Entrance Tickets, The Cliffs of Moher

The road was quiet and there weren’t a great deal of traffic so I was shocked when we arrived there and found a car park that covered several hundred square metres and was completely full of cars, I couldn’t imagine where they had all come from, it was as though they had been beamed down from space.

The second shock was the admission fee which at €6 seemed excessive to me so at the pay booth we asked for four senior tickets at only €4 each and got away with it.  This was a massive shock to Kim who sulked for the next few minutes because she hadn’t been challenged and later that night she used a lot more miracle night cream than she normally does.

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Twenty Good Reasons to Visit Ireland

“Take every praiseworthy characteristic of the Irish pub – democratic; spontaneous; generous; sociable; wild; nostalgic; cossetting – and you have to amplify all those characteristics to explain the charm of this little bar, with its stone floor, with its artworks, with its punky staff, with its excellent drinks and its soulful cooking. Hackett’s has the warmth of a hearth – you are drawn to it as you are drawn to a crackling fire, all energy and comfort.” – John and Sally McKennas’ Irish Guides

“The Burren is a country where there is not enough water to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him.”

“At the very edge of Europe, as far west as you can go in Ireland…. once described by National Geographic as the most beautiful place on earth… a place where the mountains roll into the ocean.”

“Dubliner seems to me to have some meaning and I doubt whether the same can be said for such words as Londoner or Parisian” – James Joyce

‘Are you right there Father Ted?’

“Certainly there was no sailor who ever sailed salt water but who smiled – and still smiles – at the idea of the unsinkable ship” –  Charles Lightoller (Surviving Officer) in ‘Titanic and Other Ships’

“Irish road signs are idiosyncratic in the extreme… a masterpiece of disinformation.  A sign is designed to lure you towards a place that you’ll never see mentioned again, unless it is marked in two separate directions on the same post.”  – Pete McCarthy

Ireland, North or South?

There was a short flight delay at Belfast International so that gave me another forty minutes or so to make my comparison between north and south Ireland.

We started our journey in Belfast so I made my first judgement between here and Dublin.  I liked Dublin, it was fun, it was more Bohemian, it was shabby chic compared to the Victorian starched collared style of Belfast which reminded me of the great cities of Northern England.

Dublin has Temple Bar, Belfast has the Cathedral Quarter, Dublin wins hands down on that score but Belfast has the River Lagan, the Titanic Experience (which is way more interesting than the Book of Kells) and the history of the troubles.  I only spent a day in Dublin so I might be being unfair here but my vote goes to Belfast.

North 1 – South 0

Next my thoughts turned to coastal road drives.  Fresh in my memory was the glorious journey along the Antrim Coast, never before have I driven along a road so close to the seashore and with so many wonderful places to stop and admire the natural environment but then I was instantly reminded of the Ring of Dingle with its high level looping journey around the headland where Charles Lindbergh first reached Europe on his solo trans Atlantic flight and where Fungi the Dolphin entertains people on a daily basis.

North 1 – South 1

Ireland is so photogenic that it is no surprise that it has been used extensively in film locations over the years.  In the North they have the Game of Thrones but I admit to having never watched that but in the South they have Father Ted and I have watched every episode time and time again.

North 1 – South 2

I turn again now to the natural environment and the glories of nature.  In the South there is the Cliffs of Moher and in the north there is the Giant’s Causeway.  I like them both but you cannot get anywhere near the cliffs of Moher because of barricades and fencing but on the Causeway you can climb all over the rock formations and really appreciate what it is all about.

I was disappointed by the Cliffs of Moher but I liked the Causeway so much that I went twice.  Also, the Causeway was free but there was an entrance fee to the Cliffs.

North 2 – South 2

I was thinking about what to compare next as a decider when Kim asked me what I was doing.  I explained that I was drawing up a comparison between north and south. She raised an inquisitive eyebrow and asked me why and she was right.  What was the point of a comparison.  I am not making any political, religious or sectarian judgements here but Ireland should be seen as just that without any geographical divisions and on that basis I declare the contest a draw!

I need to go back…

Postcards From Ireland

Ireland, The Cliffs of Moher and Ennistymon

 

I was still pondering how I might get my own back for the leaping salmon trick in Galway and at our next stop I had my opportunity…

At a place called Fenore where the barren grey rocks of the Burren meet the blue water of the Atlantic Ocean we stopped the car and walked across the fissures to the shore and then I pulled my trick, I feigned shock and when asked what was wrong told my companions that I had dropped the keys to the car and they had fallen down a very deep crack in the rocks.

We were miles from anywhere and before you could say the word crisis Kim and Pauline moved in an instant from slightly concerned to blind panic as we all got down on hands and knees and peered hopelessly into a narrow gap that seemed to go as far as the centre of the earth.  Arms were thrust into the crack and fingers probed for the missing keys, we looked for a stick that might help and looked back woefully at the car that was all securely locked with no access to a mobile phone.

It was a good trick but unfortunately I am not very good at keeping a good tease going and it wasn’t long before I could no longer suppress the smirk that was creeping across my face and my ruse was discovered but I was happy that I had got my own back for the phoney salmon sighting story.

Our next destination was the cliffs of Moher, an eight mile stretch of cliffs that soar vertically out of the sea to a height of nearly seven hundred feet at their highest point.  They are the third most visited visitor attraction in Ireland after the Guinness Storehouse and Dublin Zoo and attract nearly a million visitors a year which is even more than the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland.  They are so famous that in 2011 they were included in the final twenty-eight candidates in a global on-line poll to find the New Seven Wonders of Nature. 

They didn’t make the final seven but then neither did the Grand Canyon or the Galapagos Islands!

The road was quiet and there weren’t a great deal of traffic so I was shocked when we arrived there and found a car park that covered several acres and was completely full of vehicles, I couldn’t imagine where they had all come from, it was as though they had been beamed down from space.

The second shock was the admission fee which at €6 seemed excessive to me so at the pay booth we asked for four senior tickets at only €4 each and got away with it.  This was a massive shock to Kim who sulked for the next few minutes because she hadn’t been challenged and later that night she used a lot more miracle night cream than she normally does.

There is no doubt that the cliffs are a wonderful sight but they have been commercialised with a vengeance with tarmac pavements, concrete viewing areas, an arcade of touristy craft outlets and a visitor centre with restaurants and a gift shop and the cliff top walk has been sunk below the level of the ground where visitors are safely separated from the land which ends surprisingly abruptly above the sea and the vertical drop beyond by a metre high rock wall which effectively destroys any effective communion with nature.

The Irish Independent newspaper include the cliffs in a list of Ireland suicide black spots* so I suppose it also prevents people throwing themselves over the side…

I like my cliff top natural environment experiences to be more natural, moody and solitary, rather like Wordsworth wandering through his field of daffodils or John Masefield going down to the sea again but that was impossible here, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of people swarming over the hills and any natural experience has been brutally denied so I came away cursing Clare County Council for building the carbuncle that is the visitor centre and feeling a little deflated and uninspired by the experience we walked back down the path past the coach park and the buses with growling engines and returned to the car park.

It was late afternoon by now so we continued the short distance towards the town of Ennistymon and found our accommodation for the night, The Grove Mount Bed and Breakfast, perched on the top of a hillside just outside the town.  It was a small and simple place and Sheila, the owner, made us welcome and gave us some advice about dining options for later on.  This didn’t take her very long because it turned out that there was only one so to be on the safe side we drove down to the town and booked a table.

We explored the main street and came across a pub called Eugene’s with a plaque on the wall declaring that it had been awarded the James Joyce Pub Award for being an authentic Irish Pub.  This was based on the fact that Joyce based many of his fictional characters on real people that he met in pubs.  It also had a painting of the Father Ted cast and whilst we stopped to photograph it a man who had far more drink than was good for him offered the information that the crew of the show used to stay in the Falls Hotel just around the corner but preferred to drink at Eugene’s.  We thought that we might come back later.

Back at the accommodation I remembered about the car and the question that I had asked earlier about the engine blowing up so I phoned the car hire company.  I explained about the mudslide of dashboard warning lights but they didn’t seem terribly concerned.

I told them that there was a reoccurring message that a service was due and the person on the other end of the line immediately diagnosed this as the problem and that it was therefore perfectly safe to drive.  Just to be sure I asked her the same question that I had asked earlier at Dunguaire Castle, ‘is the car going to blow up?  ‘Oh no’ she replied casually ‘It will be perfectly all right’ as though this was a question that she was quite used to dealing with.  On a scale of one to a hundred my confidence levels went up one notch –  from zero to one.

* Most sources claim about ten suicides a year at the Cliffs of Moher but it seems that there are no really accurate statistics available  – there are eight miles of cliffs and a raging ocean below so it is possible that many go unreported.

According to Wikipedia the three biggest suicide black spots in the World are:

• Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, Nanjing, China
• Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, California
• Prince Edward Viaduct, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

The three most popular suicide spots in England are the London Underground, the one hundred and sixty metre high cliffs at Beachy Head in Sussex and the two thousand two-hundred and twenty metre long Humber Bridge.

Click on an image to scroll through the gallery…

Ireland, The Preview

I have just returned from Ireland and will be posting about the journey soon, but before I get around to it this is a little taster…