I'm not sure Portsalon counts as 'travel' since you can get there now in just over an hour by car from my home in Derry. It was different when I was a child. We didn't have a car and the bus only ran once a day and in one direction only which meant if you got there you couldn't get back..at least until the following morning and if it now only takes an hour or so, back then it could take up to 3 hours or more, at least coming home since the bus spent an hour going round Fanad before hitting the narrow roads to Derry.
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| My mother, father, me and Terence |
I don't know what age I was when I first went to Portsalon. In those days we had a small, thatched cottage a little up the Corry Road. I have no real memory of the house but I do remember the barn and the pigsty and the pigs. I caught measles there one summer and had to be kept in the dark, which was easy as sunlight seldom penetrated the interior. Eventually, the house kind of gave way and we moved to Drum, a little down the road and closer to the beach. It was a big, draughty house and my mother believed it was haunted. It was mostly surrounded by fields and there was a very large tree at the front that I loved to climb. When I was 13 we stopped going to Portsalon as we had done every August that I could remember. It was no longer 'a family' thing but over the years until my father died my mother and I would still visit and stay with friends or in B&B's. There was an hotel; a massive, glitzy affair overlooking the bay and out of our price range. Finally it burned up, lay in ruins for awhile and is now the site of several apartments and holiday homes.
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| Me with cousins Jim and Maurice at Drum |
My childhood memories of Portsalon are of long summers when the sun was always shining, of the Clintons and the slanty rock, of hiding in the corn with my cousin Terence and watching the tide come in. Back then, we knew everyone who lived there but after my father died and I stopped going, looking further afield for 'travel' I lost touch with the local inhabitants. The place became more popular and people started building holiday homes there; today it is hardly recognizable from the Portsalon of my childhood. One of the first to build a holiday home there was my cousin Terence, now married with his own family. He built it on a plot of land overlooking the golf course and the bay and there were no other houses near him. Today there must be a dozen or more. Indeed from the moment you turn at what we called the Crossroads there are holiday homes all the way to the pier and beyond. After Terence died his widow, Marian, sold her home in Derry and moved into the Portsalon house permanently. His older brother Vincent also sold up in Derry and moved to Fanad, but to a more remote spot closer to the lighthouse.
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| Yours truly overlooking Ballymastocker Bay |
The surprising thing is that while I have no real attachment to the place anymore, my cousins keep going back and a summer doesn't pass without one segment of the family entrenched in a number of houses there. When the Hynes family had their big reunion some years back, it was in Portsalon and not Derry. Now there are at least 4 generations who think of it as their home from home. But the original generation is dying out; how long after they are gone will the next generation and the one after that continue to go there? I once envisaged my ashes being scattered on the beach there but not anymore. If anything it will be in Spain I will be scattered. The long beach, the one between Knockalla and the village, is still breathtakingly beautiful and unspoiled. It isn't easily accessible from the road and people being what they are, won't walk the length of themselves as we say, to get there. Some years back 'The Observer' newspaper voted it the second best beach in the world after one in the Seychelles. I will continue to go back but less and less now I have found Spain. Of course, if we had Spanish weather here I would never have left in the first place.
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| The Hynes family reunion (and me, of course) |
