{"id":7231,"date":"2016-06-05T07:00:38","date_gmt":"2016-06-05T06:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/janetgover.com\/?p=7231"},"modified":"2020-12-30T15:44:54","modified_gmt":"2020-12-30T15:44:54","slug":"the-wild-atlantic-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/?p=7231","title":{"rendered":"The Wild Atlantic Way"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The
The Connemara section of the drive was full of wonderful bays and inlets – and many grey ponies.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When I first heard of the Wild Atlantic Way \u2013 the very name sounded exciting. So I googled it, and then last week I drove along it. Or at least, a small part of the southern section of it.<\/p>\n

The Wild Atlantic Ways refers to the roads that run up the west coast of Ireland \u2013 where the Atlantic Ocean meets land for the first time in some 2,000 miles. I had visions of huge waves crashing against rocks, and gales blowing wildly.<\/p>\n

I am sure that happens. But for my visit, the sun shone and the waves crashed gently against the rocks.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not to say the trip was disappointing \u2013 in fact, it was far from it.<\/p>\n

The scenery was nothing short of spectacular.<\/p>\n

Ireland is, as promised, very green. For someone who grew up with the reds and browns of the Australian outback, all that green really is something worth looking at.<\/p>\n

And it was fascinating to see the fields, all enclosed by dry stone walls. It seems the average Irish farm is about 80 acres. Keep in mind, in my head, paddocks run to thousands of acres. And enclosures the size of the ones I saw in Ireland are actually yards we use when we bring stock in for handling.<\/p>\n

\"The
The stone walls form a fascinating pattern on the landscape<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It\u2019s more than just the size of the paddocks\u2026 err\u2026 fields. It\u2019s the number of animals per acre. In fact \u2013 that sentence says it all really. In some parts of Australia we talk about the number of acres per head of stock- that is to say how many acres it takes to feed one animal for a year. In Ireland, there seemed to be\u00a0many beasts per acre. But then, there\u2019s all that lovely green grass that is sadly lacking in vast areas of Australia. I guess that has something to do with the rain. Ireland gets a lot of it. Australia unfortunately misses out.<\/p>\n

Mind you, parts of Ireland looked pretty barren too.<\/p>\n

\"This
This was in County Clare – these grey bare hills went for miles.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But that coastline kept drawing my eye. It was totally spectacular. In paces it was filled with thousands of tiny bays and inlets. In other places, there were towering cliffs that were home to tens of thousands of sea birds.<\/p>\n

\"The
The Cliffs of Moher in County Clare. We took a cruise along the bottom and met rather a lot of sea birds.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It wasn\u2019t as wild as I expected \u2013 at least, not in the way I expected, but none the less, it was totally fascinating. A week was far too short a time to see even a fraction of it. Next week, I’ll post some pictures of the amazing faces I discovered carved into ruined castles and abbeys.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I first heard of the Wild Atlantic Way \u2013 the very name sounded exciting. So I googled it, and then last week I drove along it. Or at least, a small…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-travels"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7g6jm-1SD","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7231"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7241,"href":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7231\/revisions\/7241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}