Okay, I said I'd do this a couple of nights ago, so sue me. I finally got Mike to upload a few pictures off his camera and I've added them to the gallery. I'll get the film from my own camera developed eventually and I'll add a few more.
The first is of a beehive hut dwelling out on the Dingle Peninsula, the westernmost tip of Ireland:
I've read that there are more than 400 of these huts in a 3-mile stretch of coast on the Peninsula. We only saw a few of them. We were able to go in a few. I'd say they feel a bit bigger on the inside than they look from the outside. You have to stoop to go through the doorway. It's hard to date these, because the building technique was used as long ago as 3100 BC, and continued to be used to construct storage sheds as late as 1950. Some of the centuries old dwellings survived because the people believed they were occupied by fairies, heh.
After a few days in Dingle we drove up the coast and stopped to see the Cliffs of Moher, an impressive sight:
They may not look all that impressive in this picture, but notice the tiny people standing on the top of the nearest cliff. One amazing thing about these sights in Ireland is that the govmint could not care less about the safety of tourists. Here at the cliffs there are warning signs, but the "fences" (low rock walls) keeping people away from the edges are easily climbed--Mike and I both climbed over them. I laid on my stomach on the edge of a cliff to look over the side and study the grasses growing on the cliff face. It was incredibly cool; birds were circling around below me.
There weren't even any warning signs at Dun Aenghus, the ruins of a 2000 year old Celtic fort perched on a 600-foot-high cliff on Inishmore, the largest of the Aran islands. Mike didn't take any pictures of Dun Aenghus, but I found this one on the net (yeah, that's cheating):
We took a ferry out to the island. We took a lame but fun minibus tour, and our driver thought we'd like to hike up to the highest point on the island, so we did. There wasn't really much to see there, just a lighthouse and a ruin of an old tower:
Inishmore is about 16 square miles and has about 8 thousand miles (I'm not kidding) of rock walls on it. Our driver told us to climb over the walls to get to the lighthouse, but I climbed over a gate in the wall:
(The sweater I'm wearing in this picture was purchased in a gift shop near Dun Aenghus an hour earlier.) Here's a pic of Mike on Inishmore:
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