My Coast: Anne Enright

My father grew up on a small farm just outside Kilkee in County Clare, and the farmhouse looked out over the Atlantic. We had long summer holidays in those days and we went swimming in a place called the Pollock Holes. We snorkelled all day in these big rockpools. It was utterly beautiful.

I don’t see it through completely rose-tinted spectacles. The west coast of Ireland has a lot of poverty. That beauty is mixed with a certain isolation. Anyway, in 2012, we rented a house north of Kilkee above the Flaggy Shore. I was writing there and could look out the window to the Aran Islands and up to Galway. I went out every day for a walk up the Green Road.

The Green Road is literally that – where the tarmac road stops and it’s unpaved. It’s in The Burren – a distinctive landscape of limestone with these lovely little wildflowers growing in the crevices and a few herds of goats in the heather scrub. I was writing about an Irishman in Africa while I was in County Clare. When I came back to Dublin, I wrote about County Clare. The Green Road takes the story of four siblings, one after the other, and then brings them all home for Christmas.

One of the reasons we went to Clare was that the surfing beach of Lahinch was down the road. Do I surf? I have been up on the board several times, but not for very long. I’ve spent days attempting to surf. My daughter can surf, my son lives in the waves, and my husband, he’s getting there, too. But there’s nothing better than a battering on Lahinch Beach.

The east coast is a whole different coast. I live near Dún Laoghaire and Sandycove and I go down to the sea every day. I think a day I don’t go to the sea is a day wasted for me. I just get such peace from it.

The Green Road by Anne Enright is out now, published by Jonathan Cape (£17.99 hardback, also available as an ebook).