Framedlight

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...

It is a long way from Navan to the Dingle peninsula and we set out the next day after a very comfortable night at Vaughan and Truda's. Vaughan drove and we stopped for lunch in a bar, setting the trend of the holiday which contained a lot of eating and drinking! I didn't take any photographs until we got on to the peninsula which sticks out into the sea at the furthest south west of Ireland. We stopped by Inch Beach which has great views across to the Ring of Kerry. The weather was fine with scudding cumulus in the sky and, in true Irish fashion, this was to be the best day of the weekend. Inch beach is enormous and the tide was out leaving miles of reflective sand. I was tempted by a couple of panoramas. We finally arrived at the nub of the weekend, the Tom Crean festival. Tom Crean was a Polar explorer who had been part of Scott's fatal last journey to the South Pole on the Terra Nova expedition, and had also sailed with Shackleton on the En...