Friday, June 20, 2008

The Burren


After we left Kinvara, on the way to Cork, we drove upwards through a rocky highland called the Burren, apparently the same basic rock formation as the Aran Islands, probably once linked by a causeway. Here is a photo of some flowers by a ruined church wall at the bottom of the hills.

We stopped at one scenic point where Chris and I scrambled to the top of a hill in search of a rock cairn that was on the map. We found it! And here you see Chris lurking inside, if you look really carefully. Chris seems to like crawling inside of small spaces and caves -- he spent most of his time at Blarney Castle crawling around these caves underneath it that were used for dungeons.

On top of the Burren, there were several neolithic portal tombs. People are still arguing about whether they were primarily tombs, or maybe more general places of worship, where people happened to get buried, not unlike a church and churchyard today. Which brings up another interesting thing. Most of the ruined churches we saw had not been used for centuries as churches, but the church yards are mostly still being used for burials by the people who live around them. Interesting union of past and present.

Here is one that we stopped to look at.

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