On Wednesday Joy and I left Connemara and drove down
the coast to see the Cliffs of Moher,
one of Ireland's most popular tourist attraction.
By this day I was
convinced I was getting the hang of this left-sided driving, at least until I
came to a place called "Corkscrew Hill". Even so,
after finding our first Irish four lane road and enduring a half dozen
roundabouts, we made it town to County Clare in about three hours
Our first stop was
Dunguaire Castle, in the town of Kimvara.
The castle was at one time a
dwelling place for the High King of Ireland.
(You may notice a pattern here. Almost every doggone castle was saw at
some time has a "high king of Ireland") One of the legends of this castle, though was
the the king of the castle looked out of his window one day and saw a hundred
and fifty bards, or poets, standing at his gate. He gave him hospitality, and
from that time this castle became a center for poetry and art. W. B. Yeats visited there often, as dis Oscar
Wild and Singh. It was a place of
celebration and learning.
One side note on
this town. Joy and I ate at a restaurant
on the docks that evening. Three old men were celebrating at the bar, and had been celebrating for some time. We overheard their conversation, what we
could understand of it. They would occasionally burst into song, and carry on
in an inebriated fashion. One of them
regaled the restaurant with an impromptu rendition of "The Parting
Glass." From his overall condition, I thought he should have sung it about
an hour earlier. Anyway they were
colorful!
We went south from
there, though the Burrens. We stopped
along the way to see the Dolmen, a picture of which is included here.
The Dolmen is a tomb
over six thousand years old. It is the
oldest relic of anything in Ireland, an
Irish equivalent of Stonehenge. The only person around was a costumed Druid selling
charms and trinkets, even though the Dolmen predated the Druids by thousands of
years. He was talking on his cell phone
while manning his little table.
Finally, we made it
to the Cliffs of Moher. It was a crowded place. There were fleets of tour
busses and a huge parking lot surrounded by open fields. We walked up a little path, and there were
the cliffs of Moher, dropping seven hundred feet down into the Atlantic. The
cliffs show up on a lot of inspirational calendars for good reason. It is a
place to remind us of the smallness of humans and the greatness of God's
creation. We stayed there a long time,
taking in the majesty of it.
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