In Memoriam plus a GPS Adventure!

…continuing with our adventures in Ireland, we headed north toward Killarney in County Kerry.

Along the way, Laurie took this photo of these colorful townhomes… They’re eye catching and it’s an interesting way to dress up this gray stone building.

Just before we turned north, we came to the town of Skibbereen on the south coast of Ireland and when we saw the Heritage Center, we decided to stop and look around. 

The name Skibbereen means “little boat harbor”.  The town has a population of about 2,700 and the town charter dates back to 1657 although the settlement dates back even earlier.  It received a sudden influx of people from the nearby coastal town of Baltimore in 1621 following a raid on that town by slavers from the Barbary Coast of North Africa.  It was the largest raid by Barbary pirates on either Ireland or Great Britain with at least 107 local residents being brought to North Africa to be sold as slaves.  To learn more about this raid (and for a link to information about similar raids in Iceland, go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Baltimore.  These attacks by slavers were totally new information for me!

One of the key exhibits at the Skibbereen Heritage Center is the story of the Great Irish Potato Famine, (“Gorta Mor”) of the 1840s when potato blight wiped out much of the crop.  In what was the worst human disaster in Europe in the 1800s, between 1841 and 1850 over 1,000,000 people died and another 1,250,000 emigrated in an effort to escape the disaster.  Obviously the birthrate also plunged and it’s estimated that over 400,000 births just didn’t happen.  The population of Ireland had been 8,500,000 people in 1841 but by 1850, it was reduced almost in half! 

At the start of the famine, about half of the population relied on potatoes as their main source of nourishment!  As this illustration shows, the potato fungus arrived in Europe from America… Consider this, a poor family of 8 needed about 55 lbs. of potatoes every day in order to survive.   It was so bad that all eatable seaweed was stripped from the country’s shoreline.  At one point about 3,000,000 people were fed from soup kitchens every day!

A French Chef named Alexis Soyer invented a ‘famine soup’ that was named for him.  Check out these ingredients...

·         4 oz. of a half cup of beef (about 4 oz.)

·         8 quarts of water

·         2 oz. of a quarter cup of drippings (2 oz.)

·         2 onions or other vegetables

·         8 oz. or 1 cup of flour or a cup of barley (8 oz.)

·         3 oz. of salt

·         ½ oz. of brown sugar

I would lose weight fast on this diet, how about you?!

The Skibbereen Heritage Center also features an exhibit about nearby Lough Hyne.  This unique salt water lake is Ireland’s first Marine Nature Reserve.  To learn more, go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lough_Hyne.  If you’re trying trace your Irish heritage and your family roots are from County Cork, with its 350,000 local genealogy records the Heritage Center may be of assistance.  To learn more about the Skibbereen Heritage Center, go to http://skibbheritage.com/.

…this was just another old hotel that I liked the looks of.  This handsome 116 year old West Cork Hotel is located in Skibbereen.  It was operated by the same family from 1902 until 2006 when it was purchased by local residents.  I checked out photos of the rooms as well as the Kennedy Restaurant and the Bridge Bar and the West Cork Hotel appears to be a truly classy place.  Check it out at http://www.westcorkhotel.com/.

We followed Ireland’s N71 Highway out of Skibbereen up through the town of Bantry…with beautiful lush green bucolic scenery along the way.

We pulled over so Laurie could take these photos of these impressive multi-colored hydrangeas… All was going well!  What a beautiful day for a drive!

Wait…!  What is this?  Where are we headed?  The genie in the GPS had taken control, sending us on her ‘shortest’ route to Killarney!  I’ve since determined that we could have never ‘found’ this route without ‘her’ help… We were led ‘astray’ somewhere around the village of Coomhola Bridge…

The road got smaller and more narrow.  People and farms became few and far between.  Then we came upon a traffic jam!  We just trailed along for a bit…

  

We had lots of time to check out the countryside… Mountains appeared and we kept climbing up hill!

Then we had to stop when the farmer stopped to talk to the passengers in one of only 2 cars we saw for miles along this scenic back road!  FYI, can you guess where the passengers in the 2 cars we passed were from?  How about New Jersey and Virginia!  Only crazy American tourists who trusted GPS found themselves on this road…

Once we passed the 2 cars and the farmer/herder turned off the road with his cows and Border Collies, it was just the stark but beautiful countryside and occasional flocks of sheep.  There were still a few fences though...

This attractive bright red house, complete with a patio, flower garden and greenhouse was way down in one of the valleys.  This photo was taken from on high using my 10:1 zoom lens at the max…and then cropping the photo to get a close-up!

Colorful sheep were scattered throughout this rocky terrain with its steep hills, narrow valleys and ridges.  The colors indicate just who’s sheep they belong to and, since this seemed to be free range with few or zero fences, I’m sure that the color coding is a necessity!

…the lonely narrow road stretched on and on… There are few actual passing places allowing drivers to pull off and let other vehicles past.  However, we lucked out both times we encountered other cars.

We stopped a couple of times and were greeted by absolute silence.  Once we heard sheep bleating in the distance.  This is definitely pure old time Ireland…

Laurie took this photo using the grass as a contrast to show off the distance involved.  That is a river down in the valley as well as a few sheep and a copse of trees… I learned later that this is the highest pass road in Munster at about 1,518 feet.  It crosses from County Cork to County Kerry…

This multi-colored sheep obviously has a different owner than the last one I posted.  They didn’t pay much attention to the car…or us…but we did have to watch out for them along the road!  Of course, we weren’t exactly speeding along this ‘superhighway’…

Finally…we came to the summit.  This pass has been known as The Priest’s Lepp (Leap) since at least 1600.

There are other theories but according to popular tradition, the name of this pass comes from an old Irish legend in which a priest being pursued by soldiers escaped by a miraculous leap of his horse from a mountain cliff in County Cork.  His pursuit began in Killabuane where a rock allegedly melted under the pursuing hounds.  It supposedly can still be seen today…complete with what looks like pawmarks.  Marks of the priest’s knees and hands as well as the horse’s hooves appear on another rock miles away, just a few miles from Bantry in County Kerry where he is said to have landed after his miraculous leap! 

Upon researching this route I discovered that this is a well-known bicycling route! (Are they crazy or what?) To quote from one on-line site, “Priest’s Leap Mountain Pass…Cycle is a 25 mile (40 km) stunning scenic road trip and “testing cycle” over Ireland’s highest mountain pass.”  To further quote, it is “off the well-trodden nearby tourist routes”.  That is for sure!

GPS led us along many a back road (shorter route) in both Scotland and Ireland but this one was a dandy!  We all agreed that we were actually very happy that ‘she’ had led us astray on this particular occasion…

Shortly after coming on down the mountain from Priest’s Leap, we merged back onto N71 and entered 'civilization' again in the town of Kenmare at the mouth of the Kenmare River.  At this point we were only about 25 – 30 miles from our destination for the day at Killarney, but we decided to take a lunch break.  Kenmare and our luncheon will be featured in my next post from Ireland.

Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them…

Thanks for stopping by for our trip back to the Irish Famine and our exiting and beautiful ride across the mountains!

Take Care, Big Daddy Dave