We get lost in the Burren.....

It's good that we are staying 2 days in county Clare:  First, the hotel we are staying - Ballinalacken castle hotel- it really nice!  This is a view from our room.... in the distance, you can see the Cliffs of Moher.  From the other window, we have a view of the Aran islands, it is really quite spectacular.
Also, note how sunny it it, which is important in the "we got lost discussion".....
Which is the other reason it's nice we are staying 2 days, because we spent quite a bit of the first day being lost....  that is in spite of having 2 maps, a GPS system, and multiple people telling us where to go and assuring us that everything is very well marked - THIS IS A LIE!!!!!!
But maybe, this is just Karma for having made fun of Claire and Emily for getting lost in the Aran islands.... Anyway, let's start at the beginning of the day:

We left Galway around 10am for the easy 60 km drive to Doolin, where our hotel is.  On the way, we stumbled upon this cool castle:  Dunguaire Castle.  It is in fact not a castle, but a "tower house", the 15th century equivalent of a McMansion - what you built if you had too much money.  I have to admit that the mansion had quite the view from the top!

Some pretty newer thatched cottages lined the street on our way forward.










We stopped at the hotel, got a map and where told that we could not possibly get lost.  To make sure that we knew what to do, we stopped at the Burren Center, got another map and the same message.  As an unexpected treat, we discovered the Kilfenora Cathedral, right behind the Burren center, which has some impressive 12th century carved crosses and tombs.

This being Sunday, there were a lot of tour buses around, so we decided to not go to the cliffs today, but instead visit the Burren, the vast area of limestone rocks, famous for the mix of flora that grows in its seemingly barren cracks.  You can see it all around you, it's  not like it's hard to find!  and yet, we had a VERY HARD TIME finding it!!!!  I wanted to go on a short hike on the Burren to see the limestone and flowers up close, so we went up a very narrow road (by Irish standards, that's tough!) to a place that promised a flew hiking loops. 

First, we got lost getting there, we went on the right regional road, in the wrong direction  - not sure how that happened.  Then, once there, I just could not figure out the trail: I spoke with a couple of very irate French hikers who too had tried and failed to find the trail: I generally make fun of French tourists who complain, but in this particular case, they were right:  the trails are on the maps as "Burren loops" - so one assumes that some Burren hiking will happen. But they start on the road in random place, go along fields and pastures for a while (it's pleasant - just not what's advertised), and then when one expects to actually walk in the National Park, the trail just disappears..

The marker on this post, which was promising, led to this cow pasture, and then never reappeared.....Of course, as luck would have it, it then started raining..... (the weather was great all day, as seen on most of the pictures - that part though was just not good!!!)....  I got quite wet, and a bit frustrated too.....

but then we found the Poulnabrone megalith - and that made up for all the wandering.  These tombs were erected over 4000 years ago, when the landscape was quite different, and covered with trees.  People built houses and developed farming around here, and built these elaborate stone tombs (about 30 people - men, women, children- are buried there).  no one knows why.  In the mean time, the sun had come back (although, my hair shows it was a bit windy....).

The megalith itself is cool, but on top of that, it - at last- gave us the opportunity to walk on the Burren and discover its varied flora.  May is the perfect month to be here, and there were a wide variety of flowers and plants (see end of this blog), including this, which I think may be a variety of wild orchid.

You would never guess there is so much life here when you first look at this landscape.

We then drove back to the hotel along the pretty coast, but we will go back tomorrow, because by that time we were tired, and the hotel owner had promised us a tour of the castle:  His family actually bought the castle (with the property) in the 1960's, and it now their own personal castle, to do whatever they want with.  They can't renovate it, because the government would have to grant permits, etc., but they can enjoy it, give tours, etc.....  It was great!

We then had a great meal at the hotel  (the food in Ireland has been very good so far),  and then got treated to a beautiful sunset over the Aran Islands!  Not a bad day at all after all.....

Below:  More flowers from the Burren.