Sunday 3 Aug 2008: Aghadoe Heights

WE'D HAD A TIRING WORKING week and two long journeys at the end of it, so we began our Ireland holiday with a lie-in followed by a bit of blobbing followed by a bit o’ brunch. While blobbing, we had a look at the tourist literature that had been stashed in a drawer. In particular, there was a locally-produced magazine, Guide Killarney, which had an interesting and informative article on St Brendan the Navigator, a useful map of Killarney, and—more to the point—a series of day-trips and tours around County Kerry (a.k.a. “The Kingdom”), with maps, panoramas, and step-by-step driving instructions.

And the very first panorama was the view from Aghadoe Heights, just minutes up the road from our very own Aghadoe Cottage.

About 1 p.m., we roused ourselves for a drive up the road. Aghadoe Heights runs lengthwise (east-west) along a ridge, with a pretty rural view to the north and a magnificent panorama to the south.

The day was dull with occasional spots of rain and a slightly hazy atmosphere; the view would have been even more wonderful on a fine day. To the far left (east, above left) were Aghadoe Church and the tiny Norman castle; to the far right (west, above right), the distant peaks of the Iveragh Peninsula. Between them were vistas (below, L to R) of Killarney; Lough Leane with the romantic “Bricin” Bridge (just visible if you click on the middle photo); the unnamed mountain range south of the lake; and to the south-west, Ireland’s highest mountain range, Macgillicuddy’s Reeks (“reeks” being related to “ricks” as in “hayricks!”) .


When we’d looked our fill, we walked over to the castle. Its official name is “Parkavonear Castle,” which comes from the Irish paírc an mhóinéir, meaning “field of the meadow.” (’Sfaras we can tell, the English spelling is a pretty accurate reflection of the Irish pronunciation.) Not much is known about its history, but it’s Norman (13th century) and, unusually, cylindrical rather than square.

Originally you’d have had to get into it via a ladder to the 1st floor (it probably had three or four storeys when built), but someone made a convenient ground-floor entrance at some time, which is right next to the staircase that leads up inside the 6ft-thick wall to the doorway to the upper story. We went in, and up, and looked across the space where the wooden floor and its timber beam supports long ago fell away, leaving the sockets; there’s the remains of a first-floor fireplace, and a window opposite it (unless it’s the original doorway!), but the whole castle’s quite tiny, just a few metres across—more of a stumpy tower, really.

One thing that struck us as mysterious was a fine layer of black, fibrous- or tarry-looking material, which meandered round the tower at a little above head height. It would have separated layers of stones, except that as well as extending horizontally, it went up several layers at some points and down at others. Occasionally it would divide and go both up and down. We later saw the same sort of thing at the nearby church, which is mostly a century or so older, and wondered if it had something to do with modern conservation work. If any reader of this blog knows what it’s about, please leave us a comment!

The castle is surrounded by an overgrown squarish bank with a shallow ditch outside it: a wall and moat, with a gap in the north-east corner. This led us through to the lane that runs down between the castle and Aghadoe church, so we walked down the road to a stile that gave us access up through the wall and into the churchyard.

The church is roofless and ruined, we don’t know how recently, but was founded (as part of a small monastery) in the 7th Century. Before getting to it, we had to pass through the graveyard, which is still in use. There were quite modern graves and headstones, redolent of Irish Catholic piety; but also more-or-less simple iron crosses to mark the locations of graves whose headstones had vanished. We were particularly touched by a grave quite near to the road; it commemorated Cornelius Harrington, an obviously much-loved father and avid soccer fan, who died in 2006 at the age of 59. It was evident from the surrounding decoration that his headstone had only very recently been dedicated.

Ruined though it is, the church itself has several interesting features, including the stump of a round tower, the Romanesque west doorway (12th century), the lancet windows at the east end (13th century), some carved wall decorations, including a human head (also 13th century), and a rather naïve-looking stone-carved crucifixion scene (17th century, shown). There’s also a rectangular stone, broken at both ends, deposited atop the remains of the south wall, with an ancient (6th century?) inscription in the Ogham (“Owe-um”) alphabet: almost certainly a gravestone or similar memorial marker. It once commemorated someone named BRRUANANN, but of course no-one now knows who Bruanann (or Brenann) was.

We went back to Aghadoe Cottage to drop the photos to the laptop and annotate them before we forgot. Then about 8 p.m., we walked down to the Old Killarney Inn (so called) for dinner.

The Old Killarney Inn provides a dining experience we’d definitely recommend. Stay away from it!—that’s our recommendation! Well, okay: maybe we’re being a bit harsh; if you exercise careful control over what you ask for, you might have a better experience than we did.

We both ordered the “prawn salad” for entrée. The prawns were plentiful but were actually rather flavourless tinned (we think) shrimps, presented with a Marie Rose sauce on two slices of a rather coarse brown bread—not a criticism of the bread, it was good and tasty, but made a bit soggy by the liquor from the “prawns”. The main spoiler, though, was the huge quantity of “salad” that came with it: chopped up stale vegetably stuff made anonymous by the greasy creamy dressing, and occupying fully half of a large dinner plate.

Neither of us ate very much of the salad, but finishing off the shrimps-n-bread left us overprepared (or underprepared) for the main course. Margaret’s sirloin steak was a little overcooked, and “okay but not stunning”; Don’s burger (“Mac’s Famous Rock Burger, €9.50”) was actually very good, but what we’d failed to do was say, “please hold the salad,” because each dish was served with another half-plate of the same turgid vegetably mess. Moreover, Don’s dinner plate being full, the chips were served separately in a vast basket!—excellent chips, but thousands of them (you think we exaggerate?) …

We ate as much as we could, but, after the huge “entrées” (even though we hadn’t finished them), neither of us had room left to do justice to the mains. A pity, and overall it left us with the negative impression you might have picked up by now.

So … back to Aghadoe Cottage, and a good night’s sleep to make up for it.

Saturday 2 Aug 2008: Ferry ‘Cross the Irish Sea

AFTER A GOOD NIGHT'S SLEEP IN a comfortable bed, we got up about 8 o’clock and went for a full Welsh breakfast (which turned out to be very tasty and much the same as a full English breakfast, except they forgot Margaret’s black pudding!). Afterwards, we repacked our suitcases into the car and left for Anglesey a little after 9 a.m.

Our ferry was due to leave Holyhead (a little over half an hour away) at midday; we had to be there by 10:30; so we had time to go back to Llanfair PG for souvenirs. We were attracted to the large shop in the station carpark, if only by its name: James Pringleweavers; or so it seemed to say on the roadside sandwich board. But really, it’s James Pringle Weavers; one of a chain of shops, originating in Scotland, which specialises in woollen-wear, local crafts, and souvenir tat … Which was exactly what we were after; and our “Wales” fridge magnet, a colourful cartoony creation quite unlike any other we’ve ever bought, featuring some “traditional Welsh” characters standing on the Llanfair PG railway platform, was the first of this holiday …

Our ferry was the Jonathan Swift, run by Irish Ferries, and named after the great 17th-Century Anglo-Irish satirist. It was a comfortable fast ferry which easily handled the high Irish Sea, though we still needed our sea legs mid-crossing.

From the ferry shop, Don bought an AA Road Atlas of Ireland and an Irish newspaper. The lead story concerned severe flooding in precisely that part of Ireland we were heading for. The worst affected towns were Mallow in County Cork and (for the first known time) Newcastle West in Limerick. This caused us some anxiety; not only were we concerned for the people and businesses affected, but Newcastle West lay directly on our route to Killarney. A fortunate thing from our viewpoint was that there’d been no flooding in neighbouring County Kerry, which is where Killarney lies.

Otherwise, the crossing was uneventful, and despite taking the inevitable wrong turn a little after rolling off the ferry, we left Dublin about 2 p.m. and headed south-west on the M7, N7, N21, N22, and N23 (“N”-class roads being Ireland’s equivalent of England’s “A”-class roads). It was a 300 km trip (we were no longer working in miles!) and took about four and a half hours. It would have been less, but the traffic slowed to a near-standstill as we approached Rathkeale, and stayed slow through Newcastle West. We think it was simply the pressure of large amounts of weekend holiday traffic on small-town roads, rather than an effect of the flooding.

The weather was cloudy but dry, and there were many fine views of Irish countryside, but with such a long journey we didn’t stop for photos; there’d be opportunity over the next week. (But Margaret did manage to snap a fine view of the castle at Adare as we crossed the bridge over the River Maigue.)

We got to Killarney (“Hill of the Sloes”) about 6:30, and followed the Google directions that led us off the N23 and onto Aghadoe Rd, to the timeshare resort called (quite without any historical justification) “Old Killarney Village” (“opened in April 1999”!).

Our cottage was #1, closest to the entrance, and was called “Aghadoe Cottage,” Aghadoe (Achadh dá Eo, “Field of the Two Yews”—we had a lot of fun as time passed, wrestling with Irish pronunciation) being the local community, lying along the northern shore of Lough Leane. The resort features modern-built “traditional Irish cottages”, with thick walls (and double glazing for the winters!) and thatched roofs. There was also a “village pub,” the “Old Killarney Inn”: of the same vintage, naturally, as the rest of the “village”!

The cottage was roomy and comfortable—three double bedrooms, one with en-suite, separate bathroom, lounge, kitchen, laundry … We unpacked, then drove down into Killarney, where we drove round the town centre, and bought supplies at the mini-supermarket attached to a petrol station, and a Chinese meal at the adjoining takeaway. We got back to Aghadoe Cottage about 7:30-ish, sat ourselves comfortably with Chinese food at hand, and watched Irish TV …

Friday 1 Aug 2008: To Welsh Wales

THIS HOLIDAT BLOG IS BEING written entirely retrospectively, starting several days after our return. We had no Internet access for most of the trip, and have been busy and tired since getting back. But we had the most wonderful time (again), and want to share it with the world!

Our trip took us through five countries in ten days: England to Wales to Ireland to Northern Ireland to Scotland, and so back to England and home. But it started with Don already away from home, running training in Manchester. On the Friday, first day of August and last day of the course, Margaret left work mid-morning (about 10:40) and drove the 190 miles to Glossop in Derbyshire (more precisely, Hadfield). She now has quite a large collection of cross-stitch patterns (as well as the completed cross-stitches), souvenirs of places we’ve been and things we’ve seen, and wanted some coloured embroidery canvases for future use.

Hadfield’s only about 10 miles from where Don’s course was, but the road took Margaret into one of those dreaded one-way systems where you can’t get where you need to and wind up lost. She left Hadfield about 3:30, but didn’t get to the Manchester venue until about 5:10!

We loaded Don’s stuff in the back of the car, took a loo break, and drove down to Anglesey, another 100-odd miles. We were due on the ferry from Holyhead the next day, and were going to stay in a North Wales hotel overnight; but first: we had to visit

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantisiliogogoch!

It was around 7:15 p.m., and not dark, but the village was closing down for the night. We visited and photographed the railway station (now a souvenir shop, though the station is still working), and the platform, which has a handy (approximate) pronunciation guide for those a bit challenged by Welsh spelling; but we’ve adjusted it a little to make it even easier:

Llan-vire-pooll-guin-gill-gog-air-uh-quern-drob-ooll-llandus-ilio-go-go-gock

(Of course, you need the Welsh “ll”. And the “q” and “ck” are really Scottish-style “ch” sounds.)

Wherever we go, we need those fridge magnets so that we know where we’ve been!—but the souvenir shops were all closed, so we went down instead to the little Church of St Mary (“Llan fair”) in the hollow of white hazels (“pwll gwyn gyll”) near the rapid whirlpool (“goger y chwryn drobwll”) by St Tysilio’s (“Llan tysilio”) of the red cave (“gogo goch”), which lies (St Mary’s) down a lane at the edge of the village. The village itself was originally named “Pwllgwyngyll”; the rest was added in the 1860s by a local tailor (or cobbler) as a publicity stunt, to form the longest railway station name in the world. (There’s a longer one still, also in Wales—Gorsafawddachaidraigodanheddogleddollonpenrhynareurdraethceredigion—, but everyone ignores it because it’s just a copycat attempt to get into the Guinness book of records!) Llanfair(etc.)gogogoch.com is also the world’s longest Internet domain name.

(We didn’t see the red cave, or the whirlpool, or any white hazels, come to that.)

Back up in the village, we went to Tafarn Tŷ Gwyn (“White House Tavern”) for dinner, which was good-enough pub food (certainly value for money).

Then we drove back over the Menai Straits (Britannia Bridge), west through Caernarvon, and to a tiny village called Llanwnda (“Llan-oonda”), where we got a little lost before finding The Stables Hotel and Restaurant.

The accommodation was one in a row of (presumably) former stables, each suite named after a racecourse. Unfortunately, our first suite proved to have a leak in the bathroom, but the staff moved us quickly to the next suite along (which was closer to the car, actually), and there we passed a comfortable night.