On Muckross Head
Garrett Carr remembers the coast around his hometown in the north west of Ireland
I spent a lot of my youth adrift; living and working across many parts of the world, but I didn’t experience homesickness until I was about 29. It took me a while to diagnose myself as the homesickness was manifested abstractly and came and went in quick flashes. I wouldn’t have expected homesickness to feel like a seizure, although an emotional one, but that’s how it was. I’d stop whatever I was doing and close my eyes and find myself back in Donegal. But I’d not see family or old friends, I’d see a place called Muckross Head. I might even feel sea spray in my hair.
Muckross Head is a 10 minute drive from the fishing town where I grew up. It is a headland just a few fields wide and a couple of miles long and ending in a dramatic arrangement of black stone; horizontally layered slabs that form a wave-cut platform at sea level and, overhead, jut into the Atlantic wind. The slabs look like the remains of some vast interlocking puzzle, the other half borne away as continents parted. Standing there you sense deep time and you even think you can grasp it.
I always wanted to visit Muckross Head as a child, I requested it constantly. Clambering over the broken slabs was fun but even when very young I was gripped by the operatic drama of the place: white rollers crashing on the black stone, deep caves, echoes. I loved to walk about gazing at its cliffs and I still do. It was only in the last 10 years that I found chiselled into the face of a slab the name Sean Carr, the neat lettering suggesting it was the work of a schoolboy from the 1940s or even further back. I suspect my uncle, although I admit there would’ve been other Sean Carrs in the area. In 2024, about a dozen family members and I went to Muckross Head to spread the ashes of another uncle. Vincent had died in London and probably hadn’t visited Donegal in 20 years.
Whenever I bring a friend to Donegal I always take them there. Once, when I didn’t have a car, I had an unfortunate friend hike five miles in the rain to look at the place. In retrospect I understand what I was doing: I wanted him to see Muckross as a way of showing him who I am, the place is so tied up with my sense of self. More recently I’ve begun bringing my sons there too. We live in a different part of Ireland so they’ll never visit as often as I did but I hope to pass something of this inheritance to them. I know Muckross Head will never be built on, demolished or developed. It is a wonderful thing to have, this stable place, where the only changes are measured in geological time. So, those homesick seizures weren’t a bad thing. They were the soft jolt that you can see when a small boat drifts from a quayside and is tugged back by its tether.
Garrett Carr’s The Boy from the Sea was published by Picador in February 2025. He is currently reading Washington Square by Henry James