due to the fact that I’m on holidays I finally had the time to add the Ireland 2005 pictures to the gallery. The travel reports will follow tomorrow or during the weekend.
All pictures during that trip have been shot with a little Canon Digital Camera I bought a week before the trip and which turned out to make pretty good pictures.
The trip took place in May 2005 directly after I graduated university and mainly covered the south-western area of Ireland. I’d like to point out that the pictures 23 & 24 have been taken from the same spot in Killarney National Park, a point that’s called „Lady’s View“. The first one was taken at very cloudy weather, while the second one (being the lead image for the gallery and this post) has been taken at bright sunshine and I’m still absolutely stoked by seeing the difference between those too pictures.
All pictures are unedited as they came as JPG from the camera and not RAW.
Today we visited Ring of Beara. First of all I have to mention that even for people that know the streets in Ireland this can be quite hard. There are areas where the street is just that wide that two cars can pass it at the same time. No chance for car & bus. So it requires strong nerves and a calm driver (definitely not me).
Ring of Beara is definitely the most beautiful of the Southwest Coast of Ireland. The nature is quite wild and the weather was really good (sunburnt again). One of the things one should definitely go and see if traveling on the Ring of Beara would be Dunboy Castle. In 2005 it was still a ruine, nowadays they have made a hotel out of it. In the lake in front of Dunboy Castle there’s a sunken ship so the whole area is very romantic.
The rest of the day we were shopping in Bantry and took our dinner in „Brick Oven“ which was absolutely delicious! Strongly recommended.
We left quite late for the drive to Bantry and it turned out that we were even to early to check in to the B & B. So we took a walk around Bantry House which is an ancient Queen Ann House where they have regularly small concerts or readings of authors. The gardens are very beautiful and Bantry has quite a warm climate so in the gardens they have palms and other rare plants.
Our Bed & Breakfast was named Rocklands which was quite nice and I would definitely recommend it. It’s 4 km from town centre, so still in walking distance.
As we were that early we had the whole afternoon to explore the area and we took a drive to Mizen Peninsula and Mizen Head. Compared to Ring of Kerry I’d definitely prefer this.
For dinner we went to the Bantry Bay Hotel. It turned out that Bantry is quite a sleepy little town..so there was nothing to do in town for the evening.
We started the Kerry way after a delicious Irish breakfast and guess what we watched first? A stone fort. Due to the very cloudy weather I can’t say that I really found it beautiful. When we reached Caherciveen we stopped by a ruine of a castle and from there proceeded to Killarney National Park.
We took the time to see Muckross House (very impressive) and had a walk through the gardens. There are offers for a drive with a carriage and we decided to do that on the day before leaving as they are quite expensive. But on our way back to Kenmare we had the great possibility to see „Lady’s View“ with blue sky…so the difference should be obvious.
The evening we spent in Kenmare town again having our dinner in O’Donnabhain. Originally we had cast an eye on a restaurant called Lime Tree as I would have liked to have some fish again, but it tourned out they were closed that evening.
The weather was very windy, mostly try and even some sunny moments.
It turned out that ,even if it was written that way during the booking, we were not allowed to pay the B & B with credit card as in all other B & Bs before. Normally I wouldn’t mind if I knew ahead, but as we more or less booked all B & Bs with the remark Credit Cards accepted we didn’t bring enough cash with us and had to get cash in Ireland more than once (combined with high charges of course).
We started quite early that morning and took the road through Killarney National Park which is really a beautiful and very huge park that normally would invite everybody for a week of hiking. We only stopped at Lady’s View and took some pictures before we proceded to Kenmare where our next B & B was booked.
The B & B in Kenmare was really beautiful. Possibly the best one we had during our trip. It was in walking distance to town and unfortunately I can’t find it anymore in the internet.
We walked into town for dinner (walking distance were like 10 or 15 minutes) and had our dinner in „The Bridge“ which was more or less one of the first restaurants we came by. They serve a very good steak!
It was rainy the whole day (as can be clearly seen on the picture of Lady’s View)
Dingle is not really an island, but a peninsula. It’s by far smaller than The Ring of Kerry and much wilder. The roads can be very bad, but the beautiful nature is worth it.
We got up and started the day at 9.15. We first visited Dunbeg Stonefort and some bee cottages which was actually the point where I personally had seen enough of those. We drove to Slea Head and spend some time on the beach (sand beach – really!) and enjoyed the nice view on the Blasket Islands. I guess one can only see them when the weather is quite good.
The way back to Dingle town was adventurous due to the small streets and some travel buses that came across, but somehow we managed to get back without damaging the car.
In Dingle we went shopping and had dinner at Armada Inn, where they serve delicious sea food. I had monkfish with spinach. My first monkfish actually and I must say it was absolutely yummy. We ended up at O’Gradys again and enjoyed some live music that evening.
We started early and had to drive until 2 p.m. to get to Dingle. The weather during the driving was terrible and the road to Dingle was very bad so it really took us some time to get there.
The Bed in Breakfast we booked, O’Shea’s, is some km outside of Dingle and not exactly what we thought it would be, but as it’s only for sleeping it’s no problem, but I would not really recommend it as walking into town is quite a distance and walking back in the middle of the night seemed not to be a good idea.
As it was still raining the afternoon we had a walk through Dingle town. A very beautiful and nice town. Dingle has an aquarium we visited and as we were quite exhausted from the day we decided to end up in a pub and chose O’Gradys in the harbour area. I can really recommend food there and we were in the lucky position that it was Champions League finals and we watched Liverpool win the match. Very nice atmosphere and lot’s of fun.
Due to the bad weather the picture of that crow was the only one taken on that day.
We started early on Tuesday and drove to Kilfenora where we visited the Burren Center which was really interesting and provides a lot of information on how the Burren was created. From Kilfenora we first visited the Caherconnell Stone Fort, which wasn’t the last of the stone forts we visited, and from there went forward to the Alliwee Caves. I had already seen those in 1995 and we realised that already the parking would be 10 Euros which we found expensive without even having entered the caves. So we decided we wouldn’t take a closer look. Instead we drove to Ballyvaughan, a small coastal town and wandered along the coast. On our way back to Doolin we stopped at a beautiful sandy beach and as the weather was sunny we drove to the Cliffs of Moher again where we spent a couple of hours climbing up and down.
The previous night in Doolin we had found a tiny restaurant called „Lazy Lobster“ which was closed on Mondays and so we already had decided to eat there that night. This is an absolute must have for anybody coming to Doolin. We had broccoli-cauliflower-soup as starter and salmon with vegetables and rice as main course. Awesome! It’s quite expensive but extremely good and the restaurant itself has such a nice atmosphere. I would eat there again every time I get back to Doolin, no question.
Due to the sunny, windy weather it turned out I got sunburnt that day. Typical Ireland. Even if the sun isn’t that hot it’s there and I really recommend sunblocker!
Cliffs of Moher Panoramaat the CliffsO'Brien's TowerFootprintsBeachStone Fort
A lot of driving on the second day. We had to get to Doolin where we had booked the next B & B and which would be the starting point for a tour through the Burren.
Getting to Doolin from Tralee is fasted if you take the ferry boat and even with this it took us more than 3 hours driving to get there, due to the Irish streets 🙂 We stopped at the Cliffs of Moher, which is always a nice spot to stop. The cliffs are amazing and even though there are signs saying that nobody should cross that line a lot of people just do and lay down on the plateau. The cliffs are probably one of the most impressive spots in Ireland. Due to the weather we didn’t linger there, hoping that we would have more luck the next day.
From the cliffs we proceded to Doolin where we had a little Bed & Breakfast a little outside of town named „Glasha Meadows“. Nice B & B which I would always recommend to people travelling there. Doolin is a nice little town and very much crowded with tourists as the ferries to the Aran Islands depart here but it’s always worth a visit.
We ended the evening in McDermott, one of the pubs in Doolin with typical pub food again. They had live music every night after 9.30 pm.
Our trip started with a lot of delays. At check in at airport Hahn we already had a family in front of us that had over 30kg too much luggage. First they tried to pack in a different way and after half an hour they ended up in paying over 200 Euro for the additional luggage. When we reached the hand luggage check they were in front of us again and it turned out that daddy had a knife in his luggage which caused again delay for everybody behind. Finally they headed for the wrong gate (Kerry and London are obviously not the same city) and so we had to wait for them again. Needless to say that they had booked priority boarding and were extremely loud and unfriendly because of having missed the priority boarding. This all ended up in 20 min delay. Thanks to family „I‘m not able to read the flight restrictions before the flight“.
When we reached Kerry and made our way to National Car Rental where we had the next problem family in front. 5 people that all wanted to be registered as driver and none of them had done that beforehand.
Our car turned out to be a silver Opel Corsa and I was quite surprised to realise that the Irish streets haven‘t changed a bit in the last 10 years. We needed quite some time until we found our first bed & breakfast „Sheridan Lodge“ in Tralee. The owner was absolutely nice. After she had shown us the room she invited us for tee & cookies and chatted with us for quite some time. She explained where it would be best to park in town and we went downtown. Tralee isn‘t really a beautiful city but the choice for the first day would have been either Killarney or Tralee just because of the distance to the airport and as we both didn‘t want to drive to far on the first day (as we needed to get used to driving on the left side of the road first).
We had dinner at a tiny pub, as it was Sunday we hadn‘t too much of a choice, and it turned out to be delicious seafood and apple pie afterwards. Perfect start for the first day.
