The Cliffs of Moher and Other Good Tunes

Day Thirteen: June 15^th

Steve editing my blog

We left Ballyvaughan and drove a whopping 18 miles to the Cliffs of Moher.  This stretch of Atlantic coast is most amazing.  About 700 perfectly-vertical feet high and covered with tiny ledges just big enough for nesting common murre, northern fulmar and black-legged kittiwake, the Cliffs give a vertiginous, windy surround-in-sound-and-smell experience that should not be missed by anyone going to Ireland.   You get the real deal here.  Ireland does not namby-pamby its visitors by putting up too many walls or rails.  You can get blown off the cliffs.   You will smell guano climbing up and over the top towards you.  The calls of the approximately a hundred thousand birds—though quite distant—sound like an urban elementary school playground beneath your bedroom window. 

Unfortunately our cameras could not reproduce what we saw through our binoculars that illuminated the lives of these seabirds.  The kittiwake arranged themselves with the precision of Australian aboriginal dot art; perfectly spaced about six inches apart they occupied their ledges with a processional dignity.  The much more numerous common murres were more like Irish revelers in a pub; lacking pints they crowded close to each other and yelled out a constant stream of bird banter. 

I could not pose for a selfie or a non-selfie on the edge.  I encouraged Steve to pose however.  There might be a subconscious message in that, let’s not probe too much.

Cattle chat on the trail to the Cliffs of Moher

We checked into our room at McGann’s pub in Doolin, a most-heavily attended and beloved traditional music pub that has hundreds of photographs of musicians on the wall.  The collection of ancient whiskey and tobacco (and flake for pipes) ads was impressive.  There were posters of Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston and Guinness Dark ads that said “Black is Beautiful”.  Ancient tattered flyers and posters from Doolin musical events could have been source material for a history of the place.

We ordered food.  Doolin had just concluded its Doolin Folk Festival and there were a number of hangers-on who hadn’t been willing to believe it was over.  It was a beautiful sunny day and the crowd lounged on the grass across from the pub and shared hilarities and then sometimes one or another would play a song on guitar or flute.  They never stopped drinking and smoking all day (they were still going at it at midnight—one woman set danced herself and her partner right across the musicians table upsetting their drinks).  They were all gone the next morning.

After dinner we decided to amble around the block in Doolin, which is pretty much all that upper Doolin is.  We took the first left toward the Atlantic and walked about two miles to the sea.  The countryside and shore are just gorgeous. 

This was a home site with about seven camper trailers of vintage age and much decay

Garden sculpture

The rock work is over the top

God's handiwork and some fine rock work by humans in fields by the sea

As we neared the waves we encountered a couple of magical things.  We had seen a bicyclist pass us earlier and found his propped up bike at the end of the pavement.  Steve was scanning the horizon and the burren limestone that stepped down toward the corrosive waves through his binoculars.  He focused on a huge glacial erratic—an enormous boulder deposited during the ice ages —on the shoulder of the main terrace in from the sea.  There, just behind the boulder, on a particularly large flat of limestone was the lone tall bicyclist dancing with abandon.  He vogued, he sashayed, he vamped, he dropped to the stone floor and lolled.  Perhaps he was singing but we couldn’t hear it.  Binoculars allowed us to spy.  Binoculars should be required equipment carried by every traveler.  They give you birds in private, and men in private.  They are indispensable. 

Here was another magical thing, standing stones without tourists or explanation, in a very small ring.  This could have been an animal pen, but whatever it was, it was magical too.

Walking back up the sea terraces at sunset

We went back to McGann’s around 10PM, the sun was at last lowering in the sky to near the horizon. The music had started up.  A trio fed the crowd a tight flawless line-up of high energy music.  They weren’t performing as you might expect, they greeted people and talked amongst themselves, and drank and ate just like everyone else, but then transported the plebes into Trad Music heaven when they got back around to playing again.  The violinist, Tara Breen was a young petite blond, of maybe twenty, if that old.  She has won many awards already.  She played with a forty-year old flute-player, Conor Crimmins, and they were accompanied by another twenty-year old (or so) named Marty Barry on guitar.  He had composed half of their songs or if not, was twisting the traditional rhythmic backbone of each song with crazy swings into a jazz progression or some other odd pattern.  It was really, really great. 

A trio of trad titans

Our room was right above the musicians.  When we went to bed we were disappointed to find that the walls and floor were too thick to let the music permeate and the only thing we could hear was what we could actually only feel—many feet pounding out a rhythm that they couldn’t resist, carrying across the old timber.