Galway Day #4

10/29/07

Today we went on the Cliffs of Moher coach tour. On the back of one of the tour buses was an ad for Coors. And they actually have it on tap, along with 2 taps of Budweiser, at our hotel bar! I can’t believe it!



We had a really great driver who knew so much he talked almost the entire tour, which was fine because he had a pleasant voice. But he was also amusing because almost every time after he finished saying something, he would kind of trail off and mumble something. We have no idea what he was mumbling, but it was really funny.

The tour included the Cliffs of Moher, plus the Aillwee Cave and some castles and towns, all of which is located in an area called the Burren, which means rocky land and is 1% of the Irish landscape. The landscape was very beautiful, but as we drove into the hills, it got rockier and rockier, so that there were smaller grass pastures; although, grass does grow amongst the rocks and cattle and sheep will graze there too. The rock walls we have been seeing are used to divide up the land, all of which is privately owned, and they are complete dry rock walls. There is so concrete or other substance used to keep the rocks together. Amazing. We also noticed that the sheep were always colored on their backs, all the same color in one pasture. This is used to indicate the owner of the sheep.

What’s interesting about the land is that seaweed from the Atlantic Ocean (which is what the Burren borders) is used as a natural fertilizer for the soil, which really helps make the soil rich. Maybe that’s why all the grass is so bright green. However, some of the pastures are much richer than others, because some of them are more rocky and therefore can’t really be used for grazing. During the summer, they cut up the grass and roll it into huge plastic rolls to be used in the winter for hand feeding and as bedding for calves.

In some of these pictures, you will notice some hills. If you look closely, you can kind of see how there are jagged objects on top of the hills. These are burial grounds. They used to bury all their dead on top of the hills. They have excavated a lot of them, but there are still many more.

On the way to the Cliffs, we drove through the countryside to get to the Aillwee Cave and see some burial tombs. At one of the tombs we actually saw Dave, Adam, and Charlie, our Australian friends from Edinburgh, again! We saw them at the Guiness factory in Dublin and now they are on the same tour as us but with a different company. Too funny. On the way back from the Cliffs, we drove along the Atlantic coast, so you will see water pictures later in the group of pictures.

Here are the landscape pics I took:




On the way to the Aillwee Cave, we saw a castle that is actually still used for banquets today. It had a beautiful view of Galway Bay, the neighboring towns, and the distant hills.




The Aillwee Cave was really cool. It was actually discovered in 1940 but wasn’t excavated and opened to the public until 1970 because the Irish guy who discovered it didn’t think it was a big deal.


The rocks in the land have a lot of limestone in them, so when the water soaks into the ground and goes through the rocks, it picks up minerals and makes calcite, which is the shiny vanilla colored stuff that makes the stalactites and stalagmites.

This is the calcite hardened against a wall, so it didn’t make any stalactites.










This is the main area of the cave.




Somehow, the rocks formed in what looks like praying hands (near the top of the picture) :



These are straw stalactites, which are hollow in the middle. It takes 100 years for them to grow 1 cm. There is one stalactite that is 30 cm, which means it’s 3,000 years old!






The bigger stalactites and the stalagmites are created from stalactites that aren’t hollow (the middle of them are clogged with earth or minerals or something), so the calcite runs around the outside of the stalactite to increase its width and length and then drips down to the ground to create stalagmites.
Here’s a small stalagmite:


It’s hard to see, but in this picture, there is a stalagmite on the right-hand side that is 8,000 years old and a stalactite/stalagmite wall (which happens when the 2 keep growing and eventually meet) that is 11,000 years old.


Sometimes the water comes out in the cave in great force. It eventually gets absorbed by the earth and travels underground several miles to the Galway Bay, which is pretty far from the caves (they figured this out by coloring the water and then going to find out where the color came out).


We ended the tour at an area where you could keep going, but you would have to crawl to get through and eventually you would be crawling completely under water, so you would need an oxygen tank and would feel completely claustrophobic, and then you would get to an area that is large enough to stand in. Obviously, that isn’t somewhere they take tourists.


The Cliffs of Moher were beautiful. There was some large structure on top of one of the cliffs, but we don’t know what it was. It was insanely windy up there, as you will see from a couple of these pictures :) It was hard to capture the beauty and greatness of the cliffs in pictures, but we tried.