Giant's Causeway

August 8 - Bus tour of the Antrim Coast - Carrickfergus, Carrick-a-Rede, Bushmills, Giant's Causeway

As the day dawned gray and cloudy, Cheryl and I packed up our backpacks, put them in luggage storage, ate a massively filling egg and cheese on soda bread with a sad cup of instant coffee, and boarded a bus for a tour of the Antrim Coast. If we had an extra month I would spend it here. The north coast is ridiculously beautiful and varied, full of glacial valleys and waterfalls, seaside cliffs and ancient ruins.

We first stopped at Carrickfergus Castle just outside Belfast. When John de Courcy and the Anglo-Normans conquered Ulster in the twelfth century, the castle became an important military stronghold. Life-sized plastic figures depict medieval life and provide many opportunities for surreptitious molestation.From there the bus hurtled along the small coastal road toward Carrick-a-Rede. We rode through green fields dotted with sheep, clunky medieval bridges spanning rivers and canals, more castles, and a lough (lake) raised to the highest level our tour guide had ever seen due to the persistent rain. I managed to suffer my first bout of motion sickness exacerbated by the bus’ high center of gravity and the narrow twisty road. Luckily, we arrived at the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge before things got out of hand and a beautiful day of blue skies and shining sun greeted us for the first time since our arrival.

The rope bridge is included in the tour as a bit of tourist excitement. A sturdy pine and rope bridge hangs thirty meters over open sea, connecting the mainland to a small island once used for salmon fishing. Apparently the original bridge was much more thrilling to walk over as the North Antrim website explains:

Spanning a chasm some eighty feet deep is the famous Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge, its construction once consisted of a single rope hand rail and widely spaced slats which the fishermen would traverse across with salmon caught off the island. The single handrail was subsequently replaced by a two hand railed bridge, the current, caged bridge was installed by the National Trust during Easter of 2000 as a further safety measure. Although no-one has ever been injured falling off the old bridge, there have been many instances of visitors being unable to face the return walk back across the bridge, resulting in them being taken off the island by boat. A collection of old photographs in Sheep Island View Hostel show a local man doing various stunts on the bridge which include riding a bicycle across it and performing handstands on a chair in the middle. Primarily a 'seasonal' working bridge for the fishermen, since the demise of salmon fishing along the coast, the bridge is nowadays more widely used by passing visitor's and marketed as a tourist attraction.

The National Trust now runs a tight ship. There are separate queues for entrance, crossing, and return crossing, controlled by young people in polo shirts with radios. The sea was splendid though and the air filled with wheeling gulls.From Carrick-a-Rede we stopped by Bushmill’s Distillery, a maker of Irish whiskey. Cheryl’s guidebook recommends the tour, as Bushmill’s is still a working plant while Jameson’s in Dublin is not. During the week visitors see men doing whatever it is they do to barley and yeast in complicated vats. You may even meet Colum, Bushmill’s Master Distiller. We settled for breathing in the sour yeasty air and watching folks sample the goods.

Finally we arrived around lunchtime at the Giant’s Causeway. As Wikipedia says, there are two conflicting reports of the geological formation:

During the Paleogene period, Antrim was subject to intense volcanic activity, when highly fluid molten basalt intruded through chalk beds to form an extensive lava plateau. As the lava cooled rapidly, contraction occurred. While contraction in the vertical direction reduced the flow thickness (without fracturing), horizontal contraction could only be accommodated by cracking throughout the flow. The extensive fracture network produced the distinctive columns seen today. The basalts were originally part of a great volcanic plateau called the Thulean Plateau which formed during the Paleogene period.

The basalt column nonsense is all well and good, but doesn’t explain how the site got its name, leading to an alternative theory of creation:

Legend has it that the Irish giant Fionn mac Cumhaill (Finn McCool) built the causeway to walk to Scotland to fight his Scottish counterpart Benandonner. One version of the legend tells that Fionn fell asleep before he got to Scotland. When he did not arrive, the much larger Benandonner crossed the bridge looking for him. To protect Fionn, his wife Oonagh laid a blanket over him so he could pretend that he was actually their baby son. When Benandonner saw the size of the 'infant', he assumed the alleged father, Fionn, must be gigantic indeed. Therefore, Benandonner fled home in terror, ripping up the Causeway in case he was followed by Fionn. The "causeway" legend corresponds with geological history in as much as there are similar basalt formations (a part of the same ancient lava flow) at the site of Fingal's Cave on the isle of Staffa in Scotland.

Whatever the cause of the Causeway, the place is a photographer’s dream. Basalt columns exist all over the world, and their unique structure boggles the mind everywhere.All in all, a wonderful day and especially lucky with the weather. My favorite part was meeting a group of nuns who had obviously bypassed a fence that said "Do Not Enter" to climb up to the pipe organ structure off the upper cliff path. Robed in red habits with sneakers, they took pictures by the basalt columns while pretending to fall off the rocks, miming "Save me, Gabriel!" Hysterical.

Kilmainham Gaol

August 7 - Caught an afternoon bus to Belfast.

Our bus to Belfast didn't leave until the afternoon so we went on a particularly interesting tour of the Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin. The associated museum was also quite thorough, covering aspects of daily prison life as well as the political history of the prison's most famous inmates, the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising who were held and executed there. The place was a bit depressing, particularly when they led us out to the work yard where prisoners broke rocks for hard labor. Two crosses in the yard marked the spots where the nationalist men were shot by a firing squad. Definitely a worthwhile hour and a half.Before we went to the bus station we picked up some fresh apples from the Moore Street Market where we also found some complicatedly dyed flowers. I still haven't figured out how they get them to look like that. Some poor person has to sit there with a needle and inject each petal individually?From there we took a rather long bus trip up to Belfast through yet more rain. We got our first glimpses of the Irish countryside, replete with content looking sheep lounging on damp grass and hundreds of miles of rock walls.

The Belfast International Youth Hostel felt a bit sterile - it looked like a college dormitory including acoutrements like a pool table and library. We did get our own room though, and just around the corner was Benedict's, a beautiful bar/restaurant that did a brilliant early bird special. From 5-7PM dinner costs as much as the time your ordered. Starving after our ride, we ate at 5:45 and paid less than £6 for a salmon dinner.

Howth

August 6 - Day trip to Howth, on the peninsula north of Dublin. We woke to constant drizzle and, after failing to get a Wicklow tour that would take us from Dublin down to Glendalough and back, decided instead to go to Howth, a little fishing village only twenty minutes away by train. I, in my infinite wisdom, was convinced that the DART (Dublin Area Rapid Transit) rail and the Irish national rail couldn't possibly leave from the same station, and we spent a soggy half hour wandering around in a large circle trying to find an invisible second train station.

By the time we got to Howth, the rain had tapered off. We found some real coffee at a very cute cafe above a gourmet grocery store. The Irish seem quite fond of the instant stuff, which tastes vaguely like dishwater and has about as much caffeine as chamomile tea. Lunch was grilled bread with goat cheese, roasted peppers, and a variety of side salads.The walk along the Howth peninsula is supposed to be gorgeous, but the weather kept switching schizophrenically from black clouds to blue sky and getting caught in a rainstorm didn't seem particularly appealing. We went to the old Martello tower (old British defense against Napoleon, as well as marauding pirates) that now houses Ye Olde Hurdy Gurdy Musuem of Vintage Radio. From the hill we could see the rock walls of Howth Abbey and its associated graveyard, so we headed over for a look.After our fill of dead people we walked down to the harbor to ogle the boats and check out the lighthouse. A small island, Ireland's Eye, sits less than a mile away from Howth and has a Martello tower of its own. Shockingly, the weather began to clear up at this point and we had a brief spate of sunshine before heading back to pub crawl our way through Dublin. This is the River Liffey at night (back in Dublin), looking toward the Ha'penny Bridge.

Dublin

Our flight arrived early in the morning on August 5th and, after a rough night where Aer Lingus left the fluorescent lights on the entire six hours, we fortified ourselves with scrambled egg and toast and hit the streets of Dublin. This is a detail from the monument to Daniel O'Connell on O'Connell Street, not far from our hostel. Please notice the rain on her arm. Constant precipitation seems to be a theme in Ireland.Across the River Liffey is something called the Royal Liver Assurance. Given how much the Irish drink, I found this sign apropos. We wandered our way over to Trinity College, keeper of the Book of Kells. This is the campanile.
And some other random building (possibly in the corridor by the Samuel Beckett Centre).Carroll's is a gift shop chain that sells some of the most obnoxiously Irish souvenirs I have ever seen in my life. They have several locations throughout the city if you need to get a plush green hat or forty-seven leprechauns of varying size. We accidentally found St. Patrick's Cathedral while trying to get to Dublin Castle. Their lovely gardens had marigolds and a small memorial to Samuel Beckett. Fiona Shaw's "Happy Days" had also been playing at the Abbey Theater. Stupid dead Beckett, following me around with his inscrutable existential drama. We finally found Dublin Castle (phew!) across the street from a fantastic little pastry shop, the Queen of Tarts. Our extremely well appointed tour guide (who had some great peep-toe saddle shoe pumps, not at all appropriate for walking around a castle all day) showed us some of the formal chambers and explained that the original castle was burned nearly to the ground in the 1600s. Crown jewels were also stolen from the castle in 1907 and are still at large. £1000 reward for the finder, in case you see it on Ebay.We finished off the night with our first pints of Guinness and fish and chips at Brazenhead Irish Pub, purportedly the oldest pub in Ireland. If you ever find yourself at the Globetrotter's Hostel by Busaras in Dublin, try to book yourself in Room 420 (and no, it's not what you're thinking). It's a six-bed female dorm that is actually part of the Townhouse Hotel next door. Although finding the room involves climbing through a little-used part of the building, the place is a lovely little garret apartment with a kitchenette, TV, couch, and closet. And nary a bunk bed in sight. And the Irish breakfast in the morning is a definite plus.