Ireland Tour Day 4

Mon 18th Oct

Today we left Killarney for Galway.
First stop was the Foynes Flying Boat Museum along the river Shannon. Ok it might sound boring... at first i thought it would be cos i'm not really a plane enthusiast. One of ROI's airports is called Shannon and short flights out of the country leave from here (e.g. ROI to Spain or ROI to London). The old site of air traffic used to be Foynes but there was no runway but the boats would take off from the water - hence flying boats.

In the 1930's and early 1940's, transatlantic flights from the US to Europe landed at Foynes. There is a little museum of information about the planes and flights as well as a recreated model of a flying boat that you can walk around inside.

Foynes also claims to be the home of the original Irish coffee. They are very proud to claim having invented it here. So there was a coffee making demonstration before morning tea.

Next stop after Foynes was Bunratty Village which is on the outskirts of county Limerick. The witty poems called Limericks are said to originate in this county. People used to make them up as a form of entertainment as there was nothing else to do to keep themselves occupied on cold winter nights.

mmm fresh bread...

We only had an hour for lunch but Es and i decided to skip lunch in order to visit the Bunratty castle and Folk park with another young tour member. So the 3 of us did a whirlwind tour of the castle. I liked the Folk park section more and was a bit disappointed not to have had more time to fully explore it. It's very similar to the Welsh park i visited. The history is fascinating and again they have dismantled and reassembled actual dwellings. Had the nicest fresh bread baked on a peat fire... mmmm

Bunratty Castle. Our tour guide said "here in Ireland we catalogue our castles by calling them A,B,C etc... - Another Bloody Castle"

Bothan Scoir - one-room dwelling of a poor landless labourer (17th century)

I'm not sure where this photo was taken but it was somewhere along the way. This sculpture is a memorial for the people who died in the great famine in Ireland between 1845 and 1852. Ireland's population was around 8 million then and the people largely depended on the potato crop for food. They call it blight which is something like a virus that made all the potatoes rot decimated the crop and about a million people died of starvation (actual figures might be more) and a million people migrated out of the country.
The big tragedy of the situation is Ireland was governed by the UK who stood by and did nothing as people died. But even the Irish people did not help each other. The meat export market was still going strong as people chose to make money exporting rather than feeding their own countrymen. 
The sculpture depicts a skinny boy on the right standing at a door/wall begging to work for food. Whole families were evicted for failing to pay rent. They had no food or shelter. As the parents were dying of starvation they would drop their children off outside workhouses in the hope that the children would be taken in and put to work and more importantly be fed and live. It's hard to see but there is a lady's head poking out a window on the left is telling him there is no room for him. This was a true story and the real little boy died of starvation.

After lunch we went to the Cliffs of Moher. The cliffs rise to about 700ft above the Atlantic sea and are along the coast of county Clare. (We are covering quite a bit of ground to go from Kerry county to Limerick to Clare to Galway today!).
The weather decided to take a turn for the worse and it got very windy and a little drizzly when we got there... but the view was still very spectacular.

the pictures dont really do this justice. the sheer size of the cliff faces was breathtaking...

O'Brien's tower. Built in 1835 as a lookout over the cliffs of Moher

Settled for the night in Galway. But Es and i were too tired to go out so just enjoyed a night in. The good thing about staying in the same place for a couple of nights is that tomorrow night we can go out...

Click here to view photo album.