Westward Movement

 
My final day in Dublin was spent much like the previous three: walking around. Exploring. Most museums are closed Mondays, which I’d forgotten until Sunday at about 4:00.  When I finally got up and out of the hostel the next morning, I just took off walking again, starting with the north side, across the bridge from Trinity and up O’Connell Street, where a parade of statues commemorates the heroes of Irish independence. I ambled along the river, poking my head into little book shops, and then north and east, peering in the windows of the specialty stores that cater to Dublin’s sizable Polish population. Aside from O’Connell Street, a major shopping arterial, the area north of the Liffey is noticeably dingier. If you go even a block up from the river, the streets are grubbier, the storefronts less inviting, the activity more day-to-day and less geared for weekend visitors. All the areas that guidebooks warn women to stay away from at night--Gardiner Street, Phoenix Park--are on the north side.

Returning to the south, I finally strolled the narrow, cobbled streets of Temple Bar, a Mecca of tourist tat during the day and a Mecca of inebriation by night. Its shops are brimming with plastic trinkets and tacky Chinese-made Ireland shirts. Its pubs, old as they may be, cater so thoroughly to tourists that they feel no more genuinely Irish than the Irish pubs at home, Blarney Stone this and Tir Na Nog that. I find it unfortunate that so many visitors to this lovely city never really leave this neighborhood. But I suppose that’s true of any major city. I’m sure tourists in my hometown don’t see the same Seattle I do, just the ferry magnets and the souvenir-sized pieces of Portlock salmon, cunningly hidden in boxes which greatly exaggerate the size (and arguably the quality) of the contents.

Late in the day, at the end of my walk, I found myself at City Hall, the basement of which has been whitewashed and fitted with a relatively engaging multi-media exhibition chronicling the history of the city, from the Vikings to the Celtic Tiger. There are artifacts, swords and ceremonial garb and unearthed Viking coinage, and a series of videos which cover specific periods and events and are all incongruously narrated by Englishmen. But it was worth my 2 Euro (student price) and a decent use of my idle time. I climbed the stairs to the main entrance, where the lovingly-restored rotunda gleams above a polished marble floor.

I considered taking an afternoon bus to Galway, leaving time for the National Museum of History and Archaeology the next morning, but decided it would be best to get going. I found a bus service that runs back and forth on one route, Galway-Dublin non-stop, departing every hour most of the day, and booked the 10:15 from Georges Quay. Galway lies almost due west of Dublin, on the opposite coast, nestled along the northern edge of Galway Bay. Though it is certainly big enough to call a city, it manages to feel quite small, probably owing to its rapid growth. Thirty years ago, this was a town of 20,000--but the population has since quadrupled. Despite the recent economic troubles felt the world over, Galway’s booming tech and medical-supply industries keep it thriving.

And it may be that seaside-town feel that makes Galway so immediately welcoming. Its little center boasts a network of pedestrian-only lanes which put Dublin’s Grafton Street to shame, all dotted with brightly-colored boutique storefronts with cutesy names and carefully hand-painted signage. Of course, it also has a McDonald’s and a Domino’s and a Subway, but it can’t all be charming. I stopped in to a cathedral which I can only assume was the Protestant cathedral--it was sans-pomp, sans gold leaf bric-a-brac, sans grim Madonna and Child paintings--and spent most of my short time there looking at the local kids’ Mother’s Day art. The grotesque crayon portraits and brutally honest poetry were highlights of my day.

I returned to Kinlay House and booked coach tours for the next couple of days. I am generally not a fan of organized touring, as I like to be allowed to decide how long I spend in a particular place and not feel like I’m just being herded through the same series of photo opportunities and gift shops as everyone else. But the last time I refused to take day trips in order to avoid organized tours, I ended up spending one night here and one night there in order to see the things I wanted to see and as a consequence spent way too much time traveling between towns and booking transportation to get me from town center to monument. So this time I decided not to spend fewer than two nights anywhere and to try my best to make a base somewhere and take daytrips to minimize transportation costs and increase the number of sights I might be shuttled to by a knowledgeable local guide.

Wednesday was the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher tour, south of Galway in County Clare. I boarded a small coach with a dozen other young people, many of whom I recognized from the common rooms of the hostel, and together we wound our way through the southeastern suburbs of the city and down along the edge of the bay. Our guide, Martin, a friendly gent of 55 or 60, introduced himself and the day’s itinerary and told us he’d have to focus on the road for the next 20 minutes and then we’d turn onto a smaller road and he’d resume his narration. He also introduced the music he put on, an Irish singer-songwriter playing in a fairly traditional style. I watched the houses go by for a moment before turning my nose down into my book.

I looked up from Frank McCourt just in time to see the signs for Limerick as we turned west, following the edge of the bay. The further we drove into the countryside, the more it looked like the Ireland in my mind, the Ireland of postcards and calendars, of verdant pastures grazed by slow-moving cows and their offspring and hemmed in by dry stone walls. Zipping along the N67 we passed a school where children in matching sweaters and clean white collars ran and jumped rope in the yard. Under blue skies and great billowy clouds, donkeys lazed in the sun in front of whitewashed thatch-roof houses and crumbling stone cottages.

We rounded a corner and before us rose the Burren, a broad area just across the county line made up of huge hills of limestone, a karst area long-since exposed by millions of years of sea-floor uplift followed by glacial sculpting and centuries of wind and water. The glaciers that scraped across this landscape left the same sort of “erratics” as we have in the Pacific Northwest, the boulders that the ice picked up elsewhere and deposited in otherwise flat terrain. The little bus clattered up into the hills, providing a view back across the bay to Galway City and the countryside through which we’d just driven. Up in the rocky hills, there was a little grass and some little pink alpine flowers, but in the valley below, it was all lush grass and bright yellow gorse. We stopped in the town of Doolin for lunch, a lovely chowder full of seafood collected from the bay right across the road.

Ten minutes more brought us to the famous Cliffs of Moher. It’s easy to see why they are so popular, both with tourists and with filmmakers (Cliffs of Insanity, anyone?). The official pathway is pretty short, only offering a full cliff view from the northern end and hence lit only from behind at midday. I followed the path to its southern end, where the four-to-five-foot wall curves around and ends and two large signs on the other side warn of private property in several languages. A well-worn path continues between the signs and I could see dozens of people beyond, walking on out of view or picnicking in the grassy patches. I hesitated a moment but soon clambered over the low point in the wall where I saw people coming back the other way. My disobedience of posted ordinances was rewarded with a long sunny walk along the cliff tops and stunning views from the south. At times, the path came dangerously close to the edge, within a few feet, and I took my time. When it was that close, a second path ran in the space between enormous upright stones and the barbed-wire fence, both probably put in place by the property owner to keep his livestock from stumbling off the edge. At the cliff tops both north and south, there were herds of scruffy cows grazing and looking sideways for anyone coming too close. You’d think with the constant flow of people, they’d be used to it, but they were quite alert. All in all, I greatly enjoyed my visit to the Cliffs. The visitor center, which I didn’t get a chance to explore, is tastefully set into the hill below the path, so unobtrusive you might not notice it there if it didn’t face the carpark.

Our next stop was Poulnabrone Portal Tomb, a small dolmen (as dolmens go) with a capstone of about 5000 tons. It was interesting and all, but I found I was far more intrigued by the surrounding landscape, as this was my first chance to get out of the coach and walk around on the moonscape of limestone. The surface of the Burren is composed of a series of clints and grykes, flat or pocketed sections of limestone and the deep, water-carved crevices which created them. The grykes (also spelled with an i) can be quite deep, up to several feet, and are home to a surprising variety of plant life. A couple of years ago, while preparing for my last trip, I checked out all the DVDs I could from the library about Britain and Ireland. Though I didn’t make it to the Burren on that trip, I remembered a Rick Steves bit about it where he visited with a botanist or a geologist or some such expert who told him about all the arctic, alpine and Mediterranean flora that find a home in the limestone. It’s quite porous and also holds heat much better than other types of stone. That, combined with the warming air of the gulf stream, makes it an ideal habitat for some flowers originally from warmer climes, their seeds brought here in glacial deposits or on the wind.

Our final stop was at the underwhelming Aillwee Caves, the ½ kilometer tour of which they’re only able to stretch to 35 minutes by moving and speaking very slowly. When we left the caves, Martin popped out the Dubliners CD we’d been listening to and announced that this next one is the new album from the first artist we’d heard, the lady folksinger. I looked out the window as we made our way down out of the hills and thought back on my day. I was just wondering what my family at home were up to while I was out doing this and what song should come on but "River" by Bill Staines, as sung by Lady Irish.*  I nearly cried. A great wave of nostalgia and love of home and family welled up in my chest and in my throat and I couldn’t help but smile, turning my wet eyes west, across the bay to the Aran Islands, the only land between this coastline and North America.

Some day when the flowers are blooming still

Some day when the grass is still green

My rolling waters will ‘round me bend

And flow into the open sea

I sat there listening, marveling that I may be the only person in the entire country who would react to that song in that way, when what should come on two tracks later but "Field Behind The Plow". What a way to end my day.

* For those unfamiliar: I grew up listening to Bill Staines and Stan Rogers ("Field Behind the Plow"). Their music is some of the first I can remember hearing as a child, at home, on camping trips and driving to visit family in Oregon. "River" was the first song I learned to play on the guitar, when I was about 11.