Irish Blues and Greens
The Ireland most people think about is the reason it is called the Emerald Isle: the miles and miles of nothing but green hillsides and valleys. (And sheep). The green rolls all around you, on all sides, often straight into the sea. From time to time, you find crumbling Gaelic ruins.
The green grasses are intense and vibrant. I try to think of the correct hue from the Crayola box, but can only come up with shamrock green. You know the green always associated with St. Patrick’s Day? That is the color of County Clare and County Kerry. Only it is real, not manufactured.
You can’t get the true sense from the pictures of what it feels like to be surrounded by all of that vibrant green, so you’ll just have to take my word for it and go there yourself someday.
Many of the small Irish towns share the same characteristics of being based around a a main street lined with bright multi-colored shops and pubs. They all have that look – that Irish look – but none more than the towns in County Clare and County Kerry.
Doolin:
Dingle:
There are lots of other special places around the Republic, but County Clare and County Kerry were our favorites (with County Donegal as a runner-up).
The Sheep Rules
After being surrounded by the wooly critters at Mont St. Michel, I developed a certain affinity towards sheep. Driving around the Ireland countryside turned my affinity into a full-blown obsession.
You can’t avoid the sheep in Ireland. They are EVERYWHERE. Real ones, wandering around the green grasses. By the sea. Inland. Up the hills, out on cliffs, on flat land. Ambling across the road. Even black ones. Fake ones, in every Irish gift shop. On t-shirts. As stuffed animals.
The sheep are really what make the Irish countryside, in my opinion. Their shaggy off-white coats provide the perfect contrast to the vibrant green grasses. On the rare sunny day, the sheep mirror the fluffy white clouds in the sky. Sometimes, all you can see for miles is shades of blue in the ocean and sky, shades of green grasses, and shades of white in the clouds and sheep. Other times, the gray takes predominance over every other color. Even then, the wooly white still dots the landscape.
More often than not, the sheep add even more colors to the mix. The vast majority of the sheep are painted with some sort of bright color. I assumed the paint was some sort of marking system for the farmers, but I didn’t understand why some of the markings were so extensive. I later learned that the paint is washable and not permanent, and subsequently saw the proof in the window of a vet clinic:
I am sure that the branding spray is a practical solution to wandering sheep, but it interfered with my quest for a photo of the quintessential Irish landscape.
You would think by looking at my sheep photos that the sheep do something else besides eat. That would be a lie. Sheep are really just wooly, fuzzy pigs in disguise. They eat, constantly. It took hundreds of pictures of sheep to come up with ones where you could actually see anything other than there wooly butts. Their heads are always downward. They are worse than ostriches.
In order to maximize the opportunities for the best sheep photos, we had to develop the sheep rules. We were travelling in a two-car caravan without cell phones. As we learned the hard way, it is impossible for the second car to stop on its own accord. Thus, the sheep rules were born:
- We should stop for sheep that are wooly and fuzzy and unshaven.
- We should stop for sheep that are not branded with spray.
- We should stop for sheep that are by the sea.
- We must stop for any combination of the above.
Somehow, although there was much talk of the sheep rules, no one ever really enforced the failure to follow the rules. Besides, no matter where and when we stopped, there were some kind of sheep to be found.
Initially, we mistook certain sheep as goats. We thought horns were an indentifying feature of a goat, but it turns out that it is the tail. Sheep have tails that stand straight up, and goats have tails that point downward. Or maybe it was the other way around. Who knew? We didn’t. Standing on the side of the road on Conor’s Pass, a one six-foot lane pass through a mountain covered in sheep and fog, the six of us tried to remember our farm animals. I actually think they are goats, not sheep. No, they’re sheep! Wait, are sheep and goats the same animal? Not sure, but what’s a lamb? Baby sheep, right? Hmm, what’s an alpaca? I should be an alpaca farmer. Being the city folk that we are, we had to turn to The Google for answers.
One thing we didn’t ask The Google was why the sheep were being raised. Naively, we all assumed the sheep were there to shaved and shorn and later worn as one of the million wool sweaters sold all over Ireland. Then they would go on living their happy little sheep lives grazing by the sea while the owner of the sweater was nice and toasty warm. It was a sad day when we learned that may not be the case. As our last stop on the island of Ireland, we stayed at a beef and sheep farm to get up close and personal with the sheep. There, the farmer told us that he only gets 1.00 for the wool, but it costs him 1.50 to have the sheep shaved. So, what do you raise the sheep for? I asked, not wanting to hear the answer. Meat, he answered, simply. I paused before I asked the next question. You said you mostly have lambs. Do you raise them for meat, too? Yep, he said, cheerily. We kill everything!
Ten Things About Dublin
So, we received conflicting information about Dublin.
In the Irish countryside, we met two bikers from Dublin. They were insistent that Dublin was where it was at. Ya got to get to Dublin! Dublin’s the center of the universe!
A couple of days later, in a pub in Dublin, after the rest of us had gone home for the night, Tony and Jason were talking to two Irish lads who asked where they had visited in Ireland. When Jason told them they only had seen Dublin so far, they seemed very concerned. You gotta leave Dublin, man, they said, urgently. You’ve gotta get the f*ck out of Dublin!
(This last piece of advice made us slightly alarmed. They way they made it sound (or at least the way Jason told the story the next day), it was almost like they knew an apocalypse was about to happen and they were the only ones who knew about it).
While I can’t say I agree that Dublin is the center of the universe, here are ten things about Dublin that made me smile before we got the f*ck out of there (and none even involve alcohol!):
Murphy’s homemade Irish ice cream, made with the cream from the rare Kerry cow and natural ingredients… (this also made me smile in Dingle…and in Kilkenny…)
Queen of Tarts…
The doors of Dublin…
A “secret” garden…
This trio of young street performers, singing I wish, that, I knew what I knew now, when I was younger…
Rainboots and wool scarves at Avoca…
Bridges…
The light shining on this church…
and, last but not least, the man at the camera shop who fixed my camera for nothing more than the cost of a new filter after I dropped my camera and almost shattered the lens…(moral of the story: buy a filter for your lens!!!… and don’t let a klutz take an expensive camera around the world…)
