Lauraugh Day 1, "The Lady's Way"

We picked up some provisions in the O'Sheas' store when we arrived last night. Mr. O'Shea warned us, "There's probably not much here that you're looking for, this is kind of a survival store..." But we found some local eggs, a couple of onions, and (best of all) Cadbury Drinking Chocolate. What more could you possibly want?!

The eggs and half of one of the onions, plus some garlic cheese, bread, marmalade, and a butter packet pilfered from the pub last night, became our breakfast our first morning at Valley View Cottage (according to the plaque on the retaining wall by the driveway.... the part of the wall that I did *not* run into last night).

Doc seemed to approve. We drank Irish Breakfast Tea instead of the instant coffee, and it was good.

There was a TON of information in the books and pamphlets we found in the cottage, on all kinds of different activities we could do. It was a little overwhelming. We are staying on the Beara Peninsula, one of several on the southwest coast of Ireland (including the Mizen head, Sheep's Head, Iveraugh, and Dingle Peninsulas). Beara is the "undiscovered" peninsula, because it is significantly less-touristed than the others. Some of the tourist info we picked up on Counties Kerry and Cork (both of which are in Beara) completely omitted it.

One thing was sure, though, I did NOT feel like driving much today. We decided to try out one of the several walks that started within a few kilometers of the cottage, the "Lady's Way". Having learned nothing from our excursion in Killarney Nat'l Park yesterday (to the waterfall), Doc left the planning up to me. I took a good look at the map, figured out where to leave the car, and we were off!

The walk started right next to the pub we almost ate at last night, but had decided was too busy. There were signs pointing the way, so we were reasonably sure this was actually the starting point, and not some random road. The road was a little one-lane track (what I've seen called a "Jeep road" elsewhere, or double-track) that climbed up past the pub, through farms and alongside holiday cottages. It was mostly quiet, but several cars passed us, presumably on their way to holiday cottages (it's a Bank Holiday this weekend, so everyone seems to be traveling).

We saw a LOT of sheep. Some of them very shaggy.

So shaggy that clumps of their wool get caught on the barbed wire! Sheep pretty much roam at will, and completely ignore the wire, so I can only assume it's meant to deter human trespassers.

We reached the top of the road and had beautiful views down towards Killamagoue Bay.

We saw mostly sheep, but also a few cows-- mostly babies!

We didn't see any signs or other indication that we were actually on a hiking path for a long time, and started to wonder if somehow we made a wrong turn somewhere (although there were no turns anywhere along the road...). Finally we passed a couple of guys and asked them if we were headed in the right direction, and they confirmed that we were. A little while further on we came to a signpost that further confirmed that we were on an actual official hiking route.

And a sign for cheese!! Of course, we followed it. Who wouldn't?!

On the way we passed this strange sign on the gate to a house that was for sale. "Any person who omits to shut and fasten this gate is liable for a PENALTY not exceeding FORTY SHILLINGS." We weren't quite sure how such a penalty would be enforced...

We turned off the main road (well, the main hiking track) and continued up a hill, following the signs for cheese.

There were some nice views on the way up...

We walked up to a farmhouse, where a guy with impressively long hair and a matching beard seemed to be tinkering around with some farm equipment. He seemed surprised to see us, and said that he had taken down all of his signs because he was almost out of cheese. I guess he hadn't taken down *all* of them, though. He said that he still had some cheese left, though, and invited us in to his little sunroom to wait while he retrieved it. On the couch inside, he had the EXACT same blanket that Doc has! I might have gasped a little when I saw it. We mentioned it to him, and he said that everyone in the 1970s much have had the same blanket. :P

We stood and chatted with him for a little while. As we talked, his accent seemed to get less and less Irish until he confessed that he's actually English. Hm, that explains it. He said that a group of Russians comes to visit him every year to buy an entire wheel of cheese to take back to wherever they work in Co. Cork. (He said he knew they were Russian because they reeked of vodka. Hm... okay...). 

He went off on a little tirade about the state of beer in Ireland. For such a beer-loving country, he complained, they had really archaic laws about pubs. He had wanted to open a little brewery along the Ring of Kerry, for people on the giant bus tours (clearly offering alcohol to the private drivers, at least explicitly, is not the best or most responsible idea). But when he had gone to get a license, they told him that they weren't issuing any new licenses (and hadn't since the early 1900s, or something), and he'd have to buy a license off of another pub that was closing. Once a pub had a license, they were obliged to contract with one or more of the big brewing companies. And once they agreed to carry one beer, for example, Guinness, they had to carry all of the beers and liquors brewed by that company. So, Guinness is owned by a big English brewer (Diageo), and any pub that carries Guinness also carries a slew of other stuff-- including Bailey's Irish Cream, which I will never disparage, but was still shocked to learn is produced by the same company that makes Guinness. I guess they have a monopoly on iconic Irish liquors. And they're English. There's some irony for you.

(side note: in my wiki-research on Diageo, I discovered that they also market and distribute Ron Zacapa, the best Guatemalan rum. GASP. Some other well-known Diageo brands: Tusker beer [Tanzania], Red Stripe, Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff, and Captain Morgan. And they distribute Jose Cuervo in the US [but not internationally].)

All of this was meant to explain the dearth of microbrews in the country (there are a couple of beers labeled "craft-brewed", but from what I can gather there aren't many regulations on what counts as "craft-brewed" here, whereas in the US they'd have to actually meet certain regulations, such as not being produced by a huge multi-national brewery... which these beers are). It was sad to me that a country famous for a particular beer was actually monopolized by that beer's brewer. And a waterier version of it called Murphy's, similarly produced by a rival multi-national brewery (Heineken).

By contrast, he said, in the UK pubs are required by law to circulate through the beers of small, local producers. So each week they'll have a keg or two of some local brewer's latest concoction for sale, and it might be the only place you can buy it. That sounded pretty cool.

5 euro's worth of farmhouse cheddar in hand (err, backpack), we headed back down the road to be on our way.

Doc came across a huge tuft of wool in the road:

Smelled okay, so he put it in his backpack...

The sheep were really attentive to us. We could see them staring at us from quite a ways off the path.

We crested a little hill and decided to stop to have the tea and cookies we had packed. We climbed up off the road a little ways, about a quarter of the way up Knockatee Hill (according to our maps). The hill was full of giant boulders and rocks, and sheep, of course. Not a bad view, eh? These were the last of our delicious wedding cookies :'(

We sat and enjoyed the view for a while, until our tea got bitter and undrinkable. I noticed some teeny little flowers that looked like mini-succulents.

Done with our snack, we headed back to the road and came upon four sheep in our way. They were not amused with our trespassing on their territory. They stood and stared at us for a little while, and then took off running straight down the road. Then they stopped and watched us continue, and turned and ran again. Finally they found an open gate off the road and ran in there instead. (Note the adorable, fuzzy baby. Doc tried to catch him ;)).

(They eventually ran in to this pretty little pastoral scene...)

The road we were on ended at the church, a few km from where we had parked the car. We found a dirt track that cut through the woods, instead, and hoped that it headed back to the bay and the pub (and the parking lot).

Instead, it let out almost directly across from the entrance to Dereen Gardens, another local attraction. According to our watches we had about an hour left before they closed, but had noticed last night that they didn't actually close the gates.

We went in, and decided to explore the grounds a little. There were a number of family-friendly (i.e. stroller-accessible) walks through the gardens, which were more like a lightly-managed forest preserve. There were some areas that had clearly been planted, but most seemed pretty wild.

So, I took a bunch of pictures in a row of Doc climbing this cool tree we saw on one of the paths... and the camera did this automatically!!!!! Pretty nifty.

(I remember taking a whole class on how to make animated .GIFs when I was a kid...)

We decided to take the path down toward the boathouse:

The path continued out onto a little peninsula that looked like it might disappear during high tide.

We wandered back into the woods, and explored some view points built back when the grounds were a holiday home for English nobility.

There was this really cool tunnel made of branches bending over the path.

The whole place was a really interesting combination of woodland and man-made garden features.

The path ended right at the entrance (how convenient), and we walked back down to the regional road that led to the pub. There weren't many cars out, but the ones that passed us were going pretty quickly for that narrow and twisty of a road (maybe 40-50 mph?). We were a little worried that they couldn't see us, and there was no shoulder (even though this was a designated walking route), so we hopped over the bank down into the woods on the side of the road.

We came across several impromptu garbage dumps, as well as a cache of (presumably) animal bones, including this jaw. We tried to identify the animal based on its teeth, but that is definitely not our area of expertise.

There were more nice views over people's fields to the bay.

Finally we made it back to the pub (which is also a bed and breakfast!), which was much quieter than yesterday but still pretty full of people. We found a table at the back, and Doc went to order us two salmon sandwiches for 5.50 euro each. It was the kind of place where you got the impression that everyone already knew each other, which made us a little uncomfortable. There were a decent number of people sitting and standing at the bar with drinks, all chatting with each other, but not many eating. I guess we were a bit early for the dinner rush... or late? The tables outside by the waterfront were all full when we came in, so perhaps dinner had come and gone already.

Our sandwiches were surprisingly good for pub food-- real salmon fillet went in to the salmon salad, not canned! You could tell because there were bits of skin and a good number of sizeable chunks of meat, instead of all pulverized fish pulp. The sandwiches were so big that each of us could only finish half, so we wrapped the leftovers up in a napkin and took them home for later. We ended up scraping the salad out of the bread (which was just brown sandwich bread).

At "home" we lit a fire in the fireplace (Doc demonstrating his pyrotechnic skills par excellance :)), made some "drinking chocolate", and read until it got dark, which is quite late!! It was still reasonably light out (the sun had just started to set) around 10pm.