‘It’s end-of-the-fucking-world stuff out there,’ I said.

The chorus of locals in the hotel’s lounge bar as always ignored me. I was a fretful blow-in, by their mark, and simply not cut out for tough, gnarly, west of Ireland living. They were listening, instead, to John Murphy, our alcoholic funeral director.

‘I’ll bury anythin’ that fuckin’ moves,’ he said.

‘Bastards, suicides, tinkers,’ he said.

‘I couldn’t give a fuckin’ monkey’s,’ he said.

Mweelrea is the most depressing mountain you’ve ever seen, by the way, and its gaunt, looming shape filled almost every view from the Water’s Edge Hotel, the lounge bar’s included. The locals drank mostly Bushmills whiskey and Guinness stout, and they drank them to great excess. I wiped their slops from the counter with a bar cloth I had come to hate with a passion that verged on the insane. I said, ‘But seriously, that’s one motherfucker of a high tide, no?’

Barely the toss of a glance I received. The talk had shifted to roads, mileage, general directions. They made a geography of the country by the naming of pubs:

‘Do you know Madigan’s in Maynooth?’

‘I do, of course.’

‘You’d take a left there.’

‘I have you now.’

The hotel had twenty-three bedrooms and listed westward. Set a can of peas on the floor of just about any bedroom and it would roll slowly in the direction of the gibbering Atlantic. The estate agent had gussied up the history of the place in the brochure – a traditional coaching inn, original beams, visited by Thackeray, heritage bleeding out the wazoo, etc. – and I had leapt at it. I was the last of the hopeless romantics.

The talk had moved on, briefly, from roads and directions.

‘If he’s still around when her bandages come off,’ Bill Knott, the surveyor, said, ‘he’s a braver man than me.’

‘Nice woman,’ John Murphy agreed. ‘As long as you don’t put your hand in the cage.’

Behind the bar: the Guinness tap, the Smithwick’s tap, the lager taps, the line of optics, the neatly stacked rows of glasses, and a high stool that sat by a wee slit of window that had a view across the water towards Mweelrea. The iodine tang of kelp hung in the air always, and put me in mind of embalming fluid. Bill Knott looked vaguely from his Bushmills towards the water.

‘Highish alright,’ he said. ‘But now what’d we be talkin’ about for Belmullet, would you say? Off a slow road?’

The primary interest of these people’s lives, it often seemed, was how far one place was from another, and how long it might take to complete the journey, given the state of the roads. Bill had been in haulage as a young man and considered himself expert.

‘I don’t know, Bill,’ I said.

‘Would we say an hour twenty if you weren’t tailbacked out of Newport?’

‘I said I really don’t fucking well know, Bill.’

‘There are those’ll say you’d do it in the hour.’ He sipped, delicately. ‘But you’d want to be grease fuckin’ lightnin’ coming up from Westport direction, wouldn’t you?’