Last Days in Ireland

In our last few days on the River Blackwater in Ireland, we went back up to “The Vee”, which is a road that, like Skyline Drive or The Blue Ridge Parkway, runs along a series of ridges in the mountain range (The Knockmealdown—really) that divides Counties Waterford, Limerick, Cork and Tipperary. From the Vee itself (a switchback), you can see all of those counties. The mountain sides are blanketed with tall rhododendrons—and I mean blanketed! There is barely a clearing anywhere, and the tangled trunks and branches make real a term we have heard such rhododendron forests called: a rhododendron hell. If a human being gets inside one, they are not going to find their way out—they will not be able to tell direction at all (with apologies to the strict grammarians among you, annoyed about my use of “they” and “their”).

Anyway, Ireland’s mountains have many high lakes, what Americans call tarns. The one we hiked into up near the Vee is Ireland’s most accessible high mountain lake. You can see it from the road, and while it is along one of those long-distance, multi-county mountain trails, it is also easily accessed from a parking lot J We had a picnic lunch and found and picked blueberries there, too.

We also drove out to Ring (An Rinn, in the Gaelic), a village located on a peninsula south of Dungarvan that is in the gaeltecht: i.e. it is Gaelic-speaking. In most of Ireland, signs are in both Gaelic and English, but in gaeltecht areas, they are ONLY in Gaelic. The peninsula was beautiful, and we walked for an hour or so on a wide, mostly deserted beach. When the tide turned, it was a dramatic moment, as we suddenly heard small waves beginning to break near us, and watched as they immediately began creeping farther in on the beach. It took about an hour for that great, wide, expansive beach to be mostly covered with water again.

We also visited a very old castle ruin near us that we had driven by a number of times. From the top of the hill, one could easily see why the castle had been situated there: it was completely defensible and commanded a 360 degree view.

We drove from our place in Dromore, in County Waterford, to Donore in County Meath. Meath holds much of the Boyne River Valley, and is the County of the Kings. This area is Ireland’s most sacred landscape, and contains such archeological treasures as Newgrange, Knowth, Dowth, the Hill of Tara, multiple ancient monasteries, and Loughcrew. The Battle of the Boyne also took place nearby, which is when the British Protestant forces under William of Orange (The Netherlands) defeated the Catholic claimant to the British throne, James, who had rallied the Irish and French to his side (William was married to James’ Protestant daughter, Mary. King James had been thrown down from his throne by them, in 1688). Unfortunately the Irish/French side was poorly trained and poorly equipped, and faced a superior force that triumphed (haven’t we seen this movie?). This Catholic defeat led to the complete country-wide confiscation of all Catholic land and property, and the outlawing of Catholicism. The Orangemen (the rabid Protestants) in Northern Ireland still celebrate the date of that battle every year, as the day that their side won. One can easily understand why the march that they hold annually through Catholic townships in Northern Ireland has historically led to so much in the way of hard feelings and violence -rather like the nasty Israeli Settlers’ march through a Palestinian neighborhood in Jerusalem -during a festival that celebrates the city as a Jewish city- that Don witnessed a couple of months ago, where the Palestinian men were crying. Such hate-filled nose-rubbing perpetuates, in a suppressed population, rage and frustration that has no legitimate outlet, and so it periodically explodes in violence as well as in open rebellion. There is a monument on the Hill of Tara to the men who lost their lives during such a [failed] rebellion in Ireland—the Wolfe Tone Rebellion in 1798.