Duncannon is a lovely place in southwest County Wexford, located just on the coast of the sea and with magnificent views. It was the first place where I got to see the tides in a real life and seeing all these people walking their dogs, children and partners at the coastline is just like stepping into some novel that I love to read.
Today, after coming back from the little trip to Hook I felt that I want to belong to these people whose everyday life involves walks at the ocean and so I took my camera and went to wander around and find out what the ocean can tell me. Actually, it gave me a lot of nice colourful gifts and I spent more than an hour playing with them and my camera. Of course, when I found out that I had put the crab’s skeleton that I found totally upside down, I was a bit upset of my simplemindedness but it was the first time for me to find a crab 🙂 I enjoyed being a child again, almost wanted to start to build a sandcastle. Maybe the next time.
I have been really happy to spend again some time in Duncannon, a nice small village at the seaside where the sea lies just behind your garden fence and where it’s possible to watch the secret life of the sea. This time, it was mostly stormy, even when it wasn’t raining and when going on the beach, it was possible to feel how the wind is fighting with you and holding you back when you want to walk. But anyway, there were a lot of brave people walking their dogs or just wandering around despite the heavy wind. I tried to be among them and spent some time taking photos and listening to the song of the wind and struggling with the flying sand.
There are lots of marvellous places around Duncannon and this time I had a chance to visit quite a lot of them. The village itself is also very nice with picturesque views, some pubs, locals and summer visitors, small shops and sandy beach. But if you drive a bit you can visit easily the Hook peninsula, and the nearby towns Waterford and Wexford, the last one has given the county its name too.
I had been to Waterford before, but that time my stay was limited at the bus station, waiting for the bus that took us to Duncannon. This time, I was lucky to see the town twice, and try again this quite common way of travelling from one side of the river to the other. So it means that we just drove on the ferry, and after 5 minutes off again, and very soon we were in the centre of Waterford, where the Street Performers’ Festival took place. The first time when I saw this way of travelling, was when going to Cobh. This is something that we don’t have, but here it seems to be very common.
The centre of Waterford was very nice and the people who had come to see the performers didn’t mind the rainy weather. Fortunately, it wasn’t raining all the time and children could enjoy the performances. Especially cool was the drum band from Ireland which consisted of children in different ages and of their really enthusiastic teacher who encouraged them to play and act, what they did really good.
As the big clouds arrived we didn’t stay for the fireworks and we were smart because it started to pour rain and I don’t know if they could carry out any fireworks with such a weather. I would definitely want to come back to Waterford and spend some more time there.
I remember that in my 5th grade English student book there was a topic about tides – a long and boring story, mostly because of all the difficult expressions we had to underline and learn by heart. Just to refresh my memory I took down my old student book from the shelf (yes, I still have it) and looked up what it was about.
When learning it, I was probably like the ones who had lived long ago and didn’t quite understand how it all worked. Especially because we, living here at the Baltic sea, never had any tides and the water of the sea stood quite at the same place almost all year round, without very little exceptions and so it was quite hard to picture the tides. Later of course, when reading more literature, I got to know about it some more and in 2010, when visiting England and Wales, I was happy to recognize it, when seeing  the boats and yachts standing on the plain sand and I really thought about my old school book again.
We spent a nice day on the beach, found a really nice corner, where the cars were not allowed to park and enjoyed the warm day. Somewhere near 2 o’clock the water started to come back little by little. The life guards were busy to get the people back to the sea shore, because a lot of them, included myself, were walking on the wet sand that had been the bottom of the sea just a day before. And then the sea came back, just during about two hours. That was really amazing and unbelievable.
In the evening, the local musicians were performing at the pub and everybody was singing. It’s not possible to describe how much I liked it. For the first time in my life I saw people play Spoons, actually, I didn’t even know about that kind of instrument before. So besides being just great and fantastic and really full of enjoyment, it was also an educative weekend and I love Duncannon and want to come back the next year. And I am quite sure that I will. The next time it would be interesting to wonder around a bit more and discover maybe some neighbourhood as well.
Dublin Accent 