The Top Floor Flat

Sunday dawned bright and clear and the bovine inhabitants of Doolin gazed cheerfully around us as we prepared to leave the town. As the bus was getting ready to go, the owner of the hostel where we had stayed asked, quite seriously, if any of us wanted to stay behind as his current lodger and assistant at the hostel had just left. I had a seriously lengthy internal debate about how feasible it would be to actually take him up on his offer. To be honest, the only thing holding me back was my obligations and work at Spoonfed – otherwise I would have been off the bus in a minute, tour or no. Fortunately, before I could make any rash decisions, I was distracted by the arrival of one of the girls on our tour and her “date” for the “Rate my Date” game proposed by Kevin and forgotten by half the group. The poor guy was quite good natured about the whole thing and we offered him the rating of 11/10 due to his being the only point of comparison. On that note, we headed out of Doolin, leaving the hostel, the four pubs and the six streetlights behind.

Our first stop was Burren National Park although along the way we passed through the town of Lisdoonvarna, home of the Irish Matchmaking Festival. The Irish Matchmaking Festival, we were told, began with pure intentions of providing farmers and young women throughout Ireland with suitable matches but, since the advent of international tourism and desperate 30-somethings, the event has turned into a debauched orgy-like festival and is now a top destination for many singles around the world.

Perhaps the most polar opposite to such a lavish display of humanity was the Burren National Park. The Burren’s name comes from an Irish word “Boíreann” meaning a rocky place which is about the most apt description one could find. I had no idea such a landscape was in Europe, let alone Ireland. It was almost lunar and definitely a bit eerie. The Burren is an exposed platau of limestone rock that covers about 1500 hectares. It is windswept, desolate and, as one girl on our trip rightly put it, a bit like Mordor (I don’t know if it was the fonts on the signs and shop fronts or the landscape but Lord of the Rings was definitely continually brought to mind on my travels through Ireland).

We couldn’t stand the windchill for too long, however, and instead made our way towards the Poulnabrone portal tomb. This tomb, which stands almost unaltered from it’s original, is about 4500 years old and was said to be a portal to another world. Unfortunately it was roped off so I didn’t have a chance to explore, but it was certainly a moving moment, being in the presence of something so old, above the bodies of bronze age soldiers of ancient Ireland.

Another stretch of bus ride brought us to Clonmacnoise, a monastic settlement from 547 founded by one of the early Christian monks of Ireland. Of particular note were the unique stone crosses, the tops of which are enclosed in a circle, throughout the settlement. These, we were told, are thought to be an early way of incorporating pagan belief systems with new Christian ideas as the circle would have represented the sun worship of pagan traditions. Additionally, the settlement was home to a monastic tower and would have been a centre of learning, travel, trade and culture – that is before it was destroyed, multiple times, by various invading forces. What’s left, however, is another beautiful reminder of Ireland as it was hundreds of years before.

We were nearing the end of our tour and the final stop before we returned to Dublin was to be at a one of the world’s oldest whiskey distilleries for a tour and a taste-test. While the distillery itself was no longer actively making the spirit, it was still the holding place for the spirits as it matured over 5+ years into full Irish Whiskey (there were three brands associated with our distillery including Kilbeggan which we sampled). It was a good tour, and it was interesting to see the inside of a distillery that could still work today (and occasionally does) yet has been brewing spirits since 1757 – they’ve been getting drunk on whiskey there since before my country existed (and somewhat embarrassingly my country also put them out of business temporarily when supply dried up during the prohibition. They got back on their feet, though).

After what seemed like much too brief a three days, we were headed back into Dublin. While the tour group officially disbanded at 5:30 when we arrived back in the city, so many of us, including the tour guide Kevin, were staying in the city that night that, instead of heading off on our own, we decided to do a group dinner and hit the Dublin pubs for a final night of celebrating Ireland. Overall it was an amazing adventure – and I can’t recommend Shamrocker and Radical Tours enough as it was the great tour that made the trip so fantastic – and I really can’t wait to go back to Ireland.