The Burren

We left Doolin after a wonderful breakfast prepared by Kate's husband Charles. I had porridge with Bailey's and Kev had a toasted bagel with smoked Salmon. They have some of the best smoked Salmon I have ever tasted over there.

The weather map for today. We did a pretty good job of missing the rain. The Burren is a National Park which contains examples of all the major habitats within the Burren: Limestone Pavement, Calcareous Grassland, Hazel scrub, Ash/Hazel Woodland, Turloughs, Lakes, Petrifying Springs, Cliffs and Fen.

We followed a narrow road to hit some of the highlights in the Burren. There were tons of walking trails, but we only had a day and the weather wasn't the best.(You can see the dark clouds in this picture.) Our first stop was the church ruins in Carran.

I'm sure  you used to enter through this iron gate, however it is locked so you must step over the wall right next to it.

Once we left the church, we kept driving north until we reached Poulnabrone Doleman. It is a portal tomb that dates back to the Neolithic Age. It is situated in a rocky field. We walked up this long path to get there.

.

Poulnabrone represents one of the very few Irish portal tombs that have been archaeologically investigated. This excavation, which was carried out by Ann Lynch,  uncovered the remains of twenty two people, sixteen adults and six children within the interior of the tomb. Of these bodies only eight could be sexed and these were equally split between males and females. A number of the bones contained scorch marks suggesting that they had been held over a flame prior to burial, possibly during a purification ritual.

These cracks were very deep. Some of them had flowers growing out of them. It was pretty windy and chilly outside with all of the scattered storms. We walked around from about an hour exploring the area before it started raining/sleeting. You can see the little pellets of ice.

We kept driving north towards Ballyvaughan. Limestone mountains were on both sides of the road.

We found a beach to stop at. Notice how pretty and blue the sky is...

In the bottom picture you can see the storm rolling in from the north. We had walked a a good distance down the beach looking for shells and rocks. All of a sudden I looked up and noticed the dark, gray clouds were quickly moving our way and the wind was picking up. We turn around and head back towards the car, but before we could get there ice starts pelting down on us. We are running as fast as we can to the car. By the time we got there our pants were soaking wet and we were freezing. We got back on the road  to head towards Shannon. We were staying the night there and flying to London in the morning. There wasn't anything to see in Shannon, so we grabbed a quick dinner and hung out in the hotel room. I organized and repacked everything for the plane ride. The nice thing about having a car is you can spread your things out. we always had both coats in the backseat, now we had to try to get them crammed into a suitcase with all the stuff we bought.

This is the pizza I had for dinner. It was Yummy!