Motoring The North-West Passage IT is a tragic fact that
before many years are over the days of the quiet man's holiday in Great Britain will be no more than memories. - It may be a long time before the folding aeroplane and its collapsible hangar have taken the place of the Austin Seven and the Morris motor-house, but although thete "remain to us still some secret places where we may take refuge for a few weeks from the strident voices of life, they are being discovered at a disagreeably rapid rate—and not by the right explorer. Who has not returned, for example, after two or three years to a beloved funk-hole, a real village inn, let us say, on the high moors or at the head of an estuary, to find the lane there, that used to run between ancient stone walls or hedges, a cemented track, the village a Residential District •where life centres round a dozen village petrol-pumps, the inn a Road House and the host a limited liability company ? Things are not everywhere so. 'desperate as yet, but the signs of approaching doom are unmistakable. There is no help for us save in the aeroplane. When every- body else flies, the rest of us may get our England back again.
None the less there are, as I said, a number of pleasant places still able to give us happy memories in days to come. They may not escape invasion all the year round, but during at least some part of it they are nearly as peaceful as they were twenty years ago. Choose your time well-and, you will find peace in Dorset, between the Isle of Purbeck and the Devonshire border ; in Wales, south of the Teifi, in the Wye and Usk valleys, quite close to places like Llandrindod Wells and Builth and Dolgelly (including the road down Mon Mawddach), and, above all, in the austere north where the dark mountains drop down to the Menai Straits and your road twists round the flank of Snowdon ; in many parts off:Scotland that you would avoid as a plague-stricken area in July and August; in the Land's End country, and no further afield than Essex and the Chilterns. Your chosen time must naturally be some time between April and the middle of June, the middle of September and the end of the year, that is to say, the best months of the twelve. You might think that so self-evident a fact would eventually be universally recognized and offieial holiday-time extended, a blight for the lover of solitude, to coincide with Willett's Summer-time. Yet I believe we are safe, for the moment, and that there is no immediate danger of the anguished appeal we read every June—" Take Your Holiday Early "—being listened to-. No nation takes WS holidays so seriously, so officially, so punctually as the habit- enslaved British, and the notion of working in August and playing in June or September needs more than fervent exhortations in the newspapers to make it take root in the most conservative minds in the world: When our sanctuaries are at last overwhelmed it will be because everywhere else is full up.
, Of the pleasant retreats still left to us in early summer none is better suited to a lazy motor-holiday, long or short, than the North-West. The name, that sounds as if it might have been .given by one playing at fur- traders or seventeenth-century explorers, belongs to the Coast roads that skirt Soliiay Firth, the North Channel and the Firth of Clyde. It would be absurd to say - which of the three main divisions is the finest, the Mull of Kintyre, the best of Ulster or the - south coast of Scotland, but perfectly fair to admit that in the right weather neither of the other two can show anything to beat the best of Antrim, Londonderry and Down- patrick. It is a very proper place of escape from the peculiar trials of everyday, life. There is an aloofness about it, a rare loveliness, a quality in the light on land and sea that I have never seen elsewhere. It is small, as countries go, and not all- of it is of equal beauty. Some of the west can be left "for another day," parti- ctilarly if the weather is serene in the, east -pr• time is getting short, but Antrim and the Mourne mountain's and, it goes without saying, the coast road to Bally- castle, are things that must take precedence over all else. It is well to remember that when you arrive. - And all the-citeamstances of getting there are, the right ,ones; witg the right -atinosPhere of adventure. Suppose .you ar-Coming from the south, from the dreary Great North 'Road, dreary in spite of its every mile .being paved, 'With golden promises of miracles at the end of it. Until s`you reach Wetherby, itself of aspect cold ehough to -be -"grini on the Vali-nest day, you are just driving riorth,One of a .thousand each of whom is probably telling himself that this is the last time he comes_this _way. You -take a turn to the:left, just after crossing, the Wharfe, and in a dozen miles forget every- thing except that you are on the way to Ireland. Your road seeps on and up -through- great rolling moors, red and, gold and purple under a, blue sky, grey, perhaps, under' rain, but always alive and friendly. And presently you come to the Lakes, where you may find a faint hint of Irish 'colouring. If you are there when, the rhododendrons are coming out it will not matter if it rains as it can rain only in those hills. For wherever you look over the 3ifater you will see, like a flame in smoke, the cotinif&s:rreds and pinks. Above in the trees, or below in the face of -the lake, that incredible colour blazes like the beginnings of a prairie fire. For no very good reason, it lends an Irish softness to the least Irish scenery imaginable.
At Carlisle you turn to the left and make for Ireland over a road that has few equals in Great Britain. It winds and turns about the bays that break the coast- line from Dumfries to the Mull of Galloway, here showing you the -Irish Sea, there the fells' across - the Firth,' and you will'be a dull dog indeed it you do not make a slow journey of it to the quayside at Stranraer. And a couple of hours later, in the 'dusk- of a summer's night; an accommodating steamer brings you to Larne, and you hear over the water the voices of the folk who are so lucky as to live -in-this part of the world. In the morning you go north.
What is to be said of that road from Larne to the top of Ireland that has not been said a thousand times ? That there is none like it ? Of course there. is none like it, not even, if we must have ridiculous comparisons, on the coast of Spain or. of Algeria; most certainly not on any coast of France. Not only is there none like it, but itself too is never-the same. As you creep along that narrow strip that has been overlooked alike by the sea and the- feet of the'. sheer mountains .above your head, you realize that you are seeing it as it is for the first and last time. The headlands at Glenarm, Garron Point, Fair Head, standing chit into the sea like great ships' bows, the gleaming black rocks at your side, the lace of foam you can see so far, the white head of the last point you rounded, Rathlin Island, the Mull of Kintyre, the splendour of the drive across the hills from Cushen un, all these are different today, as they will be different tomorrow. And when you reach Ballycastle as I did, in a June when there Was snow on Loch Tay and not a fish had been seen for .five weeks on the Spey, and find things rioting that you would have to go to Falmouth to see in equal flower, you are quite certain that you have found a new country.
From Fair Head or Tore Head you may have seen Kintyre, and, if such a thing' could be necessary, here is a reminder that you are still in the North-West and that you have still some secret places to discover. You will not, of course, leave Ulster without going down to Warrenpoint and the other coast road that goes to Newcastle and round to Strangford Lough, by Down- patrick, but in the end you must go back to Lame and take the steamer again to Stranraer for the Ballantrae road to Ayr and the Erskine ferry that so comfortably lets you avoid Glasgow. Loch Lomond is no buried treasure, but once you have left Arrochar behind and come doirn upon Loch _Fyne and the long ,road to Campbelitown you are in the true North-West once more, and, with the eider-duck and sheldrake, safe.
JOHN PRIOLEAU.
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