I agree with Sarah. If you look closely at the two figures they look as if they’re coming to                                                               blows rather than dancing

I can never say I’ve been a lover of traditional Irish music as a genre but I did intend on hearing some live music on my trip. Pretty well all the bars in the tourist towns advertised ‘live music’ at least a couple of nights per week but that didn’t necessarily mean traditional Irish music. The first I sampled was in a bar in Killarney. I’d arranged

[wpvideo Occ8mu96]

to meet there with a couple of others from the tour but they were too Wet and Tired, as opposed to being Wild ‘n’ Happy and they had an early night, which meant that I was by myself, and looking round, I found that I was not only the only woman alone, but the only person alone in the bar. But, taking the bull by the horns, I sat at the bar with a good view of the corner where the three guys were playing. Within five minutes of beginning

their set at 9 p.m. several people, regular, I would guess, had got up to dance. Perhaps it was a special event for Mothers’ Day. I took a few photos of the band, and me being me, a

[wpvideo OcVNH7Y3]

Leaving the Killarney bar to a deserted street

few more photos of the people watching (!). It was pleasant but not particularly enthralling. In Doolin a group of us, under the guidance of J.B walked over a mile along an unlit road to a pub where a band was playing that he’d heard before. I didn’t know at the time that Doolin is famous as the capital of Irish music and each of the four pubs in

the little village feature traditional Irish music nightly. This was more like it. I was introduced to the Irish pipes player, Blackie O’Connell, and I was able to sit within an arm’s reach of him and got to see how this instrument works. With one arm you pump the bellows, with the other arm you squeeze the air bag, with the fingers of both hands

[wpvideo 7bygVyzg]

you play the chanter and with the palm of one hand you operate the drones – all the time tapping your foot noisily on the flag floor to add the percussion. I chatted to the performer. “How much does a set of Uilleann pipes cost?” He made my night when he answered, “How much is a car?”   ‘cause this is always the answer I give when someone asks me how much it costs to buy a piano. But his answer was that you can buy a set for €10,000 but his is a custom made set and cost €25,000. At least you can’t leave a piano behind in a bar – or a car! The second guy, Cyril O’Donoghue was playing a bouzouki, a guitar-like instrument originally from Greece. Unfortunately the third guy who regularly makes up Dubhlinn, playing the fiddle, wasn’t there. When I left at 11:30 they were still going strong.

Reflections on the music of Doolin

You have the admire the tenacity of some of these musicians. As I was hiking at 45 degrees into the wind on the Cliffs of Moher I passed a guy perched on the cliff edge playing the pipes.

[wpvideo 5lUeRyMT]

My hands were too cold to take his photo but I thought I’d have better luck on the way back, but by the time  returned he’d just packed up for the day and was wheeling his gear back down to the Visitors’ Centre. 

And, below,  in Galway this street musician took my eye – he had some great moves, if nothing else!

[wpvideo GpyTm1SQ]

Out at sea are the Skellig islands, now famous as a location for the Star Wars movie

But travelling for me is also about meeting fellow travellers and locals. This has become a much more important part of the trip now that I live alone and have done so for the last fifteen years. When we travelled together as a family

Our entire group

we barely noticed other travellers but now they are an integral part of my experience. Just as  in my adventures o the Outer Hebrides and St Kilda, and my trip last summer to The Orkneys and Shetland I chose a small group tour that used a minibus to get around. This way you can get to know each other, and take side roads that large coaches cannot handle. But my initial

It’s a long way down – Valentia island’s Bray Head loop

meeting with the group was not an auspicious beginning to our week together. I was given wrong information about the bus to take from the hostel in Dublin to the tour’s meeting point, a hotel close to the river. We were to meet at 9 a.m. and when I arrived late, not my usual style, at 9:01 I couldn’t see any sign of a group, so I inquired at the reception desk. “Oh, Wild ‘n’ Happy left at 8:30 in a blue minibus.” Oh my God, I’ve

blown it! What can I do? A feeling of utter panic passed through me. Then, “Heather? Aww, there you are,” came a welcoming voice and I turned to see Mr Happy himself, J.B. our lithesome tour director. “Jump aboard and we’ll get on our way.” From that moment on my role on the tour was assigned. If Heather’s on the bus that means everyone’s

J. B in a rare contemplative moment (actually I think he’s just waiting for the milk to arrive)

aboard. The bus – not blue, by the way – was well appointed with phone chargers, tables, cool box and an excellent heating system. Within minutes the youngest person aboard asked what everyone did for a job. There was a retired printer from New Zealand who knew a lot about sheep and cows; his wife, a retired midwife who was originally from Yorkshire but who had spent seven years working to eradicate leprosy in Nepal; a chef from Curacao who now lives in Amsterdam; a police sergeant and her friend, a corrections officer both from Ventura County, California and me, a piano teacher. By the end of the first day the group had divided itself into two distinct sub-groups with me, as usual, playing the role of Jaques in As You Like It, the role of the observer, who was at ease with both groups. In fact, over dinner on the first day I was describing how, when I recently went to see Prince Charles and his wife I was actually more interested in seeing and photographing the assembled crowd’s reaction to the celebrities, rather than the

celebrities themselves “I like to watch!” You can, perhaps, imagine how this was interpreted, and from then on it became my catch phrase – almost as good as “We were high all the time” which became the catch phrase of my trip to the Eastern Sierras. But I think Naina’s comment takes the biscuit. Julie’s jeans were covered in sugar from eating a sugar donut and Naina quipped, ‘If you take your pants off, Julie, I could make a myself a meal and be totally satisfied.’ Coming from a highly extrovert lesbian everyone cracked up. This gives a fairly accurate indication of what life was like on board the bus! By the last day much liquour was consumed on the bus after lunch by those eager to celebrate a final away day before returning to work, and even more  was imbibed in a bender later that in the evening in Galway if the sick bags which J.B distributed the following morning on the bus were any indication of the

evening’s celebrations – and even then we had to pull off the motorway to ‘clean up.’ Meanwhile I was having possibly my favourite meal of the trip, a fish dish in a quiet Thai restaurant in old town Galway in the company of the New Zealand contingent. In my bid to eat local delicacies I’d also had a very good fish chowder and a large bowl of mussels.

Sticky toffee pudding in Killarney

But I was disappointed with my Irish sticky toffee pudding. It was served with cream rather than custard, and it had the consistency of a light sponge cake rather than being rich and stodgy. I mean, it’s not called sticky for nothing. As far as drinks were concerned I just couldn’t resist going into a pub  on the last evening and asking for a glass of Happy Hooker, a local Galway beer. For The Killarney Red, however, I was in the company of a police sergeant, a corrections officer and a chef – sounds like the

At Killarney Brewery with Micky o’Mouse (MOM for short). I got to name him! He’d come all the way from Ventura, California to be our mascot.

beginning of a joke . . . 4 women walked into a bar and . . . (Ah, caught you out there: you weren’t seeing 4 women in your head, were you?) On our first evening we went to the brewery itself. It was advertising a beer and a pizza for €16 as if that were a bargain! Killarney had a wonderful whiskey bar which was worth going to just to look at display of the numerous varieties. Just like in Northern England gin is the ‘in’ drink, and one of our group passed round a rather pretty empty bottle of gin which she apparently ‘woke up with. ’

My favourite photo of the group.

The second big surprise about Ireland was  the appearance of the houses – not just their amazing colours, but about their age. I discussed this with my fellow tourists but we didn’t come up with much. I remembered the brightly coloured fishermen’s cottages in Burano, an island off Venice, and saw the same in the coastal villages of the Outer Hebrides, so at first I thought it was related to fishing, but even as we travelled inland through miles upon miles of cow pastures there would be a bright yellow house looking like a lighted beacon in the midst of a sea of green. But the thing that intrigued me most was that all this painting looked brand new – as in, they all looked newly painted within the last year. This cannot be. And all the houses scattered along the roads and fields seemed to be quite newly constructed. The walls have a finish obscuring the building material. No stone, no brick is visible. It’s all a smooth finish and, as I said, brightly coloured.

Many thanks to everyone who sent me ideas for this blog. I needed a kick start!

It’s highly appropriate that I’m finally writing about my 6 day trip to Ireland today, because it’s St Patrick’s day. In fact, that’s probably the biggest motivating factor that’s actually made me put pen to paper – well, fingertip to laptop – or even taptop as my autocomplete prefers. As I opened said taptop’s screen this morning I was confronted with a Google drawing that neatly summed up the item that made the biggest impression on me during my visit to the Emerald Isle: ‘The Walls of Southwest Ireland.’ I’ve never seen anything like them. I mean, I’m quite familiar with limestone country. Just look at the landscape around Malham and Ingleton, villages that were favourite Sunday runs out when I was growing up just across the border in Lancashire. Those places have walls, hundreds of the, but Irish walls have holes in them. No, I don’t mean gaps where they’ve fallen down or have been knocked down by errant sheep, I mean gaps between the stones. I’m not sure that I buy the online comment which was that the farmers who cleared the land of these stones in order to provide a smoother pasture for their flocks didn’t have time or energy to cut the stones to a more geometric shape so that they would jigsaw together better. Another comment I found online was that the holes make the walls less stable so they are more likely to fall on any sheep that gives them a shove, and therefore the sheep will learn to stay away from the walls. I prefer that idea. There are even walls in the South West known as Famine walls which were constructed purely to give the starving farmers some sort of employment and hence income paid for by local church groups and benevolent landlords. These walls, which are primarily built directly onto the limestone outcrops, are really more of a repository for stone boulders. They are not really dividing anything from anything else, but they march in straights lines through the Burren landscape as though their very life depends on it. The first iMovie I

made the day after I got back was about the wonderful variety of walls and as I worked on it I immediately found myself wanting to go back to that area and focus my attention on just taking photos of walls. I was looking up something in my Alaska journal yesterday which notes that the first thing I did on my return home from that cruise was to search for a cabin there in which to spend the summer composing music, so I’m not unfamiliar with this feeling of wanting to return.