Saturday 5th June

Today we planned to travel from our cottage in Ardcath, Co. Meath to Fanore in Co. Clare via Roscrea Castle to break up the journey and perhaps have lunch there too.

We were all packed and ready to go. We looked around for the owner but he wasn’t there so we left a Thankyou card and a message in the visitors book, and left. The journey to Roscrea was fairly uneventful which was a little surprising since this weekend is a Bank Holiday weekend in Ireland..! We reached Roscrea at around 11am and went around the castle, which was small and cute. There was a house there too, although it was closed for renovations but we were able to go into the cute little garden. This morning my side (ribs) were really very painful indeed, and I later wondered if packing and washing my hair last night had anything to do with it. Or perhaps it was because I hadn’t done anything as strenuous as the walking we have been doing…! I had no idea. But I popped into a pharmacy and got some ibuprofen gel to rub on the area. As I type now, it is a little better, but it is really rather sore today. I was getting concerned about visiting the Isle of Aran (Inishmore) because I was looking forward to riding a bike….and seeing if I could remember how to ride it!

After a quick walk around the small town of Roscrea, we headed off to Portumna for lunch. Looking at the map, we thought that we would find a park with some nice picnic tables and some nice scenery……no. We followed a road down to a gate which ended with a camp site. So we turned around and just stopped in a random spot within the park area and sat outside for lunch. We were under some trees and it was a little chilly - the first chill we have really experienced here whilst in Ireland! After lunch we explored the random friary ruins, and set off for Fanore in County Clare, and of course we passed the proper entrance for the Portumna Park which would probably have given us some nice picnic tables and scenery to enjoy….!

Again the second leg of the journey was fairly uneventful, although these roads were winding and twisting here there and everywhere and I started to get sleepy. Perhaps it was the rocking of the car on the uneven roads which was making me doze. We eventually started running parallel to “The Burren” which is a National Park in which we were staying for our second week in Ireland. Lots and lots of “limestone pavements”, basically its incredibly rocky absolutely everywhere. It’s such a surreal landscape, its very strange, yet really nice to look at because of how the stone has worn away and how grass and flowers grow in between the cracks.

We stopped off at a viewpoint so we could take a photo of the “mountains” (well, hills really….!) we had just driven through, some of the limestone pavements and the turquoise of the water in Galway Bay. Not sure if it would come out in the photos, we took some anyway! We walked down as far as the limestone pavement coast would let us, and I ended up losing one of my batteries to the Burren - a rechargeable one too! Good job I had plenty more! I think I may have strained to hard to try and get it out because my right side had been feeling okay until then!

Back into the car, we continued along the road, but not for long - we had reached our second holiday cottage “The Sanctuary”, which pretty much overlooked Galway Bay with the Aran Islands in the distance. We were hoping to see some nice sunsets from our cottage as we were facing west!

Up to the cottage we parked and knocked on the door of the owner. An old border collie dog padded slowly up to greet us, later introduced to us as Timmy. We found the owner around the back of the property doing some gardening, she welcomed us, showed us around and left us to it. She had left some fruit cake in the fridge for us, MmmmMMmmm!

So finally we were in the next holiday cottage, settling in for our week in western Ireland.