Sunday was almost a bust. Our lack of luck with alarms and phones finally came to a head and we woke up twenty minutes before our tour for the Cliffs of Moher was to leave. However, Frank at the Kinlay House was kind enough to ring up the Galway Tour Company while us girls frantically got ready. They sent a shuttle to collect us and we made the tour with a minute to spare.

Our driver was Desmond Murray, a hilarious and sometimes inappropriate old Irish man. At one point he told us to call him The King of the Burren as he had been giving these tours for years and was a familiar sight through out the Burren.

Our first stop was the Dunguaire Castle in Kinvara, a small sea port village on Galway Bay.

We stopped shortly after Kinvara on a hill to get pictures of the slightly dreary Irish countryside in County Galway.

Shortly after, we entered the Burren. This area is one of the largest karst landscapes…to put it really simply, it’s rocky. Our guide Desmond told us a quote of Edmund Ludlow saying, “The Burren is a country where there is not enough water to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him…and yet their cattle are very fat; for the grass growing in turfs of earth, of two or three foot square, that lie between the rocks, which are of limestone, is very sweet and nourishing.”

Another stop on the tour was the Ballyalban Fairy Fort in County Clare. This fairy fort, or ring fort, or raths, were believed to be full of the Druids’ magic. Death was said to come to those who destroyed these forts and so there are some that have been left untouched…like this one. Apparently, leprechauns are also quite common in fairy forts.

Visitors and fairy believers tie strips of fabric and tissue to the tree for good luck.

We were lucky enough to see a leprechaun in the circle…super rare. They move so fast.

Further on in the Burren we saw a portal tomb. This structure has been there for thousands of years.

More of the Burren.

The next portal tomb we saw was the Poulnabrone Dolmen. It is reported to date back to the Neolithic Period.

After the Poulnabrone Dolmen, we stopped briefly at the ruins of Leamaneh Castle.