going to top this line-up next year? Hopefully they’ll all be back again – try to get there.
