December 22, 2016 (Western Ireland)
One of the reasons we chose Galway to spend the Christmas holiday is because we wanted to see The Burren, Cliffs of Moher, and Kylemore Abbey in Connemara. These are all in the west of Ireland and Galway makes a good “launching off” point to visit these sights. When we arrived in Dublin, one of the first things we did was to visit the Tourist Information Office and pick up some brochures of things we wanted to see – and there were several in this part of the country.
Luckily for us, this worked out well. We booked a tour with The Galway Tour Company. I was a little hesitant at first, as their tours were listed as being only 25 Euros for full-day tours of the Cliffs of Moher. They also listed a special discount – book two tours and get 5 Euros off. Against my usual habit of researching the heck out of things, I booked both the Cliffs of Moher tour and the Kylemore Abbey tour all together. If they sucked, I’d just have to deal with it and hope Grant wouldn’t glare at me the whole time on the bus with stony glances shooting out laser beams. Boy, did I not have anything to worry about. These were both great tours, the guides were very knowledgeable (and entertaining with great senses of humor), and the value of it was super awesome.
Our tour this day left the Galway coach station at 10:00. First stop, a 16th-century castle on the southeastern coast of Galway Bay. It was home to the King of Connacht, Dun of King Guaire. It’s a pretty small castle, as far as castles go, and is actually a tower house (built for defensive purposes as well as for living in). But it still looked impressive sitting on a grassy knoll ducking into the bay.
Dunghoire Castle:
We then headed into a barren landscape that looked spooky yet surreal. This place in Ireland is known as The Burren. It is an area with exposed limestone over small hills that stretches as far as the eye can see. The limestone is formed naturally this way and is criss-crossed with lines cutting into the rock. To say that The Burren looks barren is not an exaggeration. During a time of chaos, between 1651 – 1652 when the British were conducting counter-guerrilla operations in The Burren, Edmund Ludlow, a British Parliamentarian, arrived here and proclaimed 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 at first, that is exactly how bare the landscape appears.
But at closer look, ironically enough, The Burren is home to the most varied and rare species of flora and fauna in all of Ireland. Within the cracks of limestone, there are plants that blossom and grow and are teeming with life such as butterflies and insects. If one is lucky and stood still long enough (and waited a while), they could even spot bats, badgers, stoats, and foxes. So, it is anything but barren.
The Burren was also home to Neolithic humans that left stone legacies that still stand today. Some of these are walls made of rock that create grids in the limestone landscape and some are in the form of portal tombs. We stopped at one such tomb that is older than the Pyramids at Giza and Stonehenge. This tomb is called Poulnabrone Portal Tomb and is thought to be between 5,000 and 6,000 years old. A portal tomb is a tomb with a single chamber made up of at least two large stone slabs standing up with a flat stone capstone placed over it like a table. This was pretty neat to see:
Moving on, our tour came to a medieval cathedral in Kilfenora. The different sections of Kilfenora Cathedral were built in different eras, and so consist of an odd mix of styles. The oldest part of the cathedral dates back to 1189 to 1200 and had been rebuilt from a previous church that stood there 100 years earlier. That one had been rebuilt from one that had stood from the 6th Century.
What’s fascinating about the church are the gravestones that mark the cemetery. Like with many Irish churches, there are ancient gravestones next to more recent ones. Many of the gravestones here have the traditional Celtic Cross which is a halo intersected by a cross, and many times decorated with a Celtic knot pattern.
Today, the Cathedral lies in partial ruins.
For lunch, we stopped off in a town called Doolin at Gus O’Connor’s Pub. Grant ordered sandwiches and I ordered a piping hot bowl of Guinness beef stew. It was a nice break. According to our guide, this pub is famous for having John F. Kennedy as a customer on his visit to Ireland while U.S. president.
Next, we arrived at the highlight of our tour, the Cliffs of Moher on the southwestern edge of The Burren area. The sheer cliffs rise hundreds of feet above the sea and drop off straight into the Atlantic Ocean. The path along the edge of the cliffs rise and fall along with the cliff height and is highest just north of a tower called O’Brien’s Tower, 702 feet (214 meters) above sea level. These cliffs may be recognizable in such movies as Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, when they go into the cliff cave searching for a horcrux and Princess Bride when they climb the “Cliffs of Insanity”. These cliffs were stunning.
The wind was very strong that day and there were times when I thought I was going to get blown right off the cliffs. Even though we were hundreds of feet from the ocean, we were still getting sprayed by the water and the occasional sea foam floated past us. It was pretty impressive.
As a side note, at the bottom of the path leading to the cliffs, there is a visitor’s center which has bathrooms. While in the bathroom there was a suicide hotline sticker stuck to the back of one of the stall doors. That is probably a well thought out placement for a suicide hotline notice.
As the sun was setting on the horizon, our tour bus stopped one last time before driving into the city. This was so we get a photo of the sun ducking down over the horizon in The Burren. Our guide said the landscape of The Burren was the inspiration for Mordor in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
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