Ireland—Week One
Going to Ireland was one of the things that I always said that I MUST do before I die, and I did (Which is not to say that I'm ready to die now!). It truly is as green as it’s reputation, and the Irish are all, in my experience, very friendly and helpful, although sometimes translating from Irish English to American English was a little dicey. It was mostly the accent, although there are a few things that are called something different than what I was used to. For instance, at the first place we stopped to get something to eat, I ordered a water and the lad said, “Stale or sparkling?” I was perplexed, and asked him to repeat, whereupon he said the exact same thing. I finally said,”Just a plain water with no sparkle, please.” I wondered who on earth would order stale water? When I got my bottle of water, it plainly said on the front, “STILL”. As opposed to sparkling. But in Irish English, and with my peculiar hearing deficit, I could have sworn he said stale.
I left Spokane around noon, and flew to San Francisco where we only had just enough time to get to the international terminal for our Aer Lingus flight to Ireland. We landed in Dublin at 1130 AM Irish time, which was about 3:30 AM Idaho time, after not sleeping for the entire 10 hour flight. It was raining when we got to our lovely, old hotel, and we weren’t able to check in yet, so a group of us women got on the Hop On-Hop Off tour of Dublin bus, and we were so tired and it was so wet that we never hopped off at all. But we had a wonderful dinner in the pub next to our hotel which was called something like the Bleeding Horse, or the Dying Horse (the pub, not the hotel).
The first week of my trip was spent on a whirlwind tour of Ireland by bus with 21 other women, most of whom had some connection to Sandpoint, Idaho. It was a great bunch of middle aged and older women and I enjoyed their company. At the last minute someone had had to cancel and so my friend Julie Bunker from Spokane (newly retired) jumped in and went with us. We traveled through most of the Republic of Ireland in 6 days!
The first day we got on the bus with our charming driver and guide, Luke Shanahan, who looked to be in his late 60’s or so and was retired from something else, but now is a tour guide. He was pretty funny and certainly knew his history of Ireland! That was impressive to me—that they all think of even their ancient history as present and important—they talk about things that happened in 1079 as though it was just a couple of years ago.
We drove south through the Wicklow Mountains to a place called Glendalough. Glen means valley, da is two and lough (pronounced “lock”; sort of; with a kind of hawking sound), so this was the valley of two lakes. This is the site where St. Kevin founded a monastery in the 6th century that became quite a center of Christianity and learning. There are still quite a few stone buildings still standing, and gravestones that are so old that they are worn smooth and crumbling. The stone work is truly amazing!
After some time in Glendalough, we set off for the Rock of Cashel, which is where the ancient kings and queens of Ireland held court before Christianity came to Ireland. It too has some impressive old stone buildings still standing, at least in part. The yellow flowered shrub is gorse, which is a helacious, thorny, invasive native that takes over anyplace that isn’t being grazed regularly. It puts Devil’s Club to shame!
We stayed that night in Cork City (so many of the towns have the same name as the county they are in that people always tack on “City” to differentiate it from the county). We stayed at a nice hotel right on the River Lee that runs through the city. Julie and I set out to explore the city and explore it we did—and got a little turned around. We finally found our way to the river with the help of the compass on my phone and Google maps, but then soon realized we were going the wrong way on the river. By then it had started to rain (it really does rain just about every day, just not ALL day), and by the time we got back to the hotel we were literally dripping as though we’d fallen into the river.
We left Cork City the next morning and took a side trip to the coast to the little port of Cobh (pronounced “Cove”). This was the last port of call for the Titanic, and there is a memorial there and an office of the steamship line. It is also where many of the bodies washed up from the Lusitania, the American ship that was torpedoed by the Germans in WWII. There is a memorial there for them too. You can see the typical brightly painted houses that are seen in all the smaller villages. I have never seen a place so tidy and well-kept as Ireland!
Our next stop was a famous cooking school called Ballymaloe School of Cookery (sidebar: “bally” means village, so there are a lot of placenames containing the word bally), which is situated on a large estate that contains vegetable gardens, orchards, berries, herbs and chickens that supply the school with their raw materials. It was a Sunday, so the school itself wasn’t in session, but we got to tour the grounds.
The founder of the school, and owner of the estate had built a little “room” entirely out of shells! It took over a year to do it, and it is unlike anything I have ever seen!
Even the chandelier was made of shells!
Next, Blarney Castle and the famous Blarney Stone! No one is entirely sure of the origin of the Blarney Stone; there are a couple of stories involving bringing the stone from elsewhere and about the origin of the belief that kissing the stone endows one with the gift of eloquence. There is another widely circulated myth that the locals pee on the stone, but we were assured that THAT wasn’t true. Going up the 127 steps to the stone that is situated at the top of the castle was pretty scary! It is a spiral set of stairs, very steep and narrow, with the castle wall on one side and NOTHING on the other. I was actually hyperventilating a bit by the time we got to the top! So the stone is offset from the castle wall by a few inches, and there is a gap between the bottom of the stone and the side of the castle that looks all the way down to the ground, very far down there. There are two men there to help you because you have to sit down on the stone parapet and lean back, holding on to two iron bars set into the stone, and then kiss the stone while you are upside down. I couldn’t reach it, and had such vertigo that I just blew it a kiss and got the heck out of there! Here is a very flattering picture of me attempting to kiss the stone:
After that ordeal I concluded that I was already sufficiently eloquent, and Julie and I set out to see the rest of the grounds, which were quite lovely. They had various collections of plants—for instance the Poison Garden.
I was exhausted when we got to our hotel in Killarney! Fortunately we stayed in Killarney for two nights, so we didn’t have to get up early and pack up all our stuff the next morning.
Day four we set off in the bus to drive what’s known as the Ring of Kerry, which is a circular route that takes one through some really beautiful country. Along the way, in the middle of nowhere, there was an old man on the side of the road with a table set up, a bucket of water with reeds in it, and a bunch of crosses made from the reeds, known as St. Bridget’s cross. She was devoted to the poor, and taught them to make these crosses out of the materials they had at hand since they had no money for crosses made of silver or gold, or even wood.
We passed through the little village of Kilorglin whose claim to fame is a legend that the wild goats had come down out of the hills fleeing some attackers and warned the people that they were about to be invaded, thus saving the village. They have a festival called the King Puck festival every year, where they go out and capture a wild billy goat, crown him King Puck, and put him in a cage in the middle of town that is elevated high above the street, and feed him delicacies and generally pay homage by subjecting the poor goat to a weekend of revelry before letting him go. I’m sure he has some stories to tell when he gets home! I wonder if they have ever captured the same goat twice?
We ended up back at our hotel in Killarney for the
night. I had some wonderful food—things
like blood sausage, bangers and mash (sausages and mashed potatoes), mushy peas
(a side dish of, well, mushed up peas and mint) and even drank some Guiness
though I don’t drink and don’t like dark beer.
You can’t go to Ireland and not drink a Guiness. The Guiness brewery covers 65 acres in downtown Dublin!
Twice I had the BEST beef stew I have ever had, which was made with Guiness and good Irish beef. The one disappointment was bacon. I ordered cabbage and bacon with mash for lunch in a little pub in the village of Lisdoonvarna, and it was really good except for that the bacon was actually ham. I don’t like ham. I asked if they ever served the strips of bacon (called rashers, I thought) and I was told that those were called “streaky bacon”, and that it was served, but not that often. So I was overjoyed to see streaky bacon on the breakfast menu of one of the hotels we stayed at and I ordered it. When the plate came, the bacon looked like bacon but it didn’t appear to be cooked at all. It seemed vaguely warm, but I couldn’t eat it! I gave up on bacon until I got home.
Day five we set out northwest to the coast and the famous Cliffs of Moher. They are spectacularly tall, and there is a wonderful visitor’s center there, and then you can hike out to the cliffs and climb up in the old castle and get an incredible view of the ocean. When our bus pulled in, a young man that worked at the visitor center stepped on to the bus to give us some directions, and I told him that his accent sounded American. He appeared to be a little insulted by that and said that he was from TIPPERARY! He did admit to having gone to school in the US, which explains the corruption of his pure Tipperary accent. It was sunny the day we were there and we got some great pictures.
Julie at cliff's edge--braver than me!
On the way to Galway City we drove through a unique landscape called the Burren, which is formed of limestone and looks as though someone installed variably sized pavers over miles of ground. It is a World Heritage Site and there are some plants growing there that don’t grow anywhere else.
From Galway City the next morning we drove through Connemara (famous for their sturdy ponies), which is rocky and thin soiled, and where many people who were thrown off their land by the English were exiled to. The saying was that they were going “to Hell or Connaught (Connemara)”. It was quite a contrast to the midlands that have deep, productive soil, and rolling low hills.
Our main stop that day was at Kylemore Abby, which was a rich man’s estate and now it is a working abby. The nuns run the tours of the mansion (which I skipped), and make candy for sale in the lavish gift shop. Julie and I opted for hiking out to the huge gardens instead of touring the house. It was still a bit early, so many plants were not yet in bloom, but it was an amazing display for plant enthusiasts. There were entire hedges of fuchsias, which grow wild over there!
Our last day together we left Galway and stopped at Clonmacnoise, which was another ancient site with very old churches, and a stone tower upon which grew a beautiful purple wildflower that I didn’t identify. I think one of the things that struck me the most about Ireland was just how present the past was; everywhere were the remains of building from many centuries ago, still standing and still being used in some cases. The juxtaposition of the ancient with the modern was really striking. And the Irish know their history well and it seems like a living thing to them; everyone I asked assured me that eventually, not in their lifetime maybe, Ireland would be one country again—a united republic. Of course we didn’t go to northern Ireland! They probably have a different opinion.
In Dublin the last night, we went out to a little lot that had several food trucks and benches and a bonfire. One of Marcia’s friends who was part of the enterprise there arranged for a young Irish traditional storyteller to entertain us. The next morning most of the women on the tour headed out to the airport, and I headed to the train station to embark on the next part of my Irish adventure—stand by for Week 2!
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