If you're thinking of booking into a certain establishment off the west coast this summer, maybe you had better get in quick. For it has been given prominence in a German colour magazine in its choice of some of the most interesting hotels worldwide, including the Danieli in Venice, and various paradisical places in parts of the world where the sun always seems to shine and the lucky people lie around, bathed in warmth and sloth. Anyway, to Ireland where the choice is the Clare Island Lighthouse, off Westport. A brilliant picture, which covers almost two pages of the colour supplement to the newspaper Die Zeit of Hamburg, shows the lighthouse and encircling wall in the foreground; in the distance a snowy or frosty portion of the Mayo coastline. The reporter, Christof Siemes, tells us that the boat Pirate Queen is already rocking in the harbour at the island and there is not a sight of the lighthouse tower. (He has been reading Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse.) To be sure, there are the remains of Grace O'Malley's castle ("the robber Diva, Patron Saint of our ferry. She was better at cattle-rustling, plundering and playing politics than any of the men of her clan"). Anyway, no tall lighthouse. But three-and-a-half miles along a gravel road, where the cliffs fall sheer into the sea, and beyond the cliffs lies America, he found his tower, but low, squat.
It had been crouched there since 1806 and up to 1965, he says, it signalled the way for boats into Clew Bay. Then in 1991, a Belgian couple, Monica and Robert Timmermans, bought the tower, the houses for the watchmen with a few sheds and some land - all surrounded by a high wall. In summer you can swim and dive and watch dolphins. In winter, the wind would take the face off you. The old lighthousemen, writes our reporter, going up to the tower for duty from their quarters, used to put a buckets over their heads. The Timmermans can put up 10 people in five rooms. It is suggested in the article that you take half-pension. The only restaurant on the island is an hour's walk away and the pub has been shut for a year.
But for the five-course meals provided by the Timmermans, writes our reporter, it would be worth your while even to swim to the island. In the same colour magazine is a brilliant full-page advertisement from Bord Failte, Skellig Michael in heavenly blue seas.