Limerick

We left Killarney this morning at 8am and headed for Dingle.

On the way we went through a little town called Milltown and then on to Castlemaine. Castlemaine is where Jack Doolan, known as The Wild Colonial Boy comes from. His real name is Jack Duggan.

We then travelled along the Dingle Peninsula to get to the Blasket Islands Centre. The road there was hairy, sometimes only wide enough for the bus along with fog and misty rain. At one point we met a car coming the opposite way and with a couple of hundred foot drop on our side and a rock wall on the other there was no room to move. The car had to reverse back quite a way just to get a small section to get off so the bus could get through. I was ever so glad to get to the end. I posted a photo below of how close the rock wall was to the bus window.

On arrival at the Blasket Island Centre we had an audio visual presentation all about the Blasket Islands.

The Blasket Islands were inhabited until 1954 by a completely Irish-speaking population and today are part of the Gaeltacht. At its peak, the islands had 175 residents. The population declined to 22 by 1953. The government evacuated most of the remaining residents to the mainland on 17 November 1953 because of increasingly extreme winter weather that left the island's ageing population cut off from emergency services. The evacuation was seen as necessary by both the Islanders and the government.

I included some photos of how these people lived.

Leaving there we headed for Dingle on the other end of the hairy road - this road was a bit better but not much. We lunched in Dingle beside the Harbour. It was very nice.

After lunch we travelled to Adare. It’s a little village with a lot of thatched roof houses. A 20 minute stop there and then onto Limerick for the night.

Lots of photos from today.Read more