While the current travel restrictions are in place I have no new stories to post so what I thought that I would do is to go through my picture archives and see where I was on this day at any time in the last few travelling years.
On 22nd June 2014 I was in Southern Ireland on the trail of Father Ted…
Click on an image to scroll through the Gallery…
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.
Posted in Beaches, Eire, Europe, History, Ireland, Literature, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Catalonia, Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Ennistymon, Eugene's Ennistymon, Father Ted, Guinness, Ireland Postcards, Life, Suicide Statistics
Posted in Arts and Crafts, Beaches, Eire, Europe, History, Ireland, Literature, Natural Environment, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Dingle, Donegal, Father Ted, Galway, Ireland Burial service, Kerry, Only in Ireland, Sligo, West Cork
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…
In Ireland they like their pubs in bright colours so they do…
After Guinness and sandwiches we left the busy pub and made our way into the centre of the city passing first through a street of brightly coloured buildings, yellow, green, red, vibrant, vivid and loud, the sort of thing that would have town planners in England descending into a frenzy of planning application refusals.
And thanks to Hugh at “Hugh’ Views and News” (a very good blog) for giving me a memory nudge about this picture!
Obviously not my picture but it is one of my favourite bits of Father Ted:
Father Ted – These Are Small but those out there are Far Away
Posted in Childhood, Europe, Ireland, Travel
Tagged Enistymon, Father Ted, Father Ted small far away, Ireland
‘The purpose of signing on the road network is to promote safety and efficiency by providing for the orderly movement of traffic’ National Roads Authority (Ireland)
We were anxious to continue with our journey now because we had a distance to travel towards our next destination of Dingle and we were unsure of the travelling time on account of conflicting information at breakfast.
We were planning to take a ferry across the River Shannon and although the lady who served breakfast said that it wouldn’t be too busy and there would be no problem, Sheila said that it might be so we should allow some extra time for the journey. This created some uncertainty but everyone knows of course that in Ireland road signs are contradictory and confusing, distances are approximations and travel advice is as reliable as a government economic statistic.
“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
Eugene’s was a wonderful place, well deserving of its James Joyce Pub Award, with a genuine Irish welcome and an excellent glass of Guinness, so excellent in fact that we stayed for a second and almost missed our table reservation.
We sat in a corner surrounded by Father Ted mementos and hatched a plan to try and visit some of the places associated with the TV series. Actually, as it turned out we had already made a good start and we had unknowingly already visited some of the filming locations. On the drive into the Burren we had seen the Aiilwee Caves which were renamed ‘the very dark caves’ in the episode ‘The Main Land’, the bare rock beach was the picnic site in ‘Old Grey Whistle Theft’ and the Cliffs of Moher were featured in ‘Tentacles of Doom’.
As we spoke to other customers who for some reason were gathered around an unnecessary log fire there was a event outside which could have been a pure piece of Father Ted as a parade of Priests and altar boys made their way down the High Street following a statue of the Virgin Mary before they stopped where a crowd of people had gathered for the celebration of the Corpus Christi at the other end of the street.
After a good meal at the restaurant we returned to Eugene’s for a final Guinness and after a conversation with a very drunk lady from Belfast walked back the short distance to the Grove Mount bed and breakfast. It was the longest day of the year and a clear night so although the sun had not long disappeared already the sky was beginning to brighten again in the east.
Sheila served an excellent Irish breakfast and gave us clear instructions on how to locate the Craggy Island Parochial House, which was the home of Fathers’ Ted, Dougal and Jack and we set off in the sunshine along narrow roads flanked by hedgerows decorated with wild flowers, buttercups, iris and fuchsia, until we reached the next village of Kilfanora which is the location of Vaughan’s Pub which was used in the episode ‘Are you right there Father Ted?’ as the Chinese pub.
We stopped for a while to take some pictures of the replica props and then carried on towards our principal objective. On the way we passed the ruins of Leamanean Castle, which isn’t used in the series and then followed the directions to the house and after a while there it was looking exactly as it did nearly twenty years ago when the series was filmed. It is a private house and apparently lots of people turn up at the gate to see it and have their photograph taken but it was still quite early and we were the only ones there so we had the photo shoot location all to ourselves for ten minutes or so.
We were anxious to continue with our journey now because we had a distance to travel towards our next destination of Dingle and we were unsure of the travelling time on account of conflicting information at breakfast. We were planning to take a ferry across the River Shannon and although the lady who served breakfast said that it wouldn’t be too busy and there would be no problem, Sheila said that it might be so we should allow some extra time for the journey. This created some uncertainty but everyone knows of course that in Ireland road signs are contradictory and confusing, distances are approximations and travel advice is as reliable as a government economic statistic.
Our journey took us back to the coast at a place called Spanish Point where we stopped for a coffee and enjoyed a short spell in the sunshine next to the beach and then we followed the coast road south until we reached the river and eventually the ferry crossing at Killimer at twenty past twelve.
The timetable suggested that the next crossing was at one o’clock so we joined the line of traffic and Kim and Pauline went inside to the gift shop and as soon as they had gone through the door the cars started to move forward for loading. This seemed early so I asked the man supervising the loading what time the next crossing was and he said in five minutes! They had altered the crossing schedule!
There was potential trouble here because Kim and Pauline like browsing around shops and Richard and I grew concerned. Pauline appeared but no Kim so Richard ran back to find her. There she was casually browsing the merchandise and even refused to believe the departure information interpreting this as another trick. When she looked outside and saw that the car had moved and was parked on the ferry the penny dropped and there was a mad rush to get on board as the engines started to growl and the ferry staff began preparations for departure. She was rather flustered but eventually found it just as amusing as we did.
The boat slipped away from its moorings and we left County Clare and Father Ted and crossed the water to County Kerry.
Posted in Beaches, Eire, Europe, Food, History, Hotels, Ireland, Travel
Tagged Craggy Island, Eugene's, Father Ted, Father Ted Tour, James Joyce Pub Award, Kilfanora, Kilmer Ferry
Posted in Eire, Europe, History, Hotels, Ireland, Natural Environment, Travel
Tagged Dingle, Dublin, Enistymon, Father Ted, Guinness, Irish Pubs
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:
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…
Posted in Beaches, Eire, Europe, History, Hotels, Ireland, Natural Environment, Postcards, Travel
Tagged Catalonia, Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Ennistymon, Eugene's Ennistymon, Father Ted, Guinness, Ireland Postcards, Life, Suicide Statistics
Have Bag, Will Travel 