To make up for what was almost a sixteen-hour day yesterday, Mer had a mellow day planned for today. We got a later start, going out in the town to look for breakfast. I picked a restaurant based on the facts that it was serving breakfast and I knew it had internet access (our hostel’s internet connection is very poor, even when it is working). I needed to update my blog, and I’d promised a few folks that I would check my e-mail daily. Word to the the wise, though – when you order your very excellent three-egg omelets, check on the price when you enter the restaurant. Two omelets and two glasses of tap water came out to over thirty dollars. Ouch.
We finished up breakfast around 10:00, and after a brief stop in the room, we went to the town’s TI (Tourist Information center), which has a very small museum on the history of Kenmare. It was informative, telling about the town’s clan history and the founding of the town in the 1800s or so (it surprised me how late it was). The museum told about a few key figures, from hated town manager/agents to beloved priests and nuns, and it told of the rise and fall of the Kenmare lace trade. It had a panel or two on the Famine as well, and some of the measures taken to try to help local people. It only took about thirty minutes to see everything, but I enjoyed it.
We went back to the car and headed back toward the Killarney National Park, but before we got back to the Muckross House area, as I was expecting, we turned off at Kissane Sheep Farm. Mer wanted to see the demonstrations of sheep herding and sheep shearing. The farm was closed, but was going to have a demonstration at 1:00, which gave us a little over an hour to do something else.
Happily, that something else was to go see a waterfall, the Torc waterfall, near the Muckross House. I had seen signs to it when we were there on Tuesday, and I had dropped a subtle hint or two (or three). The waterfall was a short and very pretty walk from the parking lot, and we walked next to a stream the whole way, in the middle of a dense forest. The waterfall did not disappoint, and we spent about fifteen minutes just sitting next to the stream watching the water.
We headed back to the sheep farm, and this time they were open. We were the first people there, so we got to chat a little with the woman taking money, who is the sheep dogs’ trainer, and she is from Germany. We also got to pet one of the farm cats. More people trickled in, and around 1:00 we were joined by a tour bus, and the demonstration was ready to go. We headed out to a platform that overlooked some astonishingly beautiful fields and grazing lands, and we were shown four different border collies doing their jobs.
It was amazing – the dogs responded to called-out commands, and they roamed all over the field and hills chasing and herding sheep. There were very fast, smart, and really effective at their jobs. They worked well as a team, and the handler never even had to move to get all the sheep gathered and in a pen.
We headed over to the barn, where we got to see a large, muscular man manhandle a sheep and shear its wool. He was able to shear the sheep in about three minutes, and the farmer said the shearer could do about three hundred sheep a day during busy season. The farm has about fifteen hundred adult sheep, and around a thousand lambs currently. Three of the lambs had been born within the last week, and they were awfully cute.
Having been impressed by one farm, we headed to several others in the form of the Muckross Traditional Farms, in the park near the Muckross House. This collection of three farmhouses and associated buildings preserves the look and traditional means of farming from about 1930, before electricity came to rural Ireland (the last parts of Ireland to get electricity got it in the 1970s).
The three farmhouses represented typical ones from a small farm (about twenty acres), a medium farm (about fifty acres), and a large farm (a hundred acres). Each farm had a woman in the house to explain how the farm ran, and they offered us bread that was made over the hearth in the house (it was quite good). The small farm was quite basic, with just two rooms, with the children sleeping in the main room and the parents sleeping in their own room. The medium farm added one room, a second bedroom for the children. The large farm was quite elaborate by comparison, with several rooms, including two dining rooms.
The farm had live animals, including two huge Clydesdale horses. There were a couple of kittens we saw (and we got to pet one), and we saw a four-day-old donkey who looked ready to be out in the pasture. There were puppies, and chickens, and turkeys, and even a peacock. All of this was surrounded by the mountains of the park, so it was a very pleasant walk as well as an education.
After we finished up the farm, around 4:30, Mer let me have my way. We headed back to the car, and started to head toward Kenmare, but I was distracted by a sign for “The Meeting of the Waters.” It was a fifteen-minute hike from the parking lot, and behind a tea room, but it was a beautiful and secluded spot where the three lakes all joined together in a narrow channel. We sat there for several minutes, and then wandered over to a small path that led to the double-arched bridge we had seen, called the Weir Bridge. The walk was a bit rough, but short, and the view from the bridge was looking over a lake at several mountains, so it was worthwhile.
We got back to the car and this time did head back to Kenmare. We parked the car and, after a brief stop in the room, went out to supper at a local bar and restaurant, Davitt’s. We got a table, and within a few minutes two musicians were setting up right in front of us. The man played the fiddle, and the woman played guitar and sang. We got to hear over thirty minutes of music while we ate, which, as they say here, was grand.
Finally, being somewhat addicted to dessert, we picked up some ice cream bars and candy bars from the grocery store, and we found a bench in a park on which to eat them. The evening was very fine, and it was a mellow way to end the first week of touring. I get to take over now, which should be interesting, since I have only some idea of what to do and where to go.