We started our day at 9am with a visit to the St George’s Market. A smallish market with good produce, fruit & vegetables, meat and seafood, plus other miscellaneous stores. We love visiting other cities markets, it’s a great way to see how the real people live. This market reminded me of a small version of Sydney’s Paddy’s Market. A great little market.
As it turned out this was another good day to travel, we had a bit/lot of rain all the way to every site we visited, but as our luck has been most of the holiday, the rain stops around 5 minutes before we arrive somewhere and starts up again just as we are leaving or not long after. Today was no different.
The Irish countryside is very green and full of sheep (black faced sheep), cows and hedges, and grain fields, and beautiful views everywhere. Our route today took us mostly on the “Causeway Coast” tourist trail most of the day.
We arrived at The Carrick a Rede Rope Bridge, around 10:45. We had blue skies and sunshine. As it stands today, the rope bridge is at a location where fishermen for 350 years had accessed the best place to catch migrating salmon, a small rocky outcrop just off the coast. To get there they strung a very simple rope bridge between the island and the mainland, the bridge was a simple suspended rope bridge with wooden stepping panels and a single line of rope for support. Todays fancy rope bridge is a far cry from that of the past. But it allows you to get a sense of what they did and offers access to the rocky outcrop, they fished from, to get spectacular views of the coast and all the way to Scotland (on a clear day) just like we were able to. It was about a 1km walk to and from the bridge. For those interested a scene from GoT was filmed in the quarry that is now used as a carpark for the Rope Bridge.
We left to go to the Giants Causeway, as we left the rain started. We felt sorry for those back at the bridge. On the way we called into a small fishing village Ballintoy and managed to get a fair view of it and some photos from the car. This was also a location used in GoT.
As we arrived at the Giant’s Causeway the sun came out. We walked down to the causeway. We were stunned by the number of people there and the way they were all climbing over the rocks. The Giant’s Causeway is geologically a site where a basalt intrusion was able to cool slow enough and directionally to allow the rock to solidify in columns of its preferred crystallographic form, a hexagon. This has resulted in an amazing landscape of stepped hexagonal column outcrops and hexagonal stepping stones over a very large area. The local folklore describes the formations origins very differently, and revolves around a dispute and near altercation between two ancient Giants. To cut a long story short it resulted in a bridge between Ireland and Scotland being laid to waste, and all that remains of it now is The Giant’s Causeway in Ireland and a similar feature on the Scottish west coast.
It would be good if they would restrict/deny access to at least one area of the “Causeway” so it was possible to get a clean photo of the formation you go to see. We caught the shuttle bus back to the top and had a quick look through the visitors centre.
Again, it started to rain not long after we were in the car and heading to Derry / Londonderry. A bit of a bottleneck in one town and road works slowed our journey. Derry or more properly Londonderry is an old 16th century wall city, it is also the other city in Northern Ireland that has been, and still is, a hot spot for sectarian hostilities. Similar to Belfast, there are areas of the town where huge street murals are used to push the point of each side. There are a few very graphic information boards in the town displaying some of the atrocities that have been carried out there. It is all so very sad and beyond our comprehension as to how things have got to where they are and how ordinary people have to deal with it every day of their lives.
On an amusing side to all these troubles, on the way into Londonderry / Derry we passed a few road signs indicating Londonderry was ahead, someone had spray painted out the London, then someone else had written London back in. I am probably taking this too lightly, the issues are real to the locals, but the to and fro amused me.
We are now in the County of Donegal, this is where the word leprechaun comes from, and fairies came from this area. Badly misbehaving children, particularly boys, were thought to have been swapped with a fairy . Fairies were also blamed for people getting badly disoriented and being lost for days (nothing to do with drinking).
We left the city and headed to our nights accommodation, a Castle, well quasi castle. Where Deb got bitten on the ankle by a European wasp while we were at dinner. It is still hurting and swollen 3 hours later ?
Another different and interesting day lies ahead for us as we make our way down the west of Ireland.
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