Category: Ireland (Page 2 of 3)

Whew…after a real night’s sleep (even though it was a really bad mattress) I feel much better today! 🙂

We had a lazy morning… Hung out in the apartment, walked up to the market to get some coffee and breakfast. Didn’t hit the road until about 11:30. We really didn’t have much planned today as there just isn’t that much to do in this part of the country. This was basically a travel day to get us up to the northern coast and into Northern Ireland. We meandered through some small towns and followed some detours to a couple castles but mostly just drove backroads and saw a couple things along the way.

When we left Galway, we drove through a couple small little towns in the middle of Sunday mass. The streets were lined with cars…unbelievable just how Catholic the whole country is… 

We saw a sign along the road for the town of Ballymote  and a castle…so having nothing major to do…why not 🙂

Turns out this is one of the oldest castles we’ve seen- built around 1300 by the Normans. Normans were from the present day Normandy, France region (named so for the Normans who inhabited the area) Norman is actually a loose translation (and a few hundred years worth of miscommunication) of “Northmen” or “Norsemen” as they were decendants of the Vikings. 

How the Normans ended up in Ireland basically goes back to a woman. (doesn’t it always?)

A king of a region (Mac Murchaida) decided he wanted more land. (Such a tired story, isn’t it? Men…) so he kidnapped the other King’s wife and cows. He was buddy-buddy with the High King of Ireland, so he apparently felt he was invinsable. Then the High King died unexpectedly and the new King didn’t like him, so he banished MacMirchaide.

He fled to Normandy and convinced the French to help him invade Ireland and win back the throne. Thus, Normans in Ireland.    

;  

We drove past this large graveyard… I saw the opportunity for some artsy photos 🙂 

It’s easy to see why the Irish from this area colonized Indiana and Kentucky…it’s like the Indiana of Ireland around this area.  

Drove past Muckree Castle which was closed for a wedding   

Seriously. It was Indiana. There was nothing exciting for a while. Ha Except for lunch, we stopped at a SuperMac’s. It’s basically the knockoff Irish version of a McDonalds. It was just OK. It was no American McDonalds. Lol

We eventually ended up in County Donagel where the rolling hills quickly started becoming mountainous… The views greatly improved! 🙂 Basically afternoon of some great scenery. 

My favorite picture of the day:

This is called the Gleniff Horseshoe…the picture doesn’t do the vastness of this justice…it was so awesome.

We arrived to our rented room for the night early and the family wasn’t home and wasn’t answering their emails or phones… So we decided we could probably fit something we had on the plans for tomorrow in before sunset, so we headed to the opposite side of the little peninsula to the town of Maghera. I had seen online that there was a really remote beach with some caves around there. 

Eos Waterfall outside of Maghera.

   The little sign along the road and small car park is misleading. It’s still a half-mile or more away down a path and eventually over some sand dunes. The wind was freezing and blowing so hard that all of our tracks we made heading to the beach were already gone on our way back. Unfortunately, it was high tide, so we couldn’t co inside the caves…but was still cool to see and to find a beautiful beach that remote. I felt like we were the only people in the world out there! Ha

Tomorrow is another very similar “choose your own adventure” day. We’ll see what kind of random awesomeness we can find 🙂

Sorry you got an alert a bit ago to a new post. Norah decided to help. I had just started and she decided to grab and my phone and POOF! Her magic fingers hit just the right spot. Lol

We call it “shark mode” when she gets sleepy because if she stops moving she’ll die like a shark. Lol

So anyway- here you go – the complete post haha

We started our day again with another “full Irish”. I know, I just said how I couldn’t eat it every day…but this one was free with the room. 

We left Dingle and headed north towards Limerick. It wasn’t long before signs pointed us to another random castle. This area just has castle ruins everywhere. We seriously saw 7 or more old ruined castles today. Some of them I couldn’t even find on the maps!

We came to the town of Ballybunion and I had seen some pictures online of this castle, so we stopped. Turns out there was a playground at the car park, so someone had to ride a chicken. 

We kept going toward Limerick, which our B&B host told us used to be nicknamed “Stab City”… But that it had been cleaned up in recent years.  Limerick has St John’s castle which is a really well preserved and restored castle. 

Remember the story a couple days ago of how the Irish rebelled in the 1640s and things went well for about 10 years until Cromwell set the whole island on fire?  Well when the Irish Rebellion of 1641 was going well, all of the Protestsnts in the area fled to this castle. So when the Irish got there, having no canons or other artillery to bombard the castle, they started digging out the foundations around the waters and now most of the outer walls have deteriorated. 

Leaving Limerick, we hit a few other small things on our way to Galway, the biggest being the Cliffs of Moher. Very amazing…but way touristy. They built a shopping strip into the side of the hill opposite the cliff. Come on! 

We did stumble upon this gem. Can’t remember the name now… Too bad it’s only unlocked from June-Sept… It seemed pretty cool inside.   

Along the roadway we saw this marker, so we pulled over. Turns out it’s St Brigid’s Well- the patron saint of healing”. People come here from all over to ask for healing of various conditions.  Apparently a very sacred Catholic place for the locals.. Who knew…

Next we passed through Kilfenora, or “The City of Crosses’. An amazing cemetary and church that housed an eight foot high cross. 

Last stop before Galway was to visit the Poulnadrome Dolman. A portal tomb that dates from prehistoric times. They think they have dated the human remains of this tomb to around 3000 BC. 

It sits in this thick limestone region called The Burren which looks like the lunar surface at times lol

Norah enjoyed all of the running today 🙂

Lastly we arrived at Salthill Promonade in Galway- we rented an apartment from a guy for the night here from AirBNB. (love that site!) it has an awesome view of the bay here

We walked down the hill and gambled a little at one of the many casinos here on this strip… 

(I didn’t win) 🙂 

  We ate at an amazing Indian restaurant downtown here too that just opened. Best Indian food I’ve ever had!

I am TIRED today- sorry this post is “mailed in” a bit and probably has a thousand typos since I’m doing the head bob trying to finish this before falling asleep!  🙂 headed to sleep to do it again tomorrow 🙂

Day 3 was a full day! I feel like we did so much and still arrived at our bed and breakfast ahead of schedule!

I’d love to start the blog by showing you pictures of the Blarney Castle, which I assure you we went to this morning first thing and were the only people on the entire castle grounds! And Kegan kissed the Blarney Stone…and I climbed all the way to the top! 

But… It was at this point I realized that my camera was saying “No Card”.

Damn.

After uploading my photos last night, I was too tired to get back up and put my card back in my camera, instead leaving it on the bedside table to put back in the morning. Between rolling around and Norah staying awake until 4am (Yeah. 4am. Lol) it apparently was knocked into the floor and we left town without it. 

So I called the hotel and they easily found it and we went back to Cork to pick it up. Phew. That could have been bad for the blog posting! 🙂

And then we were off again. And instead of giving Donna crap for putting the half-gallon of milk in the cooler half open and flooding our lunches, or blowing up both power converters because she doesn’t understand basic electricity, or only bringing a 500 Euro which is basically the equivalent of Monopoly money here because no one will take a bill that large… Wait…what was I getting at? Oh yeah, so now we are making fun of me for trying to lose our pictures and making us backtrack to the driving hellhole that was Cork. Ha

We headed south along the coast and saw our first megalithic site- the Drombeg Stone Circle. Aptly named because it’s in the town of Drombeg…and they are stones..in a circle.

They aren’t exactly sure what these stone circles were used for- whether it was burial ritual or sacrificial in nature… But they were definitely important. And usually located in some amazing spot. This one was no exception. This site is over 3000 years old. 3000. Like 1100BC. I can’t even wrap my head around that. 





The sign posted said that they would use these springs, which could hold almost 70 gallons of water, for cooking. They would throw heated stones into the water from a fire nearby and it could bring the entire thing to a boil in under 20 minutes.





Amazing view.

Next we drove through a cute little town called Bandy with this awesome Main Street 





Then, we were supposed to take a road that went through a mountain and had a rock tunnel to drive through, but we missed the turn and actually ended up seeing the most amazing views by going directly OVER the mountain! Haha

It was called Priest’s Leap…and it looked like another planet in places! It is this huge barren sandstone mountain and the road goes straight up. We made friends with the locals though. (baaahhhh) 









Legend has it that a priest lept from the top of this mountain while evading English soldiers and landed miles away in the aforementioned town of Bandy. The rock he lept from then melted and swallowed the chasing hounds. Supposedly you can still see the “pawprints” in a rock at the summit… And another rock in Bantry holds the marks of the horse hooves where the priest landed…but I can’t verify because I didn’t know the story until I researched tonight…and surprisingly- there was no cell service up there! 🙂





When finally came down off of the mountain, we headed towards Killarney National Park to see Torc Waterfall

It was back a trail that looked like something out of a fairy tale. Moss covered rocks and trees…so cool.







Could this thing be any cuter? 



We did a quick drive by of another 15th century Tower castle – Ross Castle since it was just a couple miles away. This was the last holdout in the Munster area in the 1600s against the eventual English takeover by Cromwell’s army.

Most of the ruined castles basically go back to the Cromwell invasion. Irish/English history is so complicated and long..but Cliff notes version: Henry VIII decided he didn’t like how Ireland’s Gaelic tribe leaders- the Fitzgeralds – were treating the Tudors so he decided to just take over Ireland, not recognize the Fitzgeralds anymore and install a new “leader” in Ireland. Then remember that England was Protestant and they hated Catholics…the English parliament basically executed King Charles I for being too catholic and this created this open and acceptable hatred of Catholics- they couldn’t hold government positions, Catholicism was outlawed, etc. This didn’t go over well and eventually the Irish rebelled and more or less “won” for about 10 years until Oliver Cromwell showed up and basically demolished the entire island in the 1650s. They killed anyone that was involved in the rebellion, they shipped off anyone who owned land to be slaves in the West Indies, they burned all the crops and lands therefore causing a famine AND bubonic plague hit about the same time. So, in a nutshell that’s why everything here is ruins instead of amazing castles. Estimates say Ireland lost one third of its entire population during this time. It was not a good time to be Irish. So, again- catholism was illegal, Catholics couldn’t live in town…absolute insanity. After a king was finally placed back over England, a lot of the crazy anti-Catholic laws didn’t stand… But Irish Catholics have always been the hated second class citizens to the English. Lol



Anyway, back from my nerdy history detour- We took some “backroads” which I’m quickly learning in Ireland basically means a half paved one lane driveway. I’m dead serious- other than the main highways, every road is a one lane road. Wasn’t expecting that… But I’m adapting. 

Along the road around Dunloe were these old Ogham Stones. They had been found around the area and displayed here. Ogham is a very old Celtric written language. Seems to originate around 3-400AD…. The lines actually are sort of like a code. We discussed it in the car…it makes more sense that this may have been a secret code by the Celts because by 300AD, the Romans controlled the area, with their Latin language…it wouldn’t make sense that there wasn’t a written language at all but the Celts may have needed a way to communicate without the Romans knowing.





We ended our day by driving some of the Ring of Kerry- an amazing oceanfront stretch of road in the southeast corner of Ireland.



This led us to our bed and breakfast for the night, just outside of Portmagee where we ate dinner at a traditional Irish pub.

Since its a harbor fishing town- I got the fish platter and seafood chowder. Kegan had fish and chips and Donna had Irish stew.





We left Dublin bright and early after some coffee and Irish breakfast. Like our staples would be bacon, sausage, biscuits, scrambled eggs, irish staples are black and white pudding (basically some sort of sausage/oat/spice mixture pressed together- it was amazing!) poached eggs, rashers-which are kind of like a cross between bacon and ham, and croissants. We headed south out of Dublin towards the town of Kilkenny.

On our way, we passed the Rock of Dunamase-an early castle now just ruins on a hill. I found an audio tour for my phone, so we walked around. It was easy to tell why the site would have been chosen back around the year 800. This rock shoots straight up out of the lowlands with the majority of the sides being unscalable. 

If you’ve never seen the History Channel show “Vikings” – go watch it now! If you have then you know how the Vikings terrorized England and Ireland for a couple hundred years around this time. Also, if you watch Vikings, you’ll love this fact: one of the earliest artifacts they’ve found at the site was a gold coin- with the inscription of King Egbert of Wessex.

Wessex was a kingdom on the south east shore of England…King Egbert was its King from about 800-840. So the theory of how that coin ended up all the way at the top of a rock in the middle of Ireland is that it was dropped by a Viking during a raid and battle at Dunamase given that Vikings raided the area and they were establishing farmlands in Wessex under authorization of Egbert.

Next we drove through Kilkenny and stopped a grocery store to get some meats/cheeses/bread and some milk for the tiny tyrant. This way we could picnic a couple lunches this week on our way  through the countryside.

After that we stopped to see the Rock of Cashel- another castle. This one in much better shape but still a ruin. St Patrick baptized the King of Munster here at this castle so it’s also called St Patrick’s rock.

Even though most of these ruins are from around 1100-1200AD, there was definitely other structures here for hundreds of years before. 

The large cathedral and the round tower are very clearly products of the Viking and Norman invasions. They would use these to spot an attack coming miles away and to hide their valuable items during an attack. The first window is 12 feet high. The monks would climb a ladder to the entrance then pull the ladder up behind him. 

We continued towards Cork via the curviest single lane road you can imagine through a little town called Cappoquin that had some cool bridges.

Finally- we arrived in Cork. Wow. This city is amazing- but the streets were not meant for cars! Everything seemed single lane wide and people didn’t  get over! 🙂  it was stressful. Lol and I didn’t get many good pictures because of the driving…maybe tomorrow I will 😉

We did seek out St Finne Barre cathedral to drive by since the sun hasn’t set yet.

Had some fish and chips and a pint of Beamish, a Guinness-esque dark ale, in the hotel restaurant tonight. Did not disappoint. Also we discovered “Brown Sauce” tonight which is basically an amazing mixture of Worchestershire sauce and Heinz 57.