1995
“If it weren’t for the warning signs and the barbed-wire fence, you’d never know, would you?”
Rory is bent over a camera lens, looking out across Coolanagh. He has lived beside this place all his life, apart from his college years in Dublin, but he knows almost nothing about it.
We are out together in daylight in Mucknamore, for the first time ever. Walking out along The Causeway, we both felt exposed to the windows of the village staring into our backs, but out here, we’re beyond view, in the dip behind the dunes that faces Coolanagh called Lovers’ Hollow.
Oh yes, the irony is not lost on me. And as I look around at the wide flat expanse of sand and sea and sky, I get a strange, hall-of-mirrors feeling. I imagine Gran out here with his great-uncle Dan, and feel like their movemen
