Teresa has been posting rock wall pictures of her New England surrounds for a while now, so I thought I'd post one for her from my last trip to Ireland. This was taken in County Clare on our way to the Cliffs of Mohr, and is literally a road to nowhere, built during the Potato Famine:Amid the bleak winter, hundreds of thousands of desperate Irish sought work on public works relief projects. By late December 1846, 500,000 men, women and children were at work building stone roads. Paid by piece-work, the men broke apart large stones with hammers then placed the fragments in baskets carried by the women to the road site where they were dumped and fit into place. They built roads that went from nowhere to nowhere in remote rural areas that had no need of such roads in the first place. Many of the workers, poorly clothed, malnourished and weakened by fever, fainted or even dropped dead on the spot.
It's a beautiful place, and a heartbreaking place.
3 comments:
... so what did you think of the cliffs?.... did you have lunch at the cafe that is buried under that hillside there?...
Eric
The Cliffs of Mohr were gorgeous, but I wish we'd had more time there. No, we didn't eat in the cafe. We had lunch at a nearby restaurant, which was really great.
Dublin rocked, Killarney was gorgeous, Tralee just as fun as I remembered. Galway wCity as kind of "meh," but worth it for the side trip to the Cliffs of Mohr and the Burren.
I'm already itching to by my next ticket over there!
Awesome picture/view! Heartbreaking history.
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