Many winters ago, as a young zoology student, I was fortunate to spend time in Newport, Co Mayo. At the time I was living in Dublin, and each time I stepped off the train in Mayo I felt an almost physical relief: the air was cooler, fresher and infinitely cleaner than the capital’s, as if it had been distilled into something entirely new.
But the true sensory relief came after nightfall when the inky blackness of the Mayo night fell. On one cloudless night, I stood alone on the shores of Lough Feeagh in Burrishoole, just north of Newport, and looked upwards at the spectacle on show: the Milky Way. It was a performance that opened up a portal into another world, one utterly unfamiliar to someone raised, as I was, beneath Dublin’s dome of perpetual brightness.
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