Based on a recommendation from Rick Steve’s Ireland book, we booked a guided walk with Shane Connolly in Ballyvaughan. We met at the Ballyvaughan church parking lot at 10 AM. There were 5 others (besides Shane and us) on the walk — a botanist and his wife and adult daughter from Holland, Bridget from the midlands of Ireland, and Freddie from Canada.
But first, a word about the Burren. Basically, the Burren is the exposed limestone that is under all of Ireland — ancient seabed wiped by glaciers. When the trees were cut by man there was nothing to hold the limited topsoil so it was washed away exposing the limestone. With the acid rain hitting the basic rock huge channels were created in the stone. Now as trees are being allowed to return to the area topsoil is also staying and supporting a unique plant system. The botanist was in heaven. You’ll find Mediterranean and Arctic wildflowers side-by-side. It’s a unique moon-like landscape. The area has been farmed (cattle/sheep) for years and stone walls and ruined buildings can be found.
We headed by car to Black Head to start our journey. Once there, after picking a walking stick (very necessary!) from Shane’s lot we headed up. Our walk would take us up 646 feet. Our pictures show some of the flowers and the landscape. We were blessed with amazing weather. It was a clear warm day. In fact, in our 2 weeks it never rained except for a light drizzle one morning. We had very unusual weather for Ireland. Hence, I was ill prepared for a sunny walk — no sun screen and no hat. This oversight would prove costly as Day 6 is the sick day.
The Burren was an amazing landscape. It’s hard to capture in pictures but the video might prove better. Our walk started up a relatively grassy part with many stone walls. We had a beautiful view of Galway Bay and you can see here the ground was starting to have some large exposed limestone. We made out way up gradually on an old old road. The walking was easy and we stopped to look at many wildflowers. We also walked past fields still in use today. The land above us was more rocky and you can see the stone walls dividing the hillside. We came across the ruins of a house from many years ago. Prior to the famine this area had a few thousand people. Now it has under a thousand. You could tell by Shane’s voice that the famine still stirs strong emotions today. As we headed up the walking became more rocky.
This video shows how it was walking on the limestone. The stone sounded really hollow as our sticks hit it. You’ll notice that I’m looking down continuously in the video. Shane warned us to keep our heads down and our minds on what were doing. The limestone is full of cracks and crevasses and it would be easy to trip and fall and really hurt yourself. You can also hear how windy it was.
Then we reached the dung holder. It was a basic arrangement of rocks to hold the dried dung that was used for fuel. The Burren is very barren (no peat bogs or turf) and people had to do what the had to to survive. This video panorama gives you an idea of the incredible landscape we were walking over.
Shane gave us a common sense lesson in figuring out the age of the walls. Take this picture, which wall is older? The one going from the right to the background? Or the one coming from the left to the middle of the shot? The first one is more likely older because the second one clearly stops when it reaches the first one. If the first one wasn’t there first, why would the second one bother to stop at it?
Then we came to a round fort which are found around the Burren. There’s not much left and Shane noted that with the increased tourism there is less every year. The tourists tend to climb up on the walls which hastens their collapse. This video shows our entrance into the fort.
Then we started our descent. You can see how the stone walls went right up the sides of the hill.
Our last stop was a bronze age rubbish pile or cooking pile. These tend to be found near a source of water. People would heat rocks in a fire and drop them in the water to rapidly cool them. This made them easier to work with. You can sometimes find stones there that you can break in your hand. The mound or pile is just all of the discarded rock bits, bones, and food trash from their cooking. One mound was analyzed and had 95% cattle bones indicating the diet of the bronze age peoples here.
We reached the bottom between 2 and 3 pm. This was an amazing walk and perhaps the best thing we did in the whole trip. It was such a personal experience with a small group and Shane guiding us. He knows everything about the Burren and we had lessons in botany, geology, and history. This is a MUST for anyone going to the west of Ireland. Exhausted we headed back to Galway for dinner. Little did I know that the nearly 5 hours of sun exposure on an amazingly clear day would make me sick in the evening and all of Day 6.
This day was a bit mild after our country touring the day before. We walked around City Centre and tried some shopping. We also walked down to the old dock, chatted with a man who was asking for a Euro get his stitches out because he lost his motorcycle and left his cash card at home though he was clear that he wasn’t a bum but just having a rough spot. We continued along the Long Walk under the Spanish arch through the Spanish Parade across Wolfe Tone Bridge over the canal basin and then along Claddagh Quay off the map. We snapped a few pictures of the bay. We also snapped a cigarette box warning — the smoking warnings tended to be very blunt in Ireland. In one store on the cigarette display it said something like” smokers die younger.”
We ate in an Irish restaurant and I tried a traditional Irish breakfast with rashers and black and white pudding. I wanted to try some authentic Irish food. You’ll really want to read about black pudding. It was one of the more spicy or flavorful foods I had. It didn’t taste bad, just a little strange. I was under the impression that it was a pudding as in dessert pudding. It’s more like a dry meatloaf consistency.
Oughterard – Leenane – Peat Bogs – Kylemore Abbey – Connemara National Park
We headed out to the rural Connemara region to the northwest of Galway.
Oughterard
We stopped in the cemetery outside of town. This is another Joyce location. Joyce had visited this cemetery and had noted that he had seen another James Joyce buried here (according to the Nora Barnacle House). Also, an early love of Nora Barnacle is buried here — Michael Bodkin who is the basis of the character Michael Furey in Joyce’s ‘The Dead.’ We were able to find neither becasue we were rather uncomfortable stumbling around. We were stepping on really old graves and the ground was so uneven and covered with thick grass like hay we worried about stepping into something. We stopped and asked some groundskeepers but they didn’t know either.
We also came across an abandoned house that was being used as storage for road works and general trash. The obligatory sheep were nearby. In this video you can see the house and the Maumturk Mountains.
Leenane and Killan Harbor
We stopped in Leenane for some soup and dog food. You see, it appears there are no leash laws in Ireland so dogs roam relatively free. When the owner is walking the dogs are trained to stay near. But in Leenane we saw a few dogs roaming and 2 looked to be starving and in bad shape. We bought some dog food at the convenience store so Aimee could give them some food. She started by feeding a dog sitting outside a pub/restaurant. Some people inside looked to be laughing at us, it might be that the dog was theirs. Aimee did get some food to the dog that looked like it was starving. But we made a hasty retreat as it looked 2 of the dogs might get a little rough over the food.
Peat Bogs
We stopped along the road to check out the peat bogs. Peat historically was cut into turf and used for fuel. The bogs are really spongy ground. People still cut the peat and dry it along the roads. In this still you can see the wall created by cutting the peat out. And behind that are little piles of the turf drying. We saw a few turf piles on the side of the road. The amazing thing is how well peat transmits vibrations. If you jump up and down on the peat this can be felt by someone standing a few feet away. This is shown by this video of me jumping on peat next to some water. Watch the ripples in the water.
Kylemore Abbey
On the way to the Abbey we passed the most amazing lakes. They were like mirrors. Check out these pictures [1][2][3].
The Abbey was a bit of ripoff (22 Euro!). Sure it was beautiful, but there wasn’t much to see inside the Abbey. The Victorian Walled Garden was impressive as are the greenhouses that are being restored. Check out these video clips.
Connemara National Park
Our last stop was Letterfrack and Connemara National Park. It was really interesting to read about the history of the peat bogs in their displays and multimedia presentation. We were so tired by this point that we didn’t have the energy to walk through the park and drive home. We’d like to return someday.
Our first real day in Ireland consisted of walking around Galway’s City Centre (downtown). We enjoyed the pedestrian High Street area [1][2]. After walking past St. Nicholas’ Cathedral [1][2][3], we walked down the beautiful Riverside Walk [1][2] on the Corrib River. Always safety-conscious, a life preserver is often found near water in public places.
Ireland is a rich place for the literary among us. Aimee is a bit of a James Joyce scholar having taken a course on Joyce and spending a summer researching him back in her college days. Galway provided our first Joyce stop on the trip, the Nora Barnacle House. Dublin will provide many more as we will be in Dublin for Bloomsday! Nora Barnacle was the wife of James Joyce and this house was where she lived at the turn of the century with her mother and 6 siblings. OK, this house had 1 room upstairs and 1 downstairs. It is tiny. Aimee knew most everything the nice tour guide did, but she did learn some new things in talking with her. The woman also gave us some suggestions to places to drive to in the next few days. We couldn’t take pictures inside, but we were able to take pictures of the outside [1][2].
My mother took some nice photos of the City Centre area, check them out.
We flew into Shannon airport about 80 km south of Galway (as the crow flies, but no road in Ireland is straight) and rented a car. Renting a car is good. Renting a car right off the plane isn’t. You see, we arrived about 8 AM Ireland time. To convert you add 6 hours to central standard time or subtract 6 hours from Ireland time. So it felt like 2 AM and it was full daylight. So we had to both deal with extreme tiredness and the shock of driving out of the Avis rent-a-car place on the left side of the road. After a few days driving was fine, but this was only an hour into our trip and it wasn’t fine yet.
After we got going with the free Avis map (which was pretty good) we made our way to Galway. We knew we had to get to Corrib Village, but we weren’t exactly sure how to get there. We knew what street it was on. Google maps made it look easy, it wasn’t. We needed the Ordinance Survey map of Galway. Once we had that the next day driving was easy. Again, that is the future. We had a really hard time finding it. We kept getting turned around because the streets wind everywhere and aren’t labeled. After an hour we finally found someone who knew where Corrib Village was. This was because we were 3 blocks away from it.
Corrib Village was interesting. They are self-catering apartments (with kitchen). Hotel rooms are considered en suite if they have a bathroom in the room — a private bath does not necessarily mean it is in the room. Because my mother was teaching for a summer abroad program we were able to share the apartment in Corrib Village. We wouldn’t have been able to take the trip without that help.
Some main points on Corrib Village:
After we found Corrib Village Aimee promptly found the bed and napped for 2 hours. I took about an hour nap. We pretty much took it easy.
