May 10, 2011

I’m in love. Ireland.

All the weather spring can provide, we had today. After some confusion, being at the coach station early—first—taking a brief walk up the hill to City Hall in the cold fierce wind, the original bus filling up and Desmond Malloy, the elderly gent who’d greeted me in the first place, asking whether I wouldn’t rather come on yet another bus he’d changed to, which was only carrying the sixteen passenger overflow (which I did), we set off. A number of American students, a couple of couples, plus two Irish ladies older than me, who sat behind me and knew ALL the words to ALL the Irish songs Desmond played on cd on the way back, and with whom I shared lunch. Desmond has been doing the tour for the company for eighteen years, with over thirty years’ experience driving tour buses otherwise, so is an actual, entertaining font of information. Says he kissed the Blarney (groan) Stone—twice. More like b.s. stone: corny, corny jokes, a bit of smut, a bit of leg-pulling. But actually a sweet and solicitous (he dropped each of us near or at our hotels as we arrived back in Galway) driver/guide.

No point in itemizing the itinerary; the photos will tell the story. The Burren, its inch or two of soil over limestone, hills scraped bare by an Ice Age. “Famine walls” that meander up mountains for no reason whatever except that the English made the Irish lay stone all day to justify the penny at the end of it, their only backhanded gesture at relief during the Famine. Ruins everywhere, from thousands of years ago to pathetic little clustered stone hovel famine villages; a haunting packed-clay-with-moat enclosure (dun) that protected a wooden farmstead 3,000 years ago; various castles and watchtowers. Lots of new construction. Tidy villages and towns (including Kilfenora, with its ruined 12^th-century church and high Irish crosses, and Doolin, just before the Cliffs of Moher, where lunch finally took place, in Gus O’Connor’s Pub (and the seafood chowder, brown bread, and pale ale were delicious, let me note). And stopped at the most famous of over ninety Megalithic tombs in the Burren, the portal tomb at Poulnabrone.

And with a time limit, albeit generous, much brisk walking was essential in the Atlantic wind at the cliffs (the “Atlantic Edge,” indeed). Quick climbing, or its attempt, was made even more challenging by facing gusts so strong and continuous I bracketed almost every photo I took, just in case the wind had blurred the first one (so I have ridiculous quantities of almost-identical shots, of course). Having had pointed out to us that fifteen or sixteen people die at the cliffs every year, most recently a Spanish fourteen-year-old, not a one of us I think was even tempted to venture past the barriers further out onto the cliffs—which really are unstable to some degree. Plus that wind, which blew me off course of where I’d meant to be walking more than once.

The cliffs themselves, it’s belaboring the obvious to say, are magnificent (yes. They stood in for Tom Riddle’s cave in the film of Half-Blood Prince. You can spot the exact place—surely Dumbledore and Harry were put on that rock by computer.) There are good interactive informative panels inside the visitors’ center (centre), too; the center itself is completely green, and sympathetically built unobtrusively into a grass-covered mound (which also makes it look very like the burial mounds elsewhere).

Coming back down from the Cliffs, Desmond picked up a young German couple backpacking, who hitched with us for miles, though when he finally let them out at a requested bridge, they were about to hike up the mountain and camp for the night. They were with us when we stopped to take more photos, at a whole huge sloping field of cracked and eroded limestone running from the top of the hills to the edge of the cliffs, scooped-out hollows of all sizes holding water from a recent shower, wildflowers sprouting everywhere in cracks. The green stuff covering it in places I stooped to touch to be sure, and it was not grass, but some sort of—lichen, I suppose; not enough soil (no soil) for anything else. To get to the part above the road, we went (those of us addicted enough) single-file up a narrow walled trail, though at one point it came to a wall, which we could slither or hop off coming down, but which had to be detoured around going up by climbing onto a little narrow causeway of stone for a little way. I’m not in any way exaggerating this; if anything I’m downplaying it. At the moment I was thinking, “why on earth am I doing this? One wrong move and my trip could be painfully over.”

I’m in love. (Whitethorn—the white-flowered plant everywhere.)