6/27-7/2/19
The trip was months in planning. We first learned about it at Christmas, when my parents announced that all of us – myself, my sister Courtney and her husband Rich, my brother Conor and his wife Shannon, and my brothers Quinn and Austin – would be going to Ireland at the end of June. The itinerary took shape over the following weeks. We would fly into Dublin, rent two vans, and then work our way across the southern coast to County Kerry, head north to Galway, and finally return to Dublin via the Midlands.
6-27/8
From our various places of (un)employment, we met at O’Hare, fidgeted through a weather delay, and finally took off around sunset. The flight was uneventful enough for about half of us to catch some sleep. Then the shutters went up, the breakfast trays came out, and the plane rattled down in Dublin. After a few hours of jetlagged maneuvering, we boarded our vans, and set out for the city center. The drivers – in this case, my father and my brother-in-law – were immediately introduced to the joys of the Irish road: haphazardly-parked cars, buzzing roundabouts, and lanes apparently designed for mopeds.
Having managed to avoid killing ourselves or any important pedestrians, we parked in a convenient garage and checked into our hotel. Since we had scheduled a walking tour for mid-afternoon, most of us abandoned any hope of sleep and set out to explore Dublin. I made a solitary excursion to the Archaeological Museum. Then, after gawking at bog mummies, I joined the rest of the family on the stately grounds of Trinity College. Our walking tour, which departed from the front gate of the College, was a pleasure. A guide equipped with dozens of anecdotes, a booming voice, and tattoo sleeves led us and about thirty other tourists past the old Parliament, Dublin Castle, and other landmarks. As he spoke, those of us conscious enough to appreciate the presentation gained some sense of Dublin’s central place in Irish history. We also realized that we were famished, and swarmed a fish and chips restaurant immediately after the tour. Finally, determined to stave off fatigue for a few more hours, we latched onto a musical pub crawl. The pubs were small and sweltering; but the musicians were good enough to make (most of) us stay to the end. As soon as the music stopped, however, we staggered back to the hotel, and slept as the dead.
6-29
After breakfast at the hotel, we drove an hour south to Glendalough in the green Wicklow Mountains. There we met our guide, a cantankerous chain-smoker who provided a wealth of information about the medieval “monastic city” that made Glendalough famous throughout Christian Europe. As we soon discovered, however, his love of Glendalough was equaled by his hatred of the Spanish teenagers who swarmed the site shortly after our arrival. As he lectured about the site’s various chapels and famous bell tower, he glared at the gossiping students, whom he called “the bane of his existence.” He had no qualms about sharing his feelings. At one point, while trying to take a picture, he chased away twenty or thirty teens out of the foreground by waving his arms and telling them to “f-k off.”
After our guide awkwardly kissed my mother and shuffled off, we hiked up to a picturesque waterfall, returned to the cars, and headed to the small city of Kilkenny. There, after wading through tipsy wedding guests in our hotel lobby, we headed into town for dinner in a pub overlooking the river. Over the course of a pleasant meal, we befriended our teenaged waitress and were (in my father’s case) genially insulted by the bartender for ordering light beer.
6-30
While most of us slept off a night of excess, I went with my mother to visit Kilkenny Castle, residence of the Ango-Irish Butler family for seven centuries. The guided tour took in all the main rooms, decorated in high Victorian fashion, and the vast picture gallery. As soon as the tour ended, we joined the rest of the family in an echoing Gothic cathedral for the most efficient mass I have ever had the pleasure to encounter.
The next stop was Jerpoint Abbey, an impressive medieval ruin with a well-preserved tower and cloister. After a picnic lunch beside the leaning tombs of the Abbey cemetery, we drove to the Rock of Cashel, a hill crowned with the gaunt ruins of a cathedral. Once the chief fortress of the kings of Munster, the Rock was given to the Church in the eleventh century, and has been famous for its ecclesiastical architecture ever since.
The best-preserved building on the Rock is Cormac’s Chapel, built by an Irish king in the early twelfth century. Although centuries of vandalism and neglect have destroyed most of the interior decoration, tantalizing fragments remain of the colorful frescoes and intricate reliefs that made this building a jewel of medieval Ireland. The Chapel is virtually surrounded by a later, and much larger, cathedral, and ringed (like most medieval churches in Ireland) by a large graveyard. After touring the site, I rejoined my family, who were beginning to show a marked lack of enthusiasm for medieval ruins. “From now on,” my sister-in-law informed me, “I’m only stopping to see buildings that have roofs.”
After leaving Cashel, we drove west to the Dingle Peninsula, where we had rented a house. This proved to be a quaint whitewashed affair, equipped with a comfortable living room, an extremely inefficient drier, and a elderly golden retriever. All three would be heavily used during our stay.
7-1
Late last night, I discovered that the path up Mount Brandon, the highest point on the Dingle Peninsula, was only a few miles from our rented house. So I woke early, roused my brother Austin, and drove a series of one-lane roads to the trailhead. From the beginning, the walk was stunning. Ahead hovered the peak, buried in clouds. Behind spread a vast panorama of deep greens and pale blues, fence-checkered hills and wave-lashed cliffs.
The path Austin and I were following was blazed by medieval pilgrims, who trudged to the summit to visit the remains of a hut supposedly occupied by the semi-mythical Saint Brandon / Brendan. Later generations of pious climbers set up a series of large wooden crosses along the path, which are still used as Stations on Brendan’s feast day.
About two-thirds of the way to the summit, clouds washed over the mountain, reducing visibility to a few dozen yards. The remainder of the walk was picturesquely unpleasant, as a howling wind whipped rollers of fog past our feet and dashed drizzle into our faces. Finally, the tall summit cross hove into view, ghostly behind flying curtains of cloud. Crouching behind rocks to escape the wind, we waited for a break in the weather. When none appeared, we resigned ourselves to the slippery slope down.
We met the rest of the family in town, where they were just embarking on a (free) boat tour of the harbor (compliments of the guy whose house we were staying in). The scenery was impressive, particularly past the mouth of Dingle harbor, where tall cliffs looked down on the sea. Most passengers on the boat, however, had eyes only for Fungie, the dolphin who has lived in and around Dingle harbor for more than thirty years. Fungie dutifully appeared about halfway through the tour, lured out by a teenager in a dinghy. I was hoping for some Flipper-style acrobatics; but Fungie (who seemed to be a little overweight) never bothered to break water.
After the boat docked, we had time only for a quick lunch before our afternoon activity: a ride around Dingle’s famously scenic Slea Head drive. Instead of driving ourselves, we packed into a minibus driven by an elderly but very knowledgeable guide. Although the ride was beautiful, the highlights were the periodic stops. The first of these, at a working sheep farm, gave some of us an opportunity to cradle a lamb, and others (me) the chance to explore a Neolithic beehive hut. Another stop afforded a spectacular view of the tip of the Dingle peninsula and Europe’s westernmost islands.
We also stopped to see the Gallarus Oratory, an early medieval chapel shaped from carefully-fitted stones. The most memorable moment of the tour, however, came toward the end. When passing through the town of Ballyferriter, it was mentioned to our driver that my Uncle Jay’s mother had grown up there. On hearing her age and name, he pulled over in the middle of town, and knocked on the door of a brick house. Without waiting for a response, he entered, emerging a moment later with an elderly woman who turned out to be a childhood friend (and distant cousin) of my uncle’s mother. She pointed us to the village church in which my uncle’s mother had been baptized, and to the rocky slope a few miles away where she had lived.
7-2
Before the rest of the family woke, I took a short drive to a dramatically-situated ruined castle along the coast a few miles south.
Then I rejoined the group for a hike up to Eask Tower, built in the nineteenth century to mark the entrance to Dingle harbor. The views from the headland on which the tower stood took in the whole tip of the peninsula. To the north, past the town of Dingle, towered Mount Brandon, still capped with cloud. West stretched Slea Head drive and the green hills and islands on Europe’s margin. South swept the bay separating the Dingle peninsula from the Ring of Kerry.
After hiking back down, we drove to the small town of Annascaul for a pleasant lunch at the South Pole Inn, a pub founded by Antarctic explorer Tom Crean. The afternoon was spent driving to Galway – or rather to the Galway suburb of Oranmore, where my mother had mistakenly reserved rooms. However remote from the city, the B&B proved very pleasant, as did the town of Oranmore, where we ate without shame or regret at an Italian restaurant.