While in Ireland last spring, we took a rail-and-bus tour from Dublin to Cork and such well-known sights on the west coast as Bunratty Castle, the Cliffs of Moher and the Burren—but as impressive as those can be, the star of the day was surely the west of Ireland itself, even seen from the windows of a bus.
We passed farm fields and pastures, often with animals grazing.
We joined the crowds at the Cliffs of Moher, with grand sights even in the overcast that marked part of the day. And there were plenty of visitors for the shops and visitor center on the site. But my favorite view of the area was looking up from below to see the not-real-castle that provides a great view from above, too.
But the imitation (and well-maintained) castle on the hill is only a reminder of how many real castles Ireland is dotted with, and how many real conflicts they arose from. We saw quite a few, unmarked along the roadside.
And the ruins of humbler buildings, many abandoned during Ireland’s mid-19th century famine-driven depopulation.
Tough times might be a point for the rocky coast called The Burren, as well. Even at the best of times, this area of broken rock and tough soil has been a hard place to live—and yet it has a long history of habitation.
And a history of comments, some half-admiring and some downright mean-spirited. The poet John Betjeman, in New Bats in Old Belfries (1945) wrote:
Stony seaboard, far and foreign, Stony hills poured over space,
Stony outcrop of the Burren, Stones in every fertile place,
Little fields with boulders dotted, Grey-stone shoulders saffron-spotted,
Stone-walled cabins thatched with reeds, Where a Stone Age people breeds
The last of Europe’s stone age race.
One of Cromwell’s generals took a harsher view, dismissing it as a place where “There isn’t a tree to hang a man, water to drown a man nor soil to bury a man”
But of course, stones are also the material of stone walls, and western Ireland has plenty of those, often meandering across hillsides, and occasionally marching straight into the distance.
And there are flowers.
