April 23, 2005 - Kinsale in the sun.

The fog had lifted and the sky was clearing a bit by the time we were finished with breakfast the next morning, so we decided to sally forth to downtown Kinsale again and take a bus tour of the area in the afternoon. We tried our luck at visiting St. Multose Church, but it was locked up tight so we walked up and over a couple of blocks to see Desmond Castle. The castle was a pretty small castle from the 1500s that had been confiscated by the English after the Irish were defeated in the battle of Kinsale. They used it as a customs house and then a jail for many years where they kept French and American sailors captured in various wars.

But after renovation in the 1980s, the interior was converted to, of all things, a wine museum. It was a curious theme for an old castle, but the exhibits about the wine trade and Ireland's place in that traffic were actually quite interesting. Apparently the local folks made barrels from the oak forests in the area, and the French used these for shipping wine. The Irish also had cultivated vineyards over the centuries, starting with the monks in the middle ages or even the Celts before that. Who knew?

After completing our tour of Desmond Castle, we retraced our steps to the church but it was still closed. To kill some time we started visiting the shops, of which there are quite a few in Kinsale. I found a compendium of Yeats' poetry in a bookstore that I picked up, Lois found a teapot, and Monika found a ceramic thimble that had a Celtic harp on it. We also finally had lunch at Patsy's Place where Lois had eaten on her previous visit many years back, and then we made one final attempt to get into the church.

But the third time was the charm, and we were able to wander around inside St. Multose Church for a while. Although the church from the outside looked rather gray and grim, the interior appearance was quite light and cheerful. In part the large stained glass windows imparted a mellow coloration to the interior, and in part it was due to the interior being painted in light colors.

The chancel area had the largest stained glass window as a centerpiece, of course, but it also had a beautiful wooden parquet floor. The vaulted ceiling had been painted white and that also helped give an impression of airiness. In the back I found a baptismal font that just possibly was old enough to have been used to baptize my great grandmother in 1835, but I couldn't see the rector anywhere to ask him how old that was. Still, it was a very pretty church and for me personally it was nice to sit and contemplate the marriage of my great great grandparents there, the baptism of my great grandmother, and other possible family events.

The time for the bus tour was drawing near, so we hustled back down the streets to the information center to catch the 2:00 p.m. local tour. For me it was wonderful to sit back and let someone else do the driving on those crazily narrow Irish roads; at last I could really enjoy the scenery. Of course, right after we started and dove out of the city, we immediately ran into a fogbank-wouldn't you know it!

Our first stop was at Old Head, and there we watched the waves crashing against the cliffs. The cliffs were quite black and sheer, and the waves crashing against them reminded me of the Cliffs of Moher, albeit on a smaller scale. Curiously enough, there was a golf course out on the peninsula right above the cliffs, but the fee for playing was 240 Euro, so I wasn't really tempted. Besides, I don't know how to play golf and learning on a course that has steep cliffs as the rough would have probably cost me a small fortune in golf balls!

We also stopped at the white, sandy beach where we had seen sailboards when we first drove into Kinsale. Although the wind was calm and we didn't see any sailboards, the ocean swells were still rolling up on the beach and some surfers were trying their luck.

On our way back to town we stopped at a statue of the Virgin Mary in a nearby grotto. Our bus driver had claimed to see the statue move, particularly at dusk, which he attributed to magnetic lines of force underlying the area. I didn't have the heart to tell him it was a common optical illusion, but the net result was a burst in tourism as word of the "miracle" spread. This phenomenon lasted until some Fundamentalists snuck in one night and beat the statue with sledgehammers to prevent idolatry. That reminded me of the smashing of Catholic church statues by the Protestants during Cromwellian times (I think), but I was surprised to hear that stuff was still going on.

Our final stop was over on the other side of the bay at Charles Fort. That turned out to be a really big star-shaped fort with large ramparts. We didn't have time to take a tour of the inside, which our bus driver said would take well over an hour, and that was too bad. But we did have time to take some pictures of Kinsale harbor from the ramparts before we re-boarded the bus to drive back to the Visitors Center.

I should mention here what I learned about driving in Ireland by watching "Neil", our bus driver, navigate the local roads with our mini-bus. I had been wondering what the speed limit was on those narrow, twisty, unmarked rural lanes, and he informed me it was 80 kilometers per hour, or about 50 miles per hour. But he kind of chuckled after he said that and added something to the effect that of course you really couldn't safely drive that fast, so essentially the speed limit was up to the driver's judgment of a safe speed for the road conditions.

Obviously Irish drivers differed on what they considered "safe" on those rural roads. Some, young males mostly, went charging down the lanes so fast that I saw there suspensions bottom out as they went roaring and bouncing past me, something that made me feel that they were on the ragged edge of losing control. But the Real Rule that Neil followed with the mini-bus and that most Irish drivers followed on those roads, was to drive just fast enough that they could come to a screeching halt if oncoming traffic suddenly appeared in front of them, following which both drivers carefully edge around each other at a slow crawl.

Neil did this when we were on a 1½-lane road and had to pass a woman jogging with a dog on the leftmost side of the lane when suddenly a commercial truck of some kind (dump truck, I think) appeared right in front of us. The timing could not have been worse in that the speeds were such that the woman, the minibus, and the truck all met at exactly the same spot in the road, and there just was not enough room for all three. Neil slammed on his brakes just enough to slow down behind the woman so that the truck could squeeze over and pass on our right, then he passed the woman and her dog. That basically is the drill in Ireland for these Close Encounters of the Traffic Kind.

I should add that for some of the rural lanes, despite the fact that 2-way traffic is allowed there is simply not enough room for 2 cars to pass on some sections, no matter how small the car. In that case, one or the other driver must simply back up to the next wider spot where the oncoming traffic can pass. The Gentle Reader may think that would be uneventful, but backing up on a 1-lane cliff road with a mountain on one side and drop off into the sea on the other is an unforgettable experience. Do not drive in these very rural sections of Ireland unless you have instantaneous reactions, nerves of steel, and a very fine judgment of both oncoming traffic and exactly where all 4 corners of your car really are.

The Irish are, as you might expect, very good at this kind of driving but even they can make mistakes. The percentage of dinged, dented, and sideswiped vehicles I saw on the road was quite high. I'm not talking about "parking lot rash" damage like in the U.S., I'm talking about serious body work type of damage. The rental car I was driving obviously had suffered in the 19,000 miles it had been driven in Ireland. It had deep dents in the left front fender and rear hatchback, plus long scratches and grooves along the right-hand side where it had scraped against someone or something. I had never picked up a rental car with that much damage in all my years in the U.S. Of course, since our car was an automatic shift and most Irish cars are standard shifts, this may also have been a "rent-to-Americans special".

I almost added to that collection of flaws when I moved over to the left while doing Broken Field Driving in a small village on the Beara Peninsula and my left mirror went "Whack!" and folded up against the car. Fortunately, it was one of those breakaway mirrors and no damage was done to our car or the delivery truck I came so close to sideswiping. There might have had an inch or two clearance between us at that point, but no more than that. I was, of course, a bit shaken by coming that close, but at worst that would have been a minor scrape. The times I really lost my deodorant while driving in Ireland were coming around those corners where rock or a stone wall is built right up to the street and you just can't see more than about 5 feet in front of you.

That type of blind corner really posed the risk of a head-on collision, which is something on my personal Top 10 list of Things To Avoid (right up there with "running out of fuel in an airplane", "getting lost over mountains in an airplane", "having a car crush your chest to the driveway", "running over your foot when you start the car" and things like that). On really, really blind corners such as a hairpin turn around a stone wall in Kinsale, I also heard Irish drivers honk to announce their presence to potential oncoming cars that they could not see. I was relieved to see that pattern, because that is what I also had finally resorted to doing on our drives on the peninsulas and while driving the road along the southern coast where blind corners, and sometimes hills, were quite frequent. I was only half joking about having a passenger regularly sounding a horn in those situations-it would off-load a task from the driver and help him keep two hands firmly on the wheel at all times, which you need to have in those situations.

Now I don't mean to give the impression that all driving in Ireland is nerve-wracking. Their "motorways" are just like U.S. interstate highways, German Autobahns, and Italian Autostrada, which is to say, relaxing limited access roads where you can toddle along in the slow-traffic left hand lane (in this case) and relax. But it is surely also true that the regional and local roads can be quite challenging. In fact, on those roads I developed some kind of tic in my driving from having so many cars suddenly appear heading straight at me. My natural instinct was to swerve right and head for the shoulder. Well, that instinct was doubly wrong in Ireland because the shoulders on these roads were typically non-existent and the oncoming traffic would be swerving to their left, which would put us on course for a head on collision. The final result was that the over-learned, automatic response kicked in milliseconds before the cognitively controlled correct response of swerving left was executed, but in those few milliseconds I would jiggle the steering wheel first right a twitch and then left a twitch. It certainly disconcerted me if not my passengers and kept me watching like a hawk for other automatic driving responses that could get me in deep trouble in Ireland. In any case, I learned a lot about Irish driving from Neil during our bus tour of the Kinsale area.

Back at the Visitor Center after the tour, we picked up the brochure for the Compass Hill walk and decided to try that. Our walk began up Main Street to O'Connell Street where we found a bowling green and the Kinsale Town Hall. The bowling green was used for a lawn version of bowling for recreation for local folks in the late 1800s, as I recall. The town hall in back of the bowling green was really an impressive looking building built from large stone blocks and featuring a façade with several large arches. On our first night in Kinsale we had seen the illuminated facade from across the bay at our B&B and had wondered what it was. The last few kilometers of our walk were basically a ring around the upper level of the large hill on that side of the harbor.

On the far side of the hill we were treated to very nice vistas of the River Badon that flows into the harbor. Before the causeway across the river was build in the 1970s, small ships could travel upriver a couple of miles, but the current low-lying bridge would prevent anything larger than a motorboat from passing through. We also saw what looked to us like a Levittown being built on the back side of the town of Kinsale. The houses were neat, tidy, and very colorful, but also built chock-a-block in very small lots. The bus driver had told us that to control growth, the law requires a residency period of 7 years before a person can build a new home. You can buy an old home, but you apparently cannot buy a lot and put up a new one. It sounded like a curious but probably effective way to slow growth, although I didn't think it would go over too well in the U.S.

After completing our circle on the top of the hill, we came back down past the old convent (now defunct-too few new nuns) and used the Spanish Steps to return to the old section of town. We had dinner one last time at Muddy Maher's pub and walked back over to our B&B to spend a final relaxing evening reading, writing, and processing the day's pictures.