The Burren and the Cliffs of Moher- Thursday, August 8, 2013

We had another nice breakfast at our Bed and Breakfast in Galway.  We're a little sorry to say goodbye to this one.  It was a charming place (even if the WiFi didn't quite reach our third floor room.  The girls and Scott didn't like that.). 

We headed South into County Clare.  Julie asked where we were going first, and Scott said, "The Burren."

"What's in the Burren?" asked Julie.

"Nothing!" said Scott.

"Nothing? We're going to see nothing?"

"Yes," said Scott, "And that's really something."

And so the Abbott and Costello routine went on for a while.  But on our Seinfeldian trip to see nothing, we were going to a place that was famously described by one of Oliver Cromwell's officers who wrote, "It is a country where there is not enough water to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him."  

As we were driving through the Burren, the hills were not larger than others we've seen in Ireland, but their rounded shapes were now covered with grey limestone instead of green.   The limestone almost gives the place a lunar look at times.  There are some plants that grow in the many cracks that develop but there is a lot of rock.  Some rocks have been built into fences by people ages ago.  Julie and the girls wanted to build an inuksuk but there were signs saying specifically that people were not allowed to move the rocks to build cairns.  

The most interesting thing we saw in the Burren was the Poulnabrone Dolmen.   It is a tomb that is estimated to be 5000 years old, which would be older than the pyramids in Egypt.  The tomb is built of of large flat stones, placed in a way that a child might build a fort from couch cushions.  This design makes it a "portal tomb," not unlike the one that we saw in the Giant's Ring, near Belfast.  We got out of the car here, and took a closer look, along with a lot of German tourists from buses.  The girls had fun climbing across the Burren's limestone here and stepping across the wide cracks.

After the Burren, we set "Lizzie" to take us to the Cliffs of Moher (pronounced "More", rhymes with "shore") on Ireland's Atlantic Coast.  We started at the Visitors' Center, which tells about the natural history and legends of the cliffs.  It also has a computer animated movie that shows a seagull flying from the top of the cliffs, past some of its recognizable features, down to the bottom of the Atlantic, and back up again, while showing us different animals that live on and below the cliffs.  Then it was time for lunch, so we ate the picnic we had bought at Aldi's this morning, within view of the cliffs themselves.  

You can walk up on the cliffs in two different directions from the Visitor's Centre.  We went left, or south, and made our way above the most famous view of the cliffs, with three or four undulating waves of rock below us.  The cliffs are between 394 feet (120 m) to 702 feet (214 m).  To put that into perspective, The Horseshoe Falls drops about 188 feet (57 meters) into the Niagara Gorge, so we were looking at rock faces two to four times taller than the rock faces of the Niagara Gorge. Amazingly, some people were walking in a well worn path beyond the safety stones.  We didn't do that!  We thought we found the spot where Rick Steves crawled up to peek over the ledge, but if it was the same spot, we think that they've stopped letting people go down there.  We did look for the puffins and seals and other things that we saw in the video, but if they were down there, they were so far down that we couldn't positively recognize them.  One thing that is interesting about the cliffs-- Scott had pictured the cliffs as the edge of a long plateau, with Ireland descending suddenly to the Atlantic, but they aren't like that.  Instead, they are hills that rise out of the plain that Ireland sits on, and the dome of the hills are chopped of on the ocean side.  It does mean that you have a huge drop on one side of you down to the ocean, and a gently descending slope on the other side of you, heading down towards sea level.   The Visitor's Center is built into one of these hills.  Several curious cows were standing near the top of the cliff because the grass side of hill is a farmer's private land.

We didn't stay long at the cliffs, but did take in some of the views and got pictures.  When we got to the Visitors' Center again, we browsed through the gift shops (Emma bought a sheep), and set "Lizzie" for Killarney.  After driving first into County Limerick and then into County Kerry, we felt like we've been driving a long time.  We decided to stop in Tralee where our reservations are for the next two nights.  It's a good thing we did too, because we arrived a little after 5:00 and the reception desk at the place we are staying seemed to be closing for the night.  We are in a building that, during the academic year, is college dormitory living. It looks and smells a lot like a dorm room would, and Scott likes that. We are basically in a suite for ourselves.  We have the common area with a kitchen we can use and a small couch, tv, and dining table.  Then there are three bedrooms, each with their own bath and shower.  The girls are taking room B for themselves and Julie and Scott are going to be in room A.  We'll leave room C untouched because it only has one bed.   Julie and Anna went to a nearby grocery store for tonight's dinner (frozen pizza) and tomorrow's breakfast (cereal and doughnuts).  It feels good NOT to eat out for a change.