Framedlight

We left the Dingle and took the long drive back to Vaughan's house in Navan where we had a lovely supper with his family. Before that Vaughan took us to see the large megalithic tomb, Bru na Boinne, in Newgrange. I had never seen anything like it before. It had closed for the night but we looked over the hedge to see it's true enormity. It predates Stonehenge by 1,000 years and the pyramids by 400. The roof inside is corbelled and supports 200,000 tons of cairn. The cremated remains of the dead were laid out on large stone basins in the chamber. On the winter solstice a shaft of light illuminated the inside of the chamber through a purpose built opening over the doorway. The next day we set out for Dublin and the journey home. We found a great bar, O'Hogarty's, to have lunch in the Temple Bar district. Their were a couple of singers and it made our day to sit and listen to them in such friendly surroundings.

Following our tip to the cemetery we went into Annascaul to see the last of the South Pole Inn and take a couple of pictures of the Tom Crean statue. On our way back to the bed and breakfast we passed through Dingle and saw the 'Holy Stone' which the town seems to have been built around. It has cup marks in it from the grinding of corn and is probably a glacial erratic. Only in Dingle would they have given a stone it's own car parking space! The next day the weather had turned even nastier and as we drove out on a 'scenic route' Vaughan and Howard, who had been there before described what we would have seen on the way through. The mountains were full of waterfalls.

As we continued with the Slea Head Drive the weather deteriorated even further, so after lunch in a bar we decided to cut our losses and head towards home, or Dingle in this case. But, in keeping with the Tom Crean theme and feeling sorry for the poor buggers out in the hills on the 19 mile endurance walk, we returned via the cemetery in which Tom Crean and his wife are buried.  This lies just outside Annascaul in the hamlet of Ballynacourty. Howard said it would be a little bit different and he was surely right. The graveyard was overgrown and damp but what was striking about it was that most of the burials seemed to be above ground in little mausoleums. Maybe the ground was too stony and hard to dig, but it made it into a unique place. Some of the tombs were completely covered over with moss and seemed to be sliding back into the earth. In better preserved ones you could see the slabs that could be removed to place the coffins inside. As you can imagine I took a number of phot...

We woke to a drizzle the day after our 'Tom Crean experience'. We had not enlisted for the Tom Crean 19 mile endurance walk, and luckily that was sold out anyway, and given the weather would not have been pleasant by any yardstick. Instead we did what any old codger would do under the circumstances and go for a drive. The Slea Head Drive to be more precise and part of what the Dingle tourist board call the 'Wild Atlantic Way'. Wet and wild that particular Saturday. It is manners to drive clockwise around this circular route as the road is very narrow and cars coming the other way, as a couple did, cause all the traffic to snarl up. We started in Dingle where we stopped briefly by the harbour, before continuing until we shortly came to a museum. It was a private, commercial sort of venture, run by an American and called the Celtic and Prehistory Museum. And it was actually very interesting, containing some animal skeletons and stone axes and other such artefacts. Th...