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Introduction
We traveled to Ireland at the beginning of May with a group of our friends to celebrate a birthday. Jane was about to turn 50, and a trip to Ireland was her choice of how to commemorate the occasion. In addition to Jane, our group consisted of me, Mike, Susan, Mary, Marilyn, and Marj.
During the six months before the trip, we investigated various travel options, and also got together a few times with our fellow travelers to talk about what specific activities any of us might want to do, or sights we wanted to see, while we were in Ireland. The work schedules and budgets of various members of the group meant that the trip would be just one week long, and we quickly realized that we'd only be able to cover a fraction of what interested us in such a short time.
We agreed there were several things we did not want to do. None of us were interested in such stereotypically touristy things as visiting the Blarney Stone or buying leprechaun souvenirs, and we didn't want to ride around on a huge motor coach with 40 or 50 other tourists. But several of our friends did have specific wish lists of places to go and things to see. They were interested in historical sites and objects, the older the better, such as the Book of Kells at Trinity College in Dublin, and Neolithic stone circles and burial sites. They also wanted to enjoy the landscape of Ireland, but preferably without getting stuck in traffic jams full of other tourists determined to see the very same things. Finally, they wanted to have time for serious shopping for local products such as Aran wool, hand-knitted sweaters, weaving, and other crafts.
Several of us have Irish ancestors, but none of us did any serious genealogical research before the trip. In my case, I've always known that my father's mother came to the U.S. from Ireland around the end of the 19th century, but I had no information as to what part of Ireland she came from. My mother's father's family also originated in Ireland, but had been living in Canada for several generations, so I was uncertain of their original connection to any specific county or town in Ireland. The end result was that I was curious to see Ireland, but I didn't go there expecting to feel any particularly personal connection.
After deciding against going as part of a big bus tour (too many people and no itineraries we liked) or renting our own cars (I love driving, even when it involves roundabouts and narrow country roads, but others in the group thought the independence of being on our own would lose its appeal the first time we got lost), we found a small tour company, Authentic Ireland, that offered "personalized itineraries" with a van or minibus to fit the size of our group and a guide/driver to do the work of getting us from place to place. Mike sent our group's "wish list" to Mark, our contact person at Authentic Ireland, and over the course of a few weeks the two of them figured out an itinerary that would allow us to see the things we wanted to see in the time we had available.
Day One, April 28: Dublin
We arrived in Dublin at 8:00 in the morning on Saturday, April 28. Our tour company sent two vans (in case we had a lot of luggage!) to bring us from the airport to our hotel, and then we were on our own for the rest of the day. Our rooms weren't available until the afternoon, but we were able to check in at the B&B and leave most of our bags there before we walked about 20 minutes into the center of the city. Our first stop was Trinity College, to see the Book of Kells (gorgeous illuminated Bible) and the Long Room, the original library of the college which still holds 200,000 of its oldest books. We had lunch in a little café on the top floor of an Avoca woolens shop; decent food, bright and cheerful place, but loud. We were all feeling the effects of jet lag at that point, but had agreed we preferred to spend the day seeing things, and wait until night to sleep. So, after lunch, we did some desultory window shopping on Grafton Street on our way to the National History Museum, where we wanted to see the Brooch of Tara and other beautiful ancient items. While wandering through the crowds on Grafton Street, one of our group got separated from the rest of us. We expected she would meet up with us at the museum, but by 3:30 p.m. we hadn't found her, and everyone was getting tired, so we went back to our hotel, where she eventually rejoined us. That evening, we went our separate ways; some of us were ready to sleep, others got some supper at a restaurant right next to the hotel, and Mike and I walked back into the city center to wander around the Temple Bar area (lots of restaurants and shops near the River Liffey) for an hour or so, then past St. Stephen's Green (big public park) and along a quiet street in front of some imposing government buildings.
As we walked, we noticed a TV camera crew across the street from one of the buildings, and what looked like a reporter doing a stand-up segment with the building behind him. Mike glanced at his watch: 9:02 p.m. About a block later we encountered a young member of the Guarda (the police force), who explained that, yes, no doubt we had seen someone from one of the evening news programs, doing a report in front of the office of Ireland's prime minister. Mike and I were amused at the thought that, if any of our friends had still been awake and watching TV, they might have spotted a couple of suspiciously familiar-looking tourists gawking at the fancy buildings in the background of that news reporter's shot!
Day Two, April 29: Newgrange, Kilkenny
On Sunday morning, our driver for the week, Martin, picked us up in a silver Mercedes Benz minibus, which became our home away from home. The bus had nine seats, four of them facing backward, with four little tables (two on each side) and wonderfully big windows, plus a luggage storage area in the back.
We began by going north from Dublin to Newgrange, possibly the oldest existing piece of tomb architecture in the world; it dates back 5,000 years, about 500 years older than Egypt's Pyramids. After getting some lunch there, we went south and west to Kilkenny, a town with lots of surviving medieval streets and buildings and the first of the many castles we saw during our trip.
We reached Kilkenny in time to catch the last tour of Kilkenny Castle, which was interesting for several reasons. One was the stories we heard about the Butler family, who made their home there for generations and were powerful because of their affiliation with the English royal family. The other point of interest was completely unexpected. Near the beginning of the tour, the guide asked how many of the visitors had family ties to Ireland, and I raised my hand along with about half of the twenty people in the crowd. He asked us for our family names, and when I mentioned "Walsh and Costello," he nodded and said, "Oh, yes, they came from right around here. I don't know anything specific about 'Costello,' but 'Walsh' is from 'Welsh'--doubtless they came over with the Normans."
Day Three, April 30: Jerpoint Abbey, Rock of Cashel, Caher Castle, Cobh, to Killarney
On Monday, we traveled from Kilkenny to Killarney, making several stops along the way. At the ruins of Jerpoint Abbey, a tomb in the church bore the name "Michael Walsh." Later that day, at the Rock of Cashel, we found more Walsh family graves, and later in the week we encountered several businesses carrying the Walsh family name, and another store called "Costello's." So, though I didn't go to Ireland intending to search for my ancestral roots, I found them anyway.
About castles: throughout our trip, it felt like we encountered one form or another of "fortified dwelling" every few miles: ruins of ancient hilltop forts, round towers built by early Irish monks as places of refuge during Viking raids, square towers and castles built by Norman invaders to maintain control over the conquered population, abbeys left in ruins by Cromwell in the 1600s, and country estates built by wealthy landowners in the 1800s that mimic castle style. The whole history of Ireland is recorded in its stone structures. Ruins tell their own story; so many churches and monasteries, for instance, were abandoned when Henry VIII declared the Catholic Church illegal and seized its lands and properties for his own and never restored. Also interesting was the way many castles were adapted over time, with new owners remodeling the interiors to fit the changing times. The government of Ireland protects historic structures and artifacts, and so it was very common to see old towers simply standing in the middle of a field or pasture.
Our next-to-last stop on Monday was Cobh, formerly called Queenstown, in Cork Harbor just east of the city of Cork. Cobh was the departure point for many of the people who left Ireland to build new lives in other countries; we arrived too late in the day to see the immigration museum, but we climbed the hill from the harbor to visit the cathedral that dominates the skyline, built in the late 1800s. Many of the construction laborers stayed just long enough to earn their passage on an outbound ship; when they left, their work remained, a memorial to their devotion to a homeland most would never see again.
Day Four, May 1: Muckross House, Dingle Peninsula, Beehive Huts 
We stayed at a B&B in Killarney for three nights, and used that as our hub of exploration of the southwest corner of Ireland. Tuesday began with a ride in a "jaunting car" (horse-drawn cart) from our B&B into Killarney National Park, Ireland's first national park, to visit Muckross House. The tour of Muckross House fascinated me because of what it revealed about life in the Victorian British Empire. In addition to showing us the interior of the house and describing the daily life of the estate's owners and their servants, the guide explained how the house and its lands came to be donated to the people of Ireland to become the nucleus of the national park. In the 1860s, the owners were informed that Queen Victoria would be gracing their home with a visit. They were given six years' notice, and spent that entire time sprucing up the property to make it suitable to receive the Queen. They redecorated the house itself, remodeled a room for the queen's use (she was terrified of the possibility of a house fire and so required the most up-to-date fire prevention equipment and a ground-floor escape route), updated the landscaping of all of the grounds and gardens, and went heavily into debt in the process. However, they weren't concerned, because when the Queen stayed at such individual homes in the course of a tour of her empire, it was understood that she would reward their hospitality with gifts of money and titles; for instance, the home's owners could expect to become Lord and Lady Muckross, and the increased prestige and additional lands from which to collect rents would more than make up for all the money spent preparing for and hosting a royal visit.
After over five years of preparation, the Queen and her retinue (over 100 servants, plus armed security forces) arrived at Muckross House at midday, toured the grounds, and were entertained at a lavish dinner that night. The next day, she rose, had breakfast… and departed. Six years of planning and preparation for a twenty-four-hour visit!
But, it all would have been worth it, except for one thing. A few months later, before the Queen had prepared her lists of people to be honored with new titles and other royal favors that year, her beloved husband, Prince Albert, died. The Queen went into mourning and completely ignored most of her royal duties for many months. Muckross was forgotten. The family never received their new titles or improved social standing, and eventually had to sell the whole estate to pay their debts…. Which is how it became available to become a national park.
We left Muckross House shortly before 1:00, eating lunch on the bus as Martin drove us out onto the Dingle Peninsula. The scenery was breathtaking: the land slopes up and down, the road winds, with Dingle Bay often in view. We stopped at some Neolithic "beehive huts" dating back to around 350 B.C.E, then visited the Kilmalkeder burial ground, next to the ruin of a church. The Irish government, which is determined to preserve Ireland's heritage and protects historic sites and ancient relics of all kinds, rescued an ancient sundial and an ogham stone (a stone pillar inscribed with an early form of Irish writing) from land that was going to be developed and erected them in the churchyard for safekeeping. It's a wonderfully practical solution--the burial ground is a historic site already, and not likely to ever be disturbed--but it left me wondering how the priest and congregation of the church would have felt, several hundred years ago, at the thought of such pagan objects being given shelter on church property!
The cemetery also contained numerous Famine graves, marked only by a plain slab of stone. During the Famine, starving people left their homes by the thousands, in search of work and food, and too often simply collapsed and died by the roadside or in the middle of a field. Local villagers who found the corpses had no way to determine who the person had been, where he had come from, or whether he had any family left. So they did the only thing they could: give the person a proper burial in consecrated ground.
After Kilmalkeder, we visited an excellent museum that described the history of Great Blasket Island, located off the western tip of Dingle peninsula, where people preserved Irish language and culture even through all the years when the British government was trying to force everyone to speak English. We ended the afternoon with several hours of shopping in the town of Dingle, before returning to Killarney for dinner at a pub where we listened to some excellent traditional Irish music.
Day Five, May 2: Moll's Gap, Kenmare, Garnish Island, the Beara Peninsula, Healy Pass
Wednesday was another full day of ancient history, shopping, and relishing the marvelous scenery. In tiny Kenmare, at the head of Clough Bay, we visited an ancient stone circle. Then we went along the north side of the bay to visit the gorgeous gardens of Garnish Island… then back around the bay and onto Beara Peninsula, full of stunning scenery, through the mountains at Healy Pass, south for a glimpse of Bantry Bay, and finally back to Killarney in time for dinner, followed by what felt to me like our most "touristy" activity of the week, The Liam O'Conner Show. It was a concert of Irish music and dancing, excellent in quality but with the over-the-top showmanship of "Lord of the Dance"--not surprising, given that O'Conner was in that show before he struck out on his own. A bit cheesy, but entertaining; O'Conner is truly a gifted accordion player, and the bodhran drummer alone was worth the price of admission! 
This is a good place to mention Martin, our guide/chauffeur, who made a huge contribution to the success of our trip. In addition to being an excellent driver, his home is near Killarney and he was familiar with every historic site we wanted to see, plus many we never would have known to visit if we'd been on our own. He took our wish list and translated it into practical itineraries for each day's drive. It wasn't always possible to predict how long we would spend at a certain location; he might suggest that we could see a certain town in 45 minutes, but then our group would scatter in search of snacks, bathrooms, and woolens shops, and it would be an hour and a half before we all returned to the bus. But whenever that happened, Martin would quickly recalculate what was possible to do in the time we had left that day, and get us to our next destination. One of the many nice things about traveling as a small group was that our minibus could navigate small back roads that would be impossible for typical full-size motor coaches. We got to see several places that were off the beaten track, and more than once Martin took us on cross-country shortcuts to make up travel time when we'd spent longer than planned on one of our stops. As we drove from place to place, he had something to say about almost every historic site, ruined tower, and pretty village we passed, and pointed out many places where the Famine left its mark on Ireland.
Day Six, May 3: Adare, Bunratty, Lahinch, Cliffs of Mohar, The Burren, to Galway
We had a lot of miles to travel on Thursday to get from Killarney to Galway, but still managed to fit in a bunch of interesting stops along the way. At Adare, we only stopped long enough to stretch our legs. North of Limerick, we spent a couple of hours seeing Bunratty Castle and its surrounding "folk park," which contains numerous thatched cottages and stone houses moved there from around Ireland as examples of various time periods and lifestyles from Irish history. Then we crossed County Clare to the Atlantic coast at Lahinch, and went on from there to the Cliffs of Moher, which were truly impressive.
Then it was on to the Burren: a flat, at-first-glance featureless landscape of gray limestone that is home to an amazing array of plant life. We were especially lucky to be visiting in spring, because lots of wildflowers were in bloom. We visited another ancient site there, a stone slab tomb dating back to, I think, about 2000 B.C.E. It continued in use by local people, on and off, for close to 1,000 years. 
My lasting impression of Ireland includes: green grass and yellow gorse, sheep and lambs, stone walls, the lumpy landscape (to my Midwestern eyes, Ireland has no flat terrain at all!), the mix of trees (oak, palm, pine, monkey puzzle), feral rhododendrons…. But most of all, the country feels old. There is no getting away from reminders of how many generations upon generations of people have inhabited every patch of pasture and stretch of shoreline. It's a place where history is very much part of the present. It's there in obvious things, like the ubiquitous walled fields and ancient ruins, the churches and castles kept in use for a thousand years, as well as in more subtle things, such as Irish awareness of how their country is changing, thanks to its new prosperity within the European Union. The culture of a mostly rural, mostly poor, mostly Catholic Ireland of farmers and fishermen is turning into something more prosperous, more urban, and more secular. For example: for generations, village houses were built with the same sturdy gray stone used for churches, castles, and pasture walls. Those villages are still there, and the same houses made of stone: but when the country's overall economy started to improve in the 1980s, one of the first things that many people did with their newfound wealth was to paint their houses. My mental image of Ireland contains the same green fields and stone walls and imposing gray churches and castles that any visitor in the past fifteen hundred years would have seen; but the villages are no longer gray. Now they present a cheerful vista of homes and shops in every color of the rainbow, from pastel pinks to the most vibrant shades of blue.
Day Seven, May 4: Connemara, Recess, Clifden, Kylemore Abbey
In Recess, we visited a woolens shop whose owners had erected a couple of "monuments" out front (the commemorative plaque on one stated, with great solemnity, "On this site in 1847, nothing happened"). More shopping was committed in Clifden, including snacks at Walsh's Bakery. I learned that "Walsh" is one of the five most common surnames in all of Ireland, but especially common in the counties of Kilkenny, Cork, and Galway. So, it's not surprising that I kept running across the name, but still it gave me an odd feeling of connectedness whenever I saw it. The last place we visited was Kylemore Abbey, another example of castle-like architecture put to various uses by a succession of owners; it is now a school run by Catholic nuns.
We had a final pleasant dinner in Galway, then returned to our B&B to pack for departure the next day.
Day Eight, May 5: Galway to Shannon Airport
Normally there's not much to say about being driven to the airport. This time, however, was different. As we were zipping along the motorway, where the early morning traffic was mostly nonexistent, we heard an odd sound. I was sitting in one of the back seats, over the wheel well, and felt some thumps against the floorboards, then noticed an unpleasant burning smell. Martin obviously noticed something, too, because before any of us could say anything he pulled over onto the shoulder, stopped the bus, and jumped out. As he left, we heard him muttering "I don't believe it!" and Mike followed him out to see what had happened and if he could help in any way.
You guessed it: after a week of blissfully uneventful travel, on the one day when our schedule left no room for errors or delays, the bus got a flat tire.
Fortunately, the bus had double wheels on the back axle, and it was the inside right rear tire that had gone flat. Martin got on his cell phone to his dispatcher, and was instructed that he could safely drive the final 20 miles that remained between us and the airport with just the outside tire on one side.
Which is what we did. The first mile or so was a bit unnerving, because the flat tire gradually disintegrated, with pieces of it flapping loudly against the underside of the wheel well until they broke apart and fell off. It could have been a hazard to any car following closely behind us, but there was almost no one else on the road, so the pieces flew harmlessly away. We got to the airport on time, said our grateful goodbyes to Martin, and caught our flight home without any further incident.
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So, that was our week in Ireland. I would happily go back to most of the places we visited, and spend more time exploring them in depth. There are also entire regions that we didn't see at all, but that I know are worth a visit.
It's a truly beautiful country. Thanks, Jane, for inviting us to be part of your birthday celebration!
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