Travel: Europe - Under the weather

If you're ever unhappy with the weather, blame Valentia, off the coast of Kerry, because that's where it comes from

It had been raining for days when I arrived on Valentia Island; the sort of steady, insistent downpour that started Noah building the Ark and that puts people off coming to Ireland on holiday. Mauve cumulus clouds sulked on top of the nearby Kerry mainland. My gym shoes squelched as I left the car and tried to find my B&B on foot. Valentia itself was a lush, dripping smear of green fields, fuchsia hedges and peat bogs, under a sky as grey as a habit.

Still, you can't come to the island which apparently inspired Tennyson to pen: "Break, break, break on your cold stones, o sea" and expect Mediterranean sun. Weather is what Valentia does best - turning up night after night on Radio 4's shipping news, between "Sailing By" and the national anthem, number eight in the clockwise rota of weather stations in the British Isles (and the westernmost by far) with its own stormy contribution of variable pressures and Atlantic fronts. "Valentia is very important," said a Met Office spokesman, "because so much of our weather comes from the west."

Squelching around the capital of Knightstown in the newly minted weather, wondering how long it took to develop trench foot, I was asked by a man in a car if I was lost. He told me how to get to my B&B and drove off, leaving me apparently alone in the little village. Like so much of south- west Ireland, it makes up for its muted natural palette of greens and greys with wildly extrovert house paint: curacao for the Galley Kitchen Wine Bar, avocado skin for Boston's the Pub, banana milkshake for the Islander Restaurant. The Church of Ireland was hidden in a protective rectangle of trees at the top of the village and facing it at the bottom was the neat little quayside Clock Tower, restored to its former glory as part of the 1980 Tidy Town Scheme.

By now, 10am, the main thoroughfare of Peter Street was beginning to open up, with the utmost reluctance, like an elderly clam. First the sweet shop selling papers and postcards. Then the bar at the Royal Pier Hotel (plain Young's before the Prince of Wales came to visit in 1858). Then the Last Post bric-a-brac shop with its collection of brass portholes and cottage china. I stood on the weighing platform next to the Clock Tower that once weighed in coal and timber from Liverpool and wine and olive oil from Andalusia and weighed out slate, potatoes, oatmeal and the odd bull.

In the 19th century, the slate yards just across the road would have been a hive of activity. Slate is omnipresent on Valentia - there is a quarry that now houses a grotto to Our Lady - and slate used to pour out in the form of tiles, lintels, flags and slabs to roof the Houses of Parliament in London and the Opera House in Paris and to help the balls roll evenly on billiard tables across the world. Imported coal was needed to power the gigantic slate saws and the Valentia Slab Company employed many islanders through the years of famine.

Driving back along the Knightstown Road, it was difficult to imagine that in the last century the school population alone was about 500. Today there are 600 people living on Valentia, working in agriculture, tourism, fishing and radio (there are 14 employees at the medium-range coast station, built in 1914, that relayed messages during both the sinking of the Lusitania and the 1977 Fastnet disaster). At my B&B, Mrs O'Sullivan ushered me in and went to get the phone. "That was Declan to say, did I know that you were coming on foot?" she said, coming back a minute later with a cup of tea. Declan? I remembered the man in the car. The bush telegraph was singing already.

Ten minutes away, in the museum in the old National School building, I learnt that Valentia comes from the old Irish word "bealinche", or harbour mouth, rather than homesick Spanish privateers, and that the local landlords - the Knights of Kerry - had won their title from Henry II after the Anglo- Norman invasion of Ireland in 1197. Most fascinating of all was the laying of the Transatlantic Cable, when, for a while, the eyes of the world were on White Strand, Ballycarbery, Valentia.

The process - technically astounding for the time - began in 1857, but was fraught with problems. First the cable, made of hemp, tar, linseed oil, gutta-percha and copper wires, had been twisted in opposite directions by American and British manufacturers, so that it would have unravelled when the ships met in the middle. When it did work, a Dr Whitehouse (left in charge, shamingly, at the Valentia end) burnt it out "by excessive use of voltage". In the end, though, the skilled "graphers" - who communicated with their colleagues at Heart's Content, Newfoundland - were the highest paid men on the island and could be seen constantly kneading their fingers to keep them supple.

That evening, a double rainbow appeared like a vision over the Altzamuth B&B in Knightstown. Inspired, I got up at 7am the next day to walk to the western point of Bray Head, where I could see the Skellig Islands miles offshore, buried in cloud like two rock cakes in a smoke-filled kitchen. Half-way up, the world fell on my head. Rain bounced off the tussocky grass, off the rough path, off the peat bogs behind me. It poured down my neck, stiffened my jeans, re-soaked my gym shoes.

And as I stood there, with the waves foaming white and green below, thinking about the cable stretching all the way to America, the Skelligs suddenly appeared again, radiant against a background of Virgin Mary blue. Rain swept over me on its way east, dragging behind it a beautiful day. The sun came out. The path glistened like a silver ribbon. On the mainland, patches of green made fleeting appearances, like visions of Arcadia, soon to be obliterated with what I felt was my personal rainstorm. I wondered if I should ring friends in London, warn them what was on the way. But I reckoned they'd probably hear it on the radio first.

Fact File

SOPHIE CAMPBELL paid pounds 90 including tax for a return ticket from Stansted to Kerry with Ryanair (0541 569569) and pounds 8 extra for a return fare on the Stansted Express (pounds 21 without a Ryanair ticket). She rented a Group A car from Holiday Autos (0900 300411), which costs pounds 239 per week in August. An ensuite room at Glenreen Heights B&B, on the Knightstown Road (00 353 667 6241), costs pounds 17 per night, including Irish breakfast, or pounds 15 for a standard room.

The ferry from Knightstown to Renard Point is run by Valentia Island Ferries Ltd (00 353 667 6141) and costs pounds 3 single or pounds 4 return for a car, or pounds 1 single and pounds 2 return for foot passengers. It runs throughout the day from 10am. There is also a road bridge to the mainland at Portmagee, on the other side of the island.