APRIL 18 - We eat as soon as they lay the food out at Neptune’s Hostel and start the drive northeast to Limerick. Do not stop for much until we arrive at the visitors center for the Cliffs of Moher, in County Claire. The drive was about 2 1/2 hours in total.
After all the rain yesterday, it was great to get some clear weather for walking along the cliffs. View looking south.
Now some torturous geologic talk. The cliffs are upper Carboniferous in age (about 320 million years ago), and composed of cyclotherms (repeating sequences) of sandstones, siltstones, and shales from a massive river delta system. As can be seen in the above photo, the beds are horizontal and have not undergone any notable folding.
There is a ton of birdlife in the area, exploiting the security of the cliff wall for nesting sites. From the distance we observed them, the birds just appear as specks. There are puffins, but I couldn’t distinguish them from all the other birds flying around.
The wall to keep people from walking over the edge is made from pieces of slate, Most of them had either preserved ripple marks, or, as shown above, worm tracks. Unfortunately, this wall was so high that Odette couldn’t see anything without being lifted up. But I understand why they put up such a barrier, since otherwise there would be a lot of ‘selfie death’.
After the cliffs, enter a region known as The Burren. This area is characterized by thick, low brush and hilltops of bare gray limestone. It has a barren aspect that is in sharp contrast to the usual dark green fields. A few important Neolithic sites dot the landscape.
Poulneborne Dolmen, one of the best preserved such structures in Ireland. It is ‘portal tomb’, with an entrance on one side (right on photo) with a roof and side walls. It is thought to date from about 5000 BCE, and excavations below it revealed the bones of 33 individuals.
The surface around the dolmen is karstic limestone, meaning limestone that has fractured and subsequently weathered down along the cracks (called ‘grikes’). The rounded aspect of the exposed rocks results from erosion due to pooling water. The bodies of the tomb were found shoved into the grikes below it, since actually digging into this surface would have been nearly impossible for Stone Age people.
Eat in a town called Kinvarra on a narrow Atlantic bay entrance, near Dunguaire Castle. North and east of this, the landscape becomes more flat and we make the long slog east to Dublin. Some of the area we pass through is known, geomorphologically, as a ‘raised bog’. Basically, this region was populated in pre-history by lakes left over from the last glacial period, which, like most ancient lakes in the world, eventually became land. The wet climate helped produce a profusion of grasses and mosses that filled them up, creating a thick sequence of black, anoxic soil underneath. These bogs eventually made their way into the realm of archaeology because anything thrown into them (including people) were preserved. More on this tomorrow (Day 16)!
Arrive about 18:00 at Jury’s Inn Hotel, on Parnell Street.
Statue to Charles Stewart Parnell near our hotel. He was an Irish nationalist and MP (Member of Parliament) from 1875-1891.
Dublin is by far the largest city in Ireland, with a population five times that of Cork. It really does feel like a city after all the small towns we’ve been staying in.
