Donegal, the wild and glorious

  

  We're back from two days in Donegal, and again I'm struck by how phenomenally spoiled we are up here- astonishing beauty and basically no other tourists with whom to share it.  Going down south, where (recent visitors we meet up here tell us) there are hordes of people at all the sites is going to be hard.  But we'll worry about that when it happens.  For now, the  sparse, wild land that is Donegal.

     First, I should note that Donegal   (pronounced Don-ee-gahl, for those of you who, like us, have been pronouncing it wrong in your heads) is the northern most part of the Republic, it isn't part of Northern Ireland.  But it's much closer to us up here than it will be when we're in Dublin, so we decided to include it in this part of the trip.  Before we arrived here I had asked David about the border crossing and if we needed any sort of documentation, but he said we wouldn't even notice when we crossed.  And sure enough, our first indication we were in a different country was that the signs suddenly went from English to English and Gaelic.

   We took a fairly circuitous route around Donegal, which was an intentional choice.  Occasionally helped along by the fates reshaping our intentions.  We started in the town of Letterkenney (Leitir Ceaninn) , notable primarily because it has the longest main st.  in Donegal.  It also has a Cathedral, which is quite lovely, but it was built only 2 years before my own church, so you don't get to see a picture of it.   if you want to see a pretty church, drop in and visit us in Auburn sometime.  If you are ever in Letterkenney, you may or may not want to find the Cathedral, but you will want to eat in the shop in the photo- best scones ever. It's also the place we learned a traditional Irish breakfast includes an incredible amount of meat.  As far as we can tell, it usually includes 2 sausages, 2 pieces of bacon (ham), an egg, and hash browns.  For former vegetarians, travel meals can be tough in this neck of the wood!

    Then we headed up to Glenveah National Park, which deserved so much more time than we gave it.  It was as we closed in on the park that all pretense of green disappeared.  Instead, we were surrounded by often jagged hills, covered with some kind of brown brush (gorse?) and tufts of tall, sharp looking grass, with large rocks strewn about, and the edges of even larger rocks pushing through the ground.  I suppose it wouldn't be an attractive landscape to everyone, but I absolutely loved the barren wildness of it.  It invited wildness of the spirit.  I could have spent a month there.  

    The first feature to break up the landscape was the mountain above, with the unfortunate name of Muckish Mountain.   

We skimmed around the edge of the park, and it was beautiful.  But we were headed somewhere in particular- Glenveah Castle.  The Castle is a public site now, and located right in the park.  It has spectacular views, and a spectacular garden.  Plus, a roof.  which is pretty rare, as far as castles go.

     It was surrounded by all those old, half hidden touches we imagine surrounding castles (helped along by fairy tale movies, undoubtedly): statues covered in moss and ivy, fountains tucked into nooks....the stairs to the right were apparently intended to be a water feature, but something went wrong.  So instead they are just there, up in the hills behind the castle, slowly being reclaimed by the woods.

    We left the castle and headed out to Gweedore (Gaoth Dobhair) for lunch, where there was a pub famous for it's music.  Enya, among others, got her start there. After some bumbling about, we finally pulled into the parking lot. Taking in the excellent view of the tour bus parked there, we pulled out again and headed down the coast.  We skirted in between the coast and Derryveagh Mountain, in a part of Donegal called the "Atlantic Highlands."  Here, English disappeared, and everything was in Gaelic.  

    We had a few....side trips, we'll call them, but eventually landed in Ardara (Ard an Ratha), pronounced Ar-dra, where we were staying the night.  

    Ardara was supposed to be a little craft town- the heart of the wool and tweed industry Donegal is famous for.  There were lots of little shops, but we discovered that, as lovely as the tweed was, we just weren't tweed kind of people.  

    I was surprised, I'll admit, to see that Ardara was kind of....shabby.  The streets and buildings were worn down and there was practically no one there.  It reminded me, actually of South Dakota, which is also barren and beautiful and run down in a lot of places, usually because of poverty.  I wondered if it was hard to make a living in such an isolated place as Ardara.  The craftspeople were clearly gifted. But if tourists don't usually go out that far, it can still be hard to sell your craft.  Or maybe, surrounded by so much natural beauty people just don't care about the rest.  I like to imagine that's true.  But it didn't seem like it.

    This morning we went to Slieve Leagu, the towering sea cliffs on Donegal Bay.  It was raining lightly and very cool, but we decided to chance the trip down (the coast) and up (the cliffs).  It seemed a bit more iffy as we noticed the clouds covering the tops of the cliff, but we kept going.  We parked and started walking up...into the clouds.  Kai and Tess were troopers- they've become brilliant walkers/hikers, going miles each day up and down hills, mountains, and paths.  But we couldn't see how far it was from the car to the top, and about a mile up, a couple coming down gave us the news that it was easily another half hour up.  

    So Michael ran down and got the car, while Kai and Tess and I kept going.  He picked us up and drove the rest of the way, though it turned out we were almost there.  Nothing lost though, there was a path going up the mountain past the cliffs, so they still got their hiking in for the day.  The photo again doesn't do justice to the landscape.  I have a new found respect for photographers that take photos that don't just look great but also convey the reality.  The best I  can offer to help convey the enormity of these cliffs is to suggest looking along their base until you see the tiny beaches in two nooks.  They offer a little perspective.  Of course, the clouds cutting off the tops of the cliffs don't help.  Suffice to say, they were stunning, and probably more interesting on a day with weather like today than in the blazing sun.

The background of the photo to the left is all white because we were actually in the clouds when it was taken.  By who, you ask?  Tess, of course!  We've discovered that if we loop the camera strap around the back of their necks so they can't drop the camera, Kai and Tess can take some great photos.
 
So, after all the hard work of hiking around,

looking at the beauty and wonder of the cliffs, what should we do next?  Do what the Irish do, of course, or at least eat what the Irish sell- ice cream! What better place to eat Irish made ice-cream than in the middle of a cloud on top of the world?
    Ice cream eaten, we went back down the cliff, over to Glencollumbkille to take a very quick look at the craft shop and more importantly each lunch.

Then we headed back to Ardara, this time through the Glenesh Pass- a twisting road running down and through the valley.  If you look closely in the photo to the left you can see bits of the road winding through.
    We spent a bit of time in Ardara, and then, regretfully, had to head home.

On the way back, we saw lots of scenes like the one to the right.
 Oh My Goodness.  Don't be disgusting!!!!!  Of course I didn't take a photo of piles of cow droppings.  Even though, for those of us from the rural state of Maine, the scene is....evocative.
     Our drive took us, all around Donegal, actually, through peat bogs.  People still cut peat (or turf) into little bricks using a special shovel, and pile them up to dry in the summer.  The bricks dry hard as rock and burn warm.  Lots of folks still use peat to heat their houses.  Apparently cutting, drying, and gathering the turf is often a family affair, and in fact on the way home we saw a couple of families working together.
    As we drew closer to Bushmills, we saw the perfect grace note on these fantastic two days.  You guessed it- our first Irish rainbow.