On Ireland’s western seaboard is a secret coast of giant cliffs, dramatic tarns, and one gloriously isolated beach. Lenny Antonelli and two friends wild camp in the ‘Back of Beyond’.

The Great Outdoors, November 2014

You have no reason to know about Annagh. Frankly I’m even a bit reluctant to tell you. Annagh is the kind of place that makes a travel writer go ‘oh, there’s a story here’, then think twice and wonder if he should keep it all to himself. Annagh is a remote beach on Ireland’s largest island, Achill, a place of mountainous cliffs and screaming surf that is fringed by gusty beaches and capped with boggy hills.

You’ll find Annagh on a hidden coast that culminates with the highest cliffs in the geographical British Isles. But more than likely you won’t find it. You can bag Achill’s peaks and hike its trails and not see it. You can read the brochures and guidebooks and be no wiser. Far from any road, this coast was described by the naturalist Thomas A Barry as a land “beyond the mountains”; he called it “the back of beyond”.

Sitting in an Achill pub, an old islander once told me even he’d never been to Annagh. I had hiked there before, but like any compulsive backpacker, I had to come back and camp.