Tour of Ireland

After my race, all of us spent a week in Switzerland and then another week in London. Anika and her friend Matthew had more vacation time than us working adults and so had time to visit me in Ireland. They explored Dublin and its surroundings on their own while I had to go back to work, but last weekend I had three days off, rented a car, and we went to a few places further away from Dublin.
I'll post pictures from our vacation soon. In the meantime have a look at the ones I took on our mini vacation here in Ireland. I posted them on picasa.
Even though Ireland is small, it is not possible to see it all in a few days. We selected the Burren, the Dingle peninsula, and the ring of Kerry as our destinations for that weekend.
The weather, always unpredictable and changing, wasn't great and I hope to go back to some of these sites and take pictures in sunlight. We had quite a bit of rain, but also a lucky few moments when we didn't have to use our umbrellas to take in a view or hide in a visitor center.

Living just below the clouds. At sea level!

Sometimes bad weather can make for good photo opportunities.

Driving on the left required concentration but it wasn't hard after a while. Shifting with my left hand was more difficult. Our car had six forward gears and I was never quite sure which one it was in at the time I released the clutch. The hardest part, though, was navigating the narrow roads. Even main roads are often just barely wide enough to let two cars cross each other. Most roads have no shoulder but are lined with hedges on either side. Leaving enough room for oncoming cars means brushing and scraping along those hedges and getting hit by the occasional branch that sticks out. After being accused by Anika of driving too far to the left (and hitting a mirror or two on parked cars) I watched cars in front of me. They were doing the same thing. It seemed better to brush along a hedge than colliding with an oncoming car. Driving here takes a lot of concentration and makes you tired.
The Clifs of Moher are a world-famous attraction but were a little underwhelming in the weather we saw them. In proper sunset light, like on the postcards, or from a boat, these tall walls look much more impressive. We need to go back and have another look.

The Cliffs of Moher

 More of the cliff walk used to be accessible to tourists but had been blocked off for safety reasons. 650-feet falls aren't especially healthy. If you google for Cliffs of Moher accidents and falls, you find plenty of reports. Until a few years ago, people were allowed to go right to the ledge and peek over it. Even looking at these people doing that looks scary. Now, they have fences and try to keep people at a safe distance. As the picture below shows, success is limited and resentment against the restrictions is high. While we were there, people in the safe zone were talking about the people living dangerously and how the gene pool could be improved with a good gust of wind (which happens frequently here). Some parents took their small kids out onto the cliffs which caused even more comments.

On day two we drove around the Dingle peninsula. The sights were fantastic, but mostly rained out. On the other hand, we learned a lot about the history of this area. Stone ring forts and beehive dwellings from prehistoric times show that people have lived here for thousands of years. The writings from more recent inhabitants show that life here was difficult at times.
Peig Sawers married a farmer on Blasket Island and later told her life story in a Gaelic autobiography. The success of the book ignited a small literary movement and encouraged other inhabitants to write about their struggles and experiences.
This area is close to the western-most point of Europe. The next county to the west is the USA. A lot of the stories written on Blasket Island tell of hardship and famine, and friends and family who have left to settle in the USA. Some of them never heard of again, others in regular contact sending news of hope and loan money for a ship passage to the USA. In the 1950's the Blasket Islands were evacuated. The dwindling number of inhabitants and supply of peat (turf), their heat energy supply, made continued inhabitation too difficult. Today, tourists roam the ruins left behind.

Peig Sayers is buried on the mainland, overlooking the Blasket Islands.

The ring of Kerry is on the larger peninsula just south of the Dingle peninsula. The guide books warned us of hordes of tourists and big tour buses, but we had to negotiate crossing them on the narrow roads only a few times. The weather was also much better on that day, but we had less time, since we had to drive back all the way to Dublin that evening.
An impressive sight are the store ring forts built between 1,700 and 1,500 years ago. Mostly the outer walls remain, and the small entrance gives an indication that defense was an important part of daily life back then.

Another aspect that intrigues me is how religion has shaped the lives of people and is reflected here in monuments, buildings, and the history of this land. It is not uncommon to see a place here that was holy to a group of long-forgotten people, and then find that when Christians arrived, they would build churches on the same sites, putting graveyards on top of older ones, mixing pre-christian symbols with crucifixes. What made the Christians believe that a site for worshiping Norse or Celtic gods was also a site favored by their god?

An ogham stone near Kilmalkedar where the Normans later built this Romanesque church.

 Ogham is an old irish language alphabet that consists of stick marks cut into the edge of rocks or pieces of wood. The stone above is burried deep into the ground from hundreds of years of buildup in that graveyard that has been used by the Celts and Christians alike. The ogham stone had been there about 900 years before the Normans build the church about 800 years ago.
The cross in the picture below has been placed many hundred years ago and suffered the same fate as the ogham stone: Most of it is underground now.

The ground has risen, covering the base of that cross.

Another interesting site of religious significance is Skellig Michael. It is the larger of two islands off the Irish coast, about seven miles from the ring of Kerry. Bad weather and stormy seas make it often unsafe to dock a boat there. In the sixth century, a group of monks decided that it would be an ideal place to live a harsh and isolated life. This close to the edge of the world, they believed themselves closer, and more true, to their god. It is hard to imagine how these people survived there for nearly six hundred years when they finally moved to the mainland nine hundred years ago.

Skellig Michael and Little Skellig.

We did not have time to make the often-canceled-due-to-bad-weather boat trip to Skellig. But I want to come back, climb the steep steps leading up the 700 feet mountain splinter (Gaelic: skellig) sticking out of the ocean, and see the abandoned monastery and oratories. I'll probably never figure out what makes people do weird things in the name of religion, but it is interesting to see the artifacts they leave behind and trying to understand what drove them to such extremes.

A mural in the visitor center for Blasket Island.

The remaining pictures are on picasa. I wish we had more sun to brighten them up a little, but we had a fascinating trip nevertheless.