2 days in Ireland, Post 1: County Clare

Earlier this week we did a two-day whistlestop tour of Ireland's west coast! A few weeks ago, we found extremely cheap RyanAir flights online, so we booked a midweek break during Ben's school holidays. We flew out of Gatwick at 9:45pm on Monday night, and arrived back home just short of 48 hours later! We flew into Shannon Airport in County Clare on Ireland's central west coast, picked up our hire car (a light blue Fiat Panda) at the airport, and drove to our nearby B&B for a good night's sleep before a full day of sightseeing on Tuesday.

The next morning, after a little sleep in and a hearty full Irish breakfast prepared by our lovely host, Mary, we set off. First stop: the Cliffs of Moher. The first two photos below were taken during our drive there; the others are at the cliffs. As you can see, it was a beautiful sunny day, the cliffs were imposing and dramatic, and the Atlantic Ocean was a gorgeous shade of blue. Standing at the lookout, we could even see dolpins breaching in the water below! There was a tourist centre set into the hillside a little way back from the cliff edge, and there were three buskers along the clifftop pathway - a tin whistler, a harpist, and a banjo player. Incidentally, we later learnt that the Cliffs of Moher were the Cliffs of Insanity in The Princess Bride, for those familiar with it!



Along to the right was O'Brien's Tower (see the photo below with Ben in it), and the view from there looked down at a sharp rocky island. On this island were hundreds of puffins - little penguin-type birds with orange parrot-like beaks!! From the top of the cliff I could hardly even tell they were there, but luckily a man loaned us his binoculars so we did get a brief good look at them. In the photo of the island below, you might just be able to make out lots of black and white specs along the ridges all the way up the rock - those are all the puffins! Sooo cute!!!



Continuing on after seeing the cliffs, we drove north along the coast, and the scenery was just amazing! We were heading into an area called The Burren, which is an incredible 250 square kilometre "karst landscape region", meaning the ground is literally covered in rocks. The distant hills were completely gray and there were rocks piled up to make walls absolutely as far as you could see - that's what they'd used the rocks for when clearing some space for cattle and sheep!

There were fantastic old ruins everywhere - houses, barns and churches with rock walls still standing, but no roofs (probably used to be thatched). The ruins were often covered in green vines, and were just sitting in people's front yards beside their houses or in the many small paddocks beside the road. We had a quick wander through the village of Doolin, and stopped to explore some deserted cliffs and a particularly overgrown church ruin. It is impossible to convey in words how absolutely awesome this area was - The Burren was my favourite part of Ireland to date - so here are lots of photos to illustrate my point, taken as we drove up the coast towards Ailwee Cave...



Ailwee Cave is the oldest of the ancient limestone caves beneath The Burren. There are over a kilometre of passages leading into the mountain, stalactites and stalagmites, an underground river and waterfall, and the remains of bears that used to hibernate in the caves (long extinct in Ireland now). We did a guided tour of the cave in the late afternoon, and it was quite interesting - especially when the guide turned out every single light and we had about a minute to appreciate total, absolute darkness!

Before the tour, we also went through the Birds of Prey exhibit and caught the last 15 minutes of one of the twice-daily flying demonstrations. Check out the video below of Hughy the enormous owl!

Afterwards, we stopped briefly in Galway, the northernmost point we went to on the trip, and then had tea in the village of Ballyvaughan on the way back to our B&B. It was a wonderful day!