Ireland Day 5

This morning we headed out to Clifden Castle.  It's a lovely old manor house, built in about 1818, but has since fallen into ruin after ownership changed hands several times.  It's such an interesting thing to consider what life might have been like for the people who lived here.  It's on a gorgeous spot, up on a little hill, overlooking an inlet of the ever present Atlantic Ocean.

Much of the structure is gone, now, and you have to use your imagination to figure out what rooms might have been.

We traipsed through boggy wet grounds to explore inside.  This is apparently a very wet spring, one of the more wet on record, and there are whole fields that are submerged from the excessive rains.  It's wonderful traveling weather, but we stay pretty bundled up!

They simply don't build buildings like they used to!  The arches are so well crafted, and the stone work so carefully done.

There is a long entry to the manor house, which, along with its placement on the hill, would have afforded it protection and advance notice should anyone come towards it with ill intent.

It is sheep season here in Ireland, with thousands of tiny lambs, with their darling black faces.  The sheep are dyed...we found conflicting explanations of this, but for the adult female sheep, they are colored when the male sheep mount them to mate, so the farmers know which sheep have mated, and with which male.  I'm not really sure why the lambs are colored.  Perhaps they are colored the same as their mothers?  But they are seriously the cutest things.  Much like baby animals of any kind, they are playful, running around their more sedate adult counterparts, darting in and out of legs, running, and clearly playing with each other.  These two were resting from their play.

We continued on from Clifden along Sky Road, which travels along the inlet, and along Killary Fjord, which was stunning.  We stopped at a little hotel right on the Fjord, and ate a delicious lunch there.  As we drove on through the countryside heading back to our hotel, there were some stunning views.  It's still pretty early in the spring, and as I said, very wet, so it hasn't quite greened up as much as it will, but the stormy misty weather is so fun, and it makes everything look so mystical.

The Irish countryside is very interesting.  Sheep are everywhere in the fields, and you'll be driving along with enormous vistas of fields and valleys, then suddenly you'll be driving into a little tiny village.  And the roads!  These country roads are SO narrow, but Jon did a great job driving on the left side, and avoided collisions!

In this little tiny village there was a lost lamb!  He was wandering around in the middle of the road looking kind of bewildered.  We don't know how far he had wandered, because there were not any fields with sheep immediately adjacent to this village, so he'd probably gone a long way.  Poor little guy.