Conor Maguire On Mullaghmore's Swell Of The Decade

“Cast a cold eye

On life, on death.

Horseman, pass by!”

That was the self-written epitaph of William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet. It appears on his gravestone and was taken from the last stanza of his last poem, Under Ben Bulben. Benbulben is the 1000-metre-high table mountain that often frames the square-lipped mutants that roll down the Mullaghmore reef.

For almost the entire month of last December, a swathe of local and international surfers spent a month dodging horsemen...