The next part of photos and journal from our family trip to Ireland, this bit is mainly about our visit to County Clare and the Cliffs of Moher. It started as part of a bigger post, but I kept adding more information about the places we visited, so I've left it as just these 2 days...
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| Sunset at Beal, County Kerry, Ireland |
Day 4 - Swimming
After all the travelling over the last few days, the kids were desperate to go to a local (ish) swimming complex with rapids, wave machine, a slide etc, so we spent the day back in Tralee going to The Aquadome. It was good fun, and great to see my daughter's excitement when they switched the wave machine on (she's never seen one before!).
In the evening, I went out for an hour or so to try and capture the sunset from Beal. I parked opposite the entrance to the wind farm, ducked under an electric fence and walked down a path past the fields of cows (
these ones). It was fine until near the bottom when one of the cows got grumpy with me, reared up and charged at me! All I had between me was a tiny electric fence, and I was just praying that they were scared of it enough to not come over. I turned away and carried on walking and they seemed to calm down, but I was a bit nervous about having to go back past them! Down on the edge of the (small) cliff, I managed to get a couple of sunset shots - the one at the start of this page and the one below:
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| Sunset over the Shannon, County Kerry, Ireland |
Day 5 - Clare and the Cliffs of Moher
Today was going to be a day of travelling to Clare, specifically with the Cliff of Moher in mind as a destination. The map below shows the rough location of the house at A and the Cliffs of Moher at B.
First off we went to Tarbert where there's a ferry across the Shannon to Kilimer. On both sides of the river are power stations almost opposite each other. On the Clare side is Moneypoint, which is Irelands largest power station and only coal fired one, capable of producing in excess of 900MW. It was started in 1979 and took 8 years to complete. The chimneys are 218m tall and are the largest free-standing structures in the country:
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| Moneypoint Power Station - Ireland's largest power station |
Looking back the other way, Tarbert power station was built in 1969 and is oil fired with a maximum output of a little over 600MW. The power station chimneys, while smaller than Moneypoint, are still among the tallest in Ireland, standing 151 metres tall:
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| Tarbert Oil Power Station |
We drove for a while, and stopped at Kilkee as the clouds were starting to part. It wasn't a long stop, but we parked near to the massive bay area, and as always seems to be the case in Ireland the tide was out and there were rock pools to explore!
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| Searching at Kilkee |
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| Kilkee Crab |
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| Kilkee |
From here, we continued the drive up through Clare to Liscannor and the Cliffs of Moher. The cliffs, at their peak, rise 214m out of the Atlantic and are an amazing sight:
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| The Cliffs of Moher |
Unfortunately, the weather had started to close in and it wasn't the best for taking beautifully lit shots of the area, but you can get a sense of scale from the next few:
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| The Cliffs |
The image below is a crop from the one above - it's the point just right of the centre where the cliff starts to descend. I do love my 5D mark 2 - being able to get a crop showing the people at that distance and with a17mm lens is amazing!
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| Crop from the above picture |
I also had the 7D with me with the 70-200 f4L IS, and I took a few shots of the same place. Here, you can see a couple having their photo taken, and they are on the edge of what is probably a 500-600ft drop with no safety rail at all!
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| Smile! |
I need to point out here that the arrangement at the visitor centre was that a large area of the cliff edge had large slate slabs as walls and you would have had to make quite an effort to put yourself in danger. However, to each end of these, there were fences and warnings which most people were completely ignoring. I quite liked the idea - it means that you can make the decision to go somewhere dangerous but beautiful, but the risk is all yours. You just wouldn't get that in England - the state has to hold your hand so there would be a 24ft high fence and armed guard at each end :( Anyway, I didn't go over as it didn't seem appropriate with the children watching and a push chair! But plenty of people did:
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| Ignoring the Warning - you had to dodge a fence to walk this path |
As I was armed with all sorts of photographic paraphernalia (two bodies, 3 lenses, filters, tripod, timer etc), I decided to set up shop for half an hour by a piece of the wall and do some long exposures with the 10-stop ND filter (with the 5D mark 2 and 17-40L). This one is of the highest point of the cliffs - 214m above the ocean. On top is O'Briens Tower, built by Sir Cornelius O'Brien in order to impress female visitors!
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| The Cliffs and O'Briens Tower |
And here's another view looking South towards Hags Head:
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| The Cliffs, South towards Hag Head |
When we left the cliffs, we headed North to Knocknagroagh and down a scenic route past Gregan's East - there are a set of hairpin bends called "The Screwdriver" which were originally meant for horses and can be quite interesting in the car! I set up in the viewpoint and took this panorama (like all the pictures on the blog, you can click for a larger view):
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| The Screwdriver - Hairpin bends at Gregan's East, County Clare |
The landscape there is stunning - known as the Burren, this area consists of carboniferous limestone slabs and has an amazing look about it - almost like a moonscape:
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| Part of The Burren |
We drove back down through Clare, stopping at a few interesting points along the way, and finally got back down to Kilimer to wait for the Ferry. As we had a bit of time, I again got the tripod out, this time with the 7D. Before going on this trip, I had purchased an adapter ring to step up the 67mm front thread on my 70-200 f4L IS to 77mm, so I could use both the 10 stop ND filter and the Lee filter holder. The first shot below is from the 5D mark 2 with 17-40L and 10 stop filter:
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| View to Tarbert and County Kerry from Kilimer, County Clare |
And this one is from the 7D with 70-200 f4L and 10 stop filter - I reduced the clarity and increased the contrast to bring out the ruins of the pier. I was a pity that I couldn't get to a position which would have separated the pier from the horizon, and I really like the contrast on the wood in this shot, but I think it gets a bit lost in the background:
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| Old Pier, Kilimer, County Clare |
The last shot of the day was the sun breaking through the cloud and shining on what look like dock cranes on a jutting piece of land in County Clare:
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| Sun on Cranes in County Clare |
Other Parts
This post is part of a series about our holiday to Ireland:
Ireland 2010 Days 1-3 - Travelling, Ballybunion and the Dingle Peninsula
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