Katherine in Ireland Part II (or, it only rained some of the time and there was hiking)
I have learned some new general things about Ireland, which are: whatever is in the soil here, it makes hydrangeas have very, very bright colors... instead of light pink or blue they are all dark magenta or vivid purple; pretty much every thing or place can and will at some point be described to one as 'wee'; people really hate when you give them £20 notes, and sometimes give you discounts to avoid such.
and now for the adventures. Cave Hill Nature Park, just north of Belfast, was designed pretty much for the sole purpose of making me relive painful childhood memories, literally. The paths are well kept and easy to hike, but they're generally not very wide, and every one of them is lined with stinging nettles, as if they know exactly where to grow in order to attack the maximum number of people. But with my extensive nettle experience, I knew that I should neither brush past them nor use their stalks to help pull myself uphill, so I showed them.
That same Cave Hill Park, north of Belfast, is reached by taking a city bus up the Antrim Road. It's called the Antrim Road because it eventually leads to Antrim, just as the Bangor road leads to Bangor, and Dublin Road leads more or less in the direction of Dublin. So I got off the bus at Cave Hill Road, proud of my ability to figure things out without asking someone where to stop. After about a half hour walking up Cave Hill Road, I began to be more tired than proud (as it leads up towards a mountain, CHR is pretty steep), but then finally I made it to an entrance sign for the park. It had been graffitied quite a lot, so I coudn't really read the map, but there was only one path, so I started out on it. After a little ways a path went off to the side, and I decided to take the road less traveled, literally, and walked up the path until it became a thicket. I enjoyed the fruits of my labor, literally, by eating the blackberries in the thicket, and eventually found the visitor's center, which is right on the Antrim road, a couple of stops farther than Cave Hill Road. So I hiked up the route that I originally meant to take, past old caves in the cliffs and up to a hillside where I could see across Belfast and out to the Isle of Man, and then hiked back down to catch a bus back to town. This all took much longer than it sounds. But it was at least partly sunny, which was amazing sine the forecast said it would rain all week, so it was a nice day in the end.
The next morning I got up early to catch the Antrim Coaster (named after the county, not the town; not actually a 'coaster' per se, but instead a rather old bus) up the coast to the Glens of Antrim. The rain started as we left, and got harder as we drove, so my plan of hiking up in the Glens was not looking so promising. The owner of the Ballyeamon Camping Barn (not actually a barn, but instead a big house kind of thing) picked me up in Cushendall, and I went on some errands with her on her way back to the barn, meeting an Egyptian baker and learning a lot about Irish recycling, which I will not repeat because it's as interesting as it sounds. Liz, the owner, is a professional storyteller, and has been basically all over the world to tell stories, so she usually hires a 'barn minder' to take care of the place when she's away, in exchange for free room and board. Liz went on about one of her barn minders who was from Amherst, as if I might know her somehow, but I didn't. But on a wall in the barn was a picture of Julia Bozer (from Harvard) and her boyfriend (at the time? still? i don't know) Walt. Apparently Walt was a barn minder last year, and Julia came to visit him. So that was weird. Then Liz drove me to the foot of the Glenariffe Forest Park, the 'Queen of the Glens,' and I hiked up past waterfalls and ferns and more different kinds of moss than I really think need to exist. The rain, which was lighter by that point, actually made it a better hike, because the waterfalls were aparently better than they have been all summer, and I would have gotten wet from the spray anyway. After Liz dropped me off, I didn't see any other human person for the rest of the afternoon until I hiked out of the top of the glen and crossed some fields to get back to the barn. And even then most of the living things I saw were sheep - sheep that, given the fact that they were all 50ft. away from me and they must see humans every day, very much overreacted to my presence, in the form of jumping up really spastically and running across the field in a huge group. Am not sure if I am just inherently frightening to sheep, or if they fear blue rain jackets, or if they just at that time noticed how full of their poop the path was, and decided to get away from it.
But anyway, I got dry and went into town for dinner and some trad at a pub, and the next morning set out for Ballintoy, where I dropped my bags off and caught another bus on to Giant's Causeway, pretty much the main purpose of me coming to the north. And it was definitely worth it, if only to hear people explaining to other people what they thought basalt was. The National Trust maintains a path from Giant's Causeway back along the coast to Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge, which is just past Ballintoy, and since it was early afternoon, I thought I'd walk back. The signpost said it was 10 miles to Carrick-a-Rede, and I figured it'd be 9 miles to Ballintoy, and I'd be back in 3 hours. The path is along cliff tops, and has view after spectacular view, but it also has many more steep parts than you would think, and stiles every few hundred yards to climb over, and apparently, 10 miles is much farther than I really can concieve of, me not being very good with estimating things like distance. And about 2/3 of the way the path gets very boggy and hard to follow, so I had the bright idea of branching off to follow the very infrequently trafficked road, not really thinking of how much less give asphalt has than grass. So I was pretty tired when I finally reached my hostel. On my walk I learned: cows are either just as scared of me as sheep, or seem to want to attack me; September is apparently stile-rebuilding-time, so half the stiles were half made; the Spanish Armada came around the north coast of Ireland, which was a pretty poor idea considering more than half the ships are now at the bottom of north coast coves. But you can't see any wreckage, so you might as well not learn about that on a windy clifftop; even when it's sunny for a while, with the ridiculously strong winds on the Causeway Coast, there will be clouds and probably rain within a half hour, after which the cycle will probably repeat.
Today was easy compared to the past few. I hiked over to Carrick-a-Rede and went across the rope bridge, which is some amount of feet above the water and spans some distance between the little island and the larger island. There was a camera crew there, filming some sort of tourist video, so I had to wait to cross the bridge while they did about 15 takes of this man walking across the bridge jauntily, then doing this sort of misstep off the side of the plank, and catching himself on the rope handrail. There's mesh between the plank and the handrail though, so it's not as if he was going to fall. Later, when I was crossing back to the big island, they were doing takes of the same man crossing in front of a lady, and freaking her out by making the bridge sway. Then the lady would get a very scared look on her face and hang on tight on the middle of the bridge, and refuse to cross. So I'm not really sure how this is going to be useful for drawing tourists, but then I'm not a filmmaker. I caught a bus to Coleraine, which seems not a very nice place, and then a train to Derry/Londonderry, which all the people call Derry and all the transit literature calls Londonderry. I go to Galway tomorrow, so there'll be less hiking and more music probably in my next email.
as always, send me your address and i'll send you a postcard. only not until i'm back in the Republic, because when I bought stamps I didn't think about the fact that you can't send things from Northern Ireland with a stamp that says 'Eire' on it. so, patience everyone.
and now for the adventures. Cave Hill Nature Park, just north of Belfast, was designed pretty much for the sole purpose of making me relive painful childhood memories, literally. The paths are well kept and easy to hike, but they're generally not very wide, and every one of them is lined with stinging nettles, as if they know exactly where to grow in order to attack the maximum number of people. But with my extensive nettle experience, I knew that I should neither brush past them nor use their stalks to help pull myself uphill, so I showed them.
That same Cave Hill Park, north of Belfast, is reached by taking a city bus up the Antrim Road. It's called the Antrim Road because it eventually leads to Antrim, just as the Bangor road leads to Bangor, and Dublin Road leads more or less in the direction of Dublin. So I got off the bus at Cave Hill Road, proud of my ability to figure things out without asking someone where to stop. After about a half hour walking up Cave Hill Road, I began to be more tired than proud (as it leads up towards a mountain, CHR is pretty steep), but then finally I made it to an entrance sign for the park. It had been graffitied quite a lot, so I coudn't really read the map, but there was only one path, so I started out on it. After a little ways a path went off to the side, and I decided to take the road less traveled, literally, and walked up the path until it became a thicket. I enjoyed the fruits of my labor, literally, by eating the blackberries in the thicket, and eventually found the visitor's center, which is right on the Antrim road, a couple of stops farther than Cave Hill Road. So I hiked up the route that I originally meant to take, past old caves in the cliffs and up to a hillside where I could see across Belfast and out to the Isle of Man, and then hiked back down to catch a bus back to town. This all took much longer than it sounds. But it was at least partly sunny, which was amazing sine the forecast said it would rain all week, so it was a nice day in the end.
The next morning I got up early to catch the Antrim Coaster (named after the county, not the town; not actually a 'coaster' per se, but instead a rather old bus) up the coast to the Glens of Antrim. The rain started as we left, and got harder as we drove, so my plan of hiking up in the Glens was not looking so promising. The owner of the Ballyeamon Camping Barn (not actually a barn, but instead a big house kind of thing) picked me up in Cushendall, and I went on some errands with her on her way back to the barn, meeting an Egyptian baker and learning a lot about Irish recycling, which I will not repeat because it's as interesting as it sounds. Liz, the owner, is a professional storyteller, and has been basically all over the world to tell stories, so she usually hires a 'barn minder' to take care of the place when she's away, in exchange for free room and board. Liz went on about one of her barn minders who was from Amherst, as if I might know her somehow, but I didn't. But on a wall in the barn was a picture of Julia Bozer (from Harvard) and her boyfriend (at the time? still? i don't know) Walt. Apparently Walt was a barn minder last year, and Julia came to visit him. So that was weird. Then Liz drove me to the foot of the Glenariffe Forest Park, the 'Queen of the Glens,' and I hiked up past waterfalls and ferns and more different kinds of moss than I really think need to exist. The rain, which was lighter by that point, actually made it a better hike, because the waterfalls were aparently better than they have been all summer, and I would have gotten wet from the spray anyway. After Liz dropped me off, I didn't see any other human person for the rest of the afternoon until I hiked out of the top of the glen and crossed some fields to get back to the barn. And even then most of the living things I saw were sheep - sheep that, given the fact that they were all 50ft. away from me and they must see humans every day, very much overreacted to my presence, in the form of jumping up really spastically and running across the field in a huge group. Am not sure if I am just inherently frightening to sheep, or if they fear blue rain jackets, or if they just at that time noticed how full of their poop the path was, and decided to get away from it.
But anyway, I got dry and went into town for dinner and some trad at a pub, and the next morning set out for Ballintoy, where I dropped my bags off and caught another bus on to Giant's Causeway, pretty much the main purpose of me coming to the north. And it was definitely worth it, if only to hear people explaining to other people what they thought basalt was. The National Trust maintains a path from Giant's Causeway back along the coast to Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge, which is just past Ballintoy, and since it was early afternoon, I thought I'd walk back. The signpost said it was 10 miles to Carrick-a-Rede, and I figured it'd be 9 miles to Ballintoy, and I'd be back in 3 hours. The path is along cliff tops, and has view after spectacular view, but it also has many more steep parts than you would think, and stiles every few hundred yards to climb over, and apparently, 10 miles is much farther than I really can concieve of, me not being very good with estimating things like distance. And about 2/3 of the way the path gets very boggy and hard to follow, so I had the bright idea of branching off to follow the very infrequently trafficked road, not really thinking of how much less give asphalt has than grass. So I was pretty tired when I finally reached my hostel. On my walk I learned: cows are either just as scared of me as sheep, or seem to want to attack me; September is apparently stile-rebuilding-time, so half the stiles were half made; the Spanish Armada came around the north coast of Ireland, which was a pretty poor idea considering more than half the ships are now at the bottom of north coast coves. But you can't see any wreckage, so you might as well not learn about that on a windy clifftop; even when it's sunny for a while, with the ridiculously strong winds on the Causeway Coast, there will be clouds and probably rain within a half hour, after which the cycle will probably repeat.
Today was easy compared to the past few. I hiked over to Carrick-a-Rede and went across the rope bridge, which is some amount of feet above the water and spans some distance between the little island and the larger island. There was a camera crew there, filming some sort of tourist video, so I had to wait to cross the bridge while they did about 15 takes of this man walking across the bridge jauntily, then doing this sort of misstep off the side of the plank, and catching himself on the rope handrail. There's mesh between the plank and the handrail though, so it's not as if he was going to fall. Later, when I was crossing back to the big island, they were doing takes of the same man crossing in front of a lady, and freaking her out by making the bridge sway. Then the lady would get a very scared look on her face and hang on tight on the middle of the bridge, and refuse to cross. So I'm not really sure how this is going to be useful for drawing tourists, but then I'm not a filmmaker. I caught a bus to Coleraine, which seems not a very nice place, and then a train to Derry/Londonderry, which all the people call Derry and all the transit literature calls Londonderry. I go to Galway tomorrow, so there'll be less hiking and more music probably in my next email.
as always, send me your address and i'll send you a postcard. only not until i'm back in the Republic, because when I bought stamps I didn't think about the fact that you can't send things from Northern Ireland with a stamp that says 'Eire' on it. so, patience everyone.
posted by Katherine at 1:43 PM
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