APPROACH TO DONEGAL By BENEDiar KIELY. ']}RE ;best approach. to any beautiful place should be a :personal ;one, unaided by ma.p or guide book, but coloured by memories and associations; and fortunate is the man whose earliest memories are tied up ·with some place which the world thinks ibeautiful and which the world".s traffic has never managed to spoil. !Hidden somewhere in that bland and not very fresh piece of philosophising are my own reasons for thinking that I own the county of Donegal -the way .gipsies and tinkers and other wagon people own the world in spite of deeds to land, ground rents, trespass, traffic regulations, farmers' shot guns and cross dogs. Donegal was not my birth-plaice. A ma;n can be born anywhere, and there are men to whom their birth-places mean less than nothing. H was my father's birth-place. 'I.1hat',s much more important, for it means that Donegal was the first ipl•ace I heard stories about, and that from the earliest days it stood for adventure and blue· distance, for holiday and escape in the shape of everything from summer in the iRos1ses to rowdy excursions to Bundoran.. One of the first piece·s of POP.try I ever learned, after Lord Ullin's Daughter and The woman was old and feeble and grey, appeared as an advertisement in a Tyrone .newspaper. It was a resoundi!tlg verse, and no mockery ; and even if it was an advertisement it did not tamper with or inflate the truth : Bracing breezes, silvery sands, Booming b1-eakers, lovely lands. Come to Bundoran! And I1ong bef!ore rationing or the sugar train, or the raising in the Six Counties of the price of smokes and drink, the people responded to that invitation, cro·ssed the Border in their thousands, and tBundoran never disappointed them; nor, indeed, did those who ' f';..,1ched the then less frequented corners of the county, Rossnowlagh, Carrick, BaUyliffin, IGortaihork, lPort na Blagh, Carrigart, Hossapenna, Moville, ever regret their journeys. For Donegal is ever.y1where lovely and the Donegal ·people always kind. The idea that Donegal mas a land of adva.nt-age grew naturally out of my father·s 'Stories. There were stories of men who made poteen, and the wild shindys that took place when the pungent white liquid was drunk, of the stiller, who leaped, keg ln 1arm, i3G,
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