Mahon Falls and the Magic Road

We went to Mahon Falls today, an enormously high set of water falls in a u-shaped valley that reminds me of the lower 1000-feet of the Grand Canyon. Like the Grand Canyon, the whole thing is so huge that it creates an optical illusion of being smaller than it is. When you park your car, it looks to be a short, easy walk to the foot of the falls, but it is a least a leg straining 20-minute walk. Then you get to climb up beside the main falls. We did. It was an exceptionally raw, windy day (as we drove home, there were peat fires burning in houses. I’d estimate, from the layers of clothing I wore and the way I wished fervently for gloves, that the wind chill made it close to 50 degrees F, at most).


We both got a good work out climbing up. If it had been clearer, we would have been able to see the coast easily. The place was wild and gorgeous (Thank you, Anna, for telling us about it).

The drive there contains a most unusual and inexplicable thing: The Magic Road. You stop your car next to The Fairy Tree, put it in neutral, and the car rolls “uphill.’ Now, we spent a lot of skeptical moments convincing ourselves of how the road right there was actually DOWN HILL, but involved an optical illusion. At first, we agreed that about 20 or 30 feet beyond was a true uphill and we believed that the car would not in fact roll up that true hill. To prove it, we put the car in neutral and let it roll. It rolled both uphill and downhill on its own, without ever losing speed, and in fact continuing to gather speed on additional up-hills. It blew our minds. We kept going like this until approaching traffic meant Don needed control of the car. We drove away, quiet and chastised. Perhaps those who came before us KNEW it was a magic road. We should have believed them. It is Ireland, after all.