Long Way Round (Causeway, Cliffs, Whiskey, and then some)

Moving right along, you can rejoin our nonstop Irish party on a brilliant April morning in Portrush, the North.

We had had a delicious dinner and pint and taken in the late weeknight town after settling in the night before, and already Portrush was shaping up to be a precious little town. When one thinks of Northern Ireland, one tends to think of car bombs, protests, lots of orange, paintings of William and his white horse, and people behaving crankily about flags. One does not think of glowing blue skies over crashing cold waves and snow-capped islands, viewed through mansard windows with particularly delicious potato toast.

 

A boreen green

We had a full docket of Northern adventures to accomplish that day, beginning with the eminent Giant’s Causeway.

Just a twenty-minute drive from Portrush, the Giant’s Causeway, in case you grew up in a home devoid of National Geographic magazines, is a fantastic geological feature that was caused approximately fifty million years ago by a lava flow encountering a bed of chalk and forming a sort of liquid-basalt-mud that dried and cracked like the sediment at the bottom of a dry pond. The surface cracks eventually worked their way down to the base of this formation, creating the mass of columns that have been impressing human beings for centuries.

The Giant’s Causeway, as a UNESCO world heritage site, is one of the most happenin’ tourist hubs in all of Western Europe, but the artful visitors’ center and up-tempo tour made it seem far less touristy than it could have been. Our guide sported a thick Northern burr, a mixture between an Irish and Scottish accent that was at times hard to comprehend but endlessly fascinating. In this accent, the number “eight” is pronounced with four syllables: “ayy-iii-uh-ut”

Legend has it that the Causeway was not in fact formed by lava flows, but instead was the creation of two giants, Fionn MacCool of Ireland and Benandonner of Scotland. They decided to  (either, depending on the story) wage a war against each other or connect their two lands with a bridge. They toiled away for many years, eventually connecting the two, but based on the unwillingness to fight of one of the combatants (with the cowardice of Benandonner being heavily favored) the bridge was destroyed, leaving matching basalt columns on either side of the North Channel. Here is a much more spirited and/or hardcore retelling of the tale, complete with onomatopoeias and first-class animation.

The Causeway drops away into the sea and it is here that in 1588, during the Spanish Armada’s attempted invasion of England through Ireland, one of the twenty-odd ships sailing into the teeth of a North Sea gale was wrecked. This being a shipwreck, and a Spanish shipwreck no less, rumors of sunken gold enticed divers to go searching the base of the Causeway for the treasure of La Girona, a galleass whose crew, made up of the survivors of numerous other Irish shipwrecks, was sent almost entirely to a watery grave after their rudder broke and smashed them against the cliffs. Nearby Dunluce castle, which will be covered later on in this post, was the supposed site of the wreck, but it was not until the nineteen fifties that a Belgian diver did some poking around with the local folklore and discovered that it was not, in fact, the castle that had been sighted as the nearest landmark to the shipwreck, but a rock known as the Giants’ chimney just East of the Causeway that pointed to La Girona. The crags of the rock had been mistakenly cited as the towers of Dunluce through the thick rain and wind, and this mistake was not rectified for nearly four hundred years. It was only by listening to the lore of the surrounding area- the peninsula under the Giants’ chimney is called, in Irish, “Spanish point,” something entirely passed over by other treasure hunters- that our clever Belgian diver was able to recover the loot of a thousand worlds from the briny deep.

What was the point of that exercise, other than historical pedantry? Well, the tour guide and his burr put forth that in this case, the legend, the story without scientific substantiation, the far-flung possibility, turned out to be true. Perhaps, then it really was a pair of Giants who built the Causeway with their bare hands. “Ya ken bileeve what ye want,” he said.

I thought that that was a nice way of putting things.

After the Causeway we headed to the aforementioned Dunluce castle. There was not a shipwreck at this castle (as the world now knows), but it was the castle upon which C.S. Lewis based the palace of Cair Paravel in his celebrated Chronicles of Narnia.

Besides practically being Narnia, Cair Parav- I mean, Dunluce was extremely well-preserved. This being Ulster, not Munster, it was inhabited by MacDonnells, Earls of Antrim, and not the McCarthys of the South, unlike every other castle we’ve talked about. Dunluce is situated atop a near-island, surrounded by sheer drops to the sea and is only reached by crossing a bridge. The impenetrable nature of the castle kept it safe from Vikings and today makes it look extremely dramatic.

In the low-tide saltmarsh at the base of the castle stood a towering hill, almost so tall as to be level with the ramparts of the castle one hillock over. I trotted down the Cliffside and climbed the hill, leading to some very cool photos of Dunluce from below. Aunt Rita and various other visitors waved at me and shouted cautionary phrases from the turrets as I clambered about on the slope. It was most thrilling.

There I be, on my hillock

Have I yet mentioned that the weather was perfect? It was. It was cold and windy but not a cloud passed over county Antrim that day. It was impossibly lovely.

Our perfect day was about to get better, because after climbing every inch of Dunluce castle we made tracks inland for the town on Bushmills, the obvious home of the Bushmills Whiskey distillery. There we had a brilliant whiskey tour and tasting. While it didn’t quite hold a candle to the Jameson distillery fifteen minutes from Cork, to which I have gone (and been licensed as a whiskey taster… twice), there’s always something to be said for extending one’s epicurean horizons.

Our last stop of the day was at the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge, a delicate bridge (of rope, no less!) spanning the chasm between the mainland and the appropriately-named Sheep island, to which sheep were herded in days of yore to benefit from the lush sea grass thereon. Tourists went galumphing across the bridge, murmuring to themselves about not looking down, before emerging unscathed on the far side where they could frolic about on the beneficial grasses of Sheep island. One group of pilgrims was even doing a tai chi session. I rather love heights, so the bridge was little trouble for me. Aunt Rita has the usual human amount of acrophobia, and y’all should be extremely proud of her for crossing the bridge like a champ.

That evening we uncovered a mysteriously deserted restaurant called “The Blue Duck” overlooking the Portrush marina and watched the sun go down over the North sea before retiring to the hotel for an impromptu crash course in whiskey, hosted by a burring barkeep in the hotel bar.

I will skip right along to the next two days, wherein we covered the West coast of Ireland. Pictures speak louder than words for this bit, for, as anyone will gladly tell you, the beauty of the Western Shore is worth a hundred thousand words.

We left Portrush and went gliding through fields of sheep and tiny towns. We hit up a castle and yarn stores in Donegal, skimmed the bays at Derry/Londonderry and Galway, found the grave of W.B. Yeats (“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy” and “The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time”) at Drumcliff in county Sligo, wound through Galway's barren, craggy Burren, passed under Croag Patrick, and crossed the broad majestic Shannon by ferry. While we didn’t see any of the famed river dolphins, the smokestacks of the huge hydroelectric power plants that brought light, heat, and running water quite suddenly to rural Ireland in the nineteen fifties made my heart leap about like a merry ocean creature.

 

We stopped at sunset at the Cliffs of Moher. Again, there are not words.

The Cliffs are perhaps the single biggest draw for visitors to Ireland outside of Dublin, and this is no surprise. They are absolutely majestic, tall and wide as far as the eye can see, dropping down into mist and clouds of wheeling seabirds. We liked them so much we came back the next day for a few hours to see them in broad daylight. I don’t know which lighting was more stunning.

I live life on the edge.

That night we rolled into the town of Lahinch and happily stumbled across Vaughan’s, one of Ireland’s top-ranked restaurants, quite by serendipity. Our hotel was equally awesome and besides a wee bit of trouble in not crashing through the entrance arm to the parking lot, everything continued to go perfectly.

Back on the Iveragh Peninsula!

Our next day, fifth in the trip, took us down the rest of the way to Kerry, which you as a tried-and-true reader of the Irelandiary will recognize from a pair of posts waaaaaayyyyyy back in February. Yes, we had made it, once again, to Cahirsiveen, and it is there I will leave you for next post, we shall discuss perhaps the pinnacle of my Irish adventures before or since: climbing, at long last, Skellig Michael.

Until then!