North to the Edge

Sligo to Malin Head — Book Three of The Painter's Road

The final leg. Driving the empty bog roads out of Achill toward Sligo, Jason O'Brien gets a flat tyre outside Bangor Erris — and is led, by the sheep farmer who stops to help, to a hidden holy well he never would have found otherwise. It is the right beginning for the last book of The Painter's Road: a journey that has always found its best moments sideways, by accident, on the way to somewhere else.

North to the Edge carries Jason and The Curragh past Dún Briste at Downpatrick Head, under Ben Bulben to Yeats's grave, along Mullaghmore's harbour and Slieve League's iron-red cliffs, to Glenveagh Castle's mirror lake, a boatbuilder's fire-lit shed on Lough Swilly, and finally to Banba's Crown at Malin Head — the fifteenth and last Signature Discovery Point, and the end of a two-month journey around the whole of Ireland's Atlantic coast.

Illustrated with thirteen original paintings — including the series' closing image of Malin Head itself — this final volume brings the story, and the road, home.

By F Cosgrove. Available as a full-colour 8.5″×11″ paperback on Amazon. 101 pages.