Sightseeing, Pt. 1

This weekend was full of sightseeing and fun things, and I'll give you more actual details about my trips later on today or tomorrow, but for now I need to ramble for a bit. Just to warn you. Pictures can’t really do this country justice. I know that sounds trite, but it truly is that way. I look at the pictures I have, and they’re gorgeous, but the actual thing was far more intricately beautiful, full of little things, and so connected to the entire setting, not just what you can capture within the frame. For example, standing on the Cliffs of Moher: in the pictures, you realize that they are very tall, but then you look along the tops and realize that those weird little dot things are people walking along. After we hopped the fence and started walking along the mud path on the section of the Cliffs with no guardrail (standing just a little too close to the edge for pure safety, but a perfect distance for pure thrill), you see how far down it is, how that little white thing halfway down is a gull flying, and far below are huge waves sending spray. Pictures of the water show waves moving around, but the actual crash – far taller than a house – is just breathtaking in its savagery.

Sometimes, driving along, I can forget for a second that I’m in Ireland, because we’re passing a development that would be at home in New Jersey, or a section of trees and plant life like anything you see along 81, but then suddenly you come across a small cottage – architecturally in the old style, although the roof is no longer thatched – with a car in the driveway, and the half-ruined remains of a pre-famine house in the side yard. Acres of small stone-wall-enclosed pastures house groups of sheep or cows, occasionally horses. When you come into mountain country and the Burren, the limestone is everywhere, sheeting the ground and glistening from the damp. When you walk on it, it is pitted and swirled, with perfectly circular pools of water sunk into the stone and its edges worn into intricate waves. Lines running up the mountains are Famine walls, built by starving sufferers looking for a day’s wage from a government that would give no handouts, only pointless labor so the money would be “earned.”

I took a million pictures at Kilmacduagh Monastery, where the crosses fill the graveyard and the tower leans a bit to one side, but the crosses - some centuries old, and most covered in white lichen, which shows the purity of the air – against the tower needed to be shown from every side. Walking among the crosses, you hold your breath slightly from the solemnity of it all, until the sheep across the wall start calling to you.

In Coole Park, the pictures show the forest, but they can’t fully capture the rocks lining the path, each covered in a soft green moss, with a stream of ivy coming from somewhere to flow over it. The pathway is rocky, but the thin layer of moss makes it feel like a carpet. The sun slanting in onto the ivy glistens slightly next to the dark shadows where the trees stand. We hop a stone wall to get close to the lake, and looking out over the still water the sun falls at just the right angle through the trees around you, and the softest breeze moves through the tall, damp grass at your feet as ducks fly in formation over the ruins across the water. There are trees in the forest that are several trunks in one, splitting and twisting out into magnificent spreads of dark, rich wood, large enough to live in, if you wanted. When Finn takes us into a fairy ring where the trees bend out in a strange way, you half expect to see a little fairy face peeking out at you. Being at Coole, I can understand why Yeats, Shaw, and Synge came here so often to unwind and to write – we all agree that if we had that place to visit, we would all write beautiful poetry too. It’s in the air – I don’t think you could help it.