Tag: buncrana

Salam Alaykam Buncrana to Barcelona

For the past twenty years, I’ve gone on an autumn cycle tour in Europe. That first trip to Istria and northern Croatia with two friends, and I was hooked: to the airy freedom, to sharpened senses through changing landscapes, to the independence, a youthfulness returned.

A version of this piece first appeared in the June Issue III of Midnight Ireland. Support and purchase a copy at http://www.midnightireland.ie

            We bring our bikes for the week-long trip. Travel light, letting debit cards do the heavy lifting; depend on a few local words and phrases, and on the goodwill of strangers. September of 2025, we flew into Barcelona airport.

            I’m the map person; it’s been a lifetime’s interest. But maps give little sense of the changes in dialect and language. For this trip, I had learned a few basic Catalan phrases: Si us plau (thank you), una cayna (a beer from the tap) and Que parla anglès? (do you speak English?). They worked well and with a smile, and the body language of thank you goes a long way in any unfamiliar culture.

            We took a figure-of-eight route that looped through Girona down to the coast, north along by the sea and into France, overnighting to see Salvador Dalí’s imaginative weirdness in Figueres, and on to Girona, for a final overnight in the heart of the old city. 

And Salam Alaykum? I first used the phrase some fifty years ago returning overland at the end of a two-year stint as a volunteer in the Western Pacific; roughly following the Hippy Trail back to Ballymena in County Antrim. But the greeting had been lost to memory. It is, however, scratched in a worn notebook from that time, along with sketched fragments of that immersive journey through many cultural landscapes. Dipping into it occasionally, I’m in awe at how my younger self lived by his wits and travelled on a tiny budget for months on end.

            One Saturday morning two years ago, at Buncrana’s Park Run, wearing my Sanctuary Runners T-shirt, I was assistant timekeeper to Efe. A speaker played the hip-swinging track Salaam Alekum from the 1980s High-Life International album. Efe suggested I play it for Adenike. When I did, Adenike beamed and said Walaykum Salam.  Peace be on you, with her return of, and on you peace also, the Islamic greeting I’d forgotten.

Girona and the Costa Brava were a cyclist’s paradise: the city criss-crossed with marked, traffic-lighted routes, the countryside full of dedicated greenways and trails.

            We initially used an El Carrilet route that followed the bed of an old narrow-gauge railway, taking one to the coast in a short day’s cycle. The coastal cycling in this part of Catalonia is stunningly beautiful. Big sky sea views after long challenging gradients. Resting under shading pines, the years fall away; a breeze coming off the azure white-topped water far below, a sandy heat of scented pine, herbs and dried grass.

            At a small two-star hotel on the coast, a young man, I took to be of North African heritage, was dealing efficiently with our booking. While he did the paperwork, a text bounced into my phone from Adenike in Buncrana, Salam alaykum it began. I read it out, he laughed and said, Walaykum salam, send that back. It was a simple but yet affirming exchange that raised a smile for both of us.

            The following Saturday, we stopped for lunch, feeling lucky to find an isolated restaurant just off the old main road, on our route back to the Spanish border. Nearby, the elevated motorway thrummed with traffic. The casual lunch was a delight of French savoury and sweet dishes, under a packed terrace, draped with airy plants. Well-fed and charged with coffee and with a parting Si us plau, we set off uphill.

            After some three kilometres of steady climbing, we stopped in shade to cool and take on water.

            Three men walked downhill, passing where we perched on the metal barrier rail. Salam Alaykum seemed appropriate. The older of them stopped, turned, and beamed with some form of recognition. And took on, it seemed to me, a greater assurance. Salam, he said with a slight nod. Le Boulou? he asked, pointing downhill toward a town by that name.

            Cinq kilomètres, peut-être? I replied. We exchanged a few other words in broken French and Spanish. He smiled and walked off with a generous wave. Most likely, they had walked across the border to take up some migrant’s work, plentiful along the French and Spanish Mediterranean coast. They carried nothing that I could see; their shoes were well worn. 

            Spain hosts many North Africans, economic migrants and seasonal workers, some with their families. They cultivate, pick and pack fruit and olives that flow continuously towards the tables of northern Europeans. Others work in hospitality, that great Jekyll-and-Hyde descriptor. Undocumented for the most part. Yet they have not been invisible to those who recognise their value.

            In January 2026, the Spanish government announced it would regularise the position of some half a million foreign migrant workers, citing reasons of ‘economic and social cohesion’.

            To all of us who hope and work for a better life together, Salam Alaykum seems a fitting greeting, from Buncrana to Barcelona. I’ll use it when I can.

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A Slip Up

Running up past the fourteenth-century O’Doherty’s Keep in Buncrana, I turned right onto a grassy track that was once lined with houses of the medieval town, and slipped. My shoes had no purchase on a patch of mud. It was a minor skid that flashed me back to my first cross-country shoes, fresh out of their box. They had arrived that morning, mail order from a running magazine. I’d thrown a school bag from my shoulder to open this rare delivery.

O’Doherty’s Keep, Buncrana, Co Donegal.

At my first secondary school, I’d taken part in school games, though none particularly successfully. This four-year spell for those of us who failed the 11-plus exam, was to prepare us for the world of work at sixteen. P.E. class was another way to pass the time; few took it that seriously. The good footballers played their best games for the town’s teams.

Four years later, a self-propelled jump into a grammar school, where my brother had landed three years earlier, was a shock. Part of the cultural sea change was the importance of success at sports. Winning teams were famed and framed in the school’s heritage mounted in the foyer of what was a brand-new building. And there was a hierarchy with rugby – the First XV – at the pinnacle, cricket, tennis and towards the other end athletics and cross-country running. Though all winning teams, and their individual champions, were revered. Many of them went on to regional and international stardom, and were always ‘Academy past pupils’.

As far back as I can recall, I have had an instinctive fear of pain. It’s somewhere deep and hidden, and I’ve never fathomed it. To trust my physical self to the fortune of the moment, to a tackle, to a fight had never seemed right; it became second nature to shy away. The rugby motto of putting your body on the line was the antithesis of sense to me. Oddly now, the prospect of medical surgery, and I’ve had a few, doesn’t fill me with any dread.

Only once do I recall getting into a school fight. It was at primary school. Ringed by a cheering crowd, I threw a punch out of panic, drew blood and ended up in the principal’s office. I didn’t gain any kudos or reputation from it.  There were others who fought regularly; they drew the abuse from teachers.

My first trial game for a minor team place ended my rugby career there and then. As a lanky runner, I was put on the wing. And I ran. In any direction to avoid being caught, the end line was irrelevant. To take a crushing tackle to advance the team a few yards down the field, again, was all wrong. Maybe, I hadn’t yet bonded with my teammates? But if they saw fear in my eyes and laughed, I didn’t see it, nor suffered any aftereffect. Aversion to such threatening circumstances had, by then, become second nature; my style was certainly not in the spirit of the game of rugby. And so, at the end of the game, the trainer kindly guided me back in the direction of the cross-country team.

Here I found many other like-minded individuals, including those who thought the whole sport thing ludicrous. We would suffer the same misfortunes of the weather as the rugby players, but we saw a lot more mud. I wasn’t a star runner but a good mid-team dependable. There was one training day when I ran effortlessly, passed everyone, and crossed the line well ahead; pity it hadn’t happened during a competition. I’ve recently heard such days called float days; I wish there had been more.

Those first running shoes had soles like tractor tyres, deep, angled rubber chevrons, no padding or support, leather uppers that were green suede. I thought them cool, and lent some seriousness to my running.

During early summer months, the focus turned to track and field athletics. One regional event I recall was held at the local St. Patrick’s Secondary School. I competed in the high jump where my goat-like legs could spring the rest of me upwards to a significant height. Among my competitors that afternoon was the longer-legged Liam Neeson. He cleared the bar higher than me, with an old-fashioned scissors jump, not the more adventurous belly-roll. These were the years when Fosbury was experimenting with his flop, and Liam was discovering play-acting. I assume he remembers beating me that day.

Years earlier, on my first running climb up Slemish Mountain, my uncle Tom christened me the mountain goat. At home, I would climb along the outside of the bannisters, run and leap halfway down the stairs, spring-jump up onto worktops and tables. This was natural to me, an extension of my leaning towards a restless motion. And I think running cleared my head, without being aware of it, dampening the tumbling anxiousness of teenage years. Then I got hooked on endorphins.

Since then I’ve run in London at college, in the Solomon Island’s Honiara Hash House Harriers – a hare-and-hounds running event evolved in the British colonies, setting up the weekend with exercise and cold beer –  I’ve run in Derry, Donegal and Dublin, and other more exotic places, much of it by myself. And now on most Saturday mornings, at Park Runs among my friends in Sanctuary Runners. Mostly avoiding mud.

Yet, I like this grassy old track that runs up to join the Military Road, and its historic connection from the town to the Napoleonic fort at Ned’s Point. The earlier houses around O’Doherty’s Keep are long gone, any stone scavenged to build Vaughan’s Castle and the buildings of the relocated planters’ town. Lined with trees, there’s a sense of being in a woodland, and through mature beech there are elevated views of the Crana River and the beautifully renovated Swan’s Park, or Swan Park to be more colloquial and less proprietary. And then, there are those occasional patches of mud reminding me of running shoes with tractor tyre soles.

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