Travel We picked up the

Travel We picked up the County Clare sector of the Wild Atlantic Way in its south-west corner at Loop Head, a long finger of land that leads to an old lighthouse and a stack of rock onto which the fated legendary lovers Diarmuid and Gráinne are said to have leapt when they were on the run from vengeful pursuers. It was a wild, lonely, thrilling place on a chilly morning, with the turbulent Atlantic waves booming against the striated cliffs like artillery blasts. From the tower you can look south over the mouth of the Shannon estuary, where bottlenose dolphins cavort, north to the Bluestack Mountains and east along the river to Limerick. To the west, it’s all ocean until New York. Loop Head is a place of strange rock formations, rare seabirds and stark, dramatic beauty. We had come here in an F-PACE SVR, Jaguar’s ultimate performance SUV, a luminous blue gemstone amid the muted winter colours as we drove past rock and field and bog, to the horseshoe beach and natural bathing pools of Kilkee. The ocean brings a lightness to the land, and even to its song. Clare is the most musical county in a nation much given to music. As Christy Moore sang in Lisdoonvarna, ‘Flutes and fiddles everywhere/If it’s music you want, you should come to Clare’. Virtuoso fiddler Martin Hayes thinks the woodlands, mists and green gentle hills of east Clare lend its music a sweetness; the rockier terrain of the west provides a more austere style. We went past Spanish Point, a renowned surfer’s GAEL FORCE An outpost of creative energy on the wild-spirited west coast of Ireland, Galway has come of age as the 2020 European Capital of Culture. Timothy O’Grady visits this cultural hotspot in a Jaguar F-PACE SVR Photography Rama Knight / Jaguar Magazine Jaguar Magazine / 63