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Its rough stone walls were beautifully whitewashed. A water pump stood by the half-open door. There were flowers in tubs, and the neat thatched roof was held down against the ferocious blast of the winter gales by a lacework of cords, their ends weighted with smooth oval rocks gathered from the sea, every rock as neatly whited as a pearl in a necklace.

    Just beyond the cottage was Brandon Creek itself, a sheer drop where the Atlantic heaved and swirled in the constriction of the cleft, even on a calm day booming among the sea caves near the mouth of the creek.
    It was an unforgettable day, with brilliant sunshine alternating with stinging showers so typical of west Irish weather, and the aquamarine waters of Brandon Creek would not have looked out of place in a tropical island, so clear was the color. As I gazed away from the mouth of the creek to the northwest, my feeling of vertigo was even more pronounced. Out there, I thought, lay North America. Tradition dies hard, and if this is where tradition says Saint Brendan started on his voyage, this is where my boat will start too.
    I began walking down the track leading past the thatched cottage, curving down to the base of the creek where a stream emptied out the water it had collected from the slopes of Mount Brandon above us. At that instant, with a thrill of excitement, I saw them. Drawn up on the side of the road were four strange black shapes. They were boats, turned upside down so that their hulls were pointing to the sky. They were the traditional canvas-covered boats of the west of Ireland called curraghs, a type found nowhere else in the world. They are relics of the Stone Age, and believed to be among the last surviving descendants of one of the oldest types of boat in the world—the skin boat. Here, in Brandon Creek, I first laid eyes on the heirs to the craft Saint Brendan was said to have sailed.
    Crouching down, I peered underneath a curragh to see how it was made. Inside was an elegantly beautiful cagework of thin laths, frail-looking but in fact capable of withstanding great compression. Stretched over this frame was a tight skin of canvas, tarred on both sides to make it waterproof. Later I learned that this canvas, which hasreplaced the original leather skins, is still called the “hide” in some localities. Tucked under the curraghs were sets of oars of a pattern I had never seen before. About nine feet long, they were so slender that they had no blade whatever, and they were fitted with curious triangular blocks of wood, pierced with a hole that matched a pivot pin when rowing. I judged the curraghs too small for anything more than inshore skiffs, yet to my eye they were perfect. They seemed so delicately engineered and so gracefully curved. After I had climbed out of Brandon Creek, I turned back to look down on the four curraghs once again. A rain shower had slicked their hulls so that the four black shapes glistened and glinted in the sun. They looked as sleek as porpoises rolling through the sea.
    I yearned to go for a ride in a curragh, not just for my research but because I was captivated by them. A cheerful woman at the thatched cottage directed me on to the village of Dunquin, where, she said, I was likely to find a number of curragh men in the bar, as the weather was too rough to take the curraghs out fishing. I drove there, and asked the barman for advice. He pointed out a group of three elderly men sitting in a corner. “Any of them could take you,” he said, “but the sea’s no good today. Too rough.”
    I went over to the men. Not one of them could have been under fifty-five years old. They were uniformly dressed in baggy tweed jackets and battered trousers. They all had gaunt knobby hands, large and reddened raw faces, with strong noses and heavyset bones.
    “I am interested in going for a spin in a curragh,” I said. “I wonder if any of you could take me out in one.”
    I was met with blank looks.
    “In a curragh, your canvas