Woke up to partly cloudy,
no rain, so there was hope. We had
planned to go fairly directly from Killarney to the Cliffs of Moher area, but got
advice not to take the ferry across the Shannon river at Tarbert, since it
takes 40 minutes to get across and they don’t run that often!! Instead we were advised to go to to Adare, a
historic town with 3 abbeys and a castle, then swing around the outskirts of
Limerick. But the car wouldn’t
start! I tried many times and was
thinking all bets were off. I couldn’t
even get into the trunk, since the key fob wouldn’t work on that either. I tried locking and unlocking the doors, and
at first it wouldn’t work, but finally I
wore it down. Noticing I was down to one
bar of fuel (i.e. almost none, and maybe That was the reason the car wouldn’t
start?), I just put in just a few litres since the gas was over 10 cents higher
in this tourist haven of Killarney than anywhere else. Arriving at the petrol station, there was an
old dog (black lab?) lying in the spot where I’d have brought the car for
refueling. Poor thing. It got up eventually, after I parked a few
feet away, and it wandered across the street with lots of traffic, looking
neither to the left or right (they stopped).
Car wouldn’t start again, initially, but eventually seemed to behave.
Adare was as lovely as
people had said. And it was overrun with
tourists. We couldn’t find parking on
the first swing through the town, but coming back someone was pulling out in a
perfect spot. On the main street of the
village there are thatched cottages with shops and cafes in them, a couple of
them with lovely gardens out front.
Poppies are out, among many others; I’ve never seen a purple poppy
before!
We went through the
historical museum. I must admit that I
couldn’t follow all the wars, the families, who overthrew whom, etc. I found some dark chocolate covered mint chocolate
bars and bought a few. Good stuff! The British Isles tend towards milk chocolate,
what with all the land given to cows and grazing, and it’s hard to find dark,
or what they call, plain chocolate, but the trend is going in a good direction
(i.e. finding more dark chocolate than I used to). I didn’t know it yet, but it turns out it was
Butlers chocolate, the same company as this chocolate café that I found on the
Grafton pedestrian mall opposite St. Stephens’ Green in Dublin, which had just
closed when I got there.
We headed off in the on
and off rain towards Limerick, took the tunnel under the Shannon river to
bypass, and into County Clare. On the right side of the road saw Bunratty castle, which is a luxury tourist castle and folk park. JFK visited as did the Beatles. They have medieval banquets, but we had to press onwards past the green fields and farms. Our first stop was in a little town with a pottery workshop, and then on to see the Burren Center, which describes
the physical and social history of the area.
The “burren” is a limestone karst area, with active dissolution of the
limestone going on underground, caves to explore, one of which is 15 km
long! As the precip gets more acid, with air pollution, the
dissolving of the limestone increases. Clare
has a lot of upland, not so many trees. But
there were ancient settlements in the area, nonetheless, as evidenced by the ancient gravestones and circle forts (the pic here is in County Clare in the Burren.. taken from Wikipedia).
Next stop was the Cliffs
of Moher on the rugged west coast of the county. It’s a regular tourist attraction, complete
with road signs directing one there, big parking lots, really well done ultra-modern
exhibits inside talking about the geology of the cliffs, the science of climate
change, impacts of that on species, and a really neat video, which you can stop
motion or speed up on how Ireland, and all the other land in the world, has
moved around the globe over the eons of time.
It’s now known that Ireland was once in the southern hemisphere, moving
later over the equator, and then to its present position, so rock types in
Ireland vary all over the map, as it were.
I’ve been seeing this considerable variation from day one. One thing I didn’t realize before this trip
is that Ireland was not always part of the continent or landmass of Europe; at
one point it was part of North America.
All of the land mass in the world was once Pangaea, but before that,
Ireland was on the other side of the ocean.
Fascinating. In the last many
thousands of years, as the miles of thickness of ice from the glaciations
pushed northern areas downwards, and then glacial rebound slowly occurred as
the ice retreated. This is how the wave
cut sheer cliffs came to be.
Finally moving out to the
cliffs, the wind seemed like it could be near hurricane force at times, much
worse than up at Slieve League a few days before, where the wind was louder than my narration of the panorama video I took at the top. Here at the Cliffs of Moher, which are about 1/3 as high as Slieve League, I was literally blown backwards as I walked forwards, and pelted
by water that was picked up from puddles on the ground and thrown around. I had wanted to get out to the end of the promontory where there was a building / fort, and it would have been nice to walk the path you see on the pic to the right. I don't easily get pushed back, but the wind was just too much. Thanks to the wonders of zoom lenses, I was able to get a better look at the fort. It was also colder than it
has been, and almost thought I’d need gloves and scarf. There were lots of buttercups on the
hillsides. I'm guessing there's no vegetation more than a few inches high because of the exposed nature of the cliff area. It was hard to really appreciate the true colors of the cliffs because it was so heavily overcast. But this gives me a good reason to revisit. 
Next stop was the little
town of Doolin, which was in the middle of a 2 day folk festival. We’d thought to grab dinner there, maybe with
a view of the shore, but the town was packed, and nowhere to eat (we walked in on a hen party at one point, and a packed pub at another), so we moved
on to Lisdoonvarna and our hotel.
The Hydro
Hotel, is old (1800s) and big (110 rooms) and grand. The town is the site of this annual
matchmaking ritual that takes place in September. More on this tomorrow. In the beginning, and
similar to the grand Muckross house in Killarney park, this hotel was where
aristocrats, who came to the area for hunting and fishing, would stay. This is
the first hotel in Ireland to have hot and cold running water in 1948, hence
the name Hydro! It stuns me that this
would be the first one to have this (that is, in this location, and not Dublin) and that it
would be so recent. We’d found out during
the Muckross house tour that this grand house with 26 bedrooms and an ingenious and intricate system of more than 30 distinct bells physically connected by cords to a basement room, for the owners to summon specific servants in every room, didn’t have electricity
until the 1960s. I’d thought that the
story of Glencolmcille was anomalous, the story of a priest starting a campaign
to bring electricity and water to his home area, starting in the 1950s. But all this gives indication of just how
poor a country this has been. I’m also
realizing that all the woolen stores all over Ireland with handknit sweaters and socks, with
styles that are so very thick (think off-white, knitted, thick sweaters), are
due to the rough nature of the weather:
wet, damp, and windy a lot of the time, and only a wood or peat fire to
keep you warm. It gives me great
appreciation for those who lived before the modern conveniences, some even in
my lifetime.
For simplicity we had
dinner in the hotel. The language of the
menu was first in German, then English – not sure why. Noticing again how the portion size in Irish
restaurants are HUGE. We have heard how
American portions are huge, but these are even bigger (maybe a holdover from
those days without central heating?).
Veg almost always includes at least two or three of the following: carrot, turnip, and broccoli. Of course there are lots of potatoes. My tortellini were about 3 times the size of
those in the US. With all this food, there was no room
for dessert this night. We spent the
rest of the night repacking for the upcoming flight to Gatwick day after
tomorrow. I realized that I need to send
the drum I’d bought in Sneem back separately (was never going to fit in the
luggage). Since it’s light and came in a
box, it should be easy enough. This
hotel is also having trouble with wifi, saying they’ve called someone to come
on Monday. I find this altogether too
casual, especially from the first hotel in Ireland with the advanced technology
of running water. Also, interestingly, the
temperature of the shower water was lukewarm.
At least the Woodlawn House in Killarney had intermittent wifi and hot
water. Tomorrow we head to Dublin.
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