May 25th - Night and day in Ireland’s glorious west
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 25 May 2023
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I'm in County Mayo, Ireland, getting a real night and day experience in Ireland's glorious west. In this episode, I visit Wild Nephin National Park and Blacksod Lighthouse on the Mullet Peninsula, meeting Georgia MacMillan, who tells me a little about the the dark sky park and Mark Ruddy, who explains what there is to explore on the peninsula.
Of course, this podcast is free, as is my weekly newsletter. Subscribe here to have it delivered every Friday.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Independence Daily Travel podcast with me Simon Calder. I'm now in the |
| 0:08.3 | main street of Westport County Mayo on my journey through the northwest of Ireland. Before I arrived here |
| 0:17.0 | though in what's very much a tourist in town very welcoming I called him at a couple of |
| 0:22.9 | fascinating locations one best at night the other most impressive in broad daylight for the first |
| 0:28.9 | well let georgia mcmillan of mayo dark sky park who i met close to midnight explain |
| 0:37.1 | hi simon well we're in a place called Mayo Dark Sky Park, and that is at night. |
| 0:42.7 | It's the national park called Wild Nathan National Park, but we like to say half the park is after dark. |
| 0:48.2 | So we're just north of a town called Newport in County Mayo on the west coast of Ireland. |
| 0:53.9 | And tell me how a dark sky park is created and what exactly it is. |
| 1:01.1 | Well, it's a place that's free from artificial light at night, first of all, so it doesn't have |
| 1:06.1 | any light pollution in it. How it's created is it takes about two years to go through a series of measurements |
| 1:13.6 | and a community engagement and you submit an application to an organisation called the International |
| 1:19.6 | Dark Sky Association and they're based in Tucson in Arizona and they're like the biosphere, |
| 1:24.6 | the UNESCO if you like of biospheres in terms of sanctioning. |
| 1:30.4 | What does it mean for visitors to come to a dark sky park? |
| 1:35.8 | Yeah, it's a wonderful resource to have for visitors and for local people alike |
| 1:40.0 | because there are very few places now left in the world where you can get away from excess artificial light at night |
| 1:46.6 | and you can experience tranquility, darkness, natural darkness, you can reconnect. |
| 1:52.7 | And of course, when we have beautiful skies overhead, you can enjoy the stars and the planets and the Milky Way and even the aurora from time to time. |
| 2:02.1 | But it sounds from what you're saying as though it can also be rewarding even under |
| 2:07.0 | cloudy skies. Yeah, absolutely. And that's, you know, something we recognise here. We're in the |
| 2:12.2 | west of Ireland. We're right on the edge of the Atlantic. So we do suffer from the Gulf |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Independent, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Independent and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.