The chatty young man at the next table is insistent. “You must go,” Peter says. “Kinnagoe Bay's the prettiest place in Ireland.”
When you're about to drive the northern coast of an island renowned for its natural beauty, it's hard to believe this twentysomething market researcher with crew-cut red hair has the inside track on a must-see place. We crack open our travel guides. No mention of Kinnagoe Bay.
Peter scoots into the lounge of the bed and breakfast that has brought us together and retrieves a highway atlas. He grew up in Derry, our destination today after a drive along Northern Ireland's Antrim Coast. A short detour into the Republic of Ireland, he says, will have us there in no time.
He finds the right page and runs a finger upward along the Inishowen Peninsula of remote County Donegal. Nothing. Mapmakers either haven't heard of Kinnagoe Bay or believe no one needs to go there. Peter looks surprised. I make a mental note of the blank space between his fingertip – the approximate location of Kinnagoe Bay – and the few main roads in the area.
Assuring us once again of the bay's beauty – and its existence – Peter is off to a business meeting, and we're on our way. Tourism Ireland's advertising campaigns encourage visitors to throw itineraries to the wind and to wander off the beaten track; finding the mysterious Kinnagoe Bay, we decide, will be our little Irish adventure.
The Irish are fiercely proud of three things: their history, their scenery and their Guinness, though not always in that order. So there's no shortage of pubs, armchair historians and amateur tour guides like Peter.
Or contenders for the title Prettiest Place in Ireland. Our drive along the Antrim Coast from Belfast to Derry offers a succession of candidates – clifftop ocean lookouts, whitewashed fishing villages, wild headlands, swaths of empty beach. Then there's the Giant's Causeway and its 40,000 geometric-shaped columns and stones tumbling into the ocean, a geological oddity that, unlike Kinnagoe Bay, is on the map.
About 200 kilometres of narrow, twisting highway later, we arrive in Derry, better known to the outside world as Londonderry. Be tactful if you ask why – it was Derry until Protestant newcomers supplanted its Catholic founders four centuries ago. The Good Friday peace accord of 1998 has quelled Northern Ireland's sectarian strife – and ushered in a tourism boom – but, in Irish terms, the renaming of Derry is recent history.
Derry boasts an intact fortress wall enclosing the old city – one of the best-preserved in Europe – and it's a pleasant kilometre-and-a-half stroll along the ramparts. By now, we've acquired a map that shows Kinnagoe Bay as a crescent-shaped dent in the Inishowen Peninsula and one thin road pointing toward it. The host at our bed and breakfast knows the place, but does not share Peter's enthusiasm. “It is one pretty place in Ireland,” he notes dryly.
We head north in the morning and make the seamless crossing into County Donegal. Speed-limit signs in kilometres instead of miles confirm we've left Ulster. There's an older, more settled feel to the countryside and we see the first thatched-roof cottage of the trip.
Author Donald Connery, an expert on all things Irish, described Donegal as a “retreat of unrivalled primitive splendour,” which bodes well for this side trip. The sun warms the glassy surface of Lough Foyle, the broad basin that connects Derry to the sea and site of a ninth-century naval battle between Viking invaders and Irish defenders.
Within an hour, we reach Moville, a neat little town the map places within striking distance of Kinnagoe Bay. We turn onto a side road that seems headed in the right direction, but it's a dead end that deposits us on the wrong side of a mountain. Renting a car without a GPS, and saving a few pounds, suddenly seems like a bad idea.
