The Olde Sod ... continues

When we stayed in Ireland, it was for 10 days. We spent those 10 days in the lovely little time share cottage you see on the left in the picture below. That's the car we rented you can almost clearly see in the driveway to the cottage. As always, you can click on any of these pictures to see them large.

We made this little cottage our headquarters and from here we took day trips to everywhere and anywhere in Connemara. I put 1200 miles on that rental in a little over a week. And Ireland isn't that big. It's about 120 miles wide and 170 miles long. And all the roads are approximately 1 and a half lanes wide. If you're lucky. And they're always wet.

To get to anyhere from where we were, we had to travel a narrow country track to get to the N59, the two lane National Highway that runs through Connemara. The narrow country track, however, though hairy, was scenic - as scene below.

And nearby us, was a golf course and if you stopped and looked, you could sometimes see across the small, fresh water lake, and then across the narrow bit of the Atlantic, the Isle of Innis Bo Finne. Through the rain and mist it made an eerily lonely sight.

As lonely as the island looked, nothing was sadder than seeing so many of these old, collapsed cottages scattered all throughout the west of Ireland. This one is in better shape than many we saw - the chimney looks almost new. But the roof has fallen in, as they will after years of neglect.

The cottage depicted above sits at an intersection at the base of a hill. We went up that hill and near the top, turned onto a narrow stone track that took us around the face of the hill toward the sea. We stopped along the way and I took the photo below. Where we are is on the south side of Galway Bay. Connemara is on the other side of the Bay from where we are, lost in the haze and the mist.

Ireland is such a beautiful place. Under that beauty, however, is a hard and unforgiving land, and it is a hardy people that live there - and left there. The remnants of the potato famine of 150 years ago are still there. There are the ruins of family homes everywhere. They've never been torn down. It's almost as though the land is waiting for the people to come back, and all the while, reminding those that stayed of those that left. The names are not forgotten. If you ask, they'll tell you who it was that lived in that tumbled down wreck, and when they left. As though it was yesterday. As though they still expect them to return.

I have several family lines that go back to Ireland. As far as I know, none of us have gone back there to take up residence. It's a nice place to visit, but ....

We're Americans, now.

Ndinombethe.