You never need look far to find old stone structures and lush greenery in Ireland. 

 

There’s the most obvious, of course: Inch, Ireland. A town with the diminutive name of a minute unit. But Ireland is filled with others. A matter of inches extends the eves out from the cottage, forming a little reading nook just beyond the reach of the rain. Every photo, just a few inches wide, is filled with an enormous amount of green in this lush country. Little wonder: about thirty to thirty-five inches of rain falls in these parts each year.

The view from the reading nook under the eves of the cabin where we stayed. 

The most terrifying inches are those scant ones—feeling more like hairbreadths—separating our rental car from the whizzing vehicle bound the opposite way. The roads are in excellent repair, but they are some of the narrowest I’ve ever seen—the phenomenal walking trails are at least as wide as the winding, hedgerow-lined country lanes that astonishingly, impossibly, are expected to occasionally accommodate two cars side-by-side. Every corner is a blind, unnerving one. Every fellow passenger is missed by a matter of inches.

A typical Irish countryside road.

But the landscape is like nothing I’ve ever seen, yet everything I’d ever imagined through years of dreaming of Ireland. Where I sit typing, the windows open onto a several-kilometers-wide vista of rolling green hills populated with sheep and horses and bordered by narrow corridors of woodland and hedgerows. It barely scratches the surface of this fair land, but it’s an apt microcosm—of all the inches I’ve walked and driven in Ireland, most have some aspect of this, be it rolling hills, a green tunnel of elderly trees arching over the scant road, or sheep and horses and cows milling about in contented, pastoral profusion.

A typical Irish walking trail.

But there’s more variety than I expected, too. We once drove over miles of rocky outcropping without a tree (and scarcely a shrub) in sight: a welcome stretch of curvy roadway on which oncoming traffic was visible before it was upon us. We stood at the summit of the 8,424-inch-tall Cliffs of Moher for an interminable stretch, taking in the majesty of lush green pasture giving sudden way to jagged, vertical, bird-nest-spotted stone yielding in turn to frothing, unabating ocean. On another coast, honeycomb-shaped pillars of stone thrust skyward from the sea, difficult to describe but thrillingly effortless to range one’s eyes wonderingly over: the Giant’s Causeway.

Despite their profusion, I never get tired of seeing sheep.

The Cliffs of Moher | A close-to-earth birds-eye view of the Giant’s Causeway. 

 

A sidelong view of the Giant’s Causeway. 

On another day, we visited Glendstal Abbey, where we ranged over immaculate grounds suffused with birdsong and a chapel where Latin vespers echoed hauntingly through a vast room with a new structure but ancient air—filled, as it was, with the scent of incense and beeswax and the reverberating sound of venerable verse. It was as I’d expected: Ireland is an enthralling expanse with every square inch (save, perhaps, the too-few-for-comfort that compose the roads)—a thing of beauty.

1 Comment

  1. Geneva Langeland

    Looks like a wonderful trip!

    Reply

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