Tag Archives: travel

Irish fjords

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Killary Harbour

The day before we left Galway, I got my hair cut. That’s always a potentially traumatic experience on the road, but I found someone I liked. She gave me her mobile number so I could text her at home on a Sunday to make an appointment, for crying out loud, what’s not to like? So while we were chatting as she snipped away, she asked me where we were off to next.

“Westport,” I answered.

“Oh, Westport!” she gushed. “That’s where we go when we want to get away from Galway.” Get away from Galway? Why? We love this city. “Be sure to stop at Killary Harbour on your way. The fjord is beautiful.” Fjord? In Ireland???

Yes, Ireland does have fjords, it turns out. Three of them. And one is Killary Harbour. I thought fjord was a Scandinavian word for a long, narrow inlet or bay. According to my research assistant, however, a fjord is not just a foreign word but also a geological phenomenon. During an ice age, as the rapid accumulation of snow and ice compacts and forms a glacier in a river valley, the weight of the glacier eventually causes it to slide down the valley toward the sea. The V-shaped river valley is carved wider and rounder, into more of a U-shape, by the glacier. At the end of the ice age, the warming climate causes the glacier to melt and the ice effectively recedes back up the valley as the glacier gets smaller. 

When the glacier starts to recede, moraine—that rocky rubble that the glacier has been chiseling off the valley floor and walls and pushing down the valley—is deposited at the lower end and forms a sill or lip to the basin that it’s carved out. Seas rise as glaciers melt, and eventually they rise higher than the sill and flood the basin, creating a fjord. Non-fjordal inlets are the more V-shaped, river-cut valleys that weren’t rounded out by glaciers and don’t have sills that a glacier would leave behind. And there endeth the lesson, as Sean Connery would say.

We didn’t have time for a boat trip into the fjord, but we did stop at a lay-by to watch the boats go by and absorb the beauty.

Get a load of those rhododendrons! I stood mesmerized in a sea of deep pink. My guess is we passed through at peak bloom. Now that, my friends, is beautiful countryside and another serendipitous moment, all because I needed a haircut.

Connemara

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view of Ballynakill Harbour and Barnaderg Bay from Diamond Hill

Connemara, the wild, remote wilderness of Irish-speaking Galway. Just the name conjures images of The Quiet Man, which was filmed not far away in east Galway. We looked forward to seeing what glories Connemara National Park had to offer. Reading up on it before we got there, we didn’t see anything mentioned other than a walk up Diamond Hill. Well, there had to be more than that. It’s a national park, for Pete’s sake, and one of only six in the country. We’d just go and see what else they’ve got.

Diamond Hill surrounded by typical Irish grassland

We asked at the visitor center and found that the hike up Diamond Hill really is all they have to offer. No exhibits in the visitors center. No informational plaques outside. Just a walk. 

An interesting note: No matter how taxing the hike, the Irish (and Brits too, we observed when we were in the UK) called them walks, as in a walk in the park. You can ascend 1200 feet over two hours (e.g. Diamond Hill) and it’s still called a walk, although they do acknowledge it’s a “strenuous” walk. That’s one difference between Americans and the Irish. In the US we’d be plastering bumper stickers on our cars saying “I climbed Diamond Hill.” In Ireland they tell their friends “I went on the loveliest walk this afternoon. It was grand.” I just love their understatement!

We opted out of the strenuous part of the walk, but hiked up far enough to get great views of Ballynakill Harbour and Barnaderg Bay, and it was still a good stretch in the fresh country air.

We started to encounter marshy wetlands.

And as we walked, we gradually began to realize something about the park that we hadn’t seen mentioned. The area surrounding Diamond Hill is all bogland. We noticed the reed-filled ponds and the lumpy tufts of grass that we had seen in Killarney National Park’s bog. After gaining a bit of altitude, we saw fields below us where peat was being harvested—the telltale plateaus of turf where vertical slices of peat were being removed like slivers of dark chocolate cake, one layer at a time. The water running in the streams was brown from the tannins leaching out of the peat. And much of the walk was on boardwalk to prevent people from walking on the bog and destroying the fragile habitat.

The color of the landscape changed from vibrant green to rusty brown.
multiple layers of turf in peat fields
peat, or turf, on the banks of this tannin-brown stream

The walk was a series of “aha” moments as we put it all together. Why hadn’t they said something about the bog, talked it up, showcased it for unenlightened visitors, used this beautiful park as an educational opportunity? Perhaps it was another case of Irish understatement. Just get out there and walk in it, and you’ll see what you see. Isn’t it grand?

Connemara ponies

This Connemara pony and her foal grazed amid the midges, annoying flying insects that will suck the blood out of your flesh and the wits out of your head. The mom’s tail was moving non-stop to keep them at bay, and her foal took refuge under her fan. Smart little lad!

Even Connemara lambs have horns. This one can’t be more than a few months old and already has quite a bit of growth.

Inis Mór

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the Cliffs of Aran, from Dun Aengus on Inis Mór

We’re not fans of tours, but sometimes a tour is truly the best way to see a place. The weather was beautiful while we were in Galway, perfect for visiting one of the Aran Islands just offshore where Galway Bay meets the North Atlantic. There are three islands; I chose the biggest, Inis Mór (Inishmore), because I wanted to hike up to Dun Aengus, a stone fort overlooking the Atlantic to the west and County Clare to the south across Galway Bay, seemingly at the edge of the world.

We could have driven the 40 kilometers to Ros an Mhil, figured out the ferry schedule and bought tickets, and arranged to rent bikes, hike, or hire a cab or local tour guide to take us to the foot of Dun Aengus, or we could just hire Michael Faherty, an Inis Mór native, to arrange the whole package for us.

  • Dun Aengus on the horizon
  • clints and grikes…look familiar?
  • an “erratic” left by a glacier in the last Ice Age
  • the fort
  • the edge of the world…the Cliffs of Aran

Michael was born and raised on Inis Mór. He was a commercial fisherman until the EU restrictions on fishing open waters became too restrictive. He decided to try his hand at the tourism business. He picks you up in his van in downtown Galway, drives you to the ferry, purchases the ferry tickets, escorts you to the island where he has another van to drive you from the ferry terminal not only to Dun Aengus, which is the highlight, but also to his favorites spots on the island. 

Seven Churches monastic site

Note: Michael inherited his father’s farm on Inis Mór last year when his father passed away, so he maintains that too. The day before our tour, he had to stop mid-tour to “pull a calf.” One of his cows was having a difficult delivery, so he had to pull off the road at one of his pastures to help her out. Man, why didn’t we book the tour the day before?

  • 7800 linear miles of stone wall
  • wildflowers growing out of stone
  • non-native beach rubble thrown up on the shore by Hurricane Sandy in 2012
  • notice the difference between native and non-native stone

The most striking thing about Inis Mór? The stone. OMG, it’s everywhere! The Aran Islands are actually a geological extension of the Burren. We saw clints and grikes [The Burren] on the island like the ones we saw in the national park. Over the centuries, as farmers cleared land for livestock, they removed stone from the fields and used it to build walls delineating pastureland. Michael says there are 7800 linear miles of stone wall on Inis Mór alone.

snail in a grike

Michael recently built a shed on his property using stone from his land. It was about 92% complete when the local authorities showed up. You can’t use those stones. They’re part of the heritage of our island. You’ll have to put them back. So Michael disassembled his shed. (Why didn’t they stop by when the shed was only 19% done? he mused.) You can own the land, you can build a wall with the stone from your land, but you can’t build a structure with the stone. They have more stone than they know what to do with. I doubt they could exhaust the supply if they tried.

This is the kind of insight you get only from hanging out with the locals.

member of the local seal colony

The Burren

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the Burren

We were driving from the Cliffs of Moher through typically Irish, rolling, green pastureland on our way to our next stay in Galway when we came across this. Are we still in Ireland? What sort of geological mash-up is this?

the Burren, up close

This is the Burren (in Irish, Boireann or “great rock”) Great rock, indeed. Weird rock, as well. The limestone “pavement” has been eroded into large rectangles, or clints, with long, narrow fissures, called grikes, between them where the softer rock has eroded away. So weird that the rock eroded along gridlines!

clints (blocks) and grikes (grooves)

Today we hiked in Burren National Park, our third of six national parks in the Republic of Ireland. I had to get out in it and see it up close. We chose a short loop-walk to the monastic site of St. Cronan. And guess what I discovered there. My first holy well!  St. Cronan’s Well. Who knew?

Sure enough, there was a shrine to St. Cronan next to the well and faded strips of cloth hanging from tree branches overhead. [Serendipity] I felt like I had just won a scavenger hunt I hadn’t realized I was playing. Now I understand one reason people go in search of the wells; they’re spiritual geocaches. The thrill of the hunt may be what gets people out there, but it’s even more fun finding something you didn’t know was out there to find!

  • an easy hike to St. Cronan’s monastic site
  • well, maybe not such an easy hike after all
  • cow playgroup
  • “grass growing in turfs of earth…that lie between the rocks”
  • crossing the wall “in stile”
  • St. Cronan’s church
  • St. Cronan’s well!
  • a standing stone at the well
  • look carefully for strips of cloth hanging in the tree branches

In the 17th century, English Parliamentarian Edmund Ludlow, who served under Oliver Cromwell in Ireland, observed that the Burren “is a country where there is not enough water to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him…… and yet their cattle are very fat; for the grass growing in turfs of earth, of two or three foot square, that lie between the rocks, which are of limestone, is very sweet and nourishing.”

in the grike

He is absolutely right. Rainfall disappears quickly into the grikes between the clints and makes its way into the limestone aquifers below. There is essentially no soil on the limestone pavement for living organisms to establish themselves. What grass and trees there are grow in small plots of soil between the clints, yet the grikes themselves are a haven for all manner of tiny plants from Mediterranean to alpine to arctic in habitat, all living side-by-side. They are miniature, terrarium-like ravines in a network of barren rock; I could explore them all day. 

Very interesting terrain. Not at all what I expected. This, my friends, is exactly the reason I travel.

The sun will come out

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The Shannon River in Limerick

When Marcus and I were researching our trip to Ireland, we watched the film version of Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt’s account of his impoverished childhood in Limerick. One thing that was readily apparent from the movie: It rains a lot in Limerick, like all the time. Frank and his brother, Malachy, were always running through Limerick’s streets and alleyways in the driving (horizontal) rain. At one point the rain was so heavy that their family had to abandon the first floor of their home, which they had to wade across to get to the stairs, and live on the upper level. For us, this trip is all about the outdoors. I only booked four nights in the Limerick area.

King John’s 13th-century castle

True to form, the weather was pretty cold, overcast, and wet while we were in the area, which suited my recovery from food poisoning. Apparently I ate something that didn’t agree with my cast-iron stomach in a pub on the beach on the Dingle Peninsula, which made for an interesting (not) transition to our new home-from-home in the Slieve Felim Mountains about ten miles east of Limerick. But every cloud has a silver lining, and this one was a beautiful, light, airy remodeled stable/cottage on property owned by a warm and welcoming Irish couple—a nurse and her husband. It doesn’t get much better than that! My best friends for the next four days were a fleece blanket, a wood stove, and The Bodyguard on Netflix.

one of two gatehouse towers

But eventually I was able to muster the energy to leave our bucolic surroundings and venture into the city. We spent a couple of hours in King John’s Castle experiencing a fascinating interactive exhibit on the role of Limerick’s castle in the incessant Anglo-Irish conflict and having lunch in a wee snug pub on the river. The return to food in general, and pubs in particular, was challenging psychologically, but it’s hard to go wrong with a good, hearty Irish stew on a cold and rainy day. Things are looking up. Who knows? Perhaps the sun will come out tomorrow.

Is that blue on the horizon?

Sign of the times

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What do you do with this kind of information? As you’re going into a blind curve? On a single-track road?

It’s amazing that we haven’t hit someone head-on. We’ve come close. With some buffoon in a snazzy suit driving a BMW and talking and laughing into his phone. At 100 kilometers per hour.

When we arrived at our destination just east of Limerick Town, Marcus asked our host, Pat, how the Irish deal with the stress of driving on these roads every day. (Pat and Breda live out in the country on a long single-track road off of a longer single-track road.) “Well, you drive in the middle of the road,” says he. Excuse me? “You never want to drive on the edge of the road. You’ll pop a tire.” Interesting. The stress, for him, is the fear of damaging a tire. Flat tire or head-on collision? That’s a tough choice. Not.

So Marcus continues to drive as close to the edge as he safely can. So far, no popped tires, but the air brakes* engage frequently. [*a device for quickly slowing or stopping a moving vehicle that is initiated by the sudden, sharp, and simultaneous intake of breath of both driver and passenger as they round a curve to find themselves on a collision course with another vehicle]

air brake zone

Okay, I’ve been wanting to try this since arriving in County Limerick. Let’s see now. Let me think. Okay, I’ve got one!

There once was a man from the States,
Who traveled the world with his mate.
But the single-track roads
Caused him nothing but woe,
And the tremors have yet to abate.

Well, what do you expect on such short notice?

An Gaeltacht

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the Wild Atlantic from Slea Head Drive

Can you stand one more gorgeous peninsula? Although I can’t promise this will be the last. We have the rest of the Wild Atlantic Way to explore as we head north toward Northern Ireland. But the Dingle Peninsula is certainly one of the most beautiful, and worth sharing.

Slea Head Drive is a scenic, 18-mile loop on the western end of the Dingle Peninsula, in Gaeltacht country. Established in 1922 when the Free State of Ireland was created, An Gaeltacht is the part of the country that is primarily Irish speaking—mostly the central-west and northwest coasts. When the western part of the Dingle Peninsula opted to revert to their native language, the Irish government required that all signs be posted in Irish only—no English. Word has it that tourists were getting lost on their way to Dingle Town, the beginning of the Gaeltacht region on the peninsula, because they didn’t realize that “An Daingean” on road signs is the Irish name for Dingle. So the tourist mecca was granted dispensation and allowed to post signs in English as well as Irish; however, Irish must be posted above English. 

Coumeenoole Beach

It’s surprising to me that in the 800 years that Great Britain dominated Ireland—and outlawed use of the Irish language—the language wasn’t lost completely. If the majority of the Irish population hadn’t been rural, it may well have been. No wonder An Gaeltacht today includes some of the remotest parts of Ireland. But there is no guarantee that the language will survive, even though Ireland has an educational requirement that all students become fluent in Irish. I read that in An Gaeltacht only two-thirds of the people speak Irish as their main language during the course of their day. History shows that when less than two-thirds of a people use a language, the language is at risk of dying out.

lazy sheep

Speaking of remote parts of Ireland, we stopped at the Blasket Islands Heritage Centre in Dún Chaoin/Dunquin to learn more about this cluster of six islands just two kilometers off the coast. Irish farmers settled on Great Blasket Island centuries ago, living off of fish, mutton, beef, and whatever vegetables they could grow. They were so isolated from the mainland that their language essentially became frozen in time, while the language on the mainland continued to evolve. By the 20th century, islanders were speaking their own dialect of Irish. 

Great Blasket Island

The population on Great Blasket peaked in the early 20th century at about 175, but in 1953 the government had to evacuate the last 22 residents, by mutual consent, because of increasingly extreme weather conditions in the North Atlantic that would make rescue, if required, nearly impossible. A few former residents have gone back to the island, but today it is primarily a tourist day-trip destination. The government has recently purchased most of the land and plans to turn it into a national park. I hope the signs are all in Irish, despite the tourists.

Sybil Point and the Three Sisters

Tír álainn (beautiful country).

Lambs

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We arrived in Ireland right in the middle of lambing season, so within a few weeks we started to see lambs grazing with their mothers in the pastures. They’re adorable!

Although they’ve caught on to the grazing thing, they still nurse from time to time especially when anxious about weird guys with cameras hanging over the fence.

A ewe will typically have one or two lambs in a litter, but occasionally there will be three. Because mom isn’t able to feed more than two, the third sheep becomes a “pet sheep,” bottle-fed by the farmer’s family and kept separate from the rest of the herd…raised to who-knows-what purpose. I didn’t want to ask. Let’s assume it’s wool production.

Like Waldo in the ever-popular children’s books, sheep can be detected in just about every photo I’ve posted of the Irish countryside. Here in County Kerry, sheep outnumber people. You may have noticed the bright-colored spots on the sheeps’ wool. Farmers here use water soluble paint to “brand” their sheep. This poor guy must have been at the front of the purple paint line.

Stopping at the Gap

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the Gap of Dunloe

It took three tries, but I finally got there—the Gap of Dunloe, a remote pass through MacGillycuddy’s Reeks. The Reeks, Ireland’s highest mountain range, lie just to the west of Killarney National Park. I first read about the Gap months ago, and I knew I had to go. The isolation was calling me. (Plus, the name of the mountains is just so cool!)

I wanted to hike the Gap the first time we entered the park, but we spent too much time in Killarney town after our wild and crazy drive through the lakes of Killarney. Which is not a bad thing. Killarney is a good-sized town with plenty to enthrall, but after a filling lunch, it was too late in the day to start a four-mile hike.

Our second foray into the park was closer to the Gap, but I didn’t have it in me to start another hike after our eight-mile trek around Muckross Lake.

Our time was running out in Kenmare, and I was beginning to think I’d have to give up on the Gap until I realized that the trailhead lies only seven miles off our path from Kenmare to our next home-from-home on the Dingle Peninsula. Stopping to do a little jaunt on our drive would be a good opportunity to stretch our legs.

As we drove into the valley, a man waved us over to the side of the road. The proud owner of a jaunting car, he gave us the hard sell on why we should allow him to escort us into the gap with his horse and cart. Wary of why he was flagging us down outside the normal confines of the attraction, and in urgent need of finding a place to dispose of some used coffee, we begged off and continued down the road. After taking advantage of the facilities at a gift shop, Marcus politely asked a woman behind the counter if the guy we encountered was legit. Oh, yes! she assured him. All the cart drivers live in the community, know each other, and work together. Their rates should all be the same, and you can trust any of them. We drove back to Sean and his horse, Seamus. Why not? We can walk anywhere, but how often do we get to ride in a jaunting car? Sean was very happy—albeit, surprised—to see us again.

  • our jaunting car
  • onward, Seamus
  • our tour guide, Sean
  • a Chilean pine tree
  • a house, once upon a time
  • Purple Mountain
  • feral goats

An hour, and several Dunloe legends, later Sean dropped us at the end of our chosen tour—four miles into the Gap—and we walked back down the hill to our car.

Everyone was happy: I got to ride in something called a jaunting car, Marcus got to re-take all those out-of-focus shots he took in the jostling jaunting car, we got to stretch our legs a bit, and Sean got to put down another healthy deposit toward his next Disney World vacation. And Seamus? He just lost his 270-pound load, and the walk back to his feedbag was all downhill.