Part 2 - Belfast to the Burren
August 24 - 25, 2016
For a more photo-centric view of the trip, you can also check out my Flickr album for this part of the trip.
Wednesday, August 24th: Belfast to Limerick
Wednesday morning, our time in Northern Ireland at an end, we checked out of the hotel to make our way toward our next destination, a few miles west of Limerick (with a few stops along the way). As we were checking out, the clerk at the desk asked where we were headed to next, and was shocked to hear how far we were going. It was about a 250 mile, 4 hour drive, which we wouldn't bat an eye at here at home, but I guess technically there it was halfway across Northern Ireland and all the way across Ireland.
We got on the road about 9 am and headed south down the motorway toward Dublin. We took a brief diversion to a scenic overlook (we saw a sign for it along the highway), then made a navigational error that caused us to drive on some very small (like, one-lane two-way) roads to get back on course. It was actually pretty fun - it beats sitting in traffic, and we randomly came across an old tower that was probably older than the United States just sitting in a farmer's field.
Eventually we arrived at Monasterboice, a small cemetery and site of a monastery since around 500 AD. The weather was sunny and beautiful, and there was a friendly local (from the historic society or something) dispensing information about the site. There were three high crosses (large stone crosses carved with patterns or Biblical scenes) on the site, including the Muiredach high cross, which dates to the 9th or 10th century and is one of the best surviving high crosses. It was impressive - huge and ornately carved, even after being exposed to the elements for a thousand years. There was also a medieval round tower (probably built as a bell tower for the nearby monastery) on the site. The small cemetery intermingled with the ancient structures was still in use, with modern memorials on some of the graves contrasting with the historic buildings. It was a small, low-key site, but ended up as one of my favorite stops on the trip.
On the guide's recommendation, we next visited Mellifont Abbey, which we had in our plans for our first day but had to skip. The site was quite interesting, with extensive ruins of a large abbey complex. A couple of parts were relatively intact, and many of the areas were still recognizable from the layout of the walls. It was free to walk around the grounds, so we explored the ruins but skipped the visitor center in the interest of time.
Continuing our tour of old stone ruins, we visited the Hill of Slane. Legend (incorrectly, apparently) holds that in 433, St. Patrick list a Paschal fire atop this hill in defiance of an order from the High King. The hill is now topped by the ruins of a friary church and college that dates to at least 1512, a Norman castle built in the 1170s, and also some cows. The views of the surrounding countryside were lovely.
Nearby, we drove by Slane Castle (which has hosted large concerts by U2 and other over the years) on the way to the town of Drogheda, home of a medieval city gate that is the remnant of walls that used to surround the city (and which currently has an active street running through it). We parked the car and walked down the high street, stopping for lunch at a Tex-Mex place (mostly just to horrify my purist Texan friends). (Oddly enough, we also saw a couple of different people fall down in the street - something odd was going on around town.) We saw a large old church and eventually found the gate, went back to the car, and caught a glimpse of the town's Victorian-era rail bridge as we drove out of town.
We realized that we were going to be too late to visit the Irish National Stud (a horse breeding place), which has a world-renowned Japanese Garden. Instead, we headed for the Rock of Dunamase - more ruins, this time a fortress from the 12th century perched atop a hill (and ringed with defensive walls) with stunning views all around. It was another one of the coolest places we visited on the trip.
It was getting late in the afternoon and we had plans for the evening, so we finished the last hundred miles of our journey quickly. Our accommodations for the next two evenings were at the Dromoland Castle Hotel, a 5-star resort. This was one of the few things we splurged on for the trip, and it was much fancier than our normal accommodations. A porter came to help us with our bags (it took us a minute to get packed up - we had kind of exploded into the car over the course of the day) and take us to our room. He gave us an overview of all the features of the hotel (a spa, a restaurant with a Michelin star) - most of which we wouldn't have time to enjoy given our style of travel.
We really only had time to freshen up before driving back out to our evening engagement (and one of the more touristy things that we booked), dinner and a show at Bunratty Castle. The refurbished castle is located in a kind of living history park (that mostly shuts down in the evening), so after brief visits with a goat and a chicken, we went into the castle for the evening. Things started out in the great hall of the castle, where mead was served and some musicians were playing. Then we were ushered into the banquet hall for a Medieval Times-style dinner of soup, bread, spare ribs, chicken, veggies, and an apple dessert while a variety of Irish music was performed. It was a little cheesy, but fun if you embraced it. We sat with a family from western New York and a guy who lived about 20 minutes away and was there on a Groupon with his girlfriend from Brazil. Turned out that he was a big NASCAR fan working on a degree in aerodynamics, and hoped to get a job with NASCAR in Charlotte after graduation.
Finally, exhausted, we drove back to the hotel late on a dark and foggy night. The low beams on the car were dangerously dim, so we could barely see to drive (I think we later discovered a control to let you aim the low beams, and they were basically pointed all the way down), but we made it back. We were surprised to find that somebody had turned down the bed - again, we're really not used to fancy hotels!
Thursday, August 25th: Day Trip to the Cliffs of Moher and the Burren
We woke to a beautiful, sunny morning, and we wanted to get an early start because we knew we'd be racing rain starting in the afternoon. Before we left the hotel, though, I had to figure out how to make a phone call to confirm our boat trip to Skellig Michael that was coming up in a few days (more on that later). The phone in our room was broken, and my cell phone was unable to make calls for some reason, but I was eventually able to use a house phone in the lobby to make the call and confirm the trip.
We left the hotel before 9 am, and as we drove toward the coast it started to get foggy and then cleared up again. We arrived at the Cliffs of Moher (famous sea cliffs that are up to 700 feet high, and were apparently featured in the Princess Bride as the "Cliffs of Insanity") a little before 10. We starting walking south on the cliff-top trail and continued beyond the "official" trail on an undeveloped hiking track past cows, a quarry area where people made stacks of rock, and giant slug. We saw a stone tower in the distance that Julie was convinced we could get to with 5 more minutes of walking, and quite a bit after that, we got there. It was a nice view, but unfortunately there was no information about the tower and you couldn't approach it, so it really wasn't worth the extra walking.
On the return hike, we saw a few crazy people dangling their legs over the edge of the cliffs (no thanks!). We also watched some rain clouds out at sea over the Aran Islands (one of the few "major" Irish attractions that we weren't able to fit into the trip), but made it back without getting wet. We walked the northern leg of the official trail to O'Brien's Tower amidst growing crowds and then took a quick spin through the visitor center (which was set into a hillside so that it didn't interfere with the natural beauty of the area). Overall, I wasn't blown away by the cliffs. They were impressively tall, but under mostly gray skies, they weren't as dramatic as I'd hoped they would be.
After a quick snack in the car, we drove north into the Burren, a region of hills covered in cracked limestone noted for its otherworldly appearance. The green hills we'd been seeing around Ireland gave way to odd, fractured limestone mountains in the distance. We stopped at an overlook for the "corkscrew road," a winding segment of road with several switchbacks in a row, then continued to Aillwee Cave for a cave tour.
The cave was much less crowded than the Cliffs of Moher, and our tour started just a few minutes after we arrived. The tour was about 40 minutes long and the guide was entertaining. The cave was OK - it had a few formations, but overall didn't have much to see. It was a pleasant way to spend an hour. There was also a birds of prey show at the cave that we skipped in the interest of time. We stopped by the farm shop for some free cheese samples, then continued our drive into the Burren.
We soon arrived at a scenic overlook and we strolled out into the limestone fields for a bit, before increasing rain caused us to turn back. Then we stopped at a dolmen (a "portal tomb" made of some slabs of rock stood on end with another flat rock as a roof - there are apparently scores of dolmen scattered around the Burren) called Poulnabrone. There were a few interpretive plaques, some nearby cows, some tricky limestone, and an actual glacial erratic (a large rock carried to the site and deposited by a glacier) around the tomb. The structure itself was pretty basic, but it was fascinating to think that it had been standing there for 6,000 years or more.
We tried to follow some signs to another ancient burial cairn but never found it. Then we visited an ancient stone ring fort (basically a circular wall made of stacked stones) called Caherconnell and walked around it in the rain. It was interesting, but surprisingly small. We also found a wedge tomb (a different type of ancient stone burial structure) in the middle of a cow pasture - you had to climb stairs over the pasture fence and take your chances with any livestock in the field to visit it. Finally, we had intended to do some hikes in the Burren National Park, but when we found the trailhead along a tiny road, the rain was steady, so we decided to give up and return to the hotel.
We stopped in a town called Corofin and had dinner at a pub. The food was among the best that we'd had thus far (I had lasagna and I think Julie had some kind of stew) and the service was nice and quick. On the way back to the car, we had an odd conversation with a friendly older lady who was hanging out on the street outside of a church. The weather had cleared while we were eating, and it was sunny and gorgeous on the drive back to the hotel. We dropped our stuff off in the room and strolled around the grounds of the hotel for a bit as the sun was setting, then turned in after a long day with a lot of walking.
