As we’ve travelled the highways, byways and backroads of Eire, I’m slightly sad to acknowledge that we’ve taken some of our entertainment from various road-signs espied as we’ve hurtled past. 

In the UK, we seem to have fairly strict conventions governing our roadside signage, clearly developed and sterilised over many years by dedicated teams of graphic designers at the Department of Transport for the general benefit and safety of the motorist.

And the same must surely apply in Ireland too, although we’ve found the general standard of graphic depiction to be far more freeform than our own. As you’ve already seen, for instance, the title photo imparts its own amusingly simplistic suggestion to choose between turning left or driving (from height) into the sea. Love it.

Then there’s these two . . . 

Both Roadworks Person and Innocent Schoolchildren seem to have survived some form of cataclysmic, deforming and unreported nuclear attack, forging them into representations of human beings which might perhaps have been conjured off the drawing board by alien designers from another planet? Unless Roadworks Person is in actual fact providing coded directions to a hurling (or shit-slinging) match – or maybe just a weaponised ceilidh?

Then, warning of tumbling roadside rocks appears to double as an apposite artistic impression of our broken, post-Brexit, race-to-the-bottom, sad old UK – crumbling around the edges, while the Irish mastery of bumpy roads ahead utilises the brilliant triple-tit protocol, making it well nigh impossible for cheeky graffiti artists to add nipples to our own double-boob bumps, as they are often wont to do in the UK.

Other informational signage has also caught our attention en passant, raising a smile or two for their innocent idiosyncrasies, such as the one on the left here, spotted close to an overnight stop on the water’s edge just outside Clifden, County Galway. And this joined by another surprising juxtaposition of local services provided in Westport, County Mayo, where the local taxi firm doubles up as the town’s funeral undertakers. So, after the wake, do the Irish just call a car to send Granny off? (“Hello? I need a cab – can you make sure it’s black with a big boot”?)

And for our final hurrah, here’s a brave sign spotted on a coastal path, which might induce wrath, hysteria and significant trolling from the dog-owning members of our exclusive readership. For those of us who choose not to own such pets, however, this meant we enjoyed a walk free from plastic poo-bags hanging from tree branches or fence-posts; nor any accidental steps into the actual nasties. All the sheep we passed also seemed intact and decidedly relaxed – as their lambs gambolled innocently in a canine-free environment – on the sun-warmed greensward at the edge of the world.