Senior Morton's World Tour

Kids are done, work is done, Grand Kids…Eh… they'll be here when we get back!

The Ring of Kerry ……

Posted by laurie and jill in Adventures on 10 15th, 2011

Saturday 8th October

Limerick is where King John signed a Treaty in 1691 when his castle was attacked by the local lords in the Jacobite Uprising. Today you can still see the repairs made by the Jacobite canons. It must have given King John a real fright! A short time later we passed Adare Golf Course where a number of celebrity games have been held. In the town was a church built in 1230, firstly as a fortress then converted to a church as things quietened down. As we travelled, the weather closed in to heavy fog, so we couldn’t appreciate what we were told was a very beautiful place, but we could see the wild fuchsias growing prolifically along the road.

This is Daniel O ‘Connell area, where he was born and where he retired to. Most towns have an O’Connell Street in his memory. The clouds lifted for short periods and we could see the high rolling hills flowing into the Atlantic and right across the ocean lay America. It is claimed that Saint Brendan sailed to America from around here in a cowhide shell boat in the 5th Century. An adventurer recently built a replica and set off and actually reached America. Ireland has many fresh water streams and they are full of salmon and trout. You will only ever have wild salmon here! There is no aquaculture.

The weather is against us, but we meandered along narrow country roads going around the MacGillicuddy’s Reeks. These are the highest mountains in Ireland. The trip is called the Ring of Kerry and is supposed to be some of the most picturesque in Ireland. We didn’t get to see much of it, but we have postcards of what it looks like in sunshine. This is where Gaelic is the first language. As the weather was deteriorating and we couldn’t see much, our tour guide decided to head straight to where we were staying the night at Kenmore, just outside Killarney and we spent the remainder of the afternoon shopping in the local village.

In the evening we had dinner in an 18th Century farmhouse that was also a shabeen in the early days ( an illegal distillery). The owner gave us a short tour of his farm which is run as a historical replica of life in the 18th century. We had a great Irish meal in the house consisting of vegetable soup (root vegetables only), a big plate of Irish Stew and mashed potato and Apple Crumble. After this we learnt how to make soda bread, which everyone ate with their meals in the olden days and then stepped outside again to learn how to make “potcheen” – distilled from potatoes and still illegal. To finish it off we had to have a taste, so we were all given a glass, but the host had two glasses. We were not permitted to drink our “potcheen” until our host had proposed a toast and thrown one of the glasses over his right shoulder for the fairies. If you don’t include the fairies in your tasting, they will do bad things. Who in their right mind would want to tempt fate?!! The taste – it was different!