SOUTH & WEST EIRE - September 2000

In those days I had a not very good non-digital camera, an even worse scanner and very few ideas about IT and webweaving.

Compiled March 2004 and therefore just a little short on details, but big thanks so far to Frank, Davy, Bryan, Mick and Craig for their help in identifying locations, etc. If you can help further, please contact this web weaver.

One small cake, a few small presents and an enormous one. Got me all emotional, it did. Jo had got us ferry tickets for Ireland! All sneaky-like, behind my back. I'd been wanting to go there for a very long time though, as well she knew.

And better still, she'd got the tickets from a former school-friend who was running a travel agency. And they were free!

Jo doesn't like this photograph of herself, but it's only a creased-up grin frozen by the camera. And you can't have enough creased-up grins, can you.

We shot down to Holyhead....., Well, we didn't, we got stuck for worrying ages in fuel strike queues on the M6 and then in roadworks on the A5 on Anglesey, crossed to Dublin, got snarled up in the rush hour traffic around Dun Laoghaire, (what a brilliant way to spell Leary), emerged into chaotic roadworks again and finally escaped into steep lanes heading for the Wicklow Mountains.

That was all the plan we had:

Wicklow Mountains - find a campsite - drive clockwise.

Good enough though! And for a day or two the only map we had was on the last two pages of Jo's "Great Britain" road atlas - the scale was 1:1,000,000!

I remember we drove over a high point and down past a vast waterchute and in Wicklow we found a good campsite and shut up shop for the night.

Next morning we turned west and, without stopping there, we drove past the Round Tower (ca. 11-12th century)at Glendalough. (Intense Christianity of any sort makes me uncomfortable).

There are about 70 round towers in Ireland. They were built by early Christian monks as watchtowers and belfries and were used as places of refuge during Viking raids, which is why the doorway to a round tower is 15 feet or more above the ground. During a raid, the monks would pull the ladder into the tower after them.

Unless I'm mistaken, (perish the thought), we continued on west through a misty village called Hollywood. South we then trundled through overcast weather to Wexford, where we strolled around the centre and went into the tourist office. I picked up a pamphlet for a blues festival, but we we'd got too far north by the time it took place.

Click on the stone dude for his story.

All these estuary and river port towns on the south coast have a marvellous atmosphere, a feeling of potential and of a weight of history, (much of it involving bad behaviour by the British).

On to Waterford (where we didn't stop for the glass factory visit).

A view from our 2nd campsite - on the "Gold Coast" at Dungarvan, Co. Waterford.