June 29 to July 4 — Ireland, Part II
With way too many photos.
After giving my goodbyes and departing Sligo, I spend the afternoon walking around Galway, waiting for the bus to the ferry that will take me to the Aran Islands.
Eventually the bus arrives, and while carefully setting my backpack down on the seat next to mine, an older man, smelling of alcohol, sits next to me. His accent is so thick and his hearing so bad that carrying on a conversation is nigh impossible, but we attempt it regardless. I learn that he is the alderman of Inis Oírr, the smallest of the three Aran Islands. When he learns that I am intending to go to Inis Meáin, the least visited of the islands, he cannot believe.
“Why Inis Meáin!?” he immediately replies. “There’s nothing to do there! Come to Inis Oírr, it is the best of the islands.”
I actually spend some time thinking this over.
Onboard the ferry, I meet two kids from Sligo. They’re going to Inis Oírr to have a “proper rave,” as they describe it. “We have a generator and everything.”
I spend some time talking with them, then with a family from Inis Meáin that is transporting their grocery shopping back home (there is no grocery store on the island), and remain content in my decision. They also inform me of a beach where people frequently set up campsites.
After making camp and dinner, I take a walk around the island. It is almost overwhelmingly beautiful. I encounter no one. Only about 150 people live on Inis Meáin, and this weekend there is a traditional festival on the largest island, Inis Mór that is surely drawing some people away.
There are a great many tiny fields on the island, divided by the plentiful limestone that forms the ground. (The islands were so rocky when first inhabited, that residents literally made their own soil, by mixing sand with seaweed. Really.) However, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of livestock that are grazing in the fields. I’m not sure why this is.
Making my way further around the island, I catch sight of Inis Mór off towards the Atlantic, and begin to see the sea cliffs that originally drew me to Inis Meáin.
Around one more corner, and I find the edge. The limestone drops away in front of me, catching the last rays of the evening sun. I can’t believe how beautiful the weather is. Is this still Ireland?
I am fascinated by the small plants that manage to find a way to live among such harsh ground — an obvious metaphor could be drawn with the original settlers of these islands.
I stumble upon Synge’s chair, a place where he used to sit during his famous time on the Aran Islands.
“It has cleared, and the sun is shining with a luminous warmth that makes the whole island glisten with the splendour of a gem, and fills the sea and sky with a radiance of blue light. I have come out to lie on the rocks where I have the black edge of the north island in front of me, Galway Bay, too blue almost to look at, on my right, the Atlantic on my left, a perpendicular cliff under my ankles, and over me innumerable gulls that chase each other in a white cirrus of wings.”
“What would be nice right now,” I think, “would be a pint of Guinness.” I know that there is exactly one pub on the island, knowledge courtesy of a friendly local who gave me a ride to the camping beach. (Have I mentioned that the common spoken language here is still Irish, not English? It’s one of the only natively Irish-speaking areas left in the country.) However, I don’t have high hopes for the tiny pub in the tiny town on this tiny island still being open at close to midnight.
I was very, very wrong. Not only is the pub still open, but I think everyone on the island is there, and a seisún of traditional music is just beginning. Perfect.
I spend another two hours there, and when I leave, after 1am, the party shows no sign of stopping. On the way home, I stop by the old ferry dock next to the beach.
The islands are dotted with ancient ring forts, built one to two thousand years ago, as farmsteads or defensive fortifications (no one is quite sure.)
That afternoon, I bid farewell to Inis Meáin, and catch a boat sailing to the largest of the islands, Inis Mór. As I journey there, I am struck by the appearance of the land — as a thin shell, stretched between two vast blue agoraphobic expanses.
Obvious metaphors, atmospheric or existential, apply.
Inis Mór is such a contrast to Inis Meáin that I almost feel that I have made a terrible mistake by coming here. Whereas Inis Meáin was serene and quiet, Inis Mór is teeming with tourists, bicycle rental shops, cafés, and worst of all, the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Championships.
There is an official campground on the island that I find my way to. I am not impressed — it is an unaesthetic field, filled with boombox-blasting beer-case toting louts.
“Wait,” I think. “Maybe I should be more open to meeting the other people camping here.”
As I ponder what to do, someone walks up to me.
“How many nights yer stayin? 10 euro per night.”
That settles it, and I wander on in search of another space to camp. I stop to ask a farmer, bayling hay in his field, for advice. He turns out to be the friendliest person imaginable, welcoming me to the island and showing me a few fields that were so damaged by winter storms this past year that there is no risk of grazing cattle providing an unwanted alarm clock.
It is, again, a gorgeous campsite, perched on the end of the cape visible below.
That evening, I go to Dún Aonghasa, one of the most famous ring forts in Ireland. Actually, this one is only a half ring, built on the edge of a 100 meter sea cliff, falling into the Atlantic.
The next day, I visit the “worm hole.” This is the actual sight of the Red Bull Cliff Diving Championships, and I really am hoping that they have everything cleaned up by now.
How many times do you get to see a direction sign painted on a rock, pointing you to the wormhole?
Doolin is known for two things — being near the Cliffs of Moher (and The Burren), and traditional music. I visit a local pub to take in some of the latter, have some food, and get some cash (Doolin, as I found out soon after arriving, is a town with three pubs and zero ATMs). Walking back to the hostel, there is yet another beautiful sunset.
The hostel itself is an amazing restored farmhouse next to the stream that runs through the village.
The following morning, I intend to hike the length of the Cliffs of Moher, by taking a bus to the town of Liscannor, south of Doolin and the cliffs, and walking back to the hostel.
Liscannor itself is an eerily silent place. It feels very forgotten.
Stopping to apply sunscreen (a lesson I learned the hard way on the Aran Islands), I meet someone that lives in a nearby house. She is from Boston. People say that Boston has a large Irish population. I think it’s just that Ireland has a large Bostonian population.
The cliffs themselves are awe-inspiring. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves. First, a tease.
Gulls fly back and forth over the edge of the cliff. I watch one for a while, catching some sort of updraft, rising up the top of the cliff, and then swooping back down towards the sea. He repeats this, over and over again, to seemingly no practical effect. I name him “Jonathan Livingston.”
I sit here and wait several hours for sunset, which alas, never comes. Instead the sky hazes up, and sun disappears into the fog.
I have three goals when I arrive in Killarney — stock up on pseudoephedrine before I head to Turkey, rent a bicycle, and get a haircut. Miraculously, they line up like dominos as I walk down the main street, passing a pharmacy, a bike rental shop that loans me a beautiful cyclocross machine, and a barber that manages a quick trim of my out-of-control hair.
I take my bike for a test drive through the National Park adjacent to the town.
I have already fallen in love with my bicycle, and spend the next day taking it for a ride through the Gap of Dunloe and some roads around Killarney. I think Ireland is the most perfect country for cycling that I have ever seen.
From here, I must board a train to Dublin the same evening, in order to catch an early morning ferry across the Irish Sea the next day. I arrive in Dublin at sunset, and plan to walk to the River Liffey as a way to say goodbye to the city.
Email me when Logan Williams publishes or recommends stories