Coast - Series 5 - Galway to Arranmore Island

Coast ventures to the storm-battered Atlantic shore of Ireland's majestic northwest coast. Just five months before President John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, he was riding in an open top limo through the crowded streets of Galway. Neil Oliver meets a photographer who covered JFK's motorcade on one of his first assignments and hears how this junior pressman managed to get up close and personal with the President and talk him into the perfect snap. Neil also discovers how the infamous 16th century 'pirate queen' Grace O'Malley turned her coastal home into an impregnable fortress. At Clifden, Dick Strawbridge leads a team of radio experts who try to recreate the 100-year-old technology that Marconi developed to send the first commercial wireless messages across the Atlantic, using steam generators powered by peat and a massive antenna, over half a mile long. Miranda Krestovnikoff explores an odd little island where the mountain hare population is thriving; normally the animals are found high in the hills, so why are these hares happy eating seaweed on the shore? Alice Roberts unearths the remarkable remains of the oldest farm in the British Isles, a complex system of walls and houses laid out before Stonehenge. The ancient ruins of these Stone Age farmers were buried in the peat for over 5000 years. Local legend says that Clew Bay has 365 islands, one for each day of the year. Nick Crane investigates how this astonishingly beautiful and unusual landscape was created when Ireland was covered in ice.