Galway to Arranmore Island 2 Coast

There was a time when people thought Ireland's west coast

was the edge of the world.

A vast ocean meets this lonely shore

and mighty cliffs rise up to mark the boundary between land and sea.

For millennia, people have stood here in awe of what lies beyond.

Now we are following in the footsteps of those who battled to survive

and to thrive on this wild Atlantic shore.

A voyage of discovery along Ireland's northwest coast.

From the west coast of Wales,

we've come to the west coast of Ireland

for a 600-mile journey around these shores.

It'll take us all the way up to Arranmore Island in Donegal.

But our journey begins in Galway.

The walled city of Galway.

There's nothing between here and North America but sea.

An ocean of sea.

It dominates life on the Irish coast,

yet the Atlantic remains full of mystery.

We know more about Mars than we know about the oceans,

and the reason for that is, the vastness of the oceans.

They take up most of the planet.

They're really deep, huge bodies of water.

I've joined James Ryan from Galway's Marine Institute,

and we're out here to check on this.

It's a scientific buoy, and it's processing

a constant stream of information about the ocean.

Battered by the waves, occasionally,

it requires a little loving attention.

Oh, there we go. It's a more physical life

-than I imagined for most scientists.

-It is. This is the bit I really like,

when we get away from the desk and the computer.

Hanging below the buoy are data probes to monitor temperature,

salt content, wave motion, nutrients,

and even the dolphins' comings and goings.

Wow. Beautiful.

So, what do you have to do now that we're out here?

Well, I just want to raise up the sensors,

-which are down at the bottom of this big pipe here.

-Oh, I see.

In order for us to check them, we have to haul them up.

The underwater sensors need a clean to keep them working reliably.

It means scientists can now study the Atlantic

without ever leaving their desks.

-So it's sending its information out?

-Sending its information 24/7.

It's sending data all the time.

There are plans to install a network of these buoys

to track the progress of global warming.

This is one buoy here at the edge of Ireland.

There are other equivalent buoys all around the world.

All very new technology, and they are, I suppose,

like the heart monitors on a patient.

We're checking the physiology of the oceans here, and monitoring

that physiology at a time when it's really vital for the planet.

We are finally learning to cherish this precious ocean

that previous generations saw as territory to be conquered.

Past the Slyne Head lighthouse, our journey continues on to Clifden.

The first people to see this view from the air

were the pioneering aviators Alcock and Brown...

..who completed the first nonstop transatlantic flight

by landing here in 1919.

But a few years before,

this was home to another transatlantic breakthrough.

Dick Strawbridge is searching for its remains.

In its day, this was the world's biggest communications hub.

The brainchild of an Italian entrepreneur.

Just over 100 years ago, this man, Guglielmo Marconi,

the pioneer of radio, brought his men here

to set up the world's first wireless telegram service.

We want to discover how Marconi did it, and why did he come here,

to this isolated peat bog on the Irish coast?

When Marconi arrived, his challenge was immense.

Build the most powerful transmitter the world had ever seen.

-Good to see you, sir.

-I'm just going to swing around that way, yeah?

I've assembled a team of experts

who will try and generate a radio signal

with the same technology that Marconi pioneered here in Ireland.

You want to try and align those two insulators

with these two vertical members here.

We've got electronics engineers

from the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology,

supported by radio experts from the Irish Naval Service,

and they're all here to unpick the puzzle

that Marconi cracked in 1907.

Just to confirm, we have arrived at the Clifden site,

and we're going to conduct the Marconi exercises. Over.

Clifden's one of the closest point between Ireland and North America.

From here, Marconi planned to send and receive radio signals

a staggering 1,900 miles across the Atlantic.

He put the sister station at Glace Bay in Nova Scotia.

This was years before it was possible to transmit voice messages,

so he used Morse code,

electronic pulses that correspond to letters of the alphabet.

Marconi sent the first transatlantic radio message

from Poldhu at Land's End.

But six years later, to set up as a business, he uprooted to Ireland.

Marconi proved the radio communications at Land's End, didn't he?

So why did he come here? Why Ireland?

The Poldhu radio site, for Marconi,

wasn't large enough for the type of antenna

structure which he was experimenting with.

Marconi was building big.

Here at Clifden, there was room

for a huge antenna suspended on poles 200 feet high.

All that's left of the mighty structure are dozens

of concrete anchor blocks for the masts.

To get some sense of the scale,

I've asked our guys from the Navy to act as markers.

So, the far lad out there, he's only about a third of the way?

Oh, absolutely.

That guy you can see at the very top there on the hill,

he's one third of the way up the entire antenna.

This was a ginormous antenna.

You could say the biggest in the world at that point in time.

Nothing like this had been seen before.

An antenna over half a mile long.

It would need up to 300,000 watts of power to send messages

all the way across the Atlantic.

So Marconi had to generate lots of energy on site.

That's why he built a power station in the middle of a bog.

The 2m thick foundations are intact,

but little remains of the hardware itself to tell us how it worked.

He had a lake, which he needed for a water supply

for his DC generators, which were right here beside us.

That's the remnants of the DC generators over there.

Amazingly, the generators were driven by steam engines,

which burned a traditional Irish fuel.

Everywhere you look, what do you see? Energy. Turf, peat.

-So they actually used peat for fuel?

-Absolutely.

He had six generators in here, three working

and three on stand-by at all times.

But Marconi still needed a way of storing the electrical

energy from his peat-fuelled generators, and releasing it rapidly.

The solution was to construct a capacitor, or condenser.

We are trying to build one like Marconi did, from steel plates.

Adding plates increases the electrical energy a capacitor can store.

Unlike a battery, it can be charged up quickly

and discharged in a split second.

This was the key component that enabled Morse code to be

received loud and clear 1,900 miles away.

This is huge!

It may look huge today, but compared to Marconi, his condenser,

this is minute. Look!

Have a look at that picture.

LAUGHTER Have you seen it?!

-This is a man here.

-We're talking about each one of these panels being, what?

-12 times bigger than that?

-If we think the panels at the bottom were about 12 feet, which would be

that three of these sheets wide, and about 30 feet tall, which is

-between seven and eight times...

-25 times the size?

-Absolutely.

-How many did he have?

You'll not believe this. He had 1,800 sheets.

His condenser housing was 350 feet long and 75 feet wide.

We've built a Marconi-style steel plate condenser,

but what about generating the radio signal itself?

The man with the biggest collection of early radio equipment in Britain is Bob Smallbone.

He's arrived with a rare

and crucial bit of kit that dates right back to Marconi's time.

-What's in here? Couldn't you get a new one?

-That's cast iron.

Weighs a tonne. 1910 rotary spark gap. We're ready to go.

Get it connected. Good man!

In 1907, powering up such a rotary spark gap was no mean feat.

Marconi's peat-powered steam engine drove his generators.

We are using petrol power.

We should be getting, what, about 230, 240?

-But our generator's output is too low.

-I should have expected 220.

Yeah.

A century ago, Marconi overcame much bigger problems than this.

Out here, it's a bit of an unknown quantity.

Marconi's men had to be inventive as they struggled to turn

transatlantic radio messages from an experiment into a business.

After some tweaking, it's all systems go.

I shall top this one. Yes, that's it. 220 that's good. 220.

-So, we're happy with that.

-Yeah.

-OK.

Just one more part of the circuit to complete.

Bob's bought along a Morse key. An absolute replica.

So that's exactly what these 100 years ago?

-Exactly what they would have used.

-Here in Clifden?

-Here in Clifden.

-Wow.

-There you go. No expense spared today!

-Let's get it wired up.

-Perfect.

Marconi was an astute entrepreneur.

He wanted to make communications by wireless telegraph more

accessible, and create a big market for his ground-breaking service.

-Here's an advert of the time.

-The "Marconigram"!

By making messages more compact, they'd use up less airtime,

and so it'd be a lot cheaper.

Marconi's Wireless Telegraphic Code book.

You just use one word, and he gives you a whole sentence.

-And those unreal words, are they?

-No, they're not.

-"Abrotanoid."

-"Abrotanoid."

-What a cracking word. "Bankrupt's stock will realise large amount.

"Assets good." That's a very long sentence for one word, isn't it?

-It is.

-That would cost me eight pence.

-8p.

We're getting a feel for the challenges Marconi faced here in 1907,

trying to generate his revolutionary transatlantic radio messages.

Now, the ultimate test.

Frank has now got a live feed. Is anybody else worried?

If you touched the steel plates now,

you'd become part of a 6,000 volt circuit, and almost certainly die.

The condenser's all wired up, which means we're going to be able

to store lots of energy, so all we need to do is get everybody safe,

flip the switch, and we'll be sending Morse a long way using our condenser.

Do you want to do a quick safety check?

Clear the danger area, please.

-GM IT, can you confirm the danger area is clear?

-Yes, it is cleared.

Thank you. On my mark...

Five, four, three, two, one.

-Mark.

-You're in control.

ELECTRICAL CRACKLING

-Wow! We like that. We like that.

-We're looking good.

CRACKLING

-That is awesome.

-Is that good?

That's really good. Hold on, I saw the big smile coming out there.

The high-voltage sparks are jumping across a tiny air gap between the stud contacts.

When these rotating contacts line up and the Morse key is pressed,

the spark creates a signal.

Marconi's rotary spark gap was five feet in diameter,

and the sound of the sparks could be heard over half a mile away.

As well as making audible sound waves,

the sparks were also creating invisible radio waves.

Even without connecting our scaled-down model to an antenna,

it's so powerful, it's actually transmitting through the air.

-This is a radio that will pick it up?

-A conventional radio.

Set to longwave. We should be able to pick it up.

What we're going to do, if we head off, can you send us a message of some description,

-and we'll see how far we go?

-Yes, I can indeed. Excuse us.

ELECTRICAL SPARKING CONTINUES

Listen to that. Isn't that a beautiful, clean spark?

We've got 100 watts in there.

-This is still going.

-And there's no antenna!

Marconi had something like 100,000 watts.

Our signal could be picked up almost half a mile away.

Over a century ago,

when Marangoni launched his transatlantic wireless telegraph

service, it heralded the dawn of a new era of high-speed communications.

A big idea that made the world seem a little smaller.

On our journey along Ireland's north-west coast,

we've reached Cleggan.

Its bustling harbour is the point of departure

for islanders and travellers.

The local pub is run by Noreen Higgins,

who is Cleggan born and bred.

The busiest times tend to coincide with the boats.

There's a service going to Inishbofin all year round, weather permitting.

Fine weather brings them out from under the stones.

You know, a good day like this, people come to Cleggan.

If they come to Cleggan, they want to eat the crab,

they want to eat the lobster, you know?

Particularly in summertime, you can be jam-packed.

And then the boat will be leaving at 7:30.

At 7:25, the whole place clears out.

Thanks very much, folks. Thank you.

I think when you've lived on the coast,

it's very hard to live anywhere else.

We love the blue skies, the calm weather and that.

But there's a real beauty to it in the winter time as well.

You can get raging, powerful seas.

It's a very nice lifestyle,

if not the busiest or maybe the most lucrative.

But there's a good quality of life here.

People that like it, like it. It's lovely.

We're heading east, towards the holy mountain of Croagh Patrick.

Wherever there's a beach, you'll find a smattering of holiday retreats.

The temporary residents of this shore seem compelled

to journey as far west as they can, to the very edge of Europe.

And they're not alone.

For thousands of years, people have been drawn here.

The mountain of Croagh Patrick is the main attraction

for those on a spiritual journey.

Following their well trodden path is Nick Crane.

I'm on the holy mountain of Croagh Patrick,

where St Patrick is said to have fasted for 40 days.

Once a year, thousands of pilgrims make the climb

to the 762 metre summit, many of them in bare feet.

Some Catholics brave the pain

of this barefoot pilgrimage as a penance.

But I'm here on a mission of my own.

The pilgrimage I'm making

is to celebrate one of nature's great spectacles.

And you need to get high up to take it in.

The extraordinary islands of Clew Bay.

It's a beguiling waterworld, unlike anything else in the British Isles.

Local mythology counts Clew Bay's islands at 365...

..one for every day of the year.

I'm intrigued to discover how this community of islands once

supported a community of people.

Mary Gavin-Hughes still sails these waters.

She's one of the last generation of self-sufficient islanders

who fished and farmed in Clew Bay.

So, what was it like living on the islands?

It was heaven on earth living on the island. It was very peaceful.

Great tranquillity.

Mary grew up in a world of no electricity,

in a tight knit community separated by water.

What's that building over there, Mary?

This one here is known as Collan School. It's Collan Island.

-That was the school.

-That little white building?

-Yes.

It's the smallest school I've ever seen in my life!

By the time Mary was a teenager,

she was roving around Clew Bay on her own.

This picture here shows how we'd row to and from home.

It's a heavy looking boat. These oars are huge!

They're like telegraph poles.

They were handmade. My dad actually made them.

They were good and sturdy.

But we needed them for the weather we were up against sometimes.

-You look as if you're enjoying yourself.

-Of course I am.

Smile, Charlie! That's his home.

Mary's father taught her to feel at home on the water,

harvesting the sea's bounty.

But they didn't live on fish alone.

We did all our farming on the island, our fishing.

We were very self-sufficient.

The grass seems really quite lush and rich.

The soil on the island is very rich.

You can see just over here, where we grew our own crops.

-The evidence of the ridges.

-Those lines on the turf?

Yeah. It was fantastic for the potatoes and all the vegetables.

You had to be able to turn your hand to everything,

living on an island.

The fertile soil is a clue to how the extraordinary

landscape of Clew Bay formed.

Its islands are made of the rich residue left behind by glaciers.

20,000 years ago, much of Ireland was covered by a vast ice sheet.

As the climate cooled and warmed, the ice advanced and retreated,

moulding the land underneath

and creating the distinctive features that became Clew Bay.

Paul Dunlop is an expert on how glaciers made the mounds

which formed these islands.

These are known technically as drumlins, aren't they?

Where does the word come from?

The word drumlin comes from the Gaelic word druim,

which means a small hill.

Any glacial landscape you go to, you find these.

They are always called drumlins.

What's so striking is the repetitive pattern

of drumlin islands across the bay.

Paul's developed a theory that a wave-like motion

under the melting ice created these distinctive shapes and patterns.

It's a process similar to what happens when the tide goes out

on a beach, leaving those familiar wavelike ripples in the sand.

If you take a look around nature, you find wave patterns everywhere.

You find them in the clouds, on the beaches.

-Ripples on the seashore, on sand?

-Exactly.

And ice flowing across sediment can produce the same scenario.

It's the way it goes up, leaving sediment on the surface of the land,

-which then becomes a drumlin?

-That's right.

It's amazing that the most brutal forces,

working deep beneath the ice so long ago,

left as their legacy this beautiful bay.

It's the wildness of the ocean that dominates now

as we journey north-west to Achill Island.

Massive marine ramparts speak of the power struggle between land and sea.

People, too, have left their mark in stone.

The remains of communities who finally conceded defeat

in an age-old battle to cling on to this coast.

Further around the coast of County Mayo,

communities still thrive at Beal Derrig.

Beal Derrig doesn't have a village centre, as such.

Each family home is surrounded by fields - precious land for farming.

It's an agricultural tradition that goes way, way back.

Alice is time-travelling back to its beginnings.

Underneath my feet are the preserved remains of the oldest farm site

in the British Isles.

The discovery was made back in 1934, when this man, Patrick Caulfield,

was cutting peat in these fields

and kept on striking stones buried in a regular pattern.

Patrick's son, archaeologist Seamus Caulfield

has continued his father's investigation

into the stones beneath the bog.

Seamus came up with this very simple technique of probing

to plot their locations.

The probe goes through the bog really easy, doesn't it?

What am I hitting there, Seamus?

You are hitting ordinary ground level.

Now we're hitting on something higher.

You can actually hear it hitting on the stone.

Yes, I can.

The deeper you probe the peat, the further back in time you go.

The depth and pattern of the finds

forced Seamus and his father to an astounding conclusion.

The stones were placed here before Stonehenge.

That's a stone that someone lifted into place 5,500 years ago.

It hasn't been seen or known about for 5,000 years.

-And we're hearing it now for the first time.

-Which is amazing.

Mapping the site, they realised they might be

following the lines of buried walls.

We're hitting a wall in section, are we?

We are. We're coming across the wall.

It should now begin to drop,

the far side of it.

Some of this massive site has been excavated, to confirm the theory

that the lines of stones plotted with all that probing

were collapsed walls

that would originally have stood around a metre high,

and a metre wide.

These buried walls once marked out the British Isles'

oldest network of farmers' fields.

We've established that they extend over this mountain,

over the mountain in the distance,

and their large, enclosed fields appear to be grazing land for cattle.

It's likely that 5,500 years ago, people were engineering

the landscape here to rear animals for food.

These are the fields of Ireland's first farmers.

The long, parallel walls run all the way from the cliff edge

for over half a mile inland.

The layout suggests cattle were reared here for meat and milk,

as walled fields meant the farmers could separate stock

and control grazing.

This extensive farm would have supported as many as 1,000 people.

This is a massive undertaking. People must have been working

as a team to build all these miles and miles of stone walls.

There had to be.

It's not a single operation. It's not a few families,

it's a large community making a decision

to divide the terrain like this into these long, large fields.

Someone was making the decision, and they were sticking to it.

The move to farming was a revolutionary change in lifestyle.

Nearby, on the Belderrig coast, there's evidence of other people

who lived here just a few hundred years before the farmers.

-Hello, Graeme.

-Hi, Alice.

-Have you got some archaeology appearing there?

-Yes, we do.

We have a range of archaeology.

Graeme Warren's searching for the leftovers of meals

eaten 6,000 years ago, buried amongst the stone tools of people

surviving by hunting and gathering along this seashore.

Something making this site so important

is that we have some preserved fish bone.

Just in here, underneath this stone, you can just about make out

some very small creamy white little flecks

sticking out of the soil.

-Tiny...

-They don't look like very much,

but they are actually pieces of prehistoric fish bone.

In some places, we find these

with lots of stone tools,

and lots of carbonised hazelnut shells,

so we're very certain these are the results of human activity.

I have some here that we had from the excavations,

and where they've been processed.

You can just about see there's some tiny, tiny pieces.

They're very, very fragmentary.

But now and then, you get something recognisably

of a certain type of bone.

Those are tiny little fish vertebra.

That's a fish tooth, I think, actually.

Yes, I think that's a fish tooth. Very, very small.

The stone tools and fish remains

reveal that these people lived by fishing and foraging on the coast.

But the discovery of the farmers' fields nearby

shows that times were changing.

In a landscape so heavily associated with Neolithic farmers,

through Seamus' work,

to be able to look here at the very final hunter-gatherers

gives us an opportunity to answer some very basic questions.

Were these the same people who were hunter-gatherers and farmers?

Or was there a wave of different people arriving?

Or small groups of different people?

Whoever these predecessors of modern farmers were,

they'd taken a crucial step towards controlling their food supply.

Now, they could plan ahead for the winter, and leaner times.

But there's an enigma surrounding these early beef and dairy farms

that remains a puzzle. Where did the first Irish farmers

get their first livestock,

and their first crops?

Someone had to introduce cattle, sheep, wheat,

and barley into Ireland.

It wasn't here before that.

The question that still remains is,

did these Balearic fisher-gatherers switch to farming,

or were they replaced by farming?

We just don't know.

The relentless Atlantic has eroded the coastline to reveal the remains

of an ancient life form,

which has given the headland its name.

Serpent Rock.

If you take a walk along here,

and come across these shapes in the rock,

you could be forgiven for thinking they're the remains of snakes.

For centuries, that's exactly what people thought they were.

It's hardly surprising,

because snakes play a starring role in Irish mythology.

Legend has it that every loathsome and poisonous serpent

was driven from Ireland by St Patrick.

True to the legend, there ARE no snakes in Ireland now,

but, then, there's no evidence there ever WERE any.

So, what's going on here?

Every one of these WAS once an animal,

living around 340 million years ago.

They were a kind of coral.

We know they only ever lived in the warm water of shallow tropical seas.

These tube-shaped creatures grew up from the seabed,

capturing their food from the water in the same way as sea anemones.

An ancient, primeval seabed,

now exposed to the brooding Atlantic.

Skirting the cliffs of Slieve League,

I'm on the final leg of my journey to Arranmore Island.

Around here, you can't escape the power of the mighty Atlantic Ocean.

It's carved out massive sculptures to remind us that,

for millions of years, it's battered Ireland's north-west coast.

The islanders have an intimate relationship

with the fickle sea.

So, at the heart of the community,

there's a lifeboat station.

There's no way I could leave these shores without meeting the men

who know more than anyone else

about the harsh realities of life on the edge of the Atlantic.

The lifeboat men,

who brave the wildest storms to bring help to those in peril.

The RNLI in Ireland is the same organisation

that operates in Britain.

Yet the crew of the RNLI's Arranmore boat are Irish men,

operating in Irish waters.

It's remarkable that the Royal National Lifeboat Institution's presence

has survived the struggle for independence,

and the Troubles that followed.

It begs a question for Terry Johnson,

one of the RNLI's top brass.

I must admit, I'd never really thought about it.

It was almost a surprise to think there's a ROYAL

National Lifeboat Institution in the Republic Of Ireland.

Well, it's always been the RNLI.

It was operating for nearly 100 years

before Ireland's government was formed in 1922.

They approached the Irish Free State and said, "We're here in Ireland.

"Our lifeboat crews want to continue the work".

The government said, "We welcome and support you in that".

It's not about national boundaries -

England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and Northern Ireland.

It's about the sea.

If you're in it, the RNLI'll come and get you out of it.

The Irish Coast Guard work with the RNLI to provide a vital

search and rescue service for mariners in the North Atlantic.

The search and rescue helicopter

is on its way to join us for an exercise to test both crews' skills.

There's about to be a seafarer in trouble.

Me.

So far, I've done a lot of talking about the Atlantic Ocean.

Now, it's only fitting I get a proper taste of the beast itself.

Am I going in, yeah?

Yeah. OK.

Let the air out of your suit.

Without my dry suit, I wouldn't expect to last more than a matter of minutes.

Being adrift in the ocean, as the lifeboat disappears from view,

is unsettling.

In a real emergency, my distress flare could be a life-saver.

The plan is to pick me up and land me

on the deck of the moving lifeboat,

a procedure the crew practice for rescues

when there's a number of people in the water.

Imagine this in a ten-foot swell.

With the ten-ton helicopter hovering directly above me,

I'm blasted by the down draught from the rotor blades.

Brilliant.

The lifeboat's purposely travelling INTO the wind,

and I'm flying through the air at 15 knots, FOLLOWING it.

The reason?

It gives the pilot more control,

because, flying forward, the helicopter gains lift.

So it's more stable, if more scary.

I would never even contemplate taking part in an exercise like this,

if it wasn't with the RNLI and the Coast Guard.

Not only will they rescue anyone,

irrespective of nationality or creed,

they'll go out 100 miles into the worst the Atlantic storms

have to offer to get their job done.

Now, THAT's class!