I tried to cross IRELAND in 24 hours BY PUBLIC TRANSPORT #ireland24

Can Mrs Turtle and I string together buses and trains to get from Ireland’s most southerly point at Baltimore to the most northerly at Malin Head in 24 hours? Will we get blown away by Storm Kathleen? And will Ireland get a new Taoiseach before we get to the end of the journey?
Errata: Ulster does of course have 9 counties, not 7 as confidently stated at 28:45.

Music listing:
06:25 JS Bach – Goldberg Variations No 14
09:13 L van Beethoven – Piano Sonata No 31 in A flat Major – Scherzo
14:57 ‘Milk’ – The Mini Vandals
22:40 ‘Daley’s Reel’ – Nat Keefe with the Bow Ties
27:29 JS Bach – Italian Concerto – Presto
32:49 JP Sousa – ‘The Glory of the Yankee Navy’
36:39 ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ – Freedom Trail Studio
41:43 ‘It’s A Long Way to Tipperary’ – William Hooley – 1914 recording from the Library of Congress

Hello. Welcome to Baltimore in County Cork. I just climbed up what is ostensibly a path, but is basically a stream, in order to… Damn it. I’m going somewhere less windy to do this. Okay, take two. Welcome to Baltimore. That’s Baltimore, County Cork, not Mayor Carcetti and Omar Little’s lawless Maryland metropolis. Though this Baltimore has a pretty lawless history, too. This was a village of English pirates, only mildly discouraged by James I and with the active involvement of the local justices, until 1631 when Barbary pirates from modern day Algeria sacked the village to remove the competition. They carried over 200 locals off into the Barbary slave trade. Perhaps surprisingly, the village has an Algiers Inn to commemorate this unhappy time. We’re in the far south of Ireland, where the convoluted Atlantic-bashed coastline looks like it’s been violently ripped away from another landmass. Baltimore is the port for little ferries out to an archipelago of wind-wracked islands. But it’s also home of another item of transport note: Ireland’s most southerly bus stop at Baltimore Pier and at 5:30pm today, suitably fortified with Guinness and sandwiches after the long journey from London, Mrs Turtle and I are going to try to travel to Ireland’s most northerly bus stop in 24 hours. In fact, by the timetable, it should be exactly 24 hours. In that 24 hour period, Ireland will get a new Taoiseach as the Varadkar era comes to an end; and will experience a partial solar eclipse. But I think the chances of seeing that are a bit slim. Now, public transport in Ireland is a bit harder to classify than in many other countries. The bus and coach border is pretty ill- defined here, and the basic local bus network, while improving a lot and quite quickly, doesn’t let you make a journey like this. So we’re going to allow any mode of scheduled ground public transport: bus, coach – and why not for a bit of variety – train. It’s the limited services at each extremity that are tricky here, not the bit in the middle. So modes make little difference to the overall timing. So let’s head into town to catch our first bus towards Ireland’s most northerly bus stop at Malin Head, County Donegal. Now, you didn’t think it would be in Northern Ireland, did you? Of course, I have a trusty guide for us, the 1949 Blue Guide to Ireland. It assures me that travelers will ‘find as much general comfort as in any part of the British Isles’, and that ‘irksome restrictions are at a minimum’. ‘The transport authorities, even though hampered by shortage of fuel, are coping admirably with their difficulties and provide an efficient service.’ Let’s see if that still holds true. Here’s my bus. Slightly late, should be fine. Now, I sounded optimistic enough there, but my first connection is just seven minutes in Skibbereen and we’re already five minutes down. However, any worries are short-lived. On asking the driver, he cheerily assures me that we will make the Killarney connection for the straightforward reason that he’s driving it, and it’ll be the same bus. In fact, this is also confirmed by the onboard information screen, because apparently on Bus Éireann this always tells you what your bus is doing next once it terminates, even if it’s just going back the way it came. So I can relax and chalk up those extra five minutes as a bonus. Now I don’t need to be at Malin Head until 5:35pm tomorrow. That could be handy. The traditional south to north route through Ireland is Mizzen Head to Malin Head. But Mizzen Head, the actual most southerly point, doesn’t have a bus stop at the moment. It had one until a few years ago, lost it again, but now Transport for Ireland is promising to bring it back soon as part of its investment in rural busses under the connecting island banner. There’s just two of us on this bus, traveling against the peak flow, such as it is in rural west Cork, along what is effectively a branch line of the bus network. Indeed, we are effectively replacing a branch railway, the long extinct Baltimore Extension Railway, which chuffed a few miles along the island-strewn Ilen estuary to Skibbereen, where we too soon arrive, and where the driver apologetically throws me off briefly in case, in his words, the bus catches fire, or something like that while he pops to the loo. Mrs Turtle gets to remain on board, clearly not judged likely to hijack the bus. So for a few minutes I get to ponder whether I prefer the open forward bound of the post-2007 red setter emblem of Ireland’s nationalised bus company, or the classic compact missile version. Skibbereen seems a smart, pretty, bustling town today, but my 1949 Blue Guide gives it rather short shrift: ‘of little interest in itself’, though it sniffily admits that the town is ‘a good centre for exploring the attractive neighbourhood which suffered very severely in the famine of 1846′. [Michael Collins, singing]: "’They set my roof on fire with their cursed foreign spleen, and that’s another reason why I left old Skibbereen.’ Twelve more verses now." And so we do indeed leave old Skibbereen, now as the 270 to Killarney, a two and a half hour meander still deeper west. The harsh impacts of the potato famine here in West Cork probably go some way to explaining why this was a hotbed of republicanism and a pre- indepence Sinn Féin stronghold. In particular, this was Michael Collins country (the IRA intelligence genius, not the guy who went most of the way to the moon), born just up the road at Woodfield and assassinated by his own countrymen here in County Cork. For my Blue Guide the Civil War of barely a quarter of a century earlier is recent history. ‘The country has recovered’, it summarises curtly. That may be true physically, but for most of the subsequent century, the domination of Irish politics by two parties, barely divided in policy preference but forged in the bitter pro- and anti-Treaty split, finally forced into previously unthinkable coalition as recently as 2020, underlines that the human recovery took much longer. There’s an old. Irish blessing for travellers: ‘May the road rise to meet you’. Here as we intrepidly start our ascent to the Derrylahard Hills it’s doing, literally that. This is a wild and empty corner of Ireland, as much stark brown as it is emerald, still depopulated by famine, emigration and the draw of the city. But we’re a busy bus at the moment, justifying the recent expansion of service on this route from one bus a day in the summer to a stonking six per day all year round, though one prospective passenger opts not to travel with us when the driver patiently explains he’d have just 20 minutes in Killarney before the last bus back. Mrs Turtle has become custodian of the Leap card. She feels kinship with the frog. It’s a stored value card, usable on most bus services to get around 30% off the fare. And you can tap it on your smartphone to see how much value remains and top it up. All very 21st century. Down from the bleak hills, and we’re back on the coast, a low wall barely separating us from the foam-flecked battleship grey waters of Bantry Bay. Like at Baltimore, this is another convoluted sound of promontories and islands. For a few 20th century decades, this beautiful, sheltered, deep anchorage was the unlikely location of an oil terminal, taking advantage of the closure of the Suez Canal after the Six Day War to send huge oil tankers round the Cape to be offloaded here for onward distribution across Europe. This came to a horrific and sudden end on the 7th of January 1979, when the poorly maintained French tanker ‘Betelgeuse’ exploded during discharge, killing 50 and destroying the terminal. These seem unthinkable events in such a spot today, and as we press on beyond Bantry town into Glengarrif Bay, where the mirror flat waters are a total contrast to choppy Bantry. We are amid scenic honeypots that could not be further from the crude industrial world. Of Glengarrif, William Makepeace Thackeray said "Were such a bay lying upon English shore, it would be a world’s wonder." My Blue Guide labels it ‘the most beautiful spot in County Cork’, though complains that ‘the standard of available accommodation hardly comes up to the standard of other equally famous Irish beauty spots’. I can’t comment on that, but the village of Glengariff does seem to be dedicated to nothing but the provision of beds, board and Guinness for the touristic seeker of a West Cork idyll. Lots of young people, Irish and central European, get off here, heading for shifts in the many hotels and just myself and one other passenger remain for our near private, chauffeur-driven trip along the most incredible path of the 270 route. Now comes the Caha Pass. There’s not many routes from West Cork into County Kerry, but the dramatic 320 meters high Caha Pass is actually one of the easier routes, engineered and tunnelled in 1842 and still known locally as ‘The New Line’. We cross the county line into Kerry in the middle of the tunnel. In the folk song Whiskey in the Jar, made famous by the Dubliners and/or Metallica, our hero sings of crossing the Cork and Kerry mountains, where he robs Captain Farrell of the money he was counting. It’s widely assumed this is the spot referred to and at this time of year, with the road to ourselves, it feels lonely enough for a bit of highway robbery. I doubt the 270 keeps so well to the timetable when summer tourist traffic clogs the single track tunnels and tight bends. On the Kerry side, the road descends swiftly into classic green countryside. This particular Monday, befitting of a day at the tail end of Storm Kathleen, (yes, it was. the Irish Meteorological Service’s turn to name an Atlantic storm) is determined to provide a full 27 different types of weather. As we cross the wide estuary of the Kenmare river, the sun makes a surprise appearance almost spot on the hour of partial eclipse, though I’m ill-equipped to get a proper view. At Kenmare, we pause for a few minutes to wait for time beside a pub commemorating local man Tom Crean, who as a Royal Navy seaman, managed to survive both Scott’s expedition to the South Pole and Shackleton’s near fatal trip on the Endurance. Back at home, the pub he ran was raided by the Black and Tans, who only desisted when they found a photo of Crean in full Royal Navy uniform. The weather changes dramatically again. The three French hikers we picked up at Kenmare just have time to express joy at their timing before they fall asleep. We make an easterly diversion, ‘a pleasant alternative to the usual and more striking road to Killarney’, claims the Blue Guide, serving the multicolour metropolis of Kilgarvan. This village is also famous for a pub, of course, run by the eccentric Healy-Rae brothers, scions of a Kerry political dynasty and ruthlessly efficient vote-maximising machine. Both served as independent members of parliament, and the very next day Michael Healy-Rae would nominate brother Danny for Taoiseach. Their bid was not successful. Quarter to nine, and after one final pass and a fiery sunset, we finally reach the end of the wonderful 270 odyssey at Killarney’s quiet bus station. Killarney is situated next to three lakes, surrounded by forests and sits below Macgillicuddy’s Reeks, Ireland’s highest mountain range. To quote my Blue Guide: ‘Here, the beauties of nature are distributed with a lavish hand’. Alas, it’s dark and coming on to rain again. The guide also warns me that ‘some visitors take exception to ubiquitous vendors of souvenirs in town’. Walking from the bus station to the nearest pub, I fail to encounter any, just a statue of duelling red deer, Ireland’s largest land mammal and local inhabitants. It’s a fine and needed pint of the dark stuff. There’s a certain amount of wounded Celtic amour propre in this pub as a gentleman from Boulder, Colorado, loudly describes Irish roads as ‘sketchy’. A fragile peace of sorts emerges over a compromise position that the Irish are good drivers to cope with their sketchy roads. Half past eleven and fortified, I’m off into the biting cold April night – past the parking places for jaunting cars, horse-drawn carriages that will take visitors into the national park in more salubrious weather – in search of a midnight bus going anywhere. Well, actually it’s a very specific bus I’m after and it doesn’t deign to serve the bus station, just a lonely stop on Mission Road bereft of any indication that my onward conveyance stops here. I pass the time admiring the striking memorial on the other side of the road to Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, a Killarney golf course steward who became a papal consul and during World War II was nicknamed the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican’, a martyr of disguise and subterfuge who saved the lives of more than 6,000 Jews and escaped POWs in Italy. Mrs Turtle, meanwhile, is passing the time by loudly suggesting that next time we want to catch buses at midnight, we do it somewhere a bit warmer. Nerves are settled a bit as a little band of prospective travellers gathers as the witching hour approaches. And then, to everyone’s joy, a big warm coach hoves into view. As so often on 24 hours challenges the question of what to do efficiently with the early hours of the morning is answered by an airport. This is the midnight coach, or more accurately, the 00:01 coach to Dublin Airport. Cosily through the dark and, at times, the storm, we streak north eastwards across the dark lands of the Irish Midlands. At a series of anonymous towns, the coach gradually fills with families carrying sleeping infants over their shoulders, wiped out with the excitement of heading for an early flight, and holiday bound retirees in search of a late winter sun. At Farrenfore, the driver’s list has two O’Connors booked to join the coach. Neither turns up. Someone else called O’Connor does. At 1am, this seems a lot more hilarious to everyone involved than it would in the light of day. We may be a Flightlink coach, but tiny Kerry Airport and its empty car parks don’t get a second glance as we sweep past: we’ve got a proper transcontinental hub to head for. Beyond the Kerry dark comes another county and the Limerick bypass. ‘There was a young turtle in Kerry/ Who had crossed the sea on a ferry/ By bus and by train/ she rode north again./ And the thought of Malin made her merry.’ It’s not just counties we are ticking off at speed now, but also at last we are out of the first of the four ancient kingdoms of Ireland, Munster, and into Leinster. If all goes well, we’ll visit all four kingdoms on this journey. Into soaking county Dublin, and we’re no longer beyond the pale. The pale in question was the parts of medieval Ireland immediately around the capital that were under meaningful control of the English king. Our coach swings round the city’s northern ring road and we are deposited in the freezing rain of the tarmac expanses of Dublin Airport’s forecourts, filled with swirling exotic bus liveries and the silent zombie march of the sleep- deprived, luggage- and baby-juggling masses towards the bright lights of Departures. I never quite get over a feeling of being an interloper, being at an airport when not flying, like I’m prying into lives that aren’t mine and I haven’t bought a ticket to see into but, sod it: the airport has toilets where I can put on some dry socks. Oh, don’t underestimate the sheer unbridled joy of dry socks before the wet shoes start seeping through the new ones. And the terminal’s bus departure board is nearly as exotic and wide ranging as its departure board for Airbuses. There’s options where I could head north directly from here, but I’m going for the most interesting way to reach the far north and heading south into Dublin city centre. Being an economically-minded turtle wrangler, I’m eschewing the range of sleek and expensive looking fast services to the centre in favor of the all-stops, Leap card-enabled 41 from a windswept stop out by the concrete airport church. Most of Ryanair’s Irish flight crew appear to live in Swords where the 41 comes from, as they pile off the arriving city bus en masse. A handful of fellow airport interlopers join the bus with me, a distinct split between those who, at 4am wish the driver a cheery ‘good morning;, and those who simply slam their Leap card down on the reader wordlessly. It may be an ungodly hour here by the airport church, but this is our first and probably only double decker of the journey. Mrs Turtle is delighted to have her preferred perch and I’m scrabbling into the recesses of my rucksack for something to mark the occasion. Through the rainy dark, we rattle down empty bus lanes, bilingual announcements counting off every unwanted stop. We’re soon ahead of time, and I discover that ‘there will be a short delay in order to get the bus back on time’ is Dublin’s less euphemistic version of London’s dreaded ‘held here to even out the gaps in the service’. At this time of the morning it’s a fast transition from slightly scruffy suburbs to the wide, ceremonial expanse of O’Connell Street, where we bid farewell to our yellow and green chariot and set out for a little freezing early morning sightseeing in what the Blue Guide calls ‘a western Athens’. In further diplomatic observations on the recent past, the Blue Guide author opines that ‘the Easter Rising was partly crushed with spasmodically repressive measures’. At the General Post Office, the tricolor flutters proudly where the Republic was proclaimed on that Easter Sunday, while a few frozen homeless bed down beneath the portico. At the foot of O’Connell Street, the Liffey flows dark and rapid towards Dublin Bay under the cast iron span of Halfpenny Bridge, named after the toll its constructor was permitted to levy for 100 years. The toll actually lasted 103 years to 1919, by which time it had become a penny ha’penny but the bridge’s nickname never changed. Further downstream, the Custom House lowers on the north bank, all very ‘second city of the Empire’, the never quite true but also never quite untrue moniker Dublin was labeled with at the turn of the century. But what it symbolized was certainly a reason for it being the target of de Valera’s disastrous and brief turn away from guerrilla warfare in 1921, though the IRA did destroy a lot of tax records in the process. I’m delighted to finally find a cafe that will serve me a decent cup of coffee at 6am, and seems to provide a turtle babysitting service. While warming myself, I enjoy discovering that the former owner of my guidebook, a Somerset resident based on the address in the frontispiece, stayed at the Jury’s Hotel on College Green, which they had neatly circled in red pen on the map. Time to head onwards, and on my way to Connolly station, I passed the floodlit statue of James Connolly. Every major Irish station is named after a revolutionary leader and as Connolly so nearly said: ‘The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland; the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour; the train to Sligo is on platform three.’ Having hit the east coast, we’re now ricocheting back northwestwards like a pinball. Again, there’s a multiplicity of ways I could continue, including a straight shot towards Belfast. But I’m opting for what I think might be the most interesting: a journey up the remaining straggling arm of the Irish Railways – that’s Iarnród Éireann – into the northwest of the Republic. This is only my second long distance journey with Iarnród Éireann. The first was yesterday, on the way down to Cork, but I’m getting to rather like them. Their trains are modern, comfortable and spacious, and service frequency have improved a lot in the past few years. Not that long ago, Sligo had just four services a day to Dublin. Now it has eight. But despite a lot of modernisation, there’s still a distinctive Irish flavor to the operation. On my Cork train yesterday, it was only halfway through a chat with a permanent way worker at Limerick Junction that the guard realized the train was ten minutes late and he’d ‘better get it moving’. And the whole putting your name above your seat thing takes some getting used to. The almost unique thing about Irish railways, however, is their gauge: 165mm wider than the standard gauge used on the big island next door and in most of Europe, and otherwise found only in Brazil and a couple of Australian states. My Blue Guide is full of handy hints for rail travelers. I’m particularly glad that trains are air conditioned now as it tells me, ‘control of the window is, by custom, conceded to the passenger seated next to it facing the engine. Considerate passengers in this position generally take the sense of the company on the subject of ventilation’. This all sounds far too much like an exercise in consensus-building for my sleep deprived state. So the first train in the morning to Sligo makes a rooftop departure from Dublin, past the spiritual home of Gaelic football at Croke Park. And then we stop and sit on the viaduct for a long time. Turns out a commuter train in front is having door problems. Eventually, we stutter forward again, but it’s a slow run now, stuck behind the stopper all the way to Maynooth on a railway being worked beyond its ideal capacity as it struggles to cope with major suburban growth and rising demand. For much of this distance, the line follows the Royal Canal. Fierce 18th century competition gave Ireland two inland waterway connections from Dublin to the Shannon: the Royal Canal and the Grand Canal. Unusually, the Royal did a decent passenger trade as well as goods, with a fare to Maynooth of one shilling and one pence undercutting the stagecoach. At Maynooth, we’re finally free of the stopper. But now the other issue arises: from here on it’s a single line with far-flung passing loops. The crack-of-dawn up train from Sligo to the capital has been prioritised over the already delayed country-bound passengers. We’ll have to wait for it here. Luckily, one of the things that attracted me to this route was the very generous 90 minutes connection at Sligo. Looks like I may be needing much of it. Freed at last to fly northwestwards under green signals, 40 minutes late, we scorch across the rich, fertile Irish midlands under unaccustomed blue skies. In eastern County Westmeath at last, a Dublin bound train is made to wait for us in the loop at the closed Killuchen station rather than vice versa. Approaching Mullingar, the twin towers and dome of a huge church make quite a dramatic skyline. This confuses me a little, as the Blue Guide tells me the town ‘bears no trace of its great antiquity’. Then I realize this is the brushed-over new cathedral, built just 13 years before the guidebook was published in 1936. Leaving Mullingar behind, the train speeds almost at water level beside the blue, choppy waters of Lough Owel as we head for the raised peat bogs and flowering gorse of County Longford. Behind me, two men strangely dissatisfied with this South Korean built railcar, have a lengthy whinge that the trains aren’t in the classic orange and black anymore. [Advert] ‘Ireland’s on the move, in comfort and style, bringing people together.’ We cross the mighty, reed-fringed, swan-haunted Shannon, Ireland’s longest river, and here forming the boundary between counties Roscommon and Leitrim. We’re now well into our third historic kingdom – Connaught – and it won’t be long before we’re in the fourth and final. The landscape is rapidly becoming wilder and more mysterious as we speed northwest. The vegetation is thinner, the hills darker and more rugged in the stormlight, occasional dolmens and megaliths appearing beside our modern metal highway. This may be a journey of barely 200km across a small island, but there is a gently epic quality to the Dublin to Sligo train ride. From the Dublin suburbs through the lush midlands and into the sparsely populated, mysterious rugged west. There’s a brief comic interlude where our train starts rolling backwards as it attempts to restart from a signal just outside Carrick-on-Shannon. But eventually our wheels bite the rails once more and we’re off on the final leg to the end of this straggling line, under the bare bones of the roof of the much reduced Sligo MacDiarmada station. This terminus, too, takes the name of a irish independence fighter, Seán MacDiarmada, the second signatory of the proclamation of the Republic, executed by firing squad after the failure of the Easter Rising. Sligo is, according to my guide, ‘an admirable centre for fishermen and antiquaries to follow their several pursuits’. Truth be told, it probably needs more than half an hour, so that my main impression isn’t of what I think is going to be a nice riverside square that turns out to be a car park. Nevertheless, there are some fine civic buildings and best of all, some superb peaty rapids broiling right in the town center. But the train delay has curtailed our time here. This is the end of the railway these days, so we’re back on the road and back with Bus Éireann, or at least their commercial Expressway arm, which sadly downplays the Irish setter branding. We’re joining the 64 for the very last leg of its six hour odyssey up the west coast of Ireland from Galway right to Derry, providing both long distance links on this rail-less corridor, as well as lots of short hops for local passengers. The whole Sligo area is dominated by the bare, craggy head of Benbulbin. As our bus curves below it, we pass through the little village of Drumcliffe. You are never far from a literary association in Ireland. And here lies WB Yeats in his grandfather’s churchyard, brought home from the French Riviera by the repatriating dead poets division of the Irish navy. ‘Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman pass by’, reads his own epitaph on the grave. And so we do, now beside the Atlantic breakers and at the little surfing resort of Bundoran, amid the sand dunes, we pass into County Donegal and the historic kingdom of Ulster. This, you see, is why you should never call Northern Ireland ‘Ulster’. The North, famously, has six counties. Ulster has seven [Actually nine! Sorry…]. In Ballyshannon, the Republic is just 6 miles wide and two bridges here across the Erne are all that links northern County Donegal to the rest of the country. In my Go West video, I demonstrated you can indeed walk across the whole country between breakfast and lunch here. Maximalist partition plans would have seen County Donegal stay as part of the UK with the rest of Ulster. But politicians in Belfast and Westminster recognised reasonably swiftly that seeking to hold such a heavily Catholic county would be impossible, politically and militarily. And that’s why the most northerly point in Ireland isn’t in Northern Ireland at all. Not far from Ballyshannon, and we’re in the county town of Donegal, where every time I’ve passed through on a bus it has lost time, thanks to the lack of a proper bus station, the bus having to fight with cars for space in the central Diamond, while the always-numerous passengers congregate and block the narrow pavements. Luckily, once again, we’ve got a reasonably generous connection at the end of this leg. Freed at last from Donegal town, our route slices away from the coast and up and through the Bluestack mountains – which seem more brown than blue today – at Barnsmore Gap. There’s a general rule that every time you pass through a remote Irish pass, you’ll find there was once an improbable, unprofitable railway through it, too. And so is the case here. Until 1959, the narrow gauge West Donegal Railway made its leisurely way through here en route to Ballyshannon, or Killybegs. Down from the Bluestacks, and we pass through workaday Letterkenny, and then climb high above the low tide mudflats of Lough Swilly. At every Irish setter-emblazoned bus stop, we’re picking up more passengers until every seat is taken. Everyone is off to the local city, which just happens to be in a different country. The village of Killea straggles along the Derry road. This was a largely Protestant village at the time of partition, and the 1925 Boundary Commission recommended moving it to Northern Ireland, along with other minor border changes. But London, Belfast and Dublin all happily shelved the report. Now, at the eastern end of the village, there’s simply a sign saying ‘Speed limits in miles per hour’. Nothing else marks the border as we pass from County Donegal to County Londonderry, from the Republic of Ireland to the United Kingdom, and out of the European Union. We drop swiftly to the banks of the Foyle and our red Expressway bus settles happily, albeit slightly late, amid its scarlet city counterparts at Derry bus station. We’re here because, despite the border, Derry is a transport hub for the far north of County Donegal. Thanks to the delay, we’ve a little less time than I hoped in Northern Ireland’s second city, perched in its west-of-the-Foyle enclave. But we need to stroll through town anyway for our onward connection. Right next to the bus station is the magnificent Guildhall, symbol of 19th century prosperity, which gets nothing more than a desultory glancing mention in the Blue Guide, a reminder of how ill-regarded Victorian gothic architecture was until about the 1980s. I mean, they tried to knock down St. Pancras station. The Guildhall is just outside the city walls, one of the most complete set in these islands and famously never breached, giving the city the moniker of the Maiden City. Most famously and contentiously for modern Derry, thirteen apprentice boys closed the city gates against Jacobite forces led by deposed King James II in 1680. The 1949 Blue Guide tells me that just nine years before its publication, the gates had been closed again against the perceived threat of a second siege, presumably from a German landing in the neutral Republic. It’s going to be a very short return to the United Kingdom. We’re off into the Inishowen peninsula, the isolated, diamond-shaped scrap of land that perches precariously between Lough Swilly and Lough Foyle. The Transport for Ireland Local Link buses out onto the peninsula don’t get the privilege of using the smart bus station in Derry, but are relegated to an obscure backstreet terminus beside a pigeon-populated Presbyterian church. Hopping aboard the busy bus just before departure, I use my Leap card to pay the fare, which I think technically means I paid for a bus journey in Britain using euros. Wonders will never cease. Leaving Derry northwards, the border is on the edge of the village of Muff. This way round, of course, the only sign is a bilingual reminder that speed limits are now in kilometres per hour, as we return to County Donegal. Beyond the border, we’re soon speeding along the shores of Lough Foyle, the Sperrin Mountains in Northern Ireland clear on the east bank. Low tide exposes mud flats and the miniature dining tables of the oyster beds. ‘Those oysters are building houses all over the county,’ remarks a fellow passenger to the driver, a statement which confuses me until I realize he means the profits rather than the bivalves themselves. The Local Link bus services, part of the Irish government’s rural transport program to expand the skeletal bus network outside the big cities, are fantastic. However, their timetables do hide complexities known only to locals. This is not, it turns out, a through bus to Carndonagh. It’s continuing along the coast of Greencastle, but when we get to a layby by the Quigley’s Point lecture hall, the Carndonagh-bound cognoscenti lead the way to the waiting connection parked just in front. From here, we head rapidly inland through heavy showers, bright sunshine, past flowering gorse, spring lambs, whitewashed thatched cottages and shining rainwashed fields as we travel into the sparsely-populated heart of the peninsula. Carndonagh is a tiny town, but as the hub for the entire straggling peninsula, it goes into bat hard, with the vast hilltop church of the Sacred Heart dominating the town and what was once Ireland’s largest primary school. It’s our final interchange point, and the 952 drops us in Carndonagh’s central Diamond. With just over an hour before the last bus, I’m feeling cautiously optimistic. Obviously, some of my time in Carndonagh is spent examining the bulk of the Sacred Heart, some of it trying unsuccessfully to get my iPhone to charge with the help of safety pins from the pharmacy. But a lot of it is spent eating an immense Florentine from the Cafe Bamba bakery. It’s not just the church and the primary schools that are out-of-scale here, but also the baked goods. This journey’s been worth it alone for this €3 monster. It’s coming up to 5pm, and the smart minibus – at last, a bus that actually looks like a bus, not a coach – pulls in at Carndonagh Diamond, ready to take me on the wandering journey to Ireland’s Ultima Thule: Malin Head. Four times a day this Local Link service, with its incredibly friendly drivers, braves the narrow, windswept lanes on the final tip of the Inishowen peninsula. The journey starts off tamely enough, along the straight road to Malin Town. On board, we have a 60 year old sheep farmer who claims not to be able to read or write and a three year old who claims to be able to drive a tractor. I suspect both exaggerate a little. To enter Malin Town we cross Ireland’s second-longest stone bridge, swing round its village green and then head off on one of the most extraordinary bus routes I’ve ever taken. The scenery of the west side of the Inishowen peninsula is almost beyond description in its loveliness, especially on a glorious spring evening, beside the beaches and through some of Europe’s largest lamb-flecked sand dunes. As we approach the northern end of the peninsula, the 954 enters a long loop of narrow lanes, seemingly to ensure it serves every farmstead on the headland. A lady travels from one farm to the next to make a social call, seemingly happy to get confirmation from the driver that she has just 20 minutes before he returns on the last service of the day. On the radio comes the news that the Dáil Éireann has elected Simon Harris as the new taoiseach. The unsurprising news is met with an air of general apathy on board. However, outside, the landscape just gets better and better, wilder and wilder, an other-worldly landscape of exposed rocks and huge skies. My mind begins to turn to the deadline. The 954 is timed to drop me at the most northerly bus stop at 5:30pm. With the five minute delay leaving Baltimore yesterday, I’ve got a mini buffer, and despite the narrow lanes and chatty customers, the 954 is sticking more or less to schedule. But as we come into sight of journey’s end, something appears that could scuttle it. A patriotic horse half blocking the lane. Luckily, as the driver says, it is one smart horse and a few moments later he’s dropping me at the lane junction at the end of the road to Malin Head itself, that is Ireland’s most northerly bus stop, at 17:31. 23 hours and 56 minutes since we left Baltimore. Passenger facilities here aren’t substantial, but there is at least a recent corrugated plastic sign to mark the stopping point. It’s great to see such a well-used rural bus service. It turns out the lady being dropped off to catch the bus here is the owner of my B&B for the evening, off to choir practice in Carndonagh. We can hardly let the journey end here. Beckoning to me is Bamba’s Crown, the hill at the very northern end of Ireland, topped by the lookout tower built by Lloyd’s of London to provide early reports of the movement of transatlantic shipping. What an incredible spot. This is supposedly Ireland’s sunniest location. The headland is littered picturesquely with remnants of centuries of lookout and coastguard paraphernalia on this treacherous coast. I’m told later that there are more Sherman tanks lying on the seabed here in wrecked transport ships than anywhere else in the world. And there’s a reminder of war above the sea: ‘EIRE’ written out in huge letters, one of a string of such signs around the Republic’s sea borders to mark this part of the convoluted coast out as neutral territory to aerial combatants. Malin Head is where a lot of journeys the length of Ireland end or start. And there’s some road markings here to show that. It’s in no way dispiriting for Mrs Turtle and I to read the sign commemorating someone making the same journey as us by bike in four hours less than it’s taken us. Ah, well, they’d be more saddle sore and turtles don’t cycle well. "Once again I’m sheltering from the wind on an exposed headland by a tower. The tower may not be quite as pretty as the one at Baltimore, but the headland is in its different way just as beautiful. This is Malin Head, the most northerly point in Ireland. And at the bottom of the hill is the bus stop, which is the most northerly in Ireland as well. 23 hours 56 minutes – just about made that 24 hours challenge. Eight buses, one train, some utterly, utterly incredible scenery. I don’t think I’ve ever had a situation where my favorite bus journey has actually changed from one day to the next. But I think it has. It has today. Skibbereen to Killarney was astonishingly beautiful. But the bus up to Malin Head may have just about pipped it to the post, especially in this glorious light this evening. Thank you so much for coming along. Before I blow away, I’ll bid farewell and see you on the next one. And goodbye from Mrs Turtle.