Fathom it out

Submersive revelation at Joyce’s swimming hole 

The salt swell lifted and fell. Close by a fishing boat trawled. In the misty distance, container ships churned towards port. Moments earlier, I had splashed off the granite outcrop known as The Forty Foot, a wave-worn sculpture garden at Dublin Bay’s southern extremity. Here Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus bathed in Ulysses’ opening pages – a pleasure enjoyed by their creator in 1904.

My dip came three-weeks-past Bloomsday. I joined a handful of others, an hour before work. As I steadied myself in the briney, a grinning head bobbed up beside me to acclaim ‘the best weather for a while’. There was a light drizzle. The sea, however, was an enveloping balm. I felt unusually buoyant, and by some tidal freak, effortlessly floated at the mouth of the inlet. For half an hour, perhaps more, I held this position, watching quick dippers jump in and out, and athletic swimmers splashing past me and towards the horizon. 

My mind emptied and wandered. Before I made for dry land, however, a word came to me – omphalos. Like many terms and phrases in Joyce’s masterpiece, it had stretched my vocabulary. Chambers has it thus ‘i. a navel, ii, a boss, iii. a stone at Delphi believed to to mark the centre of the world, iv. a centre’.

Four times the word appears in the novel. Its second iteration comes in Mulligan’s explanation of the Martello tower, as he wraps up his shaving-foam Mass. 

I swivelled to face the land, and the Martello Tower in question, a few meters above the shore.  Over 150 of these circular structures line the coasts of our islands – built in the 1820s to repel the French. Sandycove’s unusually modest example Mulligan – a bombast – pronounces, ‘is the omphalous’.

Of my current spot, treading the watery swirl off shore, might his grand claim be apt?.

Dreamy, in marine animation, I imagine myself the pivot around which the world is spinning. I have entered a fugue, a flux, a flotation fantasy. Time is stretching and compressing. Aches have evaporated. I am on the cusp of revelation, It comes to me that I am at the omphalous, transcendental rapture its gift. I wallow on for a while, until, light-headed, I reluctantly ascend the stone steps towards towel, train and travails.

Forty Foot has fair claim to be Ireland’s most famous sea-swimming spot. Lockdown apparently turbo-charged its popularity. By the time I left, there may have been 40 bathers at some stage of their morning dip, inclemency notwithstanding. It is ungated and unsupervised, the only ‘facility’, an open concrete changing shelter. (The local swimming club sometimes operate a ‘kitchen’ on site). It is a brisk ten-minute walk from Sandycove station, itself a shade less than 30 minutes from the centre of Dublin. Trains in both directions run every ten minutes or so.

A popular place to enjoy the waves for more than 250 years, its current form dates back to 1863. Then, the Kingstown Commissioners (the local authority for what is now known as Dún Laoghaire) obtained permission from the Ballast Board (now less confusingly named the Dublin Port Company) to create a public bathing space. They cut steps, attached rails, and bolted dramatic diving boards to the rocks. A more conventional beached swimming spot was established twenty paces away within the bay itself. It too is still there. The boards are gone, alas, but brave swimmers still plummet from the cliffs into the twenty feet depth of choppy waters below. 

For many years The Forty Foot was an exclusively male enclave, and popular with naturists. Only in 1974 did the ‘Dublin City Women’s Invasion Force’ rush the promontory, with placards demanding equal access. As recently as 2014 the local swimming club ended its ban on women members. The crowd that I shared the waves with was entirely mixed, and delightfully friendly. The idea that such a joyous, natural wonder should be anything other than a universal pleasure is jarring.

I left with an invigorating sense of having lived, just for a moment, through immediate experience alone. Its a tonic that refreshes me yet.

I had no time to visit the museum dedicated to the great modernist novelist that now occupies the tower – it was too early in the day. There are, of course, many other ways to taste the Dublin of Daedalus and Bloom. But for a truly immersive Joycean experience, and much else beside, The Forty Foot is surely the plumb?