IRELAND - PART II

I suppose you could say our trip to Ireland was divided into four segments.  The first two segments I have already spoken about: the first being Dublin, and the second being the scenic and rugged west coast of the island. The next two segments involved castles and family. In this blog post I'll write about the castles. In IRELAND - PART III, I'll report on the visit with family.

After our two days and three nights in Killarney, and our visits to the Dingle Peninsula, the Burren, and the Cliffs of Moher (with brief stops in Galway and Limerick) we spent our first night in a castle. This castle was Dromoland.

 

We were only here for one night, but the staff was wonderful and we felt like royalty. The breakfast was to die for.  The next morning we left to drive through Connemara.  Along the way we saw the famous Connemara ponies, lobster pots in inlets, thousands of sheep, and this gorgeous site: Kylemore Abbey.

 

You may have seen this view in travel brochures of Ireland.  Once a private residence, it served as a school for girls for many years.  Now it is home to the Benedictine nuns.  Lucky ladies!

Our day ended at Ashford Castle, where we checked in for two nights.

The bridge leading to this castle was used in the movie The Quiet Man with John Wayne.  The small village of Cong down the road was also used. 

The castle was elegant and amazing.  Dinners were formal affairs and breakfast was an exercise in indulgence.  The first night, we were unable to get a table in the formal dining room, so we crossed the bridge to Cullen's Cottage, a lovely and less formal restaurant.  The staff was every bit as attentive, however and the food was excellent. We joked with the waiters about the pictures on the wall - every one of them was crooked.  One said, "We didn't hang them, but we like it when someone else does a bad job, because then we can complain but have no responsibility to fix it.  If you come back here next year, it will look exactly the same."  I kind of liked that philosophy.

 

But beyond the beauty and luxurious surroundings of the castle, there were also activities that were quite memorable. The first involved falconry, with a small Peruvian Hawk named "Inca."

 

This Irish beauty brought Inca to us and then Conner, our guide, took us out to the "Scary forest" and taught Tony how to handle Inca.

She performed beautifully, taking off and returning with each movement of Tony's hand, but then she found a stick and wanted to play with it on the ground. 

 

 

I believe this was one of the highlights of the trip for Tony.  In these past few years, he's taken up bird-watching, and he has always loved watching the hawks in our neighborhood.  I don't think he ever thought he'd get this close to such a beautiful animal. 

The afternoon turned to a more serious pursuit of nature and history.  We took a boat across Lake Corrib to the island known as Inchagoill, or "Island of the Stranger."  According to local legend, when St. Patrick came to this area of Ireland he was not greeted warmly by those who still practiced the Druid religion, and was exiled to the island along with his nephew and navigator, Lugnad.  They stayed there a while and built a stone church, the ruins of which are still there.

There is a small graveyard next to the ruin, with the stone marking the grave of Lugnad, who died on the island in the mid-5th century.  St. Patrick escaped somehow, and later, in the 12th century, Augustinian monks built a small church on the island, to use for a retreat center.  It was called the Church of Saints because of the heads of "the 10 Saints of Lake Corrib" over the entry door.

 

 

Our stay at Ashford ended with another glorious breakfast and then we headed back to Dublin to pick up a rental car, attempt to drive on the left hand side of the road and find our way to County Laois and my newly discovered cousins. 

That part of the story will be told in IRELAND - PART III