Take a Walking Vacation in England and Ireland

Discovering poetry and plants in Ireland

Usually less than $30, walking tours rarely tax the travel budget. Most guides gladly double as go-to local authorities, offering insights into where to find the best chowder, live music or any one of myriad other amenities. The finest guides spin yarns with exactly the right mixture of local lore and historical fact. Not surprisingly, the best weavers I’ve met ply their trade in the Republic of Ireland.

Tour guide Tony Kirby is an expert on the topography of Ireland’s Burren National Park. Encompassing 200-square miles, the area is home to diverse plant life and as well as burial plots that date back to the stone age.

Courtesy: Crai S. Bower

I’m obsessive about gardens and wildflowers, and Seamus Heaney is my favorite poet. Imagine my delight when, several years ago, I met guide Tony Kirby, who not only recites Heaney poems, but is familiar with most, if not all, of the 700 plants found in Burren National Park, the geological marvel on Ireland’s west coast.

A native of Limerick with the lilt to match, Kirby wrote the book The Burren and the Aran Islands – A Walking Guide, about this confounding natural region. The Burren — Irish for boíreann, meaning a “rocky place” — is a limestone landscape that encompasses 138-square miles. The soil that manages to take hold in patches here is nutrient-rich, providing habitat for many plants that are found nowhere else in Ireland.

A walk with Kirby is not so much about steps as squats, as in kneeling to examine this panoply of flora, including more than 20 orchid species, few rising more than 4 inches in height. Wild geraniums dot the landscape with gentle brushstrokes, rare dropwort spreads like a wee pink blanket across the limestone sheet, as do choruses of spring gentian, trumpet-shaped with boldly blue petals.

The Burren, which at first looks like a barren rockscape, unfurls petite flowers upon nearly every step. Kirby notes the presence of hazel, long associated with wisdom in Ireland, as an example of nature’s constant transition. White hawthorn, a favorite of the faeries, is also recolonizing.

Kirby points to one of more than 75 burial plots. These square stones set in a rectangular form date back to the Stone Age. “These were some of the earliest ‘temples of stone’ for which Druidic culture is known,” he says. “They were portals between the living world and whatever they believe came afterward.”

As we stand beside these well-worn stones, Kirby clears his throat and recites “Postscript,” a beloved Heaney poem about the Burren that begins:

“And some time make the time to drive out west / Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore…”

The next morning, I drive 12 miles from the Burren to the Cliffs of Moher.

Plenty of trails have been trodden across Ireland in the 2.6 million years since the Stone Age began, so it’s with some surprise that we meet the creator of the 15-year-old Doolin Cliff Walk Experience, Pat Sweeney. The Sweeney family has farmed above the Cliffs of Moher for five generations, running pastures to their fenced terminus within feet of the dramatic precipice.

The guided Doolin Cliff Walk Experience along the Cliff of Moher offers stunning views of the Aran Islands.

Courtesy: Crai S. Bower

In 2007, Pat asked his agricultural peers, including his dad and grandad, if they’d be willing to move their fences to allow for a walking path to pass from the village of Doolin to the Visitors Center. All 39 farmers agreed to, in Pat’s words, “give people a view of the Cliffs of Moher they could never imagine.”

Note that the fences were moved only slightly back from the cliffs. A gentle climb, this is not a trail for the acrophobe. The public path rarely diverges more than 6 feet from the edge. “I wanted everyone to enjoy this view of the Cliffs of Moher,” Sweeny says, “to absorb their magnificence.”

And magnificent they are. Our tour meets outside Gus O’Connor’s Pub, where breakfast can be ordered, though I recommend forgoing an Irish coffee until after the cliff walk is complete. Sweeney arrives a few minutes late, owing, he says, to an escaped steer. We’re on the trail in a heartbeat, walking beside a sea of pink flowers above waves crashing against the sandstone edifice. The vistas of the distant Aran Islands and 220-foot Branaunmore sea stack — a dramatic shard that remained as the cliff receded — take my breath away.

We humans are hardly the only creatures drawn to this dramatic landscape. Local naturalists estimate that 20,000 pairs of nesting Atlantic puffins, razorbills and other alcid species reside here in summer. Alcid chicks fledge by, flopping over the cliff and then spiraling into the water below, as dramatic a surge for independence as any species in the animal kingdom.

I highly encourage sticking around Doolin for a day or two. A night there inevitably means stepping into O’Connor’s Pub, as it should. A small posse of musicians play traditional music, and everyone’s excited for the craic, Irish for a (very!) good time.

I’d hoped to find the craic with Shane O’Doherty, founder of Howth Adventures, when I returned to greater Dublin, about three hours east, the next morning. Shane’s lived on the Howth Peninsula his entire life, a fact that becomes obvious when he greets seemingly every person we pass on the popular 5-mile Howth Cliff Walk. The trail feels remote, even though the area is only about 30 minutes by commuter train to Dublin.

The Cliff Walk also reveals the best views of Ireland’s Eye, an uninhabited island unless you count the myriad seabirds and peregrine falcons that nest there. Our walk passes several historic Irish Sea swimming pools constructed of massive rock walls that the Guinness and other prominent families moved into position in the coves beneath their estates. These manors pale in comparison to Howth Castle, the ancestral home of the St. Lawrence family, who maintained the vast property for 800 years before selling it, along with Ireland’s Eye, in 2018.

The path turns inland with a brief uphill climb, across a golf course and within a dense wood where Shane tells us he spent many youthful days lazing about and searching for faeries. The beeches — considered among the oldest in Ireland — along with the oak canopy and dreamlike tangle of rhododendrons make the idea of magic pixies very real. The path finally departs the shadows to reveal Aideen’s Grave, a megalithic monument that Oscar, considered bravest of the Fianna (mythical warriors from the “wild places”), built for his fallen bride.

The magic continues at the Brass Monkey, a village institution that serves the best seafood chowder that I, a Seattleite, have yet tasted. My walk completed, the chowder consumed, it was time for me to cross the street and enter the Bloody Stream pub for more music and a self-guided tour of a Guinness pint, or two. Let the craic begin.